God is Most Glorified in Himself When Christ is Most Penalised for Me ?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provoke what I think is some much‐needed discussion about the substitutionary mechanics that underpin explanations about what Christ accomplishes by his death. For, if your attitude about the doctrine of atonement is something like, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like these other men, I believe in penal substitution’, then this article is an invitation to reconsider both your doctrine (and maybe your practice, too). In what follows, I take issue with the claim that divine self‐interest is somehow maximally displayed in Christ's cross‐work as a penal substitute . Engaging specifically with arguably the foremost (contemporary) champion of the idea that God acts in all things for his own sake, John Piper, I argue that penal substitution is ironically among the most ‘manward’ (rather than ‘Godward’) theories of atonement on offer. Of the seven propositions into which I organise Piper's reasoning—the first three of which I accept without objection—my critique is constrained to the final four and falls most critically on the final two, both of which are matters of the precise mechanism of atonement that penal substitution boasts.