substitutionary nature of atonement

The New Bible Dictionary on the substitutionary nature of the atonement:

There is a marked disinclination among many modern scholars (though not by any means all) to use the older language of substitution. Nevertheless, this seems to be the teaching of the NT, and that not in one or two places only, but throughout. In the Synoptic Gospels there is the great ransom saying, ‘the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mk. 10:45). Both the details (‘ransom’ has a substitutionary connotation, and anti, ‘for’, is the preposition of substitution) and the general thought of the passage (men should die, Christ dies instead, men no longer die) point to substitution. The same truth is indicated by passages which speak of Christ as the suffering Servant of Is. 53, for of him it is said, ‘he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed … the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’ (Is. 53:5f.). The shrinking of Christ in Gethsemane points in the same direction. He was courageous, and many far less worthy than he have faced death calmly. The agony seems to be inexplicable other than on the grounds disclosed by Paul, that for our sake God ‘made him to be sin, who knew no sin’ (2 Cor. 5:21). In his death he took our place, and his holy soul shrank from this identification with sinners. And it seems that no less than this gives meaning to the cry of dereliction, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mk. 15:34).

Paul tells us that Christ ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:13). He bore our curse, which is but another way of saying substitution. The same thought lies behind Rom. 3:21–26, where the apostle develops the thought that God’s justice is manifested in the process whereby sin is forgiven, i.e. the cross. He is not saying, as some have thought, that God’s righteousness is shown in the fact that sin is forgiven, but that it is shown in the way in which sin is forgiven. Atonement is not a matter of passing over sin as had been done previously (Rom. 3:25). The cross shows that God is just, at the same time as it shows him justifying believers. This must mean that God’s justice is vindicated in the way sin is dealt with. And this seems another way of saying that Christ bore the penalty of men’s sin. This is also the thought in passages dealing with sin-bearing as Heb. 9:28; 1 Pet. 2:24. The meaning of bearing sin is made clear by a number of OT passages where the context shows that the bearing of penalty is meant. For example, in Ezk. 18:20 we read, ‘The soul that sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for (Heb. ‘bear’) the iniquity of the father … ‘, and in Nu. 14:34 the wilderness wanderings are described as a bearing of iniquities. Christ’s bearing of our sin, then, means that he bore our penalty.

Substitution lies behind the statement in 1 Tim. 2:6 that Christ gave himself ‘a ransom for all’. antilytron, translated ‘ransom’, is a strong compound meaning ‘substitute-ransom’. Grimm-Thayer define it as ‘what is given in exchange for another as the price of his redemption’. It is impossible to empty the word of substitutionary associations. A similar thought lies behind John’s recording of the cynical prophecy of Caiaphas, ‘it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish’ (Jn. 11:50). For Caiaphas the words were sheer political expediency, but John sees in them a prophecy that Christ would die instead of the people.

This is a formidable body of evidence (and is not exhaustive). In the face of it it seems impossible to deny that substitution is one strand in the NT understanding of the work of Christ.