[fineca];1905878]
Is. 53:4-11
Since we mentioned imputed righteousness, let me ask another question about penal substitution which is very much related. I think the RCC considers it a heresy but doesn’t Is.53 clearly teach it?
I don’t see how Is 53 can teach the notion of a legal forensic act of justification. If anything the OT and NT teach God is our Father, we have sonship and become just as a son or daughter and are imputed not
just declared righteous. We don’t just get declared just, we actually become righteous as 2 Peter 1:4 says…“we partake of His divine nature” and become part of His family, so when you use the term “born of God” that means becoming part of His family, first by baptism and then in a process of obedience. The Catholic guy who is shacking up with his family has with his own volition “left the family” by his free act of disobedience.
Penal substitution theory denies the efficacy of Chirst’s sufferings as to make them meaningless. Catholicism teaches Christ’s sufferings were efficacious, Robert Sungenis has a good article on this…
"That is because Catholic theology is basically a theology about suffering. Everything from the atonement of Christ, to our concepts of the communion of saints, Mary, the treasury of merit, intercessory prayer and fasting, victim souls, stigmatists, indulgences, purgatory, the Mass, justification, sanctification, etc, is all concerned with suffering and what it does to appease God and preserve His honor so that His blessings and grace can flow to us. No amount of suffering is wasted in Catholic theology. Every ounce is pressed into service for the saving of souls. Understanding the nature of physical suffering and the God who requires appeasement and honor (which Gibson’s film seems to have grasped at least on an elementary level), is the cornerstone of all Catholic theology. Without it, nothing else in Catholicism will make sense. Protestants, by and large, have little room for suffering in their soteriology, at least not in the vicarious sense. They may use their individual suffering to grow, or may wish it all away with health and wealth TV gospels, but they would never think of it as meritorious toward saving a soul or appeasing God.
**"Luther and Calvin believed Christ’s passion was a legal payment for sin, otherwise known as “penal substitution.” **Since Protestant theology believes salvation is forensic, then the atonement must be a legal transaction. Hence, as God requires the legal payment of eternal damnation for sin, Christ had to undergo its legal equivalent, while his physical suffering was of little consequence.
Part and parcel with the **Protestant concept of “penal substitution” is the idea that the Father punished Christ because Christ, by divine design, actually became the essence of sin. Since Christ was laden with sin, God had to reject Him, and punish Him as if He were an eternally damned sinner. This understanding comes from their innovative interpretation of 2 Cor 5:21 (“he became sin for us”), whereas all the patristic exegesis before them understood the clause as referring only to Christ becoming a “sin offering,” not sin itself, even as the corollary passage, Romans 8:3, stipulates. **In fact, for Catholic theology, it was precisely the fact that Christ was totally without the stain of sin, whether personally or vicariously, that He was able to offer Himself as an appeasing sacrifice. A victim laden with sin, even if it were only vicarious, could never be a propitiatory sacrifice, which is precisely why Luther repudiated the idea of propitiation and Catholic theology altogether. The two theologies could not be any further apart.
Having been confronted with the distorted views of Luther and Calvin, quite appropriately does the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia state:
…The second mistake is the tendency to treat the Passion of Christ as being literally a case of vicarious punishment. This is at best a distorted view of the truth that His atoning Sacrifice took the place of our punishment, and that He took upon Himself the sufferings and death that were due to our sins.
The Council of Trent on the Atonement:
Against all this bluster, of course, is the Council of Trent - the greatest dogmatic council with which God has ever blessed the Catholic Church.
The Council states Christ “made satisfaction for us to God the Father” (DS 799), and “Christ Jesus Who has satisfied for our sins” (DS 904), but never teaches that Christ paid a full eternal penalty for sin. Logically, if He had, then God would have no right to punish anyone in hell, since He could not, in justice, exact two eternal punishments for the same sin."
catholicintl.com/epologetics/articles/christiology/gibson-atonement3.htm
