Atonement

The Core Question

Whoever looks upon the cross of Christ does not first see a theory. He sees an event that demands interpretation. Precisely on this interpretation Christian paths have parted ways for almost a thousand years: does Christ pay there the penalty that should fall upon us, or does he reveal there who God already is, thus creating the space in which we can truly turn around?

The question is not academic. On it hang the Christian’s image of God, his understanding of justice, his relation to guilt, the meaning of the resurrection—and not least the question of what it means to be ‘redeemed.’ In his major work De Iesu Christo Servatore, Sozzini formulates an answer that breaks with the medieval Anselmian tradition and is consistently derived from Scripture and from a simple but rigorous logic. This page follows his line of thought in twelve steps.

Occasion and Argumentative Figure

Anselm of Canterbury gave the classical doctrine of satisfaction its elegant form in Cur Deus Homo (1098): sin is an offense against the infinite honor of God; such an offense demands an infinite satisfaction; only God himself can render it, but it must be rendered by a human being—therefore God becomes man and renders vicariously what we owe. The Reformation barely touched this figure; it merely shifted it from honor to punishment: Christ no longer bears the offense, but the punishment we would have deserved. Satisfactio became poena vicaria—vicarious punishment.

Sozzini, as also in De Ecclesia, attacks the logic of this conclusion. He shows: the premises are neither in accord with Scripture nor internally free of contradiction. If God must necessarily be paid, he is not sovereign. If guilt is transferable, Scripture contradicts itself. If Christ has fully borne an infinite punishment, the demand for the sinner’s repentance is actually superfluous. Each of these points stands on its own; together they make the classical doctrine untenable.

Sozzini’s Starting Point: The Biblical Image of God

Whoever speaks about the cross speaks first about God. Sozzini’s line of argument therefore begins not with a verse about sacrifice, but with God’s self-statements about himself. Scripture testifies to God as one who wills to forgive before he must: ‘I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake’ (Isaiah 43:25). He is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ (Exodus 34:6-7; Psalm 103:8-13). He declares: ‘I have no pleasure in the death of anyone’ (Ezekiel 18:32).

These self-statements are not incidental kindness, but the theological constant from which the cross must be read. If God forgives because he is who he is, then the cross is not the precondition for his being able to forgive, but the historical form of a forgiveness long since resolved upon. This is exactly what Sozzini insists on:

‘It is far from the truth that Christ appeased God for us; rather, he showed him as already appeased, and was sent to us by the one already appeased, in order to reconcile us with God.’

Faustus Sozzini, De Iesu Christo Servatore, Part I—Refutation: Reconciliation

The exegetical consequence is decisive. 2 Corinthians 5:19 does not say ‘God let himself be reconciled in Christ,’ but ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’ The subject of reconciliation is God, not Christ as one who pays God. The mediator stands on God’s side, not between God and himself.

‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins against them.’

Faustus Sozzini, De Iesu Christo Servatore, Part I—Refutation: Reconciliation (on 2 Cor 5)

The Logic of Penal Substitution—and Its Fractures

Sozzini examines the Anselmian-Reformational doctrine as a logical structure and finds five structural fractures.

1. Forgiveness and Payment Exclude One Another

If a debt is paid in full, it is no longer forgiven—it is discharged. Whoever has received the full purchase price does not forgive; he has nothing left to remit. But Scripture proclaims salvation as forgiveness (Ephesians 1:7; Acts 10:43). The two do not go together: either God forgives freely, or he is paid; a paid forgiver is conceptually no forgiver.

2. The Wrathful God and the Loving God

Penal substitution presupposes that God is wrathful before the cross and loving after the cross. With this the triune God falls apart into a before-and-after logic foreign to Scripture. John 3:16 does not say ‘God loved the world because his Son died,’ but ‘God so loved the world that he gave his Son.’ God’s love precedes Christ’s self-giving; it is source, not result.

3. The Infinite Punishment and Its Completion in Three Hours

If every individual human being deserves an infinite punishment (so the logic of an infinite offense against God), then Christ too must have borne an infinite punishment. But this does not fit with three hours on the cross and a death under great, but not infinite, agony. The tradition responds with auxiliary constructs (‘because of his divine dignity, a brief act sufficed’), but these auxiliary constructs themselves cancel the very logic of infinite punishment.

4. Universality and the Reality of Damnation

If Christ has borne the punishment of all, all are free; if he has borne it only for some, then God’s love has already been particularized beforehand. Both options are theologically uncomfortable. Calvinism honestly draws the particular line (limited atonement); other traditions waver—but the contradiction lies not in the answers, but in the premise. Sozzini resolves it by giving up the premise itself: Christ is not the one who bears punishment, but the one who offers forgiveness.

5. If Everything Is Paid, Why Repent?

The gospel demands repentance and faith (Mark 1:15; Acts 17:30). But if every person’s guilt has already been objectively and fully discharged, then repentance becomes a merely subjective reaction to a matter already settled. Sozzini takes this demand seriously: forgiveness is personally interwoven; it goes to the one who repents, and goes as forgiveness, not as the subsequent communication of a receipt.

The Scriptural Evidence: Word Field and Usage

Penal-substitutionary readings rest on a few key words whose biblical meaning, however, often does not correspond to their dogmatic use. Four terms decide the interpretation.

hilastērion—means of atonement, place of cleansing

Romans 3:25 calls Christ hilastērion. In the Septuagint the word is the fixed translation of the kapporet, the ‘mercy seat’ over the ark of the covenant (Exodus 25:17-22). On the great Day of Atonement this lid receives the blood, but the blood there is not a means of punishment but a means of cleansing—the place where YHWH himself meets his people. Whoever calls Christ hilastērion says: here is the place of encounter, of cleansing, of God’s presence—not: here a measure of punishment is settled.

lytron—means of liberation, not penal sum

In Septuagint usage, lytron is the price of liberation—but in the classical liberation text the recipients of this ‘payment’ are never named. YHWH himself ‘redeems’ (gā’al) his people from Egypt without any recipient of a ransom sum ever appearing (Exodus 6:6; Isaiah 43:1). The word designates the means of liberation, not the transaction with an injured party. Cf. the detailed discussion at Mark 10:45.

antí—‘for’ as self-giving, not exchange

The Greek antí can mean ‘instead of,’ but in the New Testament, in soteriological contexts, far more often simply ‘on behalf of.’ Mark 10:45 says ‘he gives his life antí pollōn’—his life for the many. To derive an exchange (‘his life instead of ours’) from this preposition alone is linguistically inadmissible. The context in Mark is service, not penal execution.

hyper—‘on behalf of’

The more frequent hyper (‘Christ died for our sins,’ 1 Corinthians 15:3) means ‘on behalf of.’ It is the standard preposition for self-giving—parents suffer hyper their children, friends die hyper their friend (John 15:13). No one would say that the friend punishes himself for his friend. Self-giving and punishment are different concepts; pushing them into each other distorts both.

The Untransferability of Guilt

Scripture explicitly declares at several key passages that guilt is not transferable. Ezekiel 18:20: ‘The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.’ Deuteronomy 24:16 and Jeremiah 31:29-30 say the same with categorical clarity.

These passages are not incidental legal principles, but God’s teaching about justice as such. If a human court were to lay the punishment of a guilty person upon an innocent one, we would rightly call it injustice. A doctrine that asserts precisely this of God asserts that God does the injustice that humans are forbidden. Sozzini draws the clear conclusion:

‘God does not consider those who repent of their sin and turn to him worthy of being punished with eternal death, but bestows on them eternal life—not from necessary justice, but from the free will of God.’

Faustus Sozzini, De Iesu Christo Servatore, Part I—The Justice of God

The reply, ‘with Christ it is different, because he took it on voluntarily,’ does not help here. Voluntariness does not change the logic of punishment; it only changes the willingness of the bearer. An unjust assignment of punishment does not become just because the punished consents—otherwise every self-sacrifice of an innocent would be a just act of justice. The biblical passages on untransferability speak objectively of the matter of guilt, not of the willingness of the bearer.

What Does ‘Sacrifice’ Mean in the Old Testament?

The penal-substitutionary reading reads Christ’s death in light of the Old Testament animal sacrifices. But what did these sacrifices actually represent? A careful reading of Torah and the Prophets yields: not penal execution upon a substitute.

• Hosea 6:6—‘I desire steadfast love, not sacrifice.’ God himself prioritizes the relationship over the rite.
• Psalm 51:18-19—‘You take no delight in sacrifice; were I to give it, you would not be pleased. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.’ The effective ‘sacrifice’ is inward self-giving.
• Micah 6:6-8—What God wills is ‘to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’—not animal sacrifices as a measure of punishment.
• Isaiah 1:11-17—‘What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? Wash yourselves; cleanse yourselves; cease to do evil.’
• Matthew 9:13 and 12:7—Jesus approvingly cites Hosea.

Sozzini draws the consequence with sober sharpness:

‘Those sacrifices and sacrificial animals had no power whatsoever to render satisfaction to divine justice. They were not even, among humans themselves, punishments to be suffered, for between humans and animals there is no common kind.’

Faustus Sozzini, De Iesu Christo Servatore, Part II—Atoning Sacrifice without Satisfaction

The cultic sacrifices had their meaning in the pedagogy of holiness: they taught the separation of holy and profane, they trained self-giving, they cleansed cultically—but they were never the measure of punishment that should actually have struck a human being. Whoever reads the cross in light of these sacrifices reads it as self-giving and as cleansing, not as penal execution.

Christ as Mediator—Biblically Understood

When Christ is called ‘mediator’ (1 Timothy 2:5; Hebrews 9:15), this, according to Sozzini, denotes not a commercial intermediate position between a wrathful God and a guilty human, but the function of an envoy and interpreter of God.

‘Mediator denotes the one who stands as intermediary between God and the human being—not in order to reconcile a wrathful God, but inasmuch as God uses him as messenger and interpreter, to open up and teach faith to humans.’

Faustus Sozzini, De Iesu Christo Servatore, Part I—Mediator without Satisfaction

This reading is not a flattening. It is consistent: if God is the initiator of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:19), the mediator cannot be the addressee of a penal payment from the initiator. He is rather the instrument of reconciliation—the one through whom God does what he has long since willed to do.

The Cross as Revelation, Confirmation, and Path

What does the cross then positively accomplish? Sozzini names three functions, all of which are anchored in Scripture and which together carry the whole soteriological meaning.

Revelation of the Divine Will to Save

At the cross it becomes visible how far God goes in his love—to the point of total self-giving. ‘In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the propitiation (hilasmós) for our sins’ (1 John 4:10). Love is the subject, the self-giving is the means; without this order the text cannot be read.

Confirmation of Christ’s Mission

Sozzini argues—drawing on Luke 24:26 and Acts 2:32-36—that the cross only becomes legible as confirmation through the resurrection. God himself signs Christ’s work by raising him from the dead and exalting him to his right hand. With this, Christ’s teaching, his life, and his self-giving are shown to be divinely commissioned.

Path into the New Life

The cross is not only a sight, but also a way. Whoever follows Christ enters the track of his self-giving—not as a moral duty, but as the only form in which forgiveness truly arrives. ‘Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps’ (1 Peter 2:21). Forgiveness works in the one who receives it; it makes him into one who himself forgives.

The Resurrection as Half of the Saving Action

An enduring weakness of penal substitution is its embarrassment about the resurrection: if the punishment was fully borne on Good Friday, then the raising on the third day is actually theologically redundant—a sign, a triumph, but not itself a saving act. But this is precisely what Scripture nowhere says. Paul says: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:17). Salvation therefore hangs not only on death, but essentially on the resurrection.

Sozzini therefore reads redemption as a two-membered event: self-giving and exaltation. Christ ‘was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification’ (Romans 4:25). The redeemer is not the one tortured to death, but the one going into death and freed from death. The Socinian reading can take up this biblical finding without distortion, because it sees salvation not in a payment, but in a turning of life—and a turning of life begins with the dying of the old person, but is completed in the rising.

Logical Arguments

1. Argument from sovereignty: A God who cannot forgive without first being paid is not sovereign in his forgiving—but Scripture testifies precisely to this sovereignty (Isa 43:25; Ps 103).
2. Argument from the definition of forgiveness: Forgiveness in the strict sense excludes prior payment. Whoever has received everything forgives nothing; he discharges.
3. Argument from untransferability: Guilt is expressly not transferable in biblical law (Ezek 18:20; Deut 24:16). A theology that presupposes transferability contradicts Scripture on a fundamental point.
4. Argument from the word fields: The Greek and Hebrew key words (hilastērion, lytron, antí, hyper, gā’al, kāphar) in their biblical usage mean liberation, cleansing, self-giving—not penal execution.
5. Argument from love as source: John 3:16; 1 John 4:10; Rom 5:8 show God’s love as the cause of Christ’s sending, not as its consequence. A theology that opposes the cross to God’s wrath reverses this biblical order.
6. Argument from the resurrection: 1 Cor 15:17 makes the resurrection itself the ground of salvation. A theory that completes salvation already on Good Friday cannot take up this verse without strain.
7. Argument from the demand for repentance: If the punishment is objectively borne, the demand for repentance (Mark 1:15; Acts 17:30) is either superfluous or merely psychological—both contradict the serious tone of the biblical calls to repentance.
8. Argument from universality vs. particularity: Penal substitution forces every theology to choose either to teach universal salvation (because the punishment would be borne for all) or to particularize God’s love. Both answers are biblically untenable; the premise itself must be given up.
9. Argument from the image of God: A doctrine that makes God the holder of an unsatisfied claim projects human conflicts into the divine being. Scripture, by contrast, knows a God who is the first to forgive.
10. Argument from ethical consequence: Penal substitution tends toward a posture of faith in which the actual saving work is accomplished outside the believer. Scripture, by contrast, understands salvation as a turning of life: ‘Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life’ (John 5:24)—not a receipt, but a connection.

Biblical Cross-References

• Ezekiel 18:20—Guilt is untransferable. The classical passage against penal substitution: righteousness comes upon the righteous, guilt upon the guilty.
• Deuteronomy 24:16—The Torah expressly forbids that one person be put to death for the guilt of another. If this is human law that God gives his people, it cannot at the same time be his own saving action.
• Isaiah 43:25—‘I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake.’ Forgiveness is grounded in God’s own being, not in a payment rendered.
• 2 Corinthians 5:19—‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’ The subject of reconciliation is God; Christ is his instrument, not his addressee.
• John 3:16—God’s love precedes the sending of the Son. It is cause, not consequence.
• Romans 4:25—Self-giving and resurrection are both grounds of salvation: delivered up for our trespasses, raised for our justification.
• 1 Corinthians 15:17—Without the resurrection, faith is futile. A salvation already completed on the cross cannot account for this.
• Luke 15:11-32—The father in the parable of the prodigal son forgives without anyone needing to die or pay. He runs to meet the son.
• Luke 23:34—‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Christ himself speaks forgiveness from the cross—not as one who pays, but as the interpreter of God’s forgiveness.
• Mark 10:45—He gives his life as a lytron, a means of liberation—in the context of service, not penal execution.
• 1 Peter 2:21—Christ as model and path: ‘that you should follow in his steps.’ Salvation as a way, not a completed reckoning.

Objections and Answers

‘But Isaiah 53 says: “The punishment was upon him”’

Isaiah 53:5 is the principal passage of penal-substitutionary readers. A careful reading shows, however: the Hebrew text speaks of mūsār—instruction, correction, discipline—not of penal execution upon an innocent. The servant bears the consequences of the sin of the many because he places himself in solidarity with their situation; but he does not bear their verdict of guilt. The LXX translates with paideia—‘instruction’—which does not support the penal-substitutionary reading. Cf. the detailed discussion at Isaiah 53:5.

‘But Hebrews 9-10 clearly shows the sacrificial typology’

Hebrews 9-10 does indeed place Christ within a sacrificial typology. But: the Letter to the Hebrews uses this typology itself in order to overcome it, not to repeat it. Its argument is precisely that the Old Testament animal sacrifices could not really take away sin, and that Christ brings in ‘once for all’ a different kind of self-giving. What this different kind is, the letter does not say in the sense of the later doctrine of satisfaction—it speaks of cleansing of the conscience, entry into the holy of holies, fulfillment of the covenant. The later reading projects a penal substitution into the text that the text does not develop.

‘But Romans 3:25 calls Christ a “propitiation through his blood”’

Exactly. Propitiation (hilastērion), not penal execution. As shown above, in the Septuagint hilastērion is the kapporet—the place of encounter and cleansing, not the place of penal measure. Blood has a cleansing function in biblical cult (Lev 17:11: ‘the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls’—atonement as cleansing, not as penal payment). Whoever equates ‘atonement’ with ‘punishment’ has already made a prior decision that the text itself does not make.

‘Without penal substitution, sin is not taken seriously’

This objection is often presented with great emphasis, but it must be checked: is sin serious because God punishes it, or is it serious because it separates the human being from God and destroys him? The biblical seriousness of sin lies in its real, life-destroying power—not in an abstract sum of guilt. Sozzini’s reading takes sin so seriously that it demands a real turning of life; it speaks precisely not of a ‘cheap forgiveness,’ because no receipt is issued, but a personal relationship is restored that lives only in repentance.

‘Sozzini’s Christ is no longer divine’

This objection changes the topic from soteriology to Christology. Sozzini does indeed have his own christological position (see Pre-existence and Trinity), but the actual argument of his soteriology is initially independent of Christology: the five fractures of penal substitution (forgiveness vs. payment, wrathful vs. loving God, infinite punishment in three hours, universality vs. particularity, demand for repentance) stand independently of whether Christ is understood, in the Chalcedonian sense, as consubstantial with the Father or not. The question ‘who is Christ?’ is to be treated on its own page; the question ‘what does his death effect?’ can and must first be clarified from the texts themselves.

‘But Christianity has never been taught this way before’

Historically this is not quite right. The early-church tradition knows several models alongside one another: the ransom-to-the-devil model (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa), the Christus Victor conception (Irenaeus), the recapitulatio doctrine, the moral-influence theory (Abelard). Anselm’s doctrine of satisfaction is formulated in the 11th century; the penal-substitutionary intensification is a Reformation development of the 16th century. Sozzini does not argue from tradition, but from Scripture and logic—but even within the tradition, penal substitution is a comparatively young, dogmatically quite contested model.

Consequences for Faith Practice and the Image of God

The shift from penal sacrifice to revelation has consequences that pervade the whole of Christian life.

First: The image of God becomes consistent. The God who according to Isa 43 forgives of his own initiative, who according to Luke 15 runs to meet the son, who according to John 3:16 loves the world before it loves—this God is not divided into wrath and love, into before and after. Christians no longer have to explain how two contradictory affects coexist in a sovereign God.

Second: Sin is taken seriously—as a reality of life that must really be turned around. There is no objective receipt behind which one could withdraw. To believe means to enter into the movement of self-giving that Christ opens up.

Third: The resurrection regains its place. It is not an appendix to Good Friday, but an integral saving act. Easter is not the triumph over a guilt already settled, but the enthronement of the redeemer and the anticipation of the believer’s transformation.

Fourth: Ethics does not become a moral appendix to redemption, but its very form. ‘Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit’ (John 15:5). Salvation and life do not part ways.

Sozzini himself draws the conclusion in a simple but load-bearing formula:

‘The office of reconciliation was nothing other than to exhort people in God’s name to be reconciled with God—but Christ did not pay our debts.’

Faustus Sozzini, De Iesu Christo Servatore, Part I—Refutation: Reconciliation (on 2 Cor 5)

Reference to Fausto Sozzini’s De Iesu Christo Servatore

De Iesu Christo Servatore (‘On Jesus Christ the Savior’) is the principal work of Fausto Sozzini on the doctrine of redemption. It is polemical in the best sense—as a response to a concrete position (Jacob Couet, who defended the Anselmian-Reformational doctrine)—and methodologically rigorous. In both main parts, Sozzini proceeds exegetically and logically: he examines passage after passage of the biblical evidence and argument after argument of the tradition. The passages cited here are all drawn from this work. Whoever wishes to follow the line of thought in its full precision will find in De Iesu Christo Servatore the source of the position here condensed.

Summary