Care must be taken in the wording of Christian songs and preaching to avoid — and indeed to repudiate — any sense that in the God-forsakenness and dereliction of the cross (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34) the Father punishes the Son.
A doctrine of the atonement containing such a notion leaves our expression and teaching open to the charge of child abuse, or to the suggestion that ‘a loving Son wrests redemption from an angry or reluctant Father.’1Robert C. Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?’ Unpublished Lecture, 2.
So how does the New Testament instruct us to understand and explain this?
A distinction between ‘bearing penalty’ and ‘inflicting punishment.’
Start With the Curse
The place to begin is with Christ’s bearing of our curse, becoming a curse for us (Deut 21:23; Gal 3:13):
‘Christ hung on the tree in obedience to the Father’s will, fulfilling the Father’s purpose of love, doing a work with which the Father was well pleased, and on account of which the Father highly exalted him; hence to describe as accursed of God would be absurd.’2James Denney, The Death of Christ (1902 ed.), 159-160; cited in Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?’, 3.
Read the sequence there. Obedience to the Father’s will. Fulfilling the Father’s purpose of love. A work with which the Father was well pleased. And on account of which the Father highly exalted him.
None of that describes a father venting anger on a son.
The Real Difficulty
This raises a genuine question, though, and it shouldn’t be dodged. Was Jesus punished by God? And is it not morally objectionable for an innocent party to be punished in place of the guilty?
There is a real difficulty here. But whatever our response, it must hold the following together:
‘It is not a picture of an angry father placated by a loving son. Nor of a separation in will and being of the Father from the Son in this great atoning act, as John 3:35, 4:34, and 5:30 makes clear. Nevertheless, because death is seen in the biblical witness as the penalty appointed by God for sin, we must say that Jesus’ sufferings were penal. [Yet] with respect to question of the nature of the forsakenness of Jesus, John 16:32 … leads us away from notions of the Father deserting the Son on the cross: “The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, every man to his home, and will leave me alone; yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.”’3Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?,’ 3.
Both halves have to stand. The sufferings were genuinely penal — death is the penalty appointed by God for sin, and Jesus bore it. And the Father did not desert the Son.
Resolved Only by Who God Is
That tension — penal suffering without paternal desertion — can only be resolved by returning to who God is.
The truth is that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor 5:19). Our grasp and expression of the atonement must therefore be determined and controlled by what we know of the nature and character of God — who he is and what he is revealed to be like, across all Scripture and pivotally in Jesus’ person, public ministry and atoning death.
As Robert Doyle has it: ‘The uniqueness of Jesus Christ tells us that the propitiatory act of atonement wrought by his incarnation, life of obedience and especially by his death, is in fact an act in God himself. … The incarnation means that “substitution” is at a very great depth.’4Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?,’ 4.
On that basis the two claims stand together without contradiction. Jesus bore the penalty issued by God for sin — his sufferings were penal, a punishment — yet, sinless, he died the death of a sinner as an act within the Being of God himself, not as the action of one Divine Person against another.
Three Conclusions
Doyle draws the threads together:
‘First … the New Testament does not give us a license to infer that the Father punished his Son, neither at the level of exegesis or at the level of the apostolic witness as to “Who God is” and “How he works personally and directly in the world for our salvation.” Secondly, when we do appropriately think and speak of propitiatory atonement against its ground in God we may grasp and convey some of the breadth and depth of what has happened there. Understand penal substitutionary atonement in this way, we may not only avoid the charge of “child abuse,” but may offer the atonement for what it is, as that which heals our deep alienation from God and each other through a reconciliation which encompasses the whole depth of our being, because it has occurred first of all in the depths of God’s being. Finally, let me suggest that in our song writing and evangelism, when we speak of the death of Christ, we make a distinction between “bearing penalty” and “inflicting punishment.”’5Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?,’ 7-8.
Why the Wording Matters
That last suggestion is worth taking seriously by anyone who writes, preaches or sings about the cross.
Bearing penalty and inflicting punishment are not the same thing. The first describes what Christ did — took upon himself, willingly, the consequence that sin carries. The second implies a transaction between two parties, one angry and one suffering.
Get the wording wrong and you don’t merely risk a caricature. You misrepresent the God who was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself — and hand the critics a target the doctrine never actually offered.
Get it right and something better emerges. Not a legal mechanism operating outside God, but a reconciliation that reaches the whole depth of our being precisely because it happened first in the depths of God’s own.
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- 1Robert C. Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?’ Unpublished Lecture, 2. ↩︎
- 2James Denney, The Death of Christ (1902 ed.), 159-160; cited in Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?’, 3. ↩︎
- 3Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?,’ 3. ↩︎
- 4Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?,’ 4. ↩︎
- 5Doyle, ‘Did the Father Punish the Son?,’ 7-8. ↩︎