What is the Catholic Theology of the Atonement?

[cutenickname]

I spent almost 30 years of my life as a serious Catholic. I only discovered five minutes ago that Catholics do not believe in penal substitution. I know that other theories of the atonement exist, but I cannot read anything other than legal language in the NT record of events and explanations of doctrine, and I am utterly amazed that no one ever actually corrected me on the atonement when I was Catholic. I have a fundamentally high view of the Catholic Church despite the disagreements that led to me leaving it; this is weird and upsetting to me.

Can someone explain the doctrine of the atonement to me from a Catholic perspective?

[cutenickname]

No takers?  Well, boo. :p

[cutenickname]

On 9/21/2020 at 11:04 PM, cutenickname said:

I spent almost 30 years of my life as a serious Catholic. I only discovered five minutes ago that Catholics do not believe in penal substitution. I know that other theories of the atonement exist, but I cannot read anything other than legal language in the NT record of events and explanations of doctrine, and I am utterly amazed that no one ever actually corrected me on the atonement when I was Catholic. I have a fundamentally high view of the Catholic Church despite the disagreements that led to me leaving it; this is weird and upsetting to me.

Can someone explain the doctrine of the atonement to me from a Catholic perspective?

The first twenty minutes or so of this give a good explanation of the Catholic view of the atonement, though it is not the primary point of the video:

 

[cutenickname]

What do Catholics make of complimentarian gender ideology/theology? Generally it seems the Church, post Vatican II, is unusual among "conservative" Christian churches in rejecting literal interpretations of things like women being "the weaker vessel" 1 Peter 3:7 and the "submissive" wife stuff in places Ephesians 5:22-23.

You can answer if you want, but I have decided to use this thread as a place to wait on God to give me answers to random things (rather than making fifty threads that I end up being the only person to reply to) which He has been doing with promptness lately.

I also had a dream about being single, childless, straight, and having a pet mouse I gave two bowls of water to, one completely filled and the other half filled, if anyone wants to take a crack at that. (There was also some strange news story in the dream about an actress getting her feet viciously beaten by some kind of mob.)

Yes, I wake up at 2 AM having to go pee and thinking about stuff like this.

[phatcatholic]

On 9/21/2020 at 11:04 PM, cutenickname said:

I spent almost 30 years of my life as a serious Catholic. I only discovered five minutes ago that Catholics do not believe in penal substitution. I know that other theories of the atonement exist, but I cannot read anything other than legal language in the NT record of events and explanations of doctrine, and I am utterly amazed that no one ever actually corrected me on the atonement when I was Catholic. I have a fundamentally high view of the Catholic Church despite the disagreements that led to me leaving it; this is weird and upsetting to me.

Can someone explain the doctrine of the atonement to me from a Catholic perspective?

Maybe this will help? This is Tim Staples, a prominent Catholic apologist, explaining the difference between penal substitution and the Catholic position:
 

 

[phatcatholic]

This is the section from the Catechism that speaks of the atonement: http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p122a4p2.htm

[cutenickname]

IN BRIEF

619 "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures" (I Cor 15:3).

620 Our salvation flows from God's initiative of love for us, because "he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins" (I Jn 4:10). "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor 5:19).

621 Jesus freely offered himself for our salvation. Beforehand, during the Last Supper, he both symbolized this offering and made it really present: "This is my body which is given for you" (Lk 22:19).

622 The redemption won by Christ consists in this, that he came "to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mt 20:28), that is, he "loved [his own] to the end" (Jn 13:1), so that they might be "ransomed from the futile ways inherited from [their] fathers" (I Pt 1:18).

623 By his loving obedience to the Father, "unto death, even death on a cross" (Phil 2:8), Jesus fulfills the atoning mission (cf. Is 53:10) of the suffering Servant, who will "make many righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities" (Is 53:11; cf. Rom 5:19).

The "problem" here is that I can and always have read these paragraphs and heard the Catholic position as being penal substitution. There is nothing in 595-623 that would be irreconcilable with penal substitution; but still every thing I can find says penal substitution is Protestant. All Christian views of the Cross are substitutionary (He died for our sins), but the atonement theologies overlap and confuse me (Christus Victor, Satisfaction, Penal Sub, Federal, etc). It would seem that growing up Catholic in Protestant country means I never really understood the Church in her own terms on these issues.

Part of me stands with CS Lewis in thinking the "how" of the atonement matters much less than the fact of the atonement; but I am a parent, I have to able to give reasonable answers to my kids when they get old enough to wonder about these things (at the moment my 5 year old mostly wants to know things like if God can understand him in both English and Spanish).

[phatcatholic]

I'm not really an expert on this myself, but from what I gather, the difference is that, in the Catholic view of atonement, the emphasis is on paying a price for the sake of satisfaction, out of love for the Father and for us, whereas penal substitution emphasizes Jesus standing in for sinners in order to take upon Himself the full wrath of God and the full punishment of sin, including complete separation from the Father and damnation.

[phatcatholic]

On 9/24/2020 at 2:20 AM, cutenickname said:

What do Catholics make of complimentarian gender ideology/theology? Generally it seems the Church, post Vatican II, is unusual among "conservative" Christian churches in rejecting literal interpretations of things like women being "the weaker vessel" 1 Peter 3:7 and the "submissive" wife stuff in places Ephesians 5:22-23.

Catholics believe that men and women are equal in dignity and complementary to one another. From the Catholic perspective, the passages you cited support this view because we don't read Scripture literalistically -- as in, taking everything only at face value. There's almost always something much deeper going on.

[cutenickname]

2 hours ago, phatcatholic said:

I'm not really an expert on this myself, but from what I gather, the difference is that, in the Catholic view of atonement, the emphasis is on paying a price for the sake of satisfaction, out of love for the Father and for us, whereas penal substitution emphasizes Jesus standing in for sinners in order to take upon Himself the full wrath of God and the full punishment of sin, including complete separation from the Father and damnation.

Yes and the Fathers seem to have mostly held the Ransom theory, that Christ died to ransom us from the possession and authority of Satan and Hell. There is all kinds of overlap between the various theologies, but I do not like the idea that my own understanding is basically penal sub (which the Reformers seem to have been the first people to believe) with aspects of the Satisfaction doctrine (which is the Council of Trent's articulation, but seems to not go back before the 12th century).

All of these theologies seem to be talking past one another and putting the emphasis in different spots. Kind of like the faith vs works fist fight Western Christendom has been going through since 1517 or so. Basically no one believes anyone is going to heaven on the basis of naked belief that is absent graced and regenerate works (excepting the free grace minority position among some evangelicals, but that only goes back to the 1980's and maybe some streams of Lutheranism), but the semantic fights over justification, while probably of great theological importance are distracting and mostly useless distinctions for ordinary Christian lay folks. Methinks trying to figure out the exact operations of the atonement might be of the same order, but I need a decent articulation of the thing for evangelizing my tiny humans.

[phatcatholic]

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Yes and the Fathers seem to have mostly held the Ransom theory, that Christ died to ransom us from the possession and authority of Satan and Hell. 

Well, some of them did. As I understand it, there was not consensus on this point. There was also no popular heresy regarding the atonement that compelled the Church to crystallize her thinking on how the atonement worked, and so I think the various Fathers felt a wide latitude to think this through in their own way.
 

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There is all kinds of overlap between the various theologies, but I do not like the idea that my own understanding is basically penal sub (which the Reformers seem to have been the first people to believe) with aspects of the Satisfaction doctrine (which is the Council of Trent's articulation, but seems to not go back before the 12th century).

I agree, there is overlap. I think that's ok. Catholics have a both/and worldview. We don't force categories into dichotomies unless we absolutely have to. William Lane Craig, a prominent Protestant philosopher and apologist, says that the fullest understanding of the atonement is the one that incorporates aspects from all of the various atonement theories. That idea is appealing to me. Here's a video where he discusses that:
 

 

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All of these theologies seem to be talking past one another and putting the emphasis in different spots. Kind of like the faith vs works fist fight Western Christendom has been going through since 1517 or so. Basically no one believes anyone is going to heaven on the basis of naked belief that is absent graced and regenerate works (excepting the free grace minority position among some evangelicals, but that only goes back to the 1980's and maybe some streams of Lutheranism), but the semantic fights over justification, while probably of great theological importance are distracting and mostly useless distinctions for ordinary Christian lay folks.

Each theory does put the emphasis on different spots, but they do also contain distinctive elements that cannot all be held together. For example, it is not the position of the Church that Jesus paid the ransom to Satan. It is not the position of the Church that Jesus was actually separated from the Father or damned. It is not the position of the Church that Jesus became guilty of our sins. So, as a Catholic, I have to make sure I know what's distinctive about my belief, make sure I hold that, and then I'm free to affirm whatever is true in the other ones.
 

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Methinks trying to figure out the exact operations of the atonement might be of the same order, but I need a decent articulation of the thing for evangelizing my tiny humans.

Did you watch the video from Tim Staples that I provided in an earlier post? He uses the example of his son throwing a rock through his neighbor's window (it starts at the 3:47 mark in the video). I think that would be a simple and intelligible way to explain the atonement to children.

[cutenickname]

A couple of small points I am sure you are clear on, but that I'd not like a reader to see and misunderstand:

1) There is nothing inherent to the Ransom Theory that requires that Ransom to have been paid to Satan, though this was certainly the position of a number of the Fathers. Scripture describes Christ as a ransom and propitiation for sin, so any Biblically sound theory of the events would have to include some kind of ransom, though who this can have been paid to besides the Father and Satan is not in the least clear to me and both of these potentialities are distasteful in their own way. (As a side note, I'd be interested in knowing which Father did not believe Ransom Theory, this is not error finding, I genuinely want to see if modern Catholic/Protestant ideas on this can actually be found there.)

2) Regarding Christ being separated from Father. This is a common lay error among both Catholics and Protestants based on an overly literal reading of the Gospels, but no learned person/Christian denomination/theology school actually teaches that God the Son ever became separate from the "rest" of the Holy Trinity. No one believes that Christ was damned (ie, went to Hell and was punished), became guilty of our sins, etc The only people I know of who would hold these vulgar and anti-biblical doctrines are people involved with Pentecostal Word-Faith and Seventh Day Adventism, both of which while being able to pass the "are they Christian?" test fall into severe enough error as to be actually dangerous (which from my perspective is not something I'd say about Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Mainstream Evangelicalism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, the Amish, etc) .

Now my response:

Catholic answers annoys me. If you say it is good, I will watch it, but my kids aren't dumb.

Dr. Craig is great, but I suspect he and I agree. I am specifically trying, as an Anglo-Catholic, ex Catholic, to get a handle on what Rome teaches.

[cutenickname]

Please delete my account or ban me.

If you do not simply comply with the request I will have to take disruptive and objectively un-Christian measures to make you do so.

God bless.

I understand your desire to not actually delete accounts so as not to interfere with the flow of conversation, so banning without deleting is fine.

@dUSt