why the violence was necessary. And in every case the answer is the same, more or less: God has so ordered the world that the inevitable consequence of sin is violence, suffering and death; and rather than let us suffer these things, God takes them on himself. Penal substitution says nothing more than this. It does not support, or legitimate, let alone give rise to, ‘the myth of redemptive violence’. (My sense from what I know of the preaching of the Crusades is that accounts of Christ’s struggle