Introduction
For years, I believed that God required Jesus’ violent death as payment to forgive our sins. This view, known as Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory (PSA), runs deep within American evangelicalism and portrays God as a judge who demands the death of innocence before He can impart forgiveness to those who have offended Him. But after careful study, prayer, and reflection, I’ve come to see that PSA distorts the heart and character of God as clearly revealed in Jesus in the New Testament.
In this brief article, I’d like to share some of my research into PSA and the reasons that compelled me to rethink the cross in light of Jesus. So here are ten reasons, rooted in Scripture, church history, and plain logic, that have helped me see why Penal Substitution doesn’t fully capture the beauty and depth of what the cross is really about.
1. It portrays God as needing violence to forgive.
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s sins against them.” — 2 Corinthians 5:19
Comment: If forgiveness requires the violent death of an innocent victim, can it genuinely be called forgiveness? Jesus taught us to forgive freely and graciously, without demanding repayment or retaliation. Are we more merciful and forgiving than God Himself?
2. Jesus never describes His death as satisfying God’s wrath.
“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” — John 15:13
Comment: Jesus consistently presented His death as an act of merciful self-giving love, not a divine act of retribution. He never described Himself as being punished by God. Rather, He described His self-sacrifice as a profound demonstration of God’s relentless, redeeming love.
3. The New Testament never says “God punished Jesus.”
Comment: Despite its centrality in modern evangelical theology, nowhere in the New Testament will you find a verse explicitly stating that God poured out His wrath upon Jesus or punished Him in our place. This is a theological interpretation imposed onto the text by well-meaning readers, which is not directly found in the New Testament.
4. PSA turns the Father against the Son.
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…” — 2 Corinthians 5:19
Comment: PSA creates an alarming division in the Trinity, portraying the Father as needing to punish the Son to satisfy His wrath as if the Father were some angry pagan deity that requires homicidal violence to satiate its wrath. But the New Testament clearly and consistently reveals that God was fully present and active “in Jesus” at the cross, not opposed to Him or pouring out His anger and wrath upon an innocent victim. It was man, not God, that murdered Jesus.
5. It makes God complicit in murder.
“You killed the Author of life, but God raised Him from the dead.” — Acts 3:15
Comment: The apostles clearly and consistently blamed human sinfulness and violence for the crucifixion. If PSA is correct, then those who crucified Jesus were carrying out God’s will. God forbid! The Apostles, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, called individuals to repentance for murdering the incarnation of God’s Love (Jesus) and never once approved of their act (or support) of homicidal violence.
6. It contradicts the character of God revealed in Jesus.
“He who has seen me has seen the Father.” — John 14:9
Comment: If God truly looks like Jesus (and Scripture affirms He does), then God doesn’t need violence in order to forgive. A literal reading of the Law of Moses may have demanded sacrifice, but God Himself did not, as both the prophets and Jesus made clear to ancient Israel. To suggest otherwise is to imply that God’s character somehow changed at the cross as a result of His wrath being satiated or satisfied. That is, God went from one extreme (anger, uncontrollable wrath) to another extreme (sublime peace and love). But we know that God is immutable. That is, God does not mutate, or change. The good news is simply this: Jesus reveals what God has always been like, and how God will always be. God doesn’t change and Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. It is man that needs to be changed, not God.
7. It is absent from the early church — for centuries.
Comment: The earliest Christians (1st–4th century) consistently taught that Jesus didn’t die to change God’s mind about humanity; but rather, He died to change humanity’s mind about God. The cross defeats violence and death by exposing their impotence. While the early church held a variety of views about the meaning of the cross, one of the most common views across early church fathers is called Christus Victor. According to this view, Jesus defeated sin, death, and Satan. Whereas Christus Victor sees the cross as a battlefield, PSA sees it as a courtroom. The idea of the Christ’s ransom being paid to God the Father in order to satisfy His wrath was absent from Christian thought and practice for the first 1000 years of church history. In fact, PSA didn’t emerge as a theological theory until Anselm (11th century) and then more clearly in Calvin (16th century). In other words, it is a late, culturally shaped Western theory, not an original apostolic teaching.
8. It distorts the purpose of the Law.
“The Law was our tutor to lead us to Christ…” — Galatians 3:24
Comment: One of the biggest problems with Penal Substitution is that it turns the Mosaic Law into something it was never meant to be: an eternal moral code that even God must bow to. In this view, not even God can forgive unless a legal requirement for blood is satisfied. It almost as if the Law outranks mercy, and God’s hands are tied until someone dies. But Paul tells us plainly: the Law was a temporary tutor and guide meant to lead us to Christ, not a rigid framework that binds God’s ability to forgive. The sacrificial system was never the ultimate expression of God’s will. It was a shadow, a concession, a cultural accommodation to teach a deeper truth until the fullness of love and grace appeared in Jesus. PSA misses that entirely. It seeks to retrofit the gospel into an outdated legal mold. But Jesus came not to reinforce the sacrificial system, but to end it. As Hebrews says, “He takes away the first to establish the second” (Hebrews 10:9). That means the old covenant of sacrifice was fulfilled and replaced, not satisfied like a debt collector, but surpassed by something better: grace.
9. It makes justice look like vengeance.
“Do not repay evil for evil… Leave room for God’s wrath.” — Romans 12:17–19
Comment: One of the most troubling features of Penal Substitution is the image it paints of God’s justice. It looks suspiciously like human revenge: someone sins, so someone has to suffer. A price must be paid. Blood must be spilled. Such thinking has rightly been called the myth of redemptive violence and encourages a view of a God who requires homicidal violence in order to forgive you. Yet, Jesus taught us to forgive seventy times seven, to love our enemies, and to turn the other cheek, not because justice doesn’t matter, but because God’s justice looks different from ours. Unlike human wrath, which works not the righteousness of God, God’s wrath doesn’t escalate violence but rather ends it. It doesn’t mirror evil but instead heals it. And if God tells us not to return evil for evil, then surely He doesn’t either. We’re not called to be better than God. We’re called to imitate Him. I contend the cross doesn’t reveal a God of payback but rather a God restoration.
10. It reduces the gospel to a legal transaction.
“He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son…” — Colossians 1:13
Comment: Penal Substitution treats salvation like a courtroom drama where we’re the guilty defendants, God is the offended judge, and Jesus takes the punishment we deserve so we can be legally declared innocent. Case closed. Verdict settled. But is that really the gospel? Is salvation really just a legal transaction that serves as a divine loophole that gets us off the hook? I believe the gospel to be far better news than that. The apostles and early church fathers understood the message of the cross to be foreshadowed in the Exodus. It’s the language of rescue, transformation, and new creation. God didn’t save us by punishing Jesus. God saved us by sending Jesus to confront and defeat the real enemies of sin, death, and the devil through radical, self-giving love. And He didn’t do it reluctantly, bound by some legal code. He did it because “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting people’s sins against them.” (2 Cor. 5:19).
Final Thought
Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory is deeply flawed as it presents a God who cannot forgive without homicidal violence, a Father who must kill His own innocent Son in order to pardon evildoers, and a gospel that sounds more like legalism than liberation. But there’s good news as Christ’s gospel of peace is infinitely more beautiful. God didn’t demand a sacrifice. He became the sacrifice, not to satisfy justice, but to dismantle the lie that God is against us. The cross reveals a God who would rather die at our hands than stop loving us. This is the gospel of peace. The gospel of Christ. The gospel that does not retaliate, but redeems. God absorbed human violence, He didn’t demand it. He overcame evil not through retaliation but rather through nonviolent love of both friends and enemies. He forgives, restores, and rises again. At Calvary, we see a love more powerful than sin, more enduring than death, and far more beautiful than any fear-driven religion could ever imagine. It’s an act of divine restoration, not divine retribution. And that difference changes everything.
Have a thought or question? Please feel free to share it below.
Suggested Books
➡️ Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement by Gustaf Aulen
