Suppose a theologian told the following parable:There was a man who had two sons. The younger said to his father, “Father, give me my share of the estate.” So the father divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son went off to a distant country, squandered all he had in wild living, and ended up feeding pigs in order to survive. Eventually he returned to his father, saying, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me one of your hired servants.” But his father responded: “I cannot simply forgive you for what you have done, not even so much as to make you one of my hired men. You have insulted my honor by your wild living. Simply to forgive you would be to trivialize sin; it would be against the moral order of the entire universe. For ‘nothing is less tolerable in the order of things than for a son to take away the honor due to his father and not make recompense for what he takes away. ‘Such is the severity of my justice that reconciliation will not be made unless the penalty is utterly paid. My wrath–my avenging justice–must be placated.’”

“But father, please…” the son began to plead.

“No,” the father said, “either you must be punished or you must pay back, through hard labor for as long as you shall live, the honor you stole from me.”

Then the elder brother spoke up. “Father, I will pay the debt that he owes and endure your just punishment for him. Let me work extra in the field on his behalf and thereby placate your wrath.” And it came to pass that the elder brother took on the garb of a servant and labored hard year after year, often long into the night, on behalf of his younger brother. And finally, when the elder brother died of exhaustion, the father’s wrath was placated against his younger son and they lived happily for the remainder of their days.
The above parable will strike many of you as a perverted version of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. And, I believe, it should. Yet it essentially embodies the most widely accepted story of the Atonement that has been told in Western Christianity since the time of Anselm in the eleventh century, and as George Foley notes (232), has been the basis ever since the Protestant Reformation for what has been called Evangelical Theology. As we shall see, this story is actually a mixture of two theories of the Atonement–Anselm’s Debt or Satisfaction theory, and the Penal theory of the Reformers–theories which essentially say that Christ’s death satisfied the debt demanded by the moral order, or paid the penalty demanded by divine justice, for our sins. Many Christians have read and heard these ideas countless times in books and sermons, and such teachings probably have seemed perfectly acceptable, sensible, and biblical. We might ask, however: if these theories (which are closely related) are really quite unbiblical when their claims are transposed into the concrete situation of Jesus’ parable, why have they been accepted by so many Christians? And are they really the only alternatives available?

Click here for the rest of the essay. It’s really long, and I haven’t read it all yet. But I do think the parable is interesting.