A question Christians are asking out loud
A question that used to be whispered is now being asked openly in the Christian mainstream: did God really have to punish someone in order to forgive us? In a June 2026 column, the Christian Century engaged readers wrestling with exactly this, weighing perspectives on the death of Jesus that do not rely on the traditional teaching that God must punish someone to satisfy his anger. The discussion in its letters and comments reflects a wider unease — thoughtful believers who love the cross and yet find themselves troubled by one common explanation of it.
The unease is not flippant. It comes from people who take Scripture seriously and who notice a tension between two things they believe at once: that God is love, and that God required the killing of an innocent before he could forgive. This essay takes the question seriously rather than treating doubt as disloyalty. It lays out what the penal-substitution model actually claims, names honestly where it strains, and then offers the reading the Divine Principle gives — one that holds the cross as a genuine and costly victory while denying that God ever needed someone punished in order to love. The aim is not to diminish the cross but to understand it more truly.
What penal substitution says
The model under pressure is usually called penal substitutionary atonement. Its logic runs like this: human sin is an offense against an infinitely holy God; God’s justice requires that sin be punished; the punishment is death; and because no sinner could bear that penalty and survive, God sent his sinless Son to bear it in our place. On the cross, in this view, the punishment we deserved fell on Jesus, the demands of justice were satisfied, and God was thereby freed to forgive without compromising his righteousness. It is a courtroom picture: a debt of punishment owed, a substitute who pays it, a ledger brought to zero.
The model has real scriptural anchors and should not be caricatured. Isaiah 53 says the servant was “wounded for our transgressions” and that “the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Paul writes that God made Christ “to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21) and that Christ “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). These texts clearly teach that Jesus bore something on our behalf, and any honest account of the cross has to reckon with the language of substitution and bearing. The question raised by troubled readers is not whether Jesus bore our sin — Scripture plainly says he did — but whether the specific framework of God requiring punishment before he can forgive is the right way to understand how that bearing works.
Where the framing strains against Scripture
The strain shows up most sharply when penal substitution meets Jesus’ own teaching about forgiveness. In the parable of the prodigal son, the father forgives the returning boy freely, runs to him, and restores him — with no payment, no substitute, no penalty exacted first (Luke 15). When Jesus teaches his disciples to forgive, he does not tell them to extract punishment from a third party before releasing the debt; he tells them to forgive as they have been forgiven, freely (Matthew 6:12, Matthew 18:21–35). If God can only forgive after punishment has been inflicted, then God forgives on stricter terms than he commands of us, which sits uneasily with the whole tenor of Jesus’ portrait of the Father.
There is also the moral question that troubled readers keep returning to: how is it just to punish an innocent person for the guilt of others? In every human court, punishing the innocent in place of the guilty is the definition of injustice, not its satisfaction. Defenders of penal substitution have careful answers to these objections, and the model has held a central place in Christian thought for good reasons. But the objections are not frivolous, and the fact that serious, devout Christians keep raising them suggests the framework is doing something the biblical data does not entirely require. Scripture offers more than one picture of the atonement — victory over evil (Colossians 2:15), the healing of a relationship (2 Corinthians 5:18–19), an example of self-giving love (1 Peter 2:21) — and not all of them run through a transfer of punishment.
The cross as the fruit of rejection
The Divine Principle offers a different starting point. It reads the cross not as the mechanism God demanded but as the result of human rejection. On this view, Jesus came to be received — to be welcomed as the Messiah, to gather a believing people, and to establish the kingdom of God through a living, accepted mission. The crucifixion was not the plan the people were meant to fulfill; it was what happened when the leaders and people of his day refused him to the point of death. As our essay on whether the cross was God’s plan develops at length, the contingency reading takes seriously the texts where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem for not knowing the things that make for peace (Luke 19:41–42) and prays that the cup pass from him (Matthew 26:39).
On this reading, the cross is a victory wrested out of a tragedy. Faced with rejection that he did not choose and did not deserve, Jesus refused to answer it with condemnation. He bore the full weight of human sin and hatred — “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34) — and turned even that murder into a doorway of salvation for all who would believe. This is bearing our sin in the deepest sense: absorbing the worst that fallen humanity could do and returning love for it. But it locates the necessity in human freedom and human failure, not in a divine requirement that someone be punished. God did not need the cross in order to be able to forgive; humanity’s rejection produced the cross, and God’s love redeemed it.
What God actually desired
If God did not require the killing of his Son, what did he desire? The Divine Principle’s answer is consistent with the heart of the Father that Jesus revealed: God desired to be received, to dwell with his people, and to see his kingdom established through a Son who was welcomed rather than crucified. The prophets longed for a day when God would “dwell in their midst” (Zechariah 2:10–11); Jesus came offering exactly that nearness, and grieved when it was refused. The picture of a Father who would rather embrace than punish is not an innovation; it is the prodigal’s father, the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine, the God who takes “no pleasure in the death of anyone” (Ezekiel 18:32).
Reading the cross this way changes what it reveals about God. In the penal model, the cross primarily reveals God’s justice — his refusal to let sin go unpunished. In the rejection model, the cross primarily reveals God’s love — the lengths to which he will go to redeem even the worst that human freedom can do. Both models honor the cross; they disagree about what it most deeply says about the heart of God. For the Christian troubled by the thought of a Father who needed blood before he could forgive, the rejection reading offers a way to hold the cross at the center of faith while seeing in it, first and last, the love that bore everything rather than the wrath that demanded payment.
Atonement reread: love bearing what love did not will
The phrase that holds this reading together is that the cross is love bearing what love did not will. God did not will the murder of his Son; the cross was a genuine evil, the killing of the one perfectly innocent man. And yet God’s love did not abandon the situation to its evil. It entered the evil, bore it without returning it, and brought salvation out of it. This is why the New Testament can speak of the cross as both the worst sin in history — “you crucified and killed” the Author of life (Acts 3:15) — and the deepest demonstration of love — “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The two are held together precisely when the cross is read as love redeeming a tragedy rather than satisfying a penalty.
This reading also preserves what is most precious in the substitution language without the difficulty that troubles so many. Jesus did bear our sin; he did stand in our place under the full force of evil; he did make a way for us that we could not make for ourselves. What it sets aside is the claim that God’s own justice demanded an innocent be punished before forgiveness was possible. The result is an atonement that is still costly, still central, still substitutionary in the sense that Jesus bore what we could not — but rooted in love rather than in a ledger. For the Christian asking whether God had to punish Jesus, the answer this gives is freeing: no, God did not have to punish his Son to love you. The cross is the measure of how far that love would go to reach you anyway. For more on how the cross fits the larger purpose of Jesus’ coming, see our essay on why Jesus had to come.
Frequently asked questions
What is penal substitutionary atonement?
The view that sin incurs a debt of punishment before God’s justice, that the punishment had to be paid, and that Jesus paid it in our place by bearing the penalty we deserved on the cross.
Why are some Christians questioning it?
Because they ask how a God who is love could require an innocent to be punished before forgiving, when Jesus taught free forgiveness and the prodigal’s father forgives without payment.
How does the Divine Principle read the cross?
As the result of human rejection that God’s love redeemed, not as a punishment God demanded. The cross is a victory wrested out of a tragedy, genuinely saving but not a penalty God required.
Does this view diminish the cross?
No. It keeps the cross central and costly. What it sets aside is one theory of how the cross saves — that God could only forgive after an innocent was punished — not the saving power of the cross itself.
What does this mean for how we are saved?
Salvation is understood as a restored relationship and a transformed life, not a cleared legal ledger. Grace opens the door; faith and a changed life walk through it.