Pros & Cons of Penal Substitution (Green/Huntsman 2 of 5)

Some people object to penal substitution as a model for atonement. Why does God require the death of Jesus? Is that part of a loving or a vengeful God? Dr Deidre Green & Dr Eric Huntsman weigh in on the pros and cons of penal substitution. Check out our conversation... https://youtu.be/FremIKcy8vw Don’t miss our other conversations about atonement: https://gospeltangents.com/lds_theology/atonement/ Copyright © 2024 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission Pros & Cons of Penal Substitution Interview Eric  00:38  What happens is, if it is this infinite, eternal thing that we experience and that we benefit from and yet it is infinite and eternal means the mortal mind can't fully comprehend it.  We necessarily fall back on models. And models help us understand what we're experiencing. And because some models make so much initial sense--so, for instance, people say, "Well, mercy can't rob justice and the Book of Mormon talks about how Jesus suffered for our sins." And so that aligns with what we have throughout Christian history called penal substitution. That's the one. And we have some very approachable models that some of our own leaders have given us. For instance, President Packer talked about the debtor theory. Or President Hinckley talked about, "He took a lickin' for me," this idea of substitution. Those work so well, and teaching our children or people in seminary or BYU religion classes, we assume that's all there is to it. And the reality is the Atonement is so rich and so deep that all these different models catch a different piece of it. Eric  01:41  One of the things we try to establish in the introduction is we think all of these models are important and useful. A couple of our reviews, which, fortunately, have been pretty positive so far, have said, "Yeah, they're showing us all these other ones besides penal substitution." And we have never suggested that penal substitution is not an important, if not vital, way of understanding the Atonement. It's just that there are additional ones, which the Book of Mormon, itself, supports. So, Fiona Givens, she and Terryl talk a lot about the healing aspect of the Atonement. Well, that's built into the Book of Mormon. And there are all kinds of other transformational models. One of our contributors, J.B. Haws, who was focusing on atonement in the Doctrine & Covenants, he took the idea of substitution and by taking the word penal out and giving us another concept that helps us understand why it is so vicarious. He didn't use this term, but the way I've described it to people is J.B., he actually has a model that his wife gave him about jeep-ing and having a problem, their natural consequences of making mistakes. And so I've kind of described that as consequential substitution. It's still substitution. But it's not just that there's some Shylock in the sky out there demanding his ounce of blood, if you've got the Merchant of Venice reference there, that it is substitutionary. But one of the things that, as Deidre says, has been attacked through the ages is well, who is demanding the punishment? Is a loving father demanding punishment, or is it a personification of justice, etc.? And so we laid out some of those. Ariel went to town on it, if you read her very deep chapter, which looks at all of these patristic models, Church Fathers approach to it. Even in the late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, there were so many different approaches just trying to catch a flavor of this. I like to describe these different models as being different pieces of a mosaic or different colored pieces of glass in a beautiful window. They're all casting a different light on it. So, we were just hoping we could present people all of these different ways that scripture and theology have tried to explain what Jesus has done for us. GT  03:44  Yeah, very good. I think, personally,