Penal substitution puts the Father against the Son

In this blog I want to continue to defend penal substitution by dealing with an objection that is sometimes placed against it.

Objection 2 ‘Penal substitution puts the Father against the Son'

Perhaps you have heard the following illustration (or one like it) to illustrate Penal Substitution. In The Miracle on the River Kwai Scottish soldiers were forced by their Japanese captors to labour on a jungle railroad. One afternoon the officer in charge became enraged because a shovel was missing. When no one owned up to the crime the vicious officer threatened to kill them all unless this shovel was produced. Finally one man stepped forward and the officer put away his gun and then beat the man to death. The survivors picked up the corpse and carried it with them to the second tool check. However this time it was found that there was no shovel missing, there had been a miscount.

That may be a moving account of personal bravery and sacrifice but it is a problematic illustration for Penal Substitution. It may give us a taste of the self-sacrifice of the Son but if we take it any further we see the cross being presented as a gross miscarriage of justice and the Father being portrayed as a ruthless tyrant.

Other illustrations have similar problems such as the signal man who sees that his son has wandered onto the main track. If he moves the switch, the son will be saved but an oncoming passenger train will crash into freight cars parked on the siding and many people will die. So the Father leaves the switch open, the passengers in the train are saved, but his son is killed. This illustration may show us something of the sacrifice made by the Father but it portrays the Son as a passive victim who has no say in what happens.

Jeffrey, Ovey and Sach warn against the dangers in these and other popular illustrations. We must not portray the Father as being reluctant to forgive, the Son as being a passive victim or the actual event being something accidental or unjust (it was in fact a demonstration and vindication of the justice of God). Maybe some people's dislike of the doctrine of penal substitution is in part because of the crude ways in which it has been explained!

John Stott writes, ‘The Father did not lay the Son an ordeal that the Son was reluctant to bear, nor did the Son extract from the Father a salvation he was reluctant to bestow. There is no suspicion anywhere in the New Testament of discord between the Father and Son . . . There is no unwillingness in either. On the contrary, their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrifice of love.’