T.F. Torrance and Penal Substitutionary Atonement

T.F. Torrance and

Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Introduction

Did the great theologian and Patristic and Reformation scholar T.F. Torrance affirm Penal Substitutionary Atonement? In order to answer that question more fully, what follows is a series of quotations from T.F. Torrance’s magisterial book dedicated to the subject of the Atonement as accomplished, given, and received in Christ. There is minimal commentary, yet the following will show that T.F. Torrance most certainly affirmed the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). Appropriately, he resisted oversimplifications of PSA, artificial narrowings of it, and legalistic caricatures of it, all in an effort to positively maintain PSA according to its full, Biblical, theological, Patristic, and Reformation proportions. As such, it will be appropriate to outline very briefly the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, which is quite simply to say that the justifying and reconciling atonement (at-one-ment) effected by Christ out of the motive force of God’s love involved His removing the profound, insurmountable, and alienating obstacle estranging and opposing God and man and man and God, caused and maintained by sin, an objective atonement wrought in history once and for all by discharging sin’s penalty, which is to say separation, suffering, death, and God’s wrath, by means of His Personal, enhypostatic incarnation and substitution, which is to say by Christ-God as man taking this divine wrath, suffering, alienation, and death upon Himself for us, in our place, and on our behalf, thus expiating sin, turning away God’s wrath, and overcoming death so as to atone, make one, or reestablish man in right relationship with God, and so removing the separation, reestablishing man by grace in union with God in Christ in perfect, divine righteousness. The penal and substitutionary aspects of the atonement, however, are not given in order to deny or obviate other aspects of the atonement, and so the modest claim herein is that T.F. Torrance does affirm this penal and substitutionary dimension of the atonement, (which is abbreviated as PSA,) and not only incidentally, but also critically and emphatically. 

Redemption

In T.F. Torrance’s book on the subject, entitled, “Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ” (ed. by Robert T. Walker, InterVarsity Press, 2009), he identifies three main historical “theories” of the atoning work of Christ: “moral influence theory, ransom theory, and penal substitution” (p. 56). He both affirms and critiques these labels insofar as they tend to point to real “aspects in the Biblical conception of redemption” (p. 56), but as theories they tend to operate as “separated strands” (p. 58) which can generate omissions, create an artificial narrowing of the Atonement, and fail to recognize inter-connections between them (p. 56). 

Torrance critiques the penal notion when it is disconnected from “the priestly aspect” (p. 57) of the Atonement. When this happens, he asserts the result is “a distinct tendency towards legalism” (p. 57), a non-necessary result derived, however, according to Torrance, not from the theological concepts of penalty and satisfaction per se, but from “the Latin language and highly Latinised concepts” (p. 57). He affirms these are yet not fatal to the “penal and satisfaction aspects” of the atonement as, for example, when he finds Cyril of Alexandria also taking up these themes (p. 57). 

In order not to fall into divided or competing aspects of the atonement, Torrance establishes Christ’s atoning work more broadly in his threefold office of king, priest, and prophet (p. 58). It is especially in Christ’s office as priest that “corresponds to the cultic-forensic of kipper-aspect of redemption - Christus victima, Christ the victim” (p. 59; kipper meaning to atone, cover, cleanse). He then adds another method of correlation or threefold strand, which he identifies as Christ’s passive obedience, His active obedience, and “his incarnational assumption of our fallen humanity” (p. 59). He thus states that the priestly office of Christ “corresponds to the passive obedience of Christ, his submission to the Father’s judgment and his self-offering in sacrifice for our sins - the piacular and cultic side of redemption - kipper redemption” (p. 59). By “piacular” is meant, “making or requiring expiation, from the Latin piaculum, expiatory sacrifice” (p. 59).

The Priesthood of Christ

Keeping these three strands together and in mind, Torrance moves forward to affirm that “Jesus went forth to face the cross and in holy obedience to submit to the divine judgment in making an expiatory sacrifice on our behalf” (p. 61). Christ thus “offered an atoning sacrifice for us, and reconciled us to the Father by removing the objective obstacle of guilt between us. That is both a priestly and a forensic act” (p. 61). Christ, as both priest and judge, is a “a priest who is a sacrificial victim, and a judge who takes his place among us as the judged” (p. 62). Torrance identifies this as the “central aspect of atoning redemption… the double emphasis upon the priestly and forensic work of Christ” (p. 62). 

Returning to focus on Christ’s priestly mediation, Torrance states, in an extended quotation: “We recall the distinction between kopher and kipper acts of redemption - kopher referring to the forensic act of piacular atonement or expiation, kipper referring to the cultic or priestly act through which the fellowship between God and man is restored and peace mediated to mankind. In Latin, propitiation is the term we use to express the fact that the chasm between God and man has been bridged - it is a pontifical act in which the estranged parties have been reconciled, God drawing near to mankind and mankind being brought near to God. The situation in which mankind is involved belongs to the mutual relation between God and humanity, so that a mutual relation needs to be repaired, and restoration needs to be effected in both a manward and in a Godward direction. Expiation refers to the piacular act through which reconciliation is effected, but propitiation refers to the personal healing and personal reconciliation. The distinctive thing about the biblical notion of propitiation is that it is initiated and carried through by God, but by God both from the side of God and toward humanity and from the side of humanity toward God. God himself draws near - he propitiates himself, provides the ground on which man is brought near to God and provides the offering or sacrifice with which man appears before God in worship.” (p. 68)

Torrance continues his thought: “That propitiation is wrought out in Jesus himself. He is the God who, in his holy love, judges humanity but who draws near in so doing for he will not hold himself aloof from men and women; but he is also the man who in our place draws near to God and so submits himself to the divine judgment, offering himself in sacrifice to God. Jesus Christ combines both acts in himself, within the unity of his own incarnate personal life, so that he is himself propitiation acutely personalised in both its Godward and manward aspects. … we have emphasized the identity of sacrifice and priest, of work and person, of pons and pontifex, bridge and bridge-maker. Propitiation is then to be understood as priestly mediation between God and humanity, and humanity and God.” (pp. 68-69)

And just so, “Christ bore in his physical existence and in the infliction of death on him the just judgment of God upon our sin” (p. 69).

As Torrance continues, and regarding Christ’s vicarious suffering of God’s judgment against our sinful condition: “When he in our place submitted himself to that, he was fulfilling his baptismal consecration into repentance in the fulfillment of the divine righteousness. But Christ bore all that in his soul, for he took the divine judgment into his mind and innermost being, acquiescing in it, accepting it willingly, and at the same time offering himself willingly to the Father. In this way he entered into the depths of judgment and of sorrow for our sin in a way we can never do. He wrought out in our human nature and in our human soul complete agreement with the Father in his righteous condemnation of our sin, his grief and sorrow over our rebellion and alienation. In vicarious penitence and sorrow for the sin of mankind, Christ met and responded to the judgment and vexation of the Father, absorbing it in his own being.” (pp. 69-70)

God and man being alienated from each other because of sin, “God from humanity through his abhorrence and judgment of sin, that is in his wrath, and humanity from God in our rejection of the love of God and rebellion against his covenant of grace. In this context, priestly atonement involves the notion of propitiation in which God turns away from his wrath to man in forgiveness and man is turned away from rebellion to draw near to God in love. But while, in the Old Testament, it is the forensic aspect of this that is dominant, in the New Testament the whole concept of propitiation together with that of wrath, judgment and forgiveness is drawn into the personal Father-Son relationship. … This is why the the New Testament speaks of the penal-substitutionary aspect of the atonement, not in the detached forensic categories that have developed in the Latin west, Roman or Protestant, but in terms of the intimacy of the Father-Son relation, in which the Son submits himself to the Father’s judgment and is answered through the Father’s good pleasure.” (pp. 71-72).

Note Torrance’s critique of the “Latin west” given here is not one of denying the validity of the per se concept of penal substitution, but of a reductive narrowing of the concept to “detached” legal categories. In fact, he affirms the penal substitutionary aspect explicitly here, according to his understanding of the integrated nature of the various aspects of the Atonement together with Christ’s offices. Rather than lessening PSA, this integrative understanding rather heightens the meaning and significance of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, steering clear from legalistic abstractions, mythologizations, and caricatures. 

Atonement as Justification

Regarding the forensic (legal) aspect of God’s righteousness, Torrance states, “This understanding of God’s righteousness and his act of putting a person in the right with his righteousness carries a forensic sense; it is an act of judgment which is both saving and condemning” (p. 100).

Christ Himself “is the righteousness of God and the righteousness of humanity who as such creates and evokes the answer of faith. In his obedience of faith that answers to the divine righteousness, God acknowledges that he has found the full satisfaction of his righteousness.” (p. 103)

“The propitiation or expiation is God’s own act of grace flowing from his eternal love and mercy. This act of righteousness in grace is the fulfillment of God’s truth, of his consistent righteousness and faithfulness against sin. It is thus the fulfillment of his truth. But this is identical with God’s grace and pardon and redemption, for God does not burden us with his wrath, but mercifully bears it himself in the passion of his Son who died for us on the cross.” (p. 104)

“That is justification, justification fulfilling the law in the judgment of sin on the cross, and in that fulfillment justification passed through the medium of the law and touched men and women personally and directly in the very root of their sins. There was no withholding of God’s wrath there, for God declared himself to be absolutely just in negating sin by all the holy majesty and love of Godhead.” (p. 115)

In fact, according to Torrance, “No act of justification or salvation delivering mankind from the falling bondage of the law could be real to them, or true for them, which did not carry out in full the condemnation that they encounter in God’s word and that therefore echoes in their conscience. That is the forensic element in justification from which we cannot and dare not get away for that would mean God’s repudiation of his law for this world. And so Christ entered into our world under the law, and submitted to the full bondage of the law, meeting not only the condemning resistance of law to our sin, but now at last the final judgment of God against it. By bearing it in perfect obedience to the Father he was able to set mankind free not only from the bondage of the external law but from their own self-imprisonment in the condemnation of their own conscience, for by condemning sin in human flesh and by acquiescing human existence, in the full verdict of God’s judgment against us, he made our judgement of ourselves acquiesce in God’s complete judgment.” (pp. 115-116)

Torrance, summing up our justification, “this royal act of grace,” states, “It is an act of substitutionary atonement by which God brings about the expiation of sin, so that we have peace with God. ‘Christ died for our sins.’ That is the holy of holies of our Christian faith - the full significance of which is unfathomable mystery. … the action of God was most definite, that a real obstacle of objective character between God and mankind was removed once for all, that an atoning work of objective nature was once and for all accomplished. It could not be accomplished simply by removing or clearing up misunderstanding or by a wave of God’s hand. It was a deed of desperate anguish even for God, a deed at terrible cost. It was atonement not in word only but in the reality of Go’s actual relationship with man, and man’s relationship with God. Apart from the actual historical death of Christ on the cross, apart from that vicarious sacrifice for us, there is no forgiveness, no justification, no reconciliation, no redemption. Jesus Christ took our place that we might take his place.” (pp. 119-120)

Continuing, Torrance argues, “The death of Christ was an expiatory sacrifice in which God judged sin and through which human guilt is completely taken away. In Christ God himself was among men and women judging sin in the flesh, but it was on the cross above all that we find a complete judgment was enacted, and it was there that Jesus Christ stepped forward as the lamb of God to bear our sin and to sacrifice himself under God’s holy judgment. … God delivered his final condemnation of sin in Jesus Christ who stood under the judgment of God for us. He bore our guilt and was judged as a malefactor, numbered among the transgressors, and in the judgment of Christ, our guilt was expiated and taken away.” (p. 120)

“That guilt was the barrier between humanity and God, a barrier lent terrible objectivity and irremediable character by the wrath of God. That was the obstacle that had to be removed if there was to be reconciliation between God and humanity. On our part that guilt was irremovable. We were helpless to emancipate ourselves from it. On God’s part, guilt had to be judged, judged in finality and completeness in those whom he loved and knew could not survive such judgment. But in Christ Jesus, the judge himself entered into the very heart of our guilty estrangement in order to reconcile us to God in bearing himself the divine wrath. God came in Christ to do from the side of humanity what humanity could not do. So Christ took our place before God and bore our sins on his own body on the tree. He died on our behalf and in that death he offered the perfect submission of humanity to God in holy obedience, and brought to God humanity’s perfect acquiescence in the divine judgment.” (p. 121)

“Christ descended into the deepest depths of our guilt and submitted to the complete judgment of God upon it. It was an enacted acknowledgment, an actual acquiescence in actual judgment, and therefore an enduring of death as the final repudiation by God of our sin. It was suffering and death under the divine judgment on our behalf.” (p. 121)

“It is God himself who expiates sin and guilt, God himself who bears sin and guilt and bears it away, God himself who reconciles himself to mankind and mankind to himself, who endures his own wrath and so in utter grace gives himself in propitiation for man and freely restores man into complete fellowship with himself” (p. 122).

Even affirming the use of Anselmian language, Torrance states, “It was enhypostatic atonement. In other words, the work of atonement was the work of the God-man, wrought for us, in our place, on our behalf, in our stead - work which we could not do, a work so radically substitutionary that it entirely displaces us and all our self-justification requiring from us therefore the most radical self-denial, yet it was a work in which God in Christ act as man as well as God. In this inconceivable union of God and humanity, then, God in Christ took our place and accomplished what we could not do. The infliction and judgment which we could not bear he bore for us. In our place he made ‘satisfaction’ (to use the language of Anselm) for our sins and for the sins of the whole world.” (pp. 122-123)

He further affirms that the “atonement is wrought in the life and blood of Christ. It is at once substitutionary sacrifice in that life is given for life as Christ stands under the divine judgment obedient unto death, the death of the cross, and substitutionary oblation in that here obedience and holiness are offered to God in place of our disobedience and sin. Here we have in one act on the cross, the twofold sacrifice indicated by the Old Testament sin offering and whole burnt offering. It is not merely the death of Christ, his suffering, his blood, his bearing of judgment, that atones or expiates guilt, but along with that and within it all the offering of perfect holiness to God from the side of humanity.” (p. 123)

“Justification is that double steadfastness of Christ as God the judge judging sin and as man the judged submitting perfectly to God’s holy judgment, and thus it is the twofold justification of God and the justification of the ungodly” (p. 124).

God the Son as man “made himself the judged. He completely identified himself in the incarnation with sinners under his judgment. He took upon himself their human nature in its existence under the divine judgment, in the guilt irreparably attached to it through the divine judgment, so that in himself in his one person he was both the judge and the judged.” (p. 124)

“It was thus that Christ, true God took upon himself our flesh and became true man, and as such made atonement. As such he got at our sin and guilt from within, not simply by wearing our flesh, but as we have seen, by penetrating into the very heart of our evil, and within the sinful conditions of our flesh living a life of perfect obedience to God and offering himself without spot to the Father.” (pp. 126-127)

Affirming Christ’s dereliction, and in light of the union of the divine and human natures, “It is in that union that the substitutionary atonement is made, in the only way and at the only point where substitution could be valid reality. That union of God and humanity in Christ taken into the cross was vindicated by the resurrection. It was such a union that when it passed through the ultimate separation of God and humanity in judgment, death and hell, it remained entire and whole and unbroken.” (p. 127) 

“In Jesus Christ, in his death on the cross, descent into hell, burial in the grave, God has given himself to humanity in its sin and corruption and lost estate, in such a way as to take the curse, the punishment, the corruption of sin upon himself, slay the old sinful and perverted adamic existence and bury it, and by penetrating right back into human existence not let it see corruption but raise it out of the grave as a new humanity in the resurrection Jesus Christ, the first-born of the new creation” (p. 132).

Regarding “the substitutionary intervention of God” in justifying mankind, “God has abased himself that we might be exalted. In Christ Jesus, God has burdened himself with the whole of our nature with all its human weakness and shame, unrighteousness and meanness, has made himself responsible for all we are in our sin and guilt. And so he has entered into our damnation and ruin, into the corruption and chaos of our existence, and transformed it all, overcoming sin and guilt, damnation and corruption and death. And in his exaltation of Jesus Christ out of our damnation, in his ascension in full humanity to God’s right hand, we the ungodly are given our right, our justification in him, the new man, who justifies us for ever as he stands before the throne of God in our name and on our behalf.” (p. 134)

Furthermore, “this justification is not a process. It is a finished work.” (p. 134)

Affirming the importance of the concept of imputation, “It is because the New Testament thinks of justification in this eschatological relation between the ‘It is finished’ in the cross and the ‘Behold I make all things new” of the parousia, that it speaks of it in terms of ‘reckoning’ or as the Reformers interpreted it, ‘imputation’ or ‘reputation’. Imputation describes the perfected work of grace. It indicates that justification is forensic in the sense that it is grounded in the once and for all judgment of Jesus Christ on the cross, but it indicates that what happened there, while complete in its reality, is yet to be fully disclosed at the advent of Christ. The Pauline ‘reckon’ (logizesthe) or the Reformers ‘impute’ is the concept which holds together those two moments, the forensic and the eschatological, in one, the once and for all completed work and the full disclosure of it in the parousia, in one.” (p. 136)

Torrance even grounds important dimensions of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist in the concept of imputation, for according to him, “It is because justification is involved  in that tension that we are given the two sacraments of baptism and eucharist, with baptism enshrining the once and for all corporate act of total justification in Christ, and the eucharist enshrining our continual participation in Christ’s new humanity until he comes again.” (p. 136)

Atonement as Reconciliation

Our reconciliation with Christ is through the substitutionary exchange and expiation of sin, as Torrance writes, “the verb katallasso refers to reconciliation through a substitutionary exchange and involves expiation. … The noun katallage refers to the exchange effected by substitution.” (p. 138)

Having shifted his focus from the aspect of the atonement concerned with justification to that aspect concerned with reconciliation, he yet says, “we presuppose at its very heart justification through the atoning expiation which effected it” (p. 145).

As such, “in reconciliation we think of that as pure condescension of God in which he abased himself, identified himself with sinners in their lostness and ruined condition under judgment in order to raise the creatures up out of damnation and exactly them to share the life and love of God” (p. 145).

Affirming that God initiated His own propitiation out of love for man while man was yet a sinner, Jesus “came therefore providing himself the expiation in order to remove the obstacle between God and humanity and humanity and God, bearing himself the entire cost of restoring fellowship” (p. 146).

Thinking about what this means, and quoting John Calvin, Torrance puts forward “the incomprehensible fact that ‘God loved us even when he hated us’. ‘God, who is perfect righteousness, cannot love the iniquity which he sees in all. All of us, therefore, have that within which deserves the hatred of God’ but ‘gratuitous love prompts him to receive us into favour… God the Father, by his love, prevents [goes before] and anticipates our reconciliation in Christ. Nay, it is because he first loves us, that he afterwards reconciles us to himself.’ (p. 146)

Now quoting Calvin’s own quotation of Augustine, Torrance maintains, “‘The fact that we were reconciled through Christ’s death must not be understood as if his Son reconciled us to him that he might now begin to love those whom he had hated. Rather, we have already been reconciled to him who loves us, with whom we were enemies on account of sin,’” wherein Augustine through Calvin quotes Romans 5:8, and so concluding, “‘Thus in a marvelous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us.’” (p. 146) 

Because Christ “is himself the incarnate holy will of God and is yet identified with humanity in its sin under the judgment of that holy will… Therefore the infliction of the judgment by the judge upon the man judged takes place in the person of the judge himself… Christ was thus God the judge, and yet the sin-bearer who bore our judgment and the penalty for our sin in his own life and death.” (p. 148)

Christ is “himself our propitiation, or our expiation in whom we are reconciled to God - Christ is set forth therefore as the hilasterion or as hilasmos, himself the means through which we are forgiven. That is to say, it is within his own person and life, in his own death, and as Calvin insists, not simply in the passion of his body, but in his soul, that reconciliation is wrought out through expiation of sin.” (pp. 148-149)

Torrance continues, “It is ultimately in the death of Christ when he plumbs the deepest depth of our estrangement, in our death, in his suffering the divine judgment upon our sin, that union between God and humanity, begun in the birth of Jesus, and carried throughout his human life, reaches its complete fulfilment. The hypostatic union is inserted into the abysmal chasm of divine judgment upon humanity, and in the heart of that divine judgment the union of God and humanity and humanity with God is established and maintained, and because it is maintained, it survives the ban of God’s wrath. This means the resurrection of man out of utter alienation where that alienation is made complete under the divine judgment, and therefore it is the triumphant restoration of man to fellowship and life with God.” (pp. 149-150)

Regarding Christ’s cry of dereliction, Christ’s “assumption of our humanity in the incarnation… took the form of the divine condescension and abasement of the Son, when he came down and made himself one with us in our alienation - but that identification of himself with us in our sin, is already our assumption and exaltation to be brothers and sisters of Christ and in him to be sons and daughters of God. That assumption of our fearful and lost condition reaches its supreme point in the cross where the Son freely assumes our damnation and final judgment, freely assumes our God-forsakenness in the Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani of death on the cross under judgment. And so he achieves our assumption into oneness with himself, and because that assumption is maintain even in the hell into which the Son descended, it achieves its end in the resurrection of man out of hell and the exaltation of man in Christ to the right hand of God. All that took place in Christ, for in him our human nature in and with all its burden of guilt and judgment and corruption has already been assumed, and in such a way through Calvary and Easter that it is actually resurrected out of our estrangement and corruption and exalted share the eternal life of God himself.” (p. 150)

In relation to the topic of reconciliation, Torrance connects this aspect of the atonement with the profound subject of our “wonderful exchange” with Christ, teaching that, “This reconciliation took place through a ‘wondrous exchange’ (as Calvin called it) in which Christ took our place, that we might have his place. That is what the term ‘reconciliation’ means, an act of reconciliation effected on the basis of exchange. In the incarnation, the Son of God abased himself, substituted himself in our place, interposed himself between us and God the Father, taking all our shame and curse upon himself, not as a third person, but as one who is God himself, God against whom we had sinned and rebelled, and yet as he who is man identified to the utmost with man’s estrangement and disobedience that might really stand in humanity’s place and work out in himself humanity’s reconciliation.” (p. 151)

Torrance builds on the foregoing, speaking of Christ, for “In that he thus took our place of sin and shame and death, he freely gives us his place of holiness and glory and life, that we through his poverty might become rich, that we through his being sin and a curse for us, might be reconciled to God clothed with his righteousness and stand before God in his person. He came in our name, that we in his name might have access to the presence of the Father and be restored to him as his children.” (p. 151)

That Christ completely identified himself with us in this wonderful exchange, “There are two intertwined elements here we must pause to consider, the identification of Christ with us, and his intervention in our place. He so identified himself with us in our sinful state that he met the full assault of our evil and took the full contradiction of our sin upon him, and so he entered also into the conflict between us and God and took the conflict upon himself, bearing it in his own life and heart in order to save us. Therefore he met the full opposition of our enmity to God, and the full opposition of God to our enmity and endured it with joy, refusing to let go of God for our sakes, and refusing to let go of us for God’s sake. In laying hold of us as sinners, he judged our sin in himself and reconciled us to God, and in laying hold of God he received his judgment of us upon himself and offered our humanity in himself to the Father.” (p. 151)

Continuing, “On the one hand, then, we must say that he based himself to participate in our alienated life that we might participate in the life of the Son of God. He identified himself with us all in our guilty estrangement and distance from the Father, that we might be identified with him in his relations with the Father and in him the beloved Son draw near to God, the loving Father. On the other hand, we must say he took our place and did for us what we could not do. He penetrated into the abyss that divides us from God, stood in the gap between God’s wrath and human guilt, and by enduring and offering as God and man all that was righteous and true, he destroyed the barrier and effected reconciliation between God and humanity. He was God, standing in our place and bearing the just judgment on our iniquity. He was also man, united with us in our humanity and offering to God in our place what we could not offer, a perfect offering of obedience, faithfulness, thankfulness and praise. He was very God, descending into the depth of our wickedness and laying hold of us in sheer love, and he was very man, receiving and laying hold of God by submitting to the divine judgement and receiving all the self-giving of God in his love which we could not receive and live.” (p. 152)

“Reconciliation between God and man issues in peace when the wrath of God is removed. That wrath is not removed simply by setting it aside, for that would be the setting of the love of God aside, nay, the setting of God himself aside. The wrath of God can be removed only through the righteous infliction of the divine judgment against our sin. Or to use more juridical terms, the wrath of God is removed only when his righteous will has punished sin and judged it.” (pp. 153-154)

Torrance continues in a clarifying theological manner, “Now it is important to see that we cannot talk here of his mercy as triumphing over his wrath, or of the victory of his love over his judgment - that would be to introduce a schizophrenia into God which is impossible, and to misunderstand the wrath of God and the meaning of the penalty or righteous infliction that is due to sin.” (p. 154) This is an important point, because it highlights the necessity of affirming the inner unity of God’s attributes. 

Stating the nature and necessity of the divine punishment due to sin, “Punishment and wrath are terms speaking of the wholly godly resistance of God to sin, the fact that the holy love of God excludes all that is not holy love. Sin must be judged, guilt must be expiated by its judgment and complete condemnation, else God is not God, and God is not love.” (p. 154)

Torrance adds, “But as we have seen, God interposes himself between us and his judgement and takes the righteous infliction on sin upon himself, and so provides for its expiation in himself in the sacrifice of Christ. And the sacrifice is to be understood both in a passive and an active sense. That is, it is the sacrifice of Christ in which he offered himself as the lamb of God in a passive sense to suffer judgement in our place, and it is active in the sense that Christ stepped into our place and fulfilled God’s holy will for us. … his passive obedience, in which through the shedding of his blood Christ offered himself in sacrifice, in aman to God’s righteous judgment upon our sin, and so accepted our judgement or infliction in our place. In so doing he took into himself and upon himself the righteous wrath of the divine love and freed us from receiving the stroke of the divine condemnation which we could not have endured, for under it we could only have been destroyed.” (p. 154)

“Christ has thus paid our debt and because he paid our debt we are freed from it and are emancipated from our burden. … God has poured out his wrath and executed his final judgment upon our sin in the sacrifice and submission of Christ… our debt and infliction has been fully paid in the sacrifice of his Son.” (p. 154)

God therefore “accepts his sacrifice on our behalf as full satisfaction for our sin and guilt, a satisfaction which he accepts because it is offered by himself and borne by himself. Satisfaction means that God has fulfilled the will of his love in taking our judgment on himself and in bearing in our stead” (p. 155).

Torrance further adds that, “Because God has removed the curse of his judgement, nothing can obstruct his love and fellowship. Because Christ has borne our punishment, that now stands behind us and we are free to enter God’s love and fellowship.” (p. 155)

Prior to and outside the reconciliation effected in and by Christ, “mankind is under the threat of damnation and final judgment .Therefore their own rebellious enmity to God is met by the threat of destruction, of final judgment, of utter rejection. But when in reconciliation God actually takes upon himself the sentence of rejection and bears it instead of mankind, then God takes all his own righteous enmity against sin and absorbs it in himself. As we have seen, that does not mean in the slightest degree a mitigation of the divine judgment, but the very reverse, the complete and entire fulfillment of the divine judgment - and therefore the vicarious act of God in the life and death of Christ is man’s complete and total exposure as guilty and a complete and total judgment. The cross is the utter condemnation of men and women. But when God took that condemnation upon himself, then his action was entirely the positive action of his mercy and will to be on humanity’s side, a positive action to accept humanity.” (pp. 155-156)

Through the Cross God in Christ acts “to take upon himself human sin in rejecting God, and to take upon himself his own rejection of humanity” (p. 156).

Conclusion

Over the course of one hundred pages, T.F. Torrance, in his book, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ,” unfolds many of the great depths of Christ’s atoning work, and in so doing does not leave out the critical elements that comprise the Penal Substitutionary aspect of Christ’s total Atonement, rather highlighting and emphasizing them. For as Torrance affirms over and over again, Christ intentionally suffered the penalty of sin, which includes suffering, death, divine wrath, and man’s estrangement from God. Christ, by having suffered this penalty, made atonement as our substitute. Thus it was suffered as penalty, and not simply that Christ suffered horrible things against himself, but suffered them as the willing infliction of God’s righteous judgment against sin. Christ suffered all of this in our place and on our behalf, which is to say substitutionally. Therefore, answering the initial question posed above in the affirmative, it is clear that T.F. Torrance positively affirmed Penal Substitutionary Atonement. 

-Rev. Joshua Schooping