2 Corinthians 5:21 Doesn't Support Penal Substitution

What does Paul mean when he says that God made Jesus "to be sin"?

2 Corinthians 5:21 is one of the most often cited verses in support of penal substitution. It reads, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

In the context of 2 Corinthians, this statement is one of Paul’s most severe objections to his opponents, who are arguing that “Paul suffered too much to be a Spirit-filled apostle of the risen Christ.”¹ They are claiming that Paul is deficient when compared to the so-called “super-apostles” who have all sorts of external, superficial badges of status. But Paul is arguing that we cannot use someone’s suffering or weakness as evidence they are not called by God or Spirit-filled. Suffering is not discrediting. And his strongest proof of this, as he says in 5:21, is that Jesus Christ suffered all the world’s sin against himself, yet he was the one who knew no sin. If we are going to use suffering to discredit anyone, then we would have to start with Jesus! And then the outcome of Jesus’ suffering is that weak, suffering sinners saved by grace in Christ are, in fact, those used by God to fulfill His righteousness. God’s righteousness here means His covenant faithfulness to his promises to reconcile the world to himself, and renew the world from sin’s destruction.

Therefore, when Paul says that God “made Jesus to be sin,” he is pointing out that on the cross, in that one event Jesus suffered all the world’s sin against himself. The crucifixion of Jesus was the ultimate sin. It was the culmination and summation of all the sin in human history. At the cross, all sin against God and all sin against Man are inflicted upon the God-Man Jesus Christ. In the divine jurisdiction of history, all of our sins are judged as participations in putting Jesus to death. As Isaiah 53 says “The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all.” We killed him. The worst aspect of any one of our sins is that it contributed to the death of God’s Son. Karl Barth says that we can’t even really understand what sin is until we consider the crucifixion of Jesus.² Though countless sins are committed throughout history, when we look to the cross we can see all of our sin displayed in one event, where Jesus himself is suffering our sins upon himself. He was made my sin.

Again, this reading is perfectly in line with Paul’s argument that suffering is not discrediting. The cross was certainly an attempt to discredit Jesus. The religious leaders who arranged his crucifixion were hoping that people would see Jesus hanging from the tree, based on verses like Deuteronomy 21:23, “he who is hanged is accursed of God,” and think that Jesus was cursed by God and therefore not the Messiah. But both his suffering on the cross and his resurrection proved that he was the Messiah, the Son of God. Suffering is not discrediting.

Here is an analogy, or microcosm, of what Paul is talking about. Instrumental in ending slavery in America was a photograph of a slave named Gordon, also known as “Whipped Peter.” On his back, you can see the ghastly scars of his harsh treatment.

Captured in this one image, many Americans saw all the horrors of slavery summed up in the suffering of this one man. Through this photograph, Gordon was made “to be sin” with regard to America’s sin of slavery.

The outcome for us of Jesus being made sin, as Paul says, is that “we might become the righteousness of God in him.” That is, the church might be the ultimate fulfilment of God’s covenant faithfulness to restore and renew the world from sin’s destruction. It is through the church, sinners saved by grace in the crucified and risen Christ, that God will crush the head of the serpent (Genesis 3, Romans 16) and bless all nations (Genesis 12, Matthew 28).

Paul is not talking about the righteousness of Christ here, as in Christ’s righteous status. It is true that the Holy Spirit applies, and yes imputes, the righteousness of Christ to believers. The Holy Spirit applies the promise, incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement of Jesus to believers. But Paul is not talking about receiving something from Christ here—he uses different words that that. He says “we become the righteousness of God in Christ.” God’s righteousness is his faithfulness to uphold his covenant promises, and Paul’s consistent argument is that God fulfills his covenant promises in Jesus (specifically his resurrection) and also the Church, the body of believers who are in Christ.³

Remember the question that is always in the back of Paul’s mind, as well as his Jewish audience: “God, how are you going to prove yourself faithful to your promise to bless all nations through Israel, given that Israel is a nation of sinful human beings?” Paul’s answer here is that, just as God used a sinless person to demonstrate the sinfulness of humanity, so also God uses sinful human beings (in this case the church as the new Israel) to demonstrate His covenant faithfulness.” Humanity’s sin was proven through the cross, and God’s faithfulness is proven through the church.

Now, let’s turn to the penal substitution interpretation. Penal substitution advocates want to use this verse to support an idea called “double imputation”, that is, at the cross our sin was imputed to Jesus, and his righteousness was imputed to us, so that he receives our punishment as our substitute and we receive his reward of eternal life and fellowship with God.

Right off the bat, it is impossible for Jesus literally (or ontologically) to “be sin” or “be sinful.” God cannot be sin. If Jesus literally was sin, he would cease to be God, and he would cease to be the unblemished sacrifice necessary to redeem us from our sin. Not only would the entire atonement mechanism collapse, but also so would the Trinity (!). And actually, many penal substitution advocates themselves agree with that reasoning. There are serious (sometimes heated) debates within the penal substitution camp over what it means that God could have made Jesus to “be sin.” Some bite the bullet and argue that Jesus became THE sinner,⁴ or as Martin Luther says, “Whatever sins I, you, all of us have committed or shall commit, they are Christ's sins as if He had committed them Himself.”⁵ But many would say that Paul is speaking poetically, hyperbolically, or in some qualified way here.

A popular, softer view many penal substitution advocates take is that Jesus maintained his innocence and divinity but was simply judicially “reckoned” as a sinner, in the same way Christians are sinners who are judicially “reckoned” as righteous. There is some truth to this concept, but only in the context of debt repayment (restitution). If my debt is imputed to you so that your payment can be imputed to my account, we could call that double imputation, but justice doesn’t work that way in the context of punishment (retribution). If I commit murder, my murder and the punishment it deserves cannot be transferred to an innocent person, even if they are willing to take it. That would be horribly unjust, and violate the purposes of punishment. The other problem with this concept is that sin and righteousness, evil and good, are not symmetrical in the way that is assumed. Good and evil are not two competing, existing entities that can be “swapped” in this manner. Christians are not Buddhists; good and evil are not equal and opposite forces. Evil is the privation of good. Goodness fills the privation of evil. Goodness forms evil’s disorder, and illumines evil’s darkness. So again, you can pay my debt, filling up what I lack, and incur the loss yourself, but you don’t lose your righteousness in doing so, or become unrighteous yourself.

Some argue for imputation of sin based on the sacrificial system, claiming that the purpose of the animal being unblemished was so that it could receive the imputation of sin from the offerer. The sacrificial animal “becomes sin” and is then slain in the offerer’s place. But this doesn’t work. The spilled blood of the animal was efficacious for purification because it was from an unblemished animal. For the animal to be polluted by sin via imputation and then slain would pollute the blood. Furthermore, the only time in the sacrificial system when sinners clearly transfer sin to an animal is the second goat on the Day of Atonement, and the animal is not slain, but driven off alive into the wilderness. Jesus is never likened to that second goat in the New Testament; Jesus is always liked to the first goat which grants the priest access into the Holy of Holies on behalf of the people.

Lastly, many scholars who affirm penal substitution and many who reject penal substitution will argue that Paul is saying God made Jesus to be a sin offering (see extended footnote for scholarship on this).⁶ I think this reading is entirely plausible. Remember a sin offering is a ritual in which an unblemished animal is killed by a guilty sinner, and the blood of the animal purifies the sinner from guilt and corruption. Paul probably does intend a reference to Jesus as a sin offering. But I think this is still secondary to his main argument, that suffering is not discrediting. On the cross, Jesus suffered all the world’s sin against himself, so that we might become the fulfillment of God’s covenant faithfulness to restore the world from sin’s destruction, as suffering sinners who are in Christ by his death and resurrection.

1. Crossway ESV Study Bible, p.2219.

2. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume IV The Doctrine of Reconciliation. 1.58.4. “The knowledge of sin can relate only to what we are told concerning our being and activity by Jesus Christ as the Mediator and Guarantor of the atonement, to what we have to say after Him, if that knowledge is to be serious.”

3. NT Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God. p.305

4. Biola University, “Bruce McCormack Atonement and Human Suffering [LATC Session 3],” YouTube, Feb 3, 2015.

5. Martin Luther, “A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians,” Galatians 3:13, https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/907.627#655

6. Dr. Tom McCall says this in his book Forsaken:

Some Christians interpret 2 Corinthians 5:21 to mean that Jesus literally became sin. On the surface, this is a possible reading of the text—although the text may also mean that Jesus Christ became a sin offering. (I understand the latter to be much more the traditional view.) And taken in isolation from what Scripture teaches elsewhere, it may even be a plausible reading. But as Oden cautions, it is “difficult to make the point that our sins were literally transferred to him without seeming to make him a sinner. He was not a sinner in the sense that he sinned. Nor was he righteous in such a way as to replace all need on our part of righteous response.” Some Christians will insist, however, that ”Jesus Christ was the greatest sinner who ever lived.” But not only does the text not demand such a claim, but it is also problematic. One may nuance the claim that Jesus was the “greatest sinner” by adding that this was the case despite the fact that “he never committed a sinful action,” but this is hard even to understand. How is someone really a sinner if that person neither has a sinful nature nor commits sinful actions? More troubling, however, are the theological problems. If Jesus Christ is really a sinner, then he is not—and cannot be—divine. To be divine is, after all, not only to be good; but also, to be divine is to be necessarily good, it is to be Goodness itself. But classical Christian orthodoxy, based as it is on the teachings of Scripture, leaves absolutely no room for doubt: Jesus Christ is fully and truly divine(in addition to being fully human). So he is not a “sinner”. Moreover, it would be terrible news for us if Christ were a sinner. For if Christ were a sinner, then he would not be qualified to be the savior. Indeed, he himself would need salvation. Nothing less than orthodox Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity would be at state here—and with it our hope of salvation.

We can only charitably assume that the theologians who make such statements do not mean that Jesus Christ really became a sinner. Perhaps they mean something more like this: God really thinks that Jesus Christ is the greatest sinner—God really believes that Christ is morally responsible for the sins of the world (or, alternatively, the sins of “the elect”) and thus guilty for those sins, and he treats him accordingly. But this alternative is not much better, for it would involve God in a mistaken belief. Thus God would not be omniscient, and he would be liable to an error of greatest importance. Moreover, once again this would be terrible news for us: our salvation would be based on a mistaken understanding of massive proportion. It seems much better to understand 2 Corinthians 5:21 to mean that God “made him who knew no sin to be the sin offering for us, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Nathan Busenitz at John Macarthur’s Master’s Seminary, who supports penal substitution himself, says (https://thecripplegate.com/did-jesus-become-a-sinner-on-the-cross/):

““Did Jesus become the literal embodiment of sin, or take on a sin nature, or become a sinner when He died at Calvary?” My answer to that question is a resounding no.”

Busenitz also says that Jesus became a sin offering.

This view explains Paul’s use of the Greek word hamartia (“sin”) which was often used in the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Old Testament) to mean “sin offering.” For example, in Leviticus 4–6, the Septuagint uses the word hamartia more than 20 times to translate the Hebrew concept of sin offering. Paul’s frequent use of the Septuagint means he would have been familiar with using hamartia in that way.

Busenitz then quotes the church father Abrosiaster:

Ambrosiaster: “It

was only because all flesh was subject to sin that He was made sin for us. In view of the fact that He was made an offering for sins, it is not wrong for Him to be said to have been made ‘sin,’ because in the law the sacrifice which was offered for sins used to be called a ‘sin.‘ (Commentary on Paul’s Epistles, cf. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, 7:252)