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Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul is unavailable, but you can change that!

In recent decades, the church and academy have witnessed intense debates concerning the concept of penal substitution to describe Christ’s atoning sacrifice. A number of theologians, New Testament scholars, and authors of popular Christian literature have taken issue with the concept, claiming that it promotes bloody violence, glorifies suffering and death, and inevitably amounts to divine child...

are often treated together: what is taken in our stead is the penalty for sins. Substitution is not always necessarily that, however. In the case of the Old Testament scapegoat, for instance, one has a clear enough example of substitutionary expiation, that is, where the goat is a substitute for the people, bearing their sins and thereby eliminating those sins. The scapegoat, however, is not clearly bearing the penalty; it is not explicitly a penal substitution. As Leviticus 16 puts it, Then Aaron
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