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Is there a consensus of the Fathers supporting penal substitutionary atonement?

A viewer says that a number of the Fathers, according to Eric Ybarra, supported penal substitutionary atonement, and asks whether there is a consensus of the Fathers on this point.

Answer

I have approached Eric Ybarra on this. I took exception to his conclusion and offered to debate him; he invited me to debate, I followed up, and I never heard back. Part of my objection is that what he was calling penal substitution was not really penal substitution as we define it today; he was mixing and matching definitions to arrive at the consensus he wanted. The early Fathers did not have a clear idea of penal substitution, so you cannot say there was a consensus on it. Underneath all of it is the question of what Christ actually did to bring us the atonement. You have the ransom theory, penal substitution, the appeasement theory, Anselm's view, Augustine's view, and we need work on this in the Catholic Church. The one you are drawn to automatically is that Jesus paid a legal price so that I do not have to pay it, and that is penal substitution. But if Jesus paid the price in full, then everybody should be going to heaven, because you cannot extract the price twice; that is double jeopardy. My contribution is that, as some of the Fathers and even Thomas Aquinas said, Christ's death was not a punishment but a sacrifice to appease the wrath of God, like the Old Testament sacrifices where God smells the sweet aroma and is put in a better disposition. Thomas uses the analogy of a man giving a gift to someone he has offended, so the offended one is brought to a better disposition. That changes God's disposition just enough to offer salvation to the whole world, not to save everyone automatically, which is why Catholics, unlike the Calvinists, do not believe everyone is saved. I cover much of this in my book Not By Bread Alone.

Dr. Robert Sungenis

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