Substitution and Forgiveness

Substitution and Forgiveness October 23, 2014

Justyn Terry argues that Kant’s critique of substitutionary atonement is misleading because he assumes that there are three parties to the transaction involved in the atonement – God, sinful humans, and an innocent victim.

There are only two, since the innocent victim is God human flesh. The transaction looks different as a bi- rather than tri-partite:

“When one person forgives another, he or she decides no longer to hold the injury they have suffered against their offender. They sur- render their rights to repayment or compensation. So the king who forgives his servant a debt of ten thousand talents (Matt. 18:21-35) chose to accept the loss; it became his bad debt. As such it was a costly act, as forgiveness generally is, since this action substantially depleted his assets. It is, however, only through that gracious generosity that his servant could have been forgiven.”

This demonstrates, Terry As this example indicates, then, forgiveness is always substitutionary. What was once the debt of the servant is now the bad debt of the king. What was once a word I should not have spoken or an action I should not have taken is now the insult borne or the pain absorbed by somebody else when they forgive me. On each such occasion one person suffers for the wrongdoing of another. As Mennonite scholar Myron S. Augsburger puts it, ‘True forgiveness means that the inno- cent one resolves his wrath occasioned by the sin of the guilty one and liberates the guilty person in freedom. Self-substitution is always the cost in forgiveness.’ To offer forgiveness is to be willing that something that was owed to me is owed to me no more. What I was entitled to get back, I relinquish, so that the debt of the other is now my loss. Their problem is now my problem, which is an act of substitution. That is the nature of forgiveness.”

(Terry, “The Forgiveness of Sins and the Work of Christ: A Case For Substitutionary Atonement,” Anglican Theological Review 95:1 [2013] 13-14.)


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