Comments on: Why Make Such A Big Deal Of PSA?

By: The Atonement - Is Penal Substitution the Only Thing That Happened at the Cross? » adrianwarnock.com

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:59:12 +0000

[...] 1 and 2 Corinthians, Atonement, Colossians, Romans UPDATE – Andrew Cottingham has posted on how critical this all is to [...]

By: Andy Cottingham

Andy Cottingham — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:25:58 +0000

I’ll concede my school-boy error. I know Paul didn’t write Hebrews. Silly mistake. Thanks for the encouragement Dave.

By: dave

dave — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:50:56 +0000

Good post Andy, though I’d say Paul didn’t write Hebrews (mostly cos we get justification by faith in the language of ‘made perfect’ rather than using righteousness/justifcation language). PSA is all over Hebrews. And you’re right, with very careful words – sin is bloody serious. Only just discovered your blog – lots of good stuff! Adrian Warnock tells me you’re down in the South West – we’re moving down that way next month.

By: Peter Kirk

Peter Kirk — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:27:51 +0000

Andy, you seem to be assuming that Paul wrote Hebrews. Most modern scholars, including evangelicals, don’t think he did. “Paul certainly saw…” cannot be accurate when referring to something in Hebrews.

Hebrews 10 does not imply PSA. Why not? Because there was nothing penal about animal sacrifices. No one has ever taught that animals were punished for human sin. And if sacrifices were made to God, and by analogy so was Jesus’ sacrifice, then who sacrificed Jesus? God the Father could hardly make a sacrifice to himself. The usual evangelical teaching, supported in verses 10 and 12, is that Jesus was both the priest and the sacrifice, that he offered himself, although not of course in a way which implies suicide – not that God the Father sacrificed Jesus, as suggested in some crude presentations of PSA. Yes, because the sacrifice died, there is no need for we for whom it was offered to die, but there is no suggestion that the sacrifice is punished. So, here we have substitution, but not penal substitution. Rather, this is a different one of Adrian’s biblical pictures of the cross, not the law court which is where PSA comes in, but the temple.

The reason to be cautious about PSA is not primarily that it seems unjust and immoral, although I do see that in some presentations, but because it is only one of a number of biblical pictures of the atonement, and one which is not given a central place in any biblical presentation.