Because penal substitutionary atonement works with a forensic, crime and punishment metaphor, salvation is framed as a judicial matter. Salvation is being declared "innocent" in a court of law. Sins are "forgiven" and we are set free from jail.
Salvation surely is all that. But "having my slate wiped clean" is a narrow view of salvation.
I described it this way to the High School students. "Imagine," I said, "I wrote every sin you ever committed on a white board. And we can agree that we'd need a pretty big white board. We've got a lot of sins to write down. So we write them down. And then I say, 'Because of Jesus, your sins are forgiven. Your sins are wiped away.' And I erase the white board. It's clean, your sins are gone. Forgiven."
"That sounds good, right?" I asked the class. And it is good! "But the problem with that view of salvation," I went on, "is that the person who caused that white board to fill up in the first place is still the same person. By erasing the white board I might have dealt with the consequences of your sin, but the sin itself hasn't been touched. So we need more than forgiveness, we need something deeper. We need healing."
One of the ways penal substitutionary atonement distorts our view of salvation is that it over-focuses on the consequences of sin (Judgment Day, hell, God's wrath) rather than upon the sin itself. Sin, I shared with the students, isn't just a crime. Sin is a power in our lives, the thing that causes us to commit the crime in the first place.
A medical way to frame this is that sin is like an addiction or a disease. Salvation, then, is about healing, wholeness and wellness. "Set the issue of hell aside for the moment," I shared with the class, "Hell is irrelevant. Just think about how unwell you are. God wants to help you right there in your life."
Theologically, what I was sharing with the students was an Augustinian view of salvation, the healing of our affections. Biblically, I was sharing Paul's view of sin and salvation from Romans 7. Critical to this view of salvation-as-healing is the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life, something that penal substitutionary atonement leaves wholly out of the picture.
