Highlights from Trent Horn – Catholic Answers
Satisfaction theory: Christ’s death on the cross is not a punishment as if he were a bad person, but it is a sacrifice and a reflection of him as a good person. Jesus did not HAVE to be crucified. Instead, Christ wanted to offer himself to the Father as the ultimate and perfect sacrifice of love to demonstrate his love for humanity and desire for the sins of humanity to be forgiven.
What we would say, then, is that rather than Jesus being punished with all of our sins and that’s why our sins go away, rather we would say that Jesus’s death on the cross is so good, it’s so meritorious, it’s of infinite value, because Jesus is God and man—He’s divine, so what he offers the Father in that act is of infinite value, because He’s divine—that it outweighs the harm caused by our sins. It outweighs the damage, the punishment due. Imagine balancing the scales of justice, that when you have our sins put the scales one way, Christ’s sacrifice punches the scales infinitely in the other direction.
And he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
(1 John 2:2)
John says that Christ’s propitiation, or sacrifice, not just for our sins or the sins of believers, but for the sins of the whole world. Christ’s death on the cross was so good that it’s superabundant. More grace was merited in Christ’s death on the cross than would ever be necessary to atone for the sins of humanity. There’s more than necessary. Now, that doesn’t mean everybody’s going to heaven, it just means there’s more than necessary.
For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?
(Hebrews 10:26-29)
What can stop that grace is you choosing to not allow it to be applied to your life, or rejecting it later. Hebrews 10 says he who goes on sinning deliberately, for him “no sacrifice for sins remains.” The sacrifice of love outweighs our sins. It is more good than how bad our sins are, and we choose to let Christ apply that to our souls by receiving him primarily in baptism.
Jesus didn’t HAVE to do that, why? Aquinas offered several reasons. One of them that sticks out to me is that it’s a visceral reminder of God’s love for us. Why did God ask the Israelites to offer animal sacrifices? He didn’t HAVE to do that.
As human beings, ritual helps us…sometimes we understand things not just through what we are told, but through what we do. So offering your lambs and your goats and the animals you’d really like to eat, and killing them and giving them to God is a way to reinforce “Hey, God is more important than your lamb, your goat, your hut, your tent, your tabernacle—he’s more important than anything. So Jesus dying on the cross shows us that God loves us; a visceral, stark, and graphic reminder of how much God loves us and is willing to give of himself for us. It’s the supreme demonstration of Christ’s sacrificial love. As Jesus says of the Greek love “agape,” that no man has greater love than he who would lay down his life for a friend. It’s that stark demonstration of God’s love for us.
The suffering and death of Jesus does not mean that the Father poured out his wrath on the Son and punished him for our crimes because it doesn’t make sense to punish an innocent person for somebody else’s crimes.
Read Jimmy Akin’s article, “Did God Punish Jesus on the Cross?” to learn more about this subject.