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Christ’s work of atonement has frequently been reinterpreted in nonviolent or victorious terms, while justification by faith has been subject to both ecumenical dialogue and extensive debate in Pauline scholarship.

Justification is not a significant feature of Orthodox soteriologies. Catholic soteriology adopted a broadly Augustinian account involving transformative righteousness, in which justification itself is not primary except in debate with Protestants. Catholic soteriology does not teach justification by meritorious works, but justification by faith as fulfilled in love. This love relates transformative righteousness to ontological renewal through infusion of sacramental grace. Believers do not merit salvation as an achievement but as a fitting divine response to human appropriation of grace. By contrast, Protestants typically define justification not as a process of infusion but as the initial imputation of Christ’s righteousness—at minimum a declaration of forgiveness based on Christ bearing believers’ sins.

Until recently atonement theology operated with a distinction between the person and the work of Christ. The former comprised the focus of Christology; the latter fell into an ambiguous space, partly Christological and partly soteriological. Magisterial Protestants developed complex accounts of the ordo salutis in which justification became a primary benefit, the initial application of Christ’s atoning work.

Ever since the Socinians of the early Protestant era, penal substitutionary atonement—according to which Christ suffered the punishment deserved by human sinners—has had opponents. Early in the twentieth century Gustaf Aulén, a Swedish Lutheran, proposed a threefold typology of atonement theologies.^[10] Aulén’s widely used typology suggested that (1) objective views, orienting atonement around change on God’s side, arose in the Middle Ages when Anselm treated atonement in terms of God’s offended honor. Such objective views bear hallmarks of feudal or legal or other realities in their originating contexts. (2) Subjective views, orienting atonement around change on the sinner’s side, also arose in the Middle Ages, thanks to Peter Abelard. Yet subjective views focus on Christ’s moral example or influence to the exclusion of other scriptural concepts, so they became widespread only in the modern era and are viewed as liberal, captivated by contemporary concerns. Aulén suggested that this binary opposition between objective and subjective views was not original to the Christian tradition, which had previously been characterized by (3) classical views orienting atonement around Christus Victor—Christ triumphing over all hostile powers, including sin, death, and the devil.

Aulén’s work appealed to many who recognized that no single atonement theory had been canonized in the early creeds, who reveled in patristic or subsequent diversity, and who rejected the penal substitution model. Modern thought finds blood sacrifice and pessimistic anthropologies distasteful. Aulén’s work opened a door through which feminist and other critiques of penal substitution walked all the more forcefully. To some, penal atonement theories entail “divine child abuse,” fostering male violence along with female victimization—glorifying Jesus’s suffering at the hands of an angry divine Father. Catholic René Girard is representative of other recent antiviolence theories, reinterpreting Christ’s sacrifice sociologically as an exposure of societies’ scapegoating mechanisms.^[11]

Alternatives to penal substitution have arisen periodically among more conservative Protestants. For instance, some Wesleyans find penal substitution to be extrinsic to their tradition and appeal to governmental models, in which Christ’s sacrifice reflects God’s justice in overcoming sin without addressing divine wrath for specific sinners. Alternatives have also arisen among biblical scholars: some argue that Scripture does not contain the penal substitution model, while others argue more modestly that Scripture does not require it.^[12] In such accounts, Scripture provides multiple metaphors from which theologians are free to choose as contextually appropriate. Unifying these objections to penal substitution is the general charge that it is Lutheran and Reformed, not broadly evangelical, reflecting an outdated and excessively Pauline theology to the exclusion of other biblical priorities.

Traditional Protestants have responded by defending the presence of penal substitution in Paul’s letters and its coherence with the rest of Scripture:^[13] substitution is not merely one metaphor among others but the reality underlying them,^[14] and the cross is integral to establishing God’s kingdom as the fulfillment of Israel’s story.^[15] The historical contexts of penal substitution are receiving their due.^[16] Implications of divine child abuse and allegations of promoting violence or victimization are eliciting more intentionally Trinitarian accounts: the Father, Son, and Spirit together lovingly accomplish our salvation; the Son lays down his life of his own accord, and the Father does not punish a mere human but mysteriously pours out judgment on the Son in the bond of the Spirit’s love.^[17] This Trinitarian emphasis has also elicited attempts to recover the patristic fullness on the subject, which includes victory alongside considerable mention of sacrifice—more than Aulén’s followers have acknowledged. These Trinitarian accounts include efforts to integrate Christ’s incarnation more fully with his atoning work: his identification with fallen humanity already begins its healing.^[18]

Justification as the declaration of forgiveness tightly correlates with penal substitutionary atonement. Though earlier modern alternatives to penal substitution may have been moralistic in their visions of the divine kingdom and human transformation, current alternatives are typically more optimistic or even universalistic regarding human salvation.^[19] Forgiveness seems to involve sheer divine fiat or radically incarnational divine identification with our plight, not a divine work of gracious justice involving the cross.

The most substantial contemporary development concerning justification is the so-called new perspective on Paul. In brief compass, this perspective rejects the Lutheran parallel between Paul’s “Judaizing” opponents and medieval Catholicism. Such a parallel suggested that just as Paul’s opponents based sanctification or assurance on law-keeping in response to covenantal grace, so later Catholic belief errantly based justification on transformative righteousness through sacramental grace. Rejecting this parallel, newer perspectives on Paul characterize Second Temple Judaism in terms of covenantal nomism, not legalism or works-righteousness: works of the law simply demarcated God’s (Jewish) covenant people (from Gentile pagans), with circumcision expressing initial commitment to the covenantal obligation of keeping Torah.

In that case Paul’s critique of his opponents chiefly opposed ethnocentric failure to recognize prophetic fulfillment of Gentile inclusion in Christ, not soteriological failure to champion the “faith alone” anthropology of true grace. Key Pauline texts, accordingly, may have in view the faith(fulness) of Christ rather than faith in Christ as what decisively accomplishes our salvation.^[20] Apocalyptic readings proceed on this basis to suggest that Paul’s gospel is more radically gracious than the Protestant Reformation suggested: not even human faith functions as any kind of condition for participating in the new reality of union with Christ, which has invaded and upended our earthly history.^[21]

However, neither apocalyptic nor any of the various new-perspective readings have vanquished more traditional accounts. Certainly the newer scholarship has led to more careful portrayals of first-century Judaism, with corresponding debates about how its nomism relates to Pauline arguments. But if “works” must be addressed more chastely, still the traditional Protestant approach has contemporary exegetical and theological defenses—including the identification of misunderstandings and excessively narrow presentations from which it too suffers.^[22]