About this project

This project is a family tree that I built to track and understand the evolution of atonement theories, along with the essays that came out of building it. In it, you can navigate through developments in theology to gain an understanding of what is believed, why, and what problems people were trying to solve.

To me, this is largely the history of man’s seeming inability to just accept that God loves us, represents our attempt to answer “what’s the catch?” (Spoiler: There isn’t one).

Fair warning: The notes in this document are highly opinionated.

I find the atonement theories of penal substitution to be based on the false premise that God is bound satisfy himself by punishing sinners retributively, not only for the moral revulsion it causes, but also because of the way it binds the free will of the sovereign Creator God.

This entire project was built for me to explore this thought in detail, and to help me identify where the shortcomings are actually coming from. I’m a software developer by trade, and I see the bug in the system, but tracking the root cause in a complex web of workarounds and patches is challenging to me, and even more challenging to explain. My hope is that this chart can help you think through some of the problems as well.

For the spiritually nervous¶

The idea of rejecting penal substitution can feel like abandoning your faith. I assure you that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re spiritually sensitive but worried about deconstructing into agnosticism or atheism, my practical advice is to start with Athanasius rather than with me — I’ve put the reasoning and four free editions on their own page.

My goal with this project has never been to tear down your faith, but rather to strengthen it. Indeed, I built this whole thing so that I could hold onto mine.

Why did I make this?¶

I have been attending church for nearly 50 years now, often in leadership positions. I’ve grown up in the American evangelical context, and so most of my understanding stems from there. I’m thankful for the western Protestant tradition, but I have some trouble accepting many of the underlying presuppositions, both logically and emotionally.

My main quibble is with an atonement theory called penal substitutionary atonement (PSA).

I have seen people leave the faith because they can’t “believe in a God that sends people to hell for eternity”, and this hurts my heart, because I believe this to be a mischaracterization of what the Bible teaches, but I simultaneously believe it to be a logical conclusion that flows from penal substitution’s need for retributive justice.

Moreover, I myself have nearly left the faith as a result of this doctrine. The mechanical nature of it, in my opinion, reduces God to something of an automaton that must respond to sin with punishment, and in doing so it rips out the foundation of a secure relationship to God before it can even get off the ground. For most believers, this isn’t a problem–they simply don’t think that deeply about it and accept PSA as generally restorative even if the core of it is retributive. I honestly wish I could take that stance, but I can’t.

Because I found it hard to swallow PSA, I began to debate about it and question it, but it seemed to be something of a slippery doctrine. Every time I would offer an objection, there always seemed to be a response that eluded refutation at some point. Nevertheless, the intuition that something was wrong persisted. Hence my effort in creating this graph. I’ve found that solving my theological (and existential!) woes was much easier if I tracked the history and development of them, relating their ideas to their most influential originators. Due to the nature of the problem, this was somewhat infeasible with a linear approach, so moving them to a family tree made far more sense and helped me to track the throughlines and unaddressed complications introduced by each of the shifts.

It’s my current view that penal substition, which has its root back in ransom theory, is essentially a giant degenerating research program: a theoretical system that survives mostly by adding auxiliary hypotheses to attempt to absorb problematic anomalies. In a theological/philosophical system, there is literally an infinity of ways to hide a concept, but in the end, a bad premise always reveals itself. The history of theology is a giant tree with lots of branches and a tendency for defenders to jump from branch to branch in defense of their beloved model of atonement.

To apply an analogy from software development, there’s a bug in the system, and each new adjustment attempts to address the bug by building upon Anselm’s satisfaction theory instead of questioning the base assumption that God is deterministically bound to punish sin in order to provide justice, and is instead providing a workaround instead of addressing the root cause.

So what is the root cause?¶

The root cause of the issue is that PSA, in all it’s forms, requires God to act in response to sin and guilt.

What do I mean by that? In classical theism, God must be actual and immutable. He cannot change, and none of his attributes can be extrinsically dependent. One theme you’ll see throughout many of these viewpoints (especially developments within the penal substitution line) is an attempt to hide contingent determinism inside our concept of God. Contingent determinism is the idea that God must respond to an action instigated by man, and that this is a necessity on the side of God. This is where I disagree. To claim that God is required to perform an action restricts the free will of God.

Moreover, the kind of contingent determinism embedded into God is one of retributive justice–he absolutely must satisfy himself and balance the scales between him and man. In most cases, this means he must punish man eternally for their sins. But as Socinus points out, satisfaction is not forgiveness. When a debt is satisfied, it is not forgiven. If it is forgiven, then it is not satisfied.

You will find further thoughts of mine in the notes sections of many of the popups when you click on one of the nodes.

God is eternal and unchanging, complete within the trinity, without want or need. There is no potentiality in him, and there’s nothing in the realm of justice that requires him to respond. His love for us is completely self-giving from first to last. It cannot be any other way. We are in total dependence upon God, so everything we are and anything we have is a gift of God himself. Glory be to God that he demands little from his creatures other than a relationship with him.

A note on why retributive justice is incoherent when applied to God¶

Retributive justice can never balance the books because it’s an admission that the books can’t be balanced.

Justice is made complete only by restoration, not by retribution. This is a very important point. Most of us would intuitively agree that restorative justice is preferred to retributive justice. If my son takes a toy from his brother, the best solution is to return the toy to the right kid. This is restorative justice. This is possible because the toy still exists, as do the boys.

Now scale the offense from stealing to murder and see how the picture changes.

If a murderer kills someone’s husband, we can’t bring the dead man back. He’s dead. Restorative justice isn’t an option, but we feel that we still need to somehow perform justice. So because we can’t restore the dead man, we punish the offender. Punishing the offender doesn’t bring back the woman’s husband, but it is the community’s way of appeasing the bereaved and signalling that the offense is taken seriously, and providing a warning to the community as a deterrent to murder. Note what it does: it appeases and it warns, but (and this is crucial), it doesn’t restore. Therefore, retributive justice is a display of justice and not actual justice. Actual justice would be to restore the husband to his wife. But because that’s impossible, we resort to retribution.

So we apply retribution when restoration is unavailable to us. It’s an inherent admission of finitude.

And this is why retributive justice fails when wielded by an infinite and generative God. There is no lack in God. He has created all things, and through him, all things are sustained. Every judicial option is open to him, even bringing back the dead. He can restore any and every loss, and even states that we will do so in spades (Matthew 19:29). He doesn’t need retributive justice in order to make things right. He can just make new things. God owns the “undo button” of the universe.

Retribution depends on a constraints. It can’t be applied to an unconstrained God.

So what do I believe now?¶

Athanasius helped me to recover my faith when I lost it. His account removes God from the sin-to-death pipeline entirely, which leaves him only one role in salvation: restoring. God is both the doctor and the antidote, and we are healed by going to him.

I’ve written that out properly, along with free copies of On the Incarnation, on the Reading Athanasius page.

Where to go from here¶

• The short essay — the objection in about fifteen minutes.
• The full essay — the historical argument with the tables and the citations.
• The family tree — every position as a box, every arrow a pressure.
• Reading Athanasius — the primary source, free.

Caveat¶

I’m not a historian of doctrine, and these summaries compress a great deal. The dates are publication or authoring dates, not the dates ideas actually moved. Where I’ve editorialized, it’s in the notes section, kept visually separate from the summary so you can ignore me and read the position on its own terms.

If this has been helpful to you, or even if it hasn’t, I’d love to hear from you. Also, please let me know if there are things that require corrections. This whole project is a work in progress.

David Morton

theology@davidmorton.io