In brief#

Jesus died for us. That sentence is the centre of the New Testament's account of salvation, and it is stated in those terms again and again. If his death stood in the place of something, the thing it stood in the place of was death.

He also suffered, terribly, and nothing here treats that as incidental. The question is narrower. If the penalty facing the unrighteous is unending conscious suffering, then what paid for sin was the suffering of Christ, and his death becomes difficult to account for. If what paid for sin was his death, then death is what the unrighteous were facing.

The two positions in view are eternal conscious torment (ECT), that the unrighteous suffer consciously and without end, and conditional immortality (CI), that immortality is given in Christ and the unrighteous are finally destroyed. The strongest ECT reply to this argument is stated below before it is answered.

The primary passages#

But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain
For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
1 Corinthians 15:3WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain
whom God sent to be an atoning sacrifice, through faith in his blood, for a demonstration of his righteousness through the passing over of prior sins, in God’s forbearance;
Romans 3:25WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Romans 3:25 is worth reading slowly. Paul says that God publicly set Christ forth as the means of atonement, and he specifies how: by his blood. On the principle set out at What the Sacrificial System Says About Sin's Penalty, blood makes atonement because it carries the life. The sins previously passed over were not answered by a quantity of pain. They were answered by a life given up.

The substitution argument#

Set out plainly, the argument has three steps.

  1. Scripture repeatedly says that Christ died for us, for our sins, in our place.
  2. A substitute bears what those he stands for would otherwise have borne.
  3. Therefore what those he stands for would otherwise have borne is death.

The argument does not require that the death was the only thing Christ endured, or that his suffering was pointless. It requires only that the death was not incidental to the payment, and the New Testament nowhere treats it as incidental.

The reply from the infinite worth of Christ#

The traditional answer is a serious one and deserves to be stated at full strength.

Christ is not merely a man. He is the eternal Son, of infinite dignity and worth, and what he offers on the cross therefore has an infinite value that no created substitute could supply. A penalty of infinite weight can be borne in a finite span by a person of infinite worth, exactly as a debt of enormous size can be discharged in a moment by someone of enormous means. So the fact that Jesus did not suffer for ever proves nothing about the duration of the penalty he bore. Further, on this account his death is not an awkward extra: death is the outward and public form his bearing of wrath took, the point at which the endurance of the curse was completed. The traditional view can therefore affirm both that he suffered our punishment and that he died our death, without treating either as spare.

Two problems with that reply#

If suffering satisfied the penalty, the death is hard to explain. Suppose the sufficiency lies in what Christ endured. Then once enough had been endured, the debt was paid, and there was no remaining reason for him to die. Yet the death is precisely what the apostolic summaries fix on. Paul's compressed statement of the gospel he received begins with the death, not the scourging. Something the New Testament makes central has become, on this reading, a demonstration attached to a payment already complete.

If infinite worth compresses the penalty, it is not clear where the compression stops. The reply works by dividing an infinite penalty by an infinite dignity. But that operation has no natural stopping point at the hours of the cross. If the worth of the person is what makes a finite suffering sufficient, a far smaller suffering ought to have been sufficient too. The source document puts the point sharply: on that logic, why not a papercut? The question is rhetorical, but the difficulty behind it is real. An account of the atonement that makes the quantity of suffering do the work has to explain why that quantity, and the appeal to infinite worth removes the only obvious answer.

Neither point is a knock-down argument, and defenders of the traditional view have answers to both. What the two together suggest is that the simplest reading of the apostolic language, the one that needs no compression at all, is that Christ died the death the unrighteous were facing.

Genesis 22 and the shape of the substitution#

After these things, God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!” He said, “Here I am.” He said, “Now take your son, your only son, whom you love, even Isaac, and go into the land of Moriah. Offer him there for a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will tell you of.” Abraham rose early in the morning, and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place far off. Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go yonder. We will worship, and come back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. He took in his hand the fire and the knife. They both went together. Isaac spoke to Abraham his father, and said, “My father?” He said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they both went together. They came to the place which God had told him of. Abraham built the altar there, and laid the wood in order, bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, on the wood. Abraham stretched out his hand, and took the knife to kill his son. Yahweh’s angel called to him out of the sky, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” He said, “Here I am.” He said, “Don’t lay your hand on the boy, neither do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and saw that behind him was a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering instead of his son. Abraham called the name of that place Yahweh Will Provide. As it is said to this day, “On Yahweh’s mountain, it will be provided.”
Genesis 22:1-14WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Abraham was told to offer Isaac. He was not told to make him suffer, and no part of the narrative concerns pain. A ram is provided and dies in Isaac's place. Christians have long read this as a foreshadowing of the Father and the Son, and what it foreshadows is a substitutionary death. There is no torment in the picture at all.

A suggestion from the author#

The suggestion has two halves.

The life from baptism to transfiguration#

The author observes that the stretch of Jesus' life from his baptism to the transfiguration traces, in physical events, the shape of a believer's spiritual life.

  • He is baptised, and the Father speaks from heaven to affirm him as his Son (Matthew 3:17). The author notes that this is what God says of a person at the moment of new birth.
  • The Holy Spirit comes upon him.
  • He meets temptation and overcomes it by the word of God.
  • He works in the power of the Spirit.
  • He is transfigured to glory in an instant.

The final day#

If the first half of the pattern holds, the author suggests the last day of Jesus' life traces the shape of the day of judgment for the unrighteous. He notes that Jesus speaks of a cup he must drink (Matthew 26:39), and that the cup of God's wrath is the image used of the unrighteous in Revelation 14:10, which is treated at Revelation 14: The Smoke of Their Torment.

The sequence he draws out runs like this.

  • A trial, at which a list of things done is set out. In Jesus' case, things he had not done.
  • A conviction, carrying a sentence of death.
  • Physical suffering, severe and brief.
  • Spiritual suffering in separation from God, at the cry of Matthew 27:46, with darkness over the land. The author compares the outer darkness of the judgment parables, treated at Weeping, Gnashing of Teeth, and Outer Darkness.
  • A cry of thirst, which he compares with the rich man in Hades at Luke 16:24.
  • Death, with breath failing.
About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, limasabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:46WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

On the last item the author draws a further inference: that a creature separated from God will not long have breath in it, since breath was his gift in the first place, as at Genesis 2:7. One narrowing is needed. The Gospels do not state a physiological cause of death. The point rests on the loss of breath, which they do describe, and not on a medical account of how it was lost.

What the picture does not claim#

The author states this explicitly, and it must not be lost. Jesus was not annihilated. His soul continued past his death. He did not need to be annihilated for the picture to hold, because what is doing the work is his physical experience, and physical death is what points to the ultimate loss of life the unrighteous face in body and soul. The picture is an analogy running from the physical to the spiritual. It is not a claim that the same thing happened to him.

What this argument establishes#

  • Scripture consistently identifies the death of Christ, not merely his suffering, as what saves.
  • Romans 3:25 locates the answer to sins previously passed over in the shedding of blood, which is the giving of a life.
  • The binding of Isaac foreshadows a substitutionary death rather than a substitutionary torment.

What it does not establish by itself#

  • That the suffering of Christ was incidental to the atonement. It was not, and no conditionalist argument requires that it was.
  • That the reply from the infinite worth of Christ has no answer. It is a coherent position held by careful theologians, and the two problems above are difficulties rather than refutations.
  • That Christ was annihilated. He was not, and the page says so directly.
  • The reading of the final day as a picture of judgment establishes nothing on its own. It is labelled an inference by the author and treated as one here.

Sources and notes#

[Dear]

Scripture passages are displayed in the World English Bible. The reading of Jesus' final day as a picture of the day of judgment is the source document's own suggestion and is labelled as an inference on this page.

[Welch, section 17]

The source document's table of contents numbers this material as section 18 while the body headings number it 17. The body headings are canonical for this edition, and the discrepancy is recorded in the migration ledger. Two cross-references inside the source document point here by the table of contents number.