Nathan Jacobs has recently devoted an episode of his podcast to a question his listeners had been asking for some time: what does the cross of Christ actually accomplish, and is the answer familiar to most Western Christians (penal substitution) also the answer of the Christian East?1 The presentation is lucid, generous in tone, and rooted in genuine patristic reading. It deserves a careful response. In my recent book, The Victorious Victim, I attempted to test every major model of the atonement against the original texts (the Hebrew, the Septuagint, the Greek New Testament) and against the Fathers themselves.2 In light of that work, we can say that Jacobs gets a great deal right, and that the places where his account falls short are precisely the places where the Orthodox tradition is richer than the contrast he draws.
What Jacobs Gets Right
Jacobs’s central contrast is between a “juridical” Latin religion, in which God is primarily a lawgiver and humanity primarily a lawbreaker, and a “therapeutic” Eastern vision, in which humanity, created for participation in the life of God, has turned away from the source of life and fallen into death and corruption. As a first approximation, this is commended, and many Orthodox readers will recognize their own catechesis in it.
Several of his points are especially valuable. He is right that, for Athanasius, the healing of humanity begins with the incarnation itself, and not only at Golgotha. He is right that the Fathers insisted that Christ assumed a full human mind and will, because, as Gregory the Theologian put it, what is unassumed is unhealed.3 His reading of the Gospels as a series of inversions (the clean One touches the leper and the leper is made clean; Christ enters the Jordan and sanctifies the waters) captures something the liturgical texts of Theophany proclaim with great force. His distinction between reanimation (Lazarus) and resurrection (Christ, the firstfruits) is exegetically sound and theologically important. He is also fair to Abelard, who was never the pure “moral influence” theorist of the textbooks.
Finally, his methodological instinct is excellent. Citing John of Damascus, he warns against “strict dichotomies” and argues that the Eastern Fathers hold several images of the atonement together in harmony. We agree entirely. The difficulty is that the presentation does not quite follow its own advice.
First Problem: The Caricature of the Western View
Jacobs is careful to say that he is describing the popular Protestant presentation, and the illustrations he gives (the judge who takes off his robe, the father who spanks the innocent son in place of the guilty one) are genuinely heard in some pulpits. A popular caricature, however, is not a serious target. The penal substitution of Turretin, of Hodge, or of contemporary defenders such as Thomas Schreiner and William Lane Craig is not a story of a Father venting anger on an unwilling third party. It is the claim that the Son, one in will with the Father, freely bore in our place the penalty that sin deserves. We may disagree with that claim, and The Victorious Victim does disagree with important parts of it, but we owe it the honor of engaging its strongest form.
The same problem affects the history. Jacobs presents Anselm as the founder of the view that Christ “takes the punishment” of humanity. This is precisely what Anselm does not say. For Anselm, every sin must be followed either by satisfaction or by punishment (aut satisfactio aut poena).4 Christ’s death is satisfaction, a gift of infinite worth freely offered, and therefore not punishment. The transformation of satisfaction into penal substitution, together with the doctrine of imputation, belongs to the Reformers, not to the archbishop of Canterbury. An Orthodox critique of the West will only be heard in the West if it describes Western theology as Western theologians recognize it.
Second Problem: Athanasius Speaks of a Debt
The more serious difficulty is on the Eastern side. Jacobs draws heavily on Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, rightly emphasizing the healing power of the Word’s assumption of flesh. Yet the same treatise insists that the incarnation was ordered to death. Having taken a body capable of dying, the Word surrendered it to death “in the place of all” (anti pantōn) and offered it to the Father.5 Athanasius calls Christ’s body a substitute (antipsychon) for all, and he explains that the debt owed by all (to para pantōn opheilomenon) had to be paid.6 He even grounds the necessity of this death in the truthfulness of God: having declared in Genesis 2:17 that disobedience would bring death, God could not prove false to His own word.7
This is not an isolated text. Eusebius of Caesarea, reading Isaiah 53, writes that the Lamb of God bore a penalty He did not owe, but which we owed for the multitude of our sins.8 John Chrysostom, commenting on 2 Corinthians 5:21, marvels that God made the Righteous One a sinner so as to make sinners righteous.9 Craig has gathered such texts into a substantial dossier and concluded that a sacrificial and substitutionary reading formed the main stream of the patristic tradition, in the East as well as the West.10 We do not accept all of Craig’s conclusions, but an Orthodox account of the atonement that omits this material leaves the field to those who will use it against us.
Jacobs describes the link between sin and death as “a principle of physics”: a creature that turns away from the source of life simply dies, without any divine decree or judgment. There is real truth here, and the Fathers often speak this way. Scripture and the Fathers, however, also speak of death as the sentence pronounced in Eden, and of the “curse of the law” (Gal 3:13) that Christ became for us. The question that decides the whole debate is not whether the cross is penal, but what kind of penalty it bears. Is the penalty a retributive infliction by the Father upon the Son? Or is it death and curse, the inherent and decreed consequence of sin, which the Son freely takes upon Himself in solidarity with us? The Victorious Victim argues for the second answer, and that answer is impossible to state if we deny that death is a penalty at all.
Third Problem: A Cross Without an Altar
Perhaps the most striking absence in the presentation is sacrifice. In an hour on the meaning of the cross, the Levitical offerings, the Day of Atonement, the Lamb of God, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the eucharistic offering scarcely appear. For an Orthodox Christian, this is a remarkable omission. At every Divine Liturgy, the priest addresses Christ in the prayer of the Cherubic Hymn: “Thou art He who offers and is offered, who receives and is distributed.” Sacrifice is not a Western import into the gospel; it is the language in which the Church prays.
Sacrifice raises the question Jacobs never asks: to whom is the offering made? Gregory the Theologian posed exactly this question and answered it with great care. The blood was not paid to the evil one, since that would be an outrage, nor did the Father demand it, since He did not accept even Isaac; the Father receives it by economy, because humanity had to be sanctified by the humanity of God.11 The Council of Constantinople of 1156-1157, important though not binding, took up the same question and affirmed that the sacrifice is offered to the whole Trinity, including the Son Himself. Its abiding point rests on the ecumenical councils: the three persons share one will in accomplishing the mystery of salvation. There is no division in God, no Father placated against the Son’s will. There is, however, a real offering, and an account of the atonement without it is incomplete.
Fourth Problem: The Dichotomy Returns
Jacobs’s treatment of the ransom tradition is one of the best parts of the presentation. He rightly notes that the hiddenness of the incarnation from the devil is an ancient theme (it goes back at least to Ignatius of Antioch12), and he retells Gregory of Nyssa’s image of the divinity concealed in flesh like a hook beneath bait.13 His use of Maximus the Confessor, who sees the cross as the definitive victory over the passions, is equally illuminating.
Yet these very authors refuse the dichotomy on which the presentation is built. Maximus describes death as the condemnation imposed on our nature because of sin; Christ, who had no sin, freely accepted that condemnation and thereby turned death into the condemnation of sin itself.14 The penalty, voluntarily borne, becomes the instrument of victory. John of Damascus, whom Jacobs rightly praises as a summary of patristic consensus, says that Christ took our curse and abandonment upon Himself by appropriation; in the same section where Death swallows the bait and is pierced by the hook of divinity, he also speaks of Christ offering Himself to the Father as a sacrifice for us.15 The Damascene does not choose between victory and offering, or between healing and the curse. He holds them together, which is exactly what Jacobs commended him for.
The hymnography of Holy and Great Friday does the same in a single sentence: “Thou hast redeemed us from the curse of the law by Thy precious blood; nailed to the Cross and pierced with a spear, Thou hast poured forth immortality upon mankind.” Redemption from the curse and the outpouring of immortality are not two theories competing for the same cross. They are one event, described from two sides.
Victor Because Victim
The title of The Victorious Victim comes from a phrase of Augustine, who calls Christ “victor and victim for us, and victor because victim.”16 We have reasons to be cautious about Augustine. In many ways, he represents a linguistic, cultural, and at times theological departure from the Greek tradition, and on this point Jacobs’s concern about the Augustinian ordering of loves and the later theology of merit is well founded. On this formula, however, Augustine speaks for the whole Church. Christ does not conquer in spite of being a victim, nor is His sacrifice a mere preliminary to a victory achieved elsewhere. He conquers death by dying, because the One who freely submits to death is Life itself. The principle “what is unassumed is unhealed” applies here too: what He did not bear, He did not abolish. He bore our mortality, our curse, and our condemnation, and in His person they were undone.
This is why the therapeutic and the juridical are not rival paradigms. The physician heals by bearing the disease; the judge’s sentence is executed upon the Judge Himself, who rises from the tomb and so turns the sentence into a pardon. The Orthodox Church does not need to deny the language of penalty in order to resist the distortions of penal substitution. It needs to say what kind of penalty Christ bore, who willed it (the Father, the Son and the Spirit together), to whom the offering was made, and why that offering was, from the first moment, a victory.
Jacobs has given us a valuable map of the Eastern side of the question. We hope his listeners will also discover the altar at its center. Let us behold the Lamb who, by His death, has trampled down death.
Notes
- Nathan Jacobs, “Penal Substitution: East vs. West; Perspectives on the Atonement,” The Nathan Jacobs Podcast, episode 53. ↩
- Laurent Cleenewerck, The Victorious Victim: Penal Substitution, Christus Victor, and an Orthodox Theology of the Atonement (Euclid University Press, 2026). ↩
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101. ↩
- Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1.15. ↩
- Athanasius, On the Incarnation 8. ↩
- Athanasius, On the Incarnation 9, 20. ↩
- Athanasius, On the Incarnation 6-7. ↩
- Eusebius, Demonstratio evangelica 10.1. ↩
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on 2 Corinthians 11. ↩
- William Lane Craig, Atonement and the Death of Christ (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020), chap. 6. ↩
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45.22. ↩
- Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 19.1. ↩
- Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration 24. ↩
- Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 61. ↩
- John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 3.25, 3.27. ↩
- Augustine, Confessions 10.43.69. ↩
Image: The Crucifixion, eleventh-century mosaic, Monastery of Hosios Loukas, Greece (Wikimedia Commons, public domain).