In Depth:  Dr. Ian J. Shaw

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).