I think you just summarized Ephesians 5:25-27.
Indeed, but where’s the substitution? There’s no question on sacrifice. But the question on PSA remains. Or rather doesn’t; it’s inextricably explicit from the Passover on. Salvation is conditional in the NT (as well as subversively implicitly not, in plain sight). In my limitless ignorance and stupidity and even searching on BibleGateway on key words in the Gospels alone, I cannot find the reference to Jesus saying that He must go on up to Jerusalem for the salvation of many. But it’s there. Turn or burn damnationism, on the head of Jesus, implicitly and explicitly.
How could it not be? And yet how can it be? How can Love be that limited? That legalistic? That incapable? That… incompetent?
So - in the spirit of recognizing that there is probably something each metaphor or atonement theory has to offer which may help us get closer to full understanding … here is my speculation. And this coming from one who also does not (anymore) accept everything that has traditionally been bundled in with this particular atonement understanding.
Our (I would say God-given) notion of fairness is that people would get what they deserve or what their life works earn after they have lived into accountable maturity long enough to be held responsible for their choices. So we all rejoice to see the righteous acquitted and even rewarded, and to see the guilty punished, or at least not rewarded for their wickedness. Christ came. And how did he fare within this Deuteronomic fairness system? Not well. He was righteous and yet we punished him. We gave him what the wicked deserve. And in turn, he exposed us - the wicked. What did he give to us - his enemies? He showed us, who were not on that cross, love, healing, and invited us into reconciliation with God. In other words, he got what the law and the prophets attribute to the wicked and cursed. And we got from him what could only be deserved by truly righteous people even though none of us are that. So there is the switch. The “upside-down” nature of the kingdom. We can think of him as occupying the space we deserved, a ‘substitution’ if you will, in which he also substituted us into his rightful place, showing us God’s continued mercy and calling to us to leave our unrighteous ways and enjoy communion with God.
And in original testament tradition, everything: calamity, punishment, even evil, is all attributed to God. God does everything (Satan does nothing without getting permission first), so it was religiously natural for them to follow these prophetic traditions of seeing Jesus as having born the brunt of “God’s wrath”, because bad stuff happening to people was seen as God’s doing (God’s curse), just like good stuff happening was seen as God’s blessing. It’s a very deuteronomic view of the world, and one that Jesus turned on its head - though he wasn’t the first to poke at that: We see hints already in the prophets and especially in Job that the deuteronomic view does not fully or accurately capture everything that was yet to be revealed about God. There was more revelation to come. And come it did. In Christ.
But meanwhile, the deuternomic economy did not just disappear (even today yet - we still have that substrate strongly operative in our view of the world). So it is quite natural to continue to use that inherited language to describe Jesus’ actions in these transactional terms that still draw on that old, but still operative economy. It isn’t abolished (God started us there, remember?) - but it does have a fulfillment layer put over it that exposes its inadequacy as any kind of “last word”. Mercy triumphs over judgment. The Law was not the end of the matter, fortunately for us. We are in the presence of one who is greater than Moses, not an equal to him. And ‘Moses’ (as I suspect any 1st century scribe might have seen it) was their jargon for: “Law”. There was no symmetry or balance there. One prevails over all others: Only Christ alone was left on the mountain after both Moses and Elijah departed. And that one alone is who we were bidden to follow by the voice from above. Nearly the entire book of Hebrews really drives all this home - the superiority of the new covenant over the old - in case one fails to recognize this from the gospels.
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A few allusions in the teaching of Jesus come to mind, but I do think there is not anything explicit in his teaching about a substitutionary atonement (his teaching about communion??? I’d have to go back and review the passages).
Either way, it would not be unlike the Christ we know, to leave so great a stone like that unturned until the Spirit came at Pentecost.
I think it’s in the “for her” part, but regardless. I never said that passage was talking directly about substitutionary atonement, I said it was an example of the picture you mentioned, a man sacrificing all for the woman he loves. But unlike just some kind of personal sacrifice (giving up dreams or money or status) this is an atoning sacrifice that cleanses and purifies.
This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Matthew 26:28
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Indeed you did not.
I was going with your ‘a substitute in the conceptual domain of atonement’.
And yes, there is atonement - at-one-ment - for the Church in particular in the world, transformed by Jesus’ death and resurrection from being dependent on His mortal leadership? (See, I can build on a premiss of - oecumenical, orthodox - faith!).
My question ‘but where’s the substitution?’ was ambiguously rhetorical.
Not sure where we’re at now after @Mervin_Bitikofer’s brilliant reply! Which I must re-read.
PS Done that. Very good. Very good indeed (although fairness is merely genetic, there is no need to bring God in to it). So, Jesus fulfilled the expectations of His culture (Mervin’s ‘deuternomic economy’), which again have nothing to do with God as He is, met them head on, inverted them and transcended them.
Justice is fully dissolved in mercy.
I was rereading the verse and the word “many” seems to beg for another comment.
In Matthew 7:13, notice the use of the word “many”:
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.”
Matthew 8:11 uses the same word for “many”:
After Jesus marveled at the faith of the centurion, he said, “many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”
The centurion, who like no one in Israel, represented the few who find the narrow way. But many will come after him and many will be forgiven.
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I think by this strange phrase you mean you assume all the metaphors for atonement offer some help. However, I think that the penal substitution theory is an obstacle for the modern mind.
I would challenge your belief that the notion of fairness you propose is God-given. Remember the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20). God’s grace comes to all the workers, but some don’t think it is fair.
The idea that a wrathful God exacts punishment in the form of torturing someone to death does not appear to be in accord with the picture of God Jesus taught. In the Sermon on the Mount, we are told not to repay evil with evil. The reason is that, as God’s children, we are meant to reflect the character of God.
The idea of a wrathful God, seems to be a tool in the hand of every dictator who wants to engage the idea in the service of their own rule through fear. Whether it be extremist Islam or Jean Calvin having someone who disagreed with him burnt alive.
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Actually - I agree with that too, and I even tend to emphasize this side of it along with you. That’s why I was stretching into that ‘mixed bag’ to see what I could find that might somewhat redeem the metaphor or perhaps see it from (what I think of as) a more faithful, and less ‘stumbling-blockish’ perspective.
We could have more fruitful discussion about this I think. If we see biblical revelation as progressive (as I tend to), then Jesus isn’t just popping stuff out there without any precedent whatsoever. He’s building on something. Would you say that ‘an eye for an eye’ is a godly attitude to have? Not to hear Christ tell it, of course. And yet any of us who accept all of scriptures as a record of God’s work with humanity can see that at one time those were the maxims and ordinances in operation for God’s people. So did God command ungodly things? I would say he was pulling cultures (especially God’s own chosen people) in godly directions by having them limit their vengeance to an ‘eye for an eye’ rather than killing an entire city because they violated one of your own community.
So perhaps it’s more about where we’re being summoned toward (even now yet today) than where we are at the moment. Giving people what they deserve may not be a great way to live, but it’s a heck of an improvement over a free-for-all in which might makes right and everybody just takes what they can with no regard whatsoever even for just deserts. Society would degenerate in a hurry if the farmer / worker cannot expect any proceeds from the work of their own hands. Deprive us of that, and very quickly we’d all be longingly singing for the day when we could even live up to that minimal standard of hard workers getting something of their due. It would look like a very godly step to us from that desperate perspective. But once that basic substrate is in place, we see that God can call us toward even better things yet.
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I used to adopt that position, but in the light of ongoing study I think it is problematic. How do we identify the progression? The Old Testament purports to cover the time from roughly the second millennium B.C.to just before the time of Christ. However, older material was constantly redacted theologically by the view of biblical theologians at a later time.
The Samaritans accepted the first five books of the Law and regarded the rest of the Jewish scriptures as a fabrication by Jews (i.e. Judahites) during their time in the Babylonian Exile. There is a lot of truth in that. Scholars of the Deuteronomic School used to see the school as being based in the Exilic period. (e.g.,Martin Noth) More recent studies have suggested a much more complicated view stretching out across a number of periods.We have a number of competing scholars in this regard, for example, the Harvard School and the Gottingen School. In his introductory chapter on the Deuteronomic School, Raymond F. Person Jr writes:
“If scholarship on the redaction of the Deuteronomic History is going to move forward, the problem of why so many well-qualified scholars using very similar methods have produced such tremendously different results must be addressed.” [Raymond F. Person, Jr The Deuteronomic School. History, Social Setting, and Literature.2002.SBL.p4. ]
One can appreciate the dangers of adopting a theological notion of progression as an assumption underlying a chronological dating of redaction. The method succeeds in assuming what it aims to prove.
The material above is probably beyond the understanding of many who would read it. I am not apologetic. For those who would argue about the finer points of genetics on this website, consider this revenge! 
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I don’t swim very deeply on either side of these things, and depend on - learn from - what experts in those areas are willing to patiently share with us lay enthusiasts. So, likewise - thanks for your response which I also learn from. I didn’t know that Samaritans thought that way about the Torah or had that disdain for the rest of the prophetic tradition that followed.
So my speculations - while I hope they don’t run roughshod against existing scholarship - are nonetheless not based deeply in scholarship either, and are subjected to the criticism of more credentialed people here who can shed more light. I’m merely laying out more of a faith position that has been shaped (and is still shaping) for me with my ongoing journey and exposure to other fellow travelers in places like this.
It seems your problem with the progressive revelation view is that it relies on too many unfounded assumptions. You may be right, I suppose. I don’t really advance it in an apologetic spirit of logical compulsion backed by indisputable evidence. To me there is a more subjective, and yet utilitarian - even pastoral - pursuit in play as believers sharpen and refine each other with, hopefully - ever more faithful understandings and responses to the Spirit of Christ. So I’m not attempting to advance scholarship here, not being in a position to do that obviously. But I am attempting to help direct intellectually afflicted believers to navigate around all the many stumbling blocks that have accrued to seemingly mainstream Christian faith over these last centuries. And some of those stumbling blocks may be as deeply embedded as to reach even into atonement theory itself.
One problem I have with my own expressed view here is how it will necessarily sound to Jewish ears. The superiority of the new covenant over the old - I know how that would play to their ears, but there it is. It isn’t my own made up trope. Rightly or wrongly, one can’t read much of Paul or books like Hebrews without seeing that attitude rather vehemently advanced. So there may be no avoiding an irreconcilable difference there between Jewish believers and Christian ones. We see it playing out in the early church in Acts, and how they wrestled with such things in Acts 15.
Is it an old, and discarded evolutionary habit that I/we retain in still insisting on seeing things in “progressive” terms? All I can say is that the early apostles and Church leaders seemed to see it that way. So whatever problems you may have with it still, what alternative views would you advance that wouldn’t be more problematic still for the believer who attends to these early apostolic traditions?
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We usually see what we want to see.
So, what is the greatest commandment? they asked Jesus: Jesus replied: "‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
(Matthew 22:37-39, Mark 12:28 ff, Luke 10:25ff (NIV )
Lots of Christians see their Faith as a retreat into subjectivity, where it appears to have some protection against objective facts. This stance ignores the fact that we are called to love God with all our mind. This means that all areas of honest intellectual inquiry should lead us to God. We need not fear objective facts. However, there is no end to intellectual inquiry. No matter how many doctorates we have accumulated, we find the same truth, namely, that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. This doesn’t excuse either of us from pursuing knowledge and understanding from whatever starting point we have. So, continue to dive deep. 
Did the prophets of old spare Jewish ears? Nevertheless, I think we should approach our Jewish friends with humility. As St Paul pointed out, God creates Christians out of nothing (1 Corinthians 1:28) so there is nothing for us to boast about. Consequently, an arrogant approach is out of the question. Nevertheless, we should not fail to distinguish between Christianity and Judaism and affirm our faith in the former. Naturally, this makes persecution of Jews out of the question.
There are some interesting accounts of contemporary Jews who have become Christians. You can bet they did not take this step as a result of an arrogant and condescending approach.
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Amen to nearly your entire post, Greg! The only thing I think I would push back on is …
And this too might be true enough, though if you see this as what ECs are doing, then I disagree.
So actually, I’m still not sure then what your actual objection against “progressive revelation” is.
-Merv
I feel as if this was directed against my comment about how we usually see what we want to see…
Have you considered Matthew 26:28?
I did not read it that way at all. I actually thought of those who reject science and other areas of study in their religious life. Sort of the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” mentality, and actually i agreement with your statement.
I see this as an indulgence in the complete delusion that one can live live according to objective observation. It is delusional because it is not possible. Life requires subjective participation – all about what you want and what you can MAKE of life. Religion is not a retreat but a last stand against a deluge of deceit. And the biggest lie here is that the only honest use of intelligence must be a purely objective enslavement to a complete uniformity of thought. Nothing is further from the truth. We do not need to fear objective facts because the idea that these rule all intellectual inquiry is just the indulgence of pompous academia in self adulation. We can consider their opinions while ignoring their pretentions to authority.
Exactly! And we can remind them of this when they overstep themselves with their frequent use of long chains of assumptions and speculations to justify their opinions.
It is one thing to make a defense of the findings of hard science and it is another thing to pretend that the overwhelming evidence there somehow gives weight to the softer areas of academia which really have very little evidence for their conclusions with any substantial assurance of objectivity.
No, it referenced the philosophy of Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaard. In the Wikipedia article on him it says Kierkegaard focused on “… the individual’s subjective relationship to the God-Man Jesus the Christ”. Kierkegaard’s thinking has been echoed down the years in the stance of many Christians
Yes, on a weekly basis.
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I don’t know what an EC is.
Well, “progressive revelation” as a concept usually implies progression over time. However, many theological ideas about the ancient past of Israel were reviewed and re-written during the time of the Babylonian Exile, so they represent a theological perspective of that smaller range of time.
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