In the recent debate over the nature of the atoning work of Christ, it has been suggested that teaching on penal substitution belongs particularly to the Reformed tradition, especially to a line leading from John Calvin, through to Charles Hodge.
This appears to be an attempt to marginalise the doctrine into belonging to only one strand within evangelicalism, and to suggest that teaching on penal substitution is the historically unrepresentative child of 19th-century American Reformed thinking. Certainly the understanding of the atonement as a work of propitiation has been strongly held by those in the Reformed tradition (to which this writer is happy to belong).
However, this view has been strongly maintained across the evangelical constituency, as was ably demonstrated during the 18th-century evangelical revival. From well-known names such as Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, to unheralded and obscure lay preachers, from Calvinist to Arminian, all preached the gospel urgently, convinced, as John Wesley put it, that nothing in the Christian system ‘is of greater consequence than the doctrine of the atonement’. Crucial to their understanding was that the saving work of Christ on the cross was a propitiatory sacrifice.
