penal substitution

penal substitution (uncountable)

1. (theology) The theory of atonement which holds that Jesus died on the Cross in place of human sinners.
   • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 863:

     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.

• vicarious atonement