The Logic of Penal Substitution Quotes

“the effect is simply to define that work with precision, and thus to evoke faith, hope, praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ.”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“The notion which the phrase 'penal substitution' expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity. The”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. Having referred to theories of the atonement 'which deal in "satisfaction" or substitution, or make use of "the sacrificial principle"', Hunter proceeds: 'It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree. There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for "the many". Not only is His thought saturated in Isa. liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering), but His words over the cup — indeed, the whole narrative of the Last Supper — almost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share. The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa. liii appears in the ransom saying. And it requires only a little reading between the lines to find in the "cup" saying, the story of the Agony, and the cry of dereliction, evidence that Christ's sufferings were what, for lack of a better word, we can only call "penal".”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“And the legendary 'Rabbi' Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence, in a famous outburst to one of his classes: 'D'ye know what Calvary was? what? what? what?' Then, with tears on his face — 'It was damnation; and he took it lovingly.”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God; to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us, even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word 'supernatural' in theology); and to remember that what is above reason is not necessari1y against it.”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment, nor need it; since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to God's work, it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere. (Indeed, there are more than we listed; for a full statement, the tri-unity of the loving God, the incarnation itself, and God's predestining the free acts of his enemies, would also, have to come in.)”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“Each document and each utterance within that document, like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances, is anchored in a particular historical situation — this particularity marks all the Christian revelation — and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreter's major task.”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“Each document and each utterance within that document, like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances, is anchored in a particular historical situation — this particularity marks all the Christian revelation — and to discern within these particularities truths from God”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“Now we come up to our second question, my answer to which has been hinted at already. By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us? I reply: through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible, which in truth are instruction, from God.”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“But these demonstrations, however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Turretin and Hodge, to name but two,3 were very skilful indeed), had builtin weaknesses. Their stance was defensive rather than declaratory, analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and kerygmatic. They made the word of the cross sound more like a conundrum than a confession of faith — more like a puzzle, we might say, than a gospel.”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“From this standpoint, the whole study of Christian theology, biblical, historical and systematic, is the exploring of a three-tier hierarchy of models: first, the 'control' models given in Scripture (God, Son of God, kingdom of God, word of God, love of God, glory of God, body of Christ, justification, adoption, redemption, new birth and so forth — in short, all the concepts analysed in Kittel's great Wörterbuch and its many epigoni) next, dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion, Trinity, nature, hypostatic union, double procession, sacrament, supernatural, etc. — in short, all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks); finally, interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution, verbal inspiration, divinization, Barth's 'Nihil' — das Nichtige — and many more).”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution

“Second, Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational 'picture-language'. This consists of parables, analogies, metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other, as in the Bible itself (from which this language is first learned), and all pointing to the reality of God's presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it. Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing,8 and no doubt much remains to be said. Already, however, the discussion has produced one firm result of major importance — the recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are 'models', comparable to the thought-models of modern physics.9”
― J.I. Packer, The Logic of Penal Substitution