Warren McGrew and Paul Vendredi continue their exploration of Penal-Substitutionary Atonement (PSA), focusing on claims eight and nine. The discussion is based on Anselm's perspective, which suggests that God cannot forgive sin without first punishing the sinner or collecting the debt of sin from an alternate source. This idea is rooted in the notion that all sin is a debt owed to God for robbed honor (claim five)and that infants are also believed to owe this debt (claim six). Anselm, believing God to be strictly just, states that God could not forgive the debt without sacrificing a substitute. Psalm 135;6 states that God can do whatever He pleases. The hosts suggest that this verse implies that God had various options to redeem mankind. One interpretation called the "restored-icon model" suggests that the second person of the Trinity, in the form of Jesus, restores the human icon by uniting all component parts of human nature with the divinity, restoring the image of God that was shattered by Satan. According to the Restored-Icon Model, Christ assumed human characteristics, including soul, mind, and will, in order to heal them. However, William Lane Craig, a proponent of PSA, asserts that Jesus had no human soul or will. This contradicts the Restored Icon Model's claims and, as Paul suggests, makes the incarnation's meaning and merit questionable. Craig's PSA theory posits that God the Father's wrath was satisfied through the spilling of Jesus' blood. The speaker contends that this view reduces Jesus to merely a "bag of blood" stapled to the second person of the Trinity, undermining the concept of Christ's healing and redemptive work. Warren and Paul clarify that they do not deny the shedding of Christ's blood on the cross or disrespect the extent of what Christ accomplished. They note their concern with the simplistic understanding of Christ's blood as a mere symbol of atonement. They propose that the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection had deeper meaning beyond the shedding of blood alone. They acknowledge the resistance they may face from Protestant perspectives and emphasize the importance of acknowledging Christ's full humanity, including his human mind, soul, and will, when considering the extent of his redemptive work. While Anselm's eighth claim is that God could have canceled mankind's debt by any means He desired, his ninth claim is that God is strictly just and cannot forgive a debt without first collecting it from an alternate source and cannot forgive a sinner without first punishing him or her. The hosts argue that these claims create a "lexical mess," as they are not consistent with the concept of forgiveness. Paul highlights three parables in the Bible that refute Anselm's thesis: the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and the Parable of the Uneven Debts. In the parables, forgiveness occurs without collection of the debt elsewhere. Paul emphasizes that the belief that God cannot forgive sin until it is first punished is not consistent with the forgiveness depicted in these parables. Anselm's tenth claim tells us the atonements must mirror the fall and be as painful as possible. Anselm's first clause, suggesting the cross mirrors the tree of knowledge, is considered acceptable, though not a hard stance. However, it is the second clause that raises concerns. This claim, which holds that since the fall was easy, the atonement must be extremely painful, has influenced both Catholic and Protestant theology. Paul criticizes this notion, stating that there is no biblical support for the idea that the atonement must be brutal and barbaric in comparison to the fall. He uses Isaac Newton's law of equal and opposite reactions as an example, questioning how the easy fall could result in the necessity of an overly painful redemption. He also notes that finding explicit statements of this idea is challenging, though it is implicit in many discussions about the brutal killing of Christ. The eleventh idea in the PSA model claims that the only commodity capable of recompensing God for his offended honor and making him propitious towards humanity is the shed blood of a god-man. The atonement school uses Romans 3;25, among other verses, as the proof text for this belief. However, the same word used for propitiation in the New Testament, hilasterion, can also be translated as “mercy seat,” leading to a dilemma in translation. Paul suggests that the answer lies in John 3:16, a verse stating that God has always been propitiously disposed toward humanity--which means God does not need to be propitiated! Paul cautions that interpreting certain Bible verses, such as 1 Peter 3;18, outside of their original context can lead to absurdities. One example is the idea that God himself inflicted the torture upon Christ during the crucifixion. Another issue is how a finite human nature can pay off an infinite debt, which is a problem, as Anselm's doctrine suggests that it is th

The second-to-last component in the machinery of penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA) is the idea that Christ--as the perfect, unblemished sacrifice--satisfies God’s wrath against sin once and for all, thereby obviating any further need for animal sacrifices. This claim (#16 in the PSA model) underlies the idea that Christ fulfills the entirety of the Old Testament sacrificial system, a belief that is ubiquitous across Christianity, including Protestantism, Catholicism, and even in the Orthodox Study Bible. Claim 16 creates inconsistencies with other aspects of the PSA system. Anselm argued that the atonement should mirror the fall and be as painful as possible, which is incompatible with the idea that Christ represents all the Old Testament animals offered in sacrifice, as these were supposedly killed quickly in a painless manner. Additionally, PSA asserts that Christ became a literal sin and a curse on the cross, raising questions about how he could simultaneously be an unblemished offering for mankind's sins. Those discrepancies expose PSA as a false system, lacking systematic consistency. Paul Vendredi also laments the ignorance of prominent Christian scholars towards basic Old Testament festivals, such as the misunderstanding of Passover being synonymous with Yom Kippur and the swapping of the Passover lamb for the Scapegoat. He notes the irony of highly educated theologians mistaking sheep for goats, creating a false system of theology whereof even the most rudimentary of farming experience would have disabused them. PSA is also undermined by the biblical references to Jesus as a priest after the order of Melchizedek. Melchizedek offered bread and wine, while Jesus reinstituted the sacrifice of bread and wine at the Last Supper. However, Jesus did not seem to hold the priests of his era, who offered animal sacrifices in the temple, in high regard. The speaker cites Matthew 22;29 where Jesus criticizes the priests for not knowing the scriptures. Jesus also predicted the destruction of the temple where these sacrifices were offered. Furthermore, when Jesus entered the temple, he drove out the animals used for sacrifice and overthrew the tables of the money changers, making the buying and selling of sacrificial animals impossible. Regarding PSA’s ransom-to-God theory, Paul emphasizes that the New Testament does not specify who the ransom is paid to, raising speculation about whether it is paid to Satan, death, or God. Despite various interpretations from church fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus suggested that the term is used in a stipulative sense to mean rescue rather than a strict lexical definition. Indeed, the Greek word "lithron," translated as "ransom," more accurately means "rescue" or "deliverance," as shown in the Septuagint’s rendering of Exodus 6;6, where God promises to “ransom” Israel from Egypt.