penal substitution
penal substitution noun: the theory of atonement which holds that Jesus died on the Cross in place of human sinners.
Noun
penal substitution (uncountable)
- The theory of atonement which holds that Jesus died on the Cross in place of human sinners.
- As part of that literal reading, concentrating on a line of thought on salvation pursued by St Paul, came the penal substitution theory, and Fundamentalists rightly concluded that these were the aspects of Christianity most vulnerable to attack from nineteenth-century intellectual developments.2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 863
- Synonyms:
- vicarious atonement
Synonyms of penal substitution
Questions about penal substitution
- What does penal substitution mean?
- Penal substitution means the theory of atonement which holds that Jesus died on the Cross in place of human sinners.
- What part of speech is penal substitution?
- Penal substitution is a noun.
Words near penal substitution in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: penal substitution (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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