2.1 Old Testament

From a canonical perspective, the depiction of salvation as redemption begins with Israel’s fundamental experience of liberation from Egypt. The Israelites had settled in Egypt and prospered because of God’s work through Joseph (see Gen 47), but the book of Exodus begins with a new pharaoh who enslaves and exploits them. In response, God promises to redeem the people of Israel from slavery (Exod 6:6; for more, see The Exodus Motif in the Christian Bible).

At a literal level, ‘redemption’ – the accepted English translation for the derivative of Hebrew roots g’l and pdh – refers to rescue from a difficult obligation by means of a monetary payment (Unterman 1992). In the Mosaic Law, this includes the reclamation of land (e.g. Lev 25:25) and the substitution of money for a cultic offering (e.g. Lev 27:11–13), among other things. Payment in these cases results in someone or something being spared, whether an animal from death or a person from debt or harm (Baden 2025: 154). This range of use opens an obvious metaphorical application to God’s saving activity in the exodus. Much like a near kinsman would redeem and thereby liberate a family member from debt slavery (see Lev 25:47–49), God freed the Israelites from bondage to Pharaoh. Of course, God did not pay Pharaoh anything – at most, one might conceive of this redemption’s ‘price’ in terms of God’s personal involvement and commitment (Rutledge 2017: 290). But some Old Testament (OT) texts stress that when God redeemed the Israelites, God acquired them, making Israel his special possession or servant (e.g. Ps 73:2; Lev 25:55; see Lyonnet and Sabourin 1970: 110–12). Perhaps shifting the metaphor’s imagery to a different social practice, these texts suggest that redemption from Egypt was indeed like a purchase, insofar as Israel changes hands from Pharaoh to a new master in God (Baden 2025: 155). With or without connotations of debt bondage and/or purchase, however, the OT repeatedly uses ‘redemption’ and related words to name divine deliverance, including in the return from Babylonian exile (e.g. Mic 4:10).

The Christian idea of sin as a debt also has roots in the OT. This is not the OT’s primary metaphor; more often, sin is presented as a burden or weight, as on the Day of Atonement when a scapegoat carries away the people’s sins (Lev 16:21–22). As Gary Anderson (2009) has shown, however, debt became Judaism’s primary metaphor for sin during the Second Temple period as the Hebrew language adopted Aramaic’s single term for both sin and the debt one owes a lender: hôbâ. Under the influence of this metaphor, some later OT texts and many rabbinic commentators presented God as collecting payment from sinners (who are obligated to God as debtors) in the form of punishment, as well as forgiving sins by cancelling a bond of indebtedness or removing sins from scales of the sort used in a marketplace (see Anderson 2009: 27–31).

Some metaphorical references to redemption in the OT incorporate this idea of sin, thereby amplifying certain economic connotations of ‘redeem’. Notably, Deutero-Isaiah processes Israel’s exile and eventual return in terms of redemption from debt. God says to the prophet, ‘Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins’ (Isa 40:1–2; all biblical quotations taken from NRSVUE). Anderson (2009: 46–48) notes that the Hebrew word for a term of service here refers to the terms of indentured service for a debt slave, suggesting that Israel had been sent to Babylon to pay the debt of their sins. In Isaiah’s view, God appointed King Cyrus of Persia to send Israel home because she ‘has satisfied her obligations and paid off her debts’ (Blenkinsopp 2000: 180, cited in Anderson 2009). ‘Redemption’ as salvation from Babylon is thereby depicted as following the payment of a price by a debt slave.

2.2 New Testament

Extending themes from the OT, many New Testament (NT) passages also speak of sin and salvation in terms of debt and redemption. Some reference Israel’s past redemption or hope for future redemption (e.g. Luke 1:68; 2:38; 24:21), presumably from Rome. However, the NT ultimately presents Jesus as bringing a fuller kind of deliverance, which includes salvation from sin and its consequences.

The gospels depict salvation as redemption in only a few relatively isolated passages. Jesus predicts redemption (apolytrōsis) drawing near at the eschatological return of the Son of Man (Luke 21:28), and he states that the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom (lytron) for many (Matt 20:28; Mark 10:45). The latter term portrays Jesus’ death as a price paid for another’s redemption from bondage (see below), but Matthew and Mark do not explain the details of this transaction. Both ransom sayings primarily reinforce a point about the surprising inversion of typical hierarchies in the kingdom of God/heaven (see Matt 20:25–27; Mark 10:42–44), where the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Debt as a metaphor for sin, on the other hand, plays major roles in Matthew and Luke. Historically, most interpreters have agreed that the petition ‘forgive us our debts [opheilēmata], as we also have forgiven our debtors’ (Matt 6:12) in the Lord’s prayer depends upon the idea of sin as debt. Nathan Eubank (2013) has further argued that Matthew’s soteriology revolves around this idea, depicting a heavenly economy in which Jesus overcomes the debt of sin by showing his followers how to earn heavenly wages with God and by vicariously earning such wages for them. The idea of sin as debt also stands behind Jesus’ announcement of his ministry as an eschatological Jubilee in Luke 4 (see Sri 2011), and Christians have traditionally read parables involving monetary debts as related to sin and God’s forgiveness. The story of the unforgiving debtor in Matthew 18, for instance, may suggest that because God forgives their sins, God’s people must likewise forgive others, or God will not forgive them (e.g. Tertullian of Carthage 2016; Augustine of Hippo 1888). The literary framing for such parables often reinforces the interpretation of debt as sin, as seen in Matthew 18, where Peter first asks a question about forgiving others who sin against him.

Redemption as a metaphor for salvation becomes more prevalent in subsequent NT books. Most NT terms for redemption derive from the verb lytroō, forming the same word group that the Septuagint uses to translate redemption and related words (whether from g’l or pdh). For example, Jesus is said to give his life or himself as lytron (Matt 20:28; Mark 10:5) or antilytron (1 Tim 2:6). In the first century CE, both words typically referred to a price to secure the release of others, such as prisoners of war or slaves. Words for redemption, such as lytrōsis and apolytrōsis, would likewise refer to the freeing of such persons. Some scholars follow Adolf Deissmann (1927) in suggesting the more specific background of sacral manumission, a practice whereby a slave would deposit the money for his or her own freedom in a temple, signalling that this person has been ‘purchased’ by the god when the money was then given to the slave’s master. Others suggest that Israel’s exodus provides the strongest influence upon NT authors (for such an argument regarding Paul, see Dunn 1998: 227–228; cf. Tolmie 2005).

Identifying a single intended background is not necessary, however, to grasp the authors’ fundamental theological points. For all these possible references, a key implication would be that salvation through Jesus involves freedom or liberation from bondage to another being or force. Paul says that Christ ‘redeemed [exēgorasen] us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Gal 3:13), for instance. Other passages focus on freedom from prior, sinful ways of life. First Peter states that ‘you were ransomed [elytrōthēte] from the futile conduct inherited from your ancestors [...] with the precious blood of Christ’ (1 Pet 1:18–19). Similarly, Titus proclaims that God’s grace brings salvation, ‘training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions’ (Tit 2:11) while awaiting the glory of Jesus Christ, ‘who gave himself for us that he might redeem [lytrōsētai] us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own’ (Tit 2:14). Here the additional image of purification suggests that Christ frees sinners from something within themselves.

As these verses indicate, depictions of salvation as redemption often stress that such deliverance is costly, insofar as Christ suffered and died to attain it. Fleming Rutledge (2017) goes as far as suggesting that the costliness of atonement is the key point of all redemption language, and some interpreters further infer an emphasis on the necessity of this cost (e.g. MacLeod 2014). Several NT references to Christ’s death as a price for redemption, however, also facilitate theological points about the character and demands of life redeemed, as seen in Titus and 1 Peter. The faithful are expected to live changed lives, for Christ has liberated them to do so.

Not all NT depictions of redemption develop these themes explicitly. Paul’s undisputed letters use the word apolytrōsis three times (Rom 3:24; 8:23; 1 Cor 1:30), each without naming a release from bondage or a payment. Verses like these might simply reflect the more general theological sense of redemption as divine deliverance. Given Paul’s idea of sin as an enslaving force from which Christ’s followers are released (see Rom 6:6–23), however, it remains possible that Paul meant to suggest a paid-for release from bondage. The claim ‘you were bought with a price’ (1 Cor 6:20; 7:23) lends further credence to this idea, and many premodern and modern theologians have interpreted Paul precisely this way, citing various Pauline passages together to articulate theologies of redemption in which Christ ‘purchases’ the faithful by dying on the cross. Indeed, two Greek verbs for purchasing or buying, agorazō and exagorazō, can also be translated ‘redeem’, as seen in Gal 3:13 above and in many English translations of Rev 14:4. Ben Pugh comments that these words give strong slavery overtones, suggesting that Paul wanted his Corinthian audience to regard themselves as serving a new master (God) because of Christ’s work to remove them from an earlier form of servitude (Pugh 2020: 30). Paul uses this idea of purchase to stress both a change in status and new obligations for those saved by Christ (see Tolmie 2005; Martin 1990).

The relation between NT depictions of salvation as redemption and the idea of sin as debt is not straightforward. No NT text beyond the gospels explicitly refers to sins as debts, a fact which raises questions about the debt metaphor’s influence and use among other NT authors. Stanislas Lyonnet claims that Paul, for example, did not adopt the Jewish idea of sin as debt (Lyonnet and Sabourin 1970: 47–48). Many theologians have connected these ideas, however, and it is possible that the idea of sin as debt indeed informed at least some NT authors’ choices of imagery for sin and salvation. Given that one of the chief causes of enslavement in the ancient world was debt, Paul could have imagined sin as a debt when he wrote of slavery to sin. A stronger suggestion of sin as debt occurs in the disputed Pauline letter of Colossians, which explicitly equates redemption (apolytrōsin) and the forgiveness of sins (Col 1:14), then states that when God forgave believers’ trespasses, God nailed to the cross and erased a cheirographon (Col 2:14). Biblical scholars debate the meaning of this term (see Moo 2008: 208–210; Thompson 2005: 58), but its ordinary sense is a record of debt (see Tob 5:3; 9:2; 9:5). Many patristic theologians interpreted the term precisely this way, with some adding that the devil had enslaved sinful humankind by this debt (e.g. Origen of Alexandria 1982: 296; Ambrose of Milan 1972: 201; Chrysostom 1963: 63).

3.1 Ransom

Explanations of Christ’s saving work that fall under this label depict Christ as paying a ransom price to redeem sinners from bondage to evil forces, such as the devil, the condemnation of the law, death, sin itself, or some combination of these. Following Gustaf Aulén’s (1931) influential atonement typology, the label ‘Christus Victor’ is also sometimes applied to ransom theologies, especially if Christ’s purchase of sinners is said to conquer death or the devil. This framework originated in the patristic period as theologians reflected on Christ’s claim that he came to give his life as a ‘ransom for many’ alongside other NT references to the cost or price of salvation, and it remained one of the dominant motifs in atonement theology until roughly the High Middle Ages. Eugene TeSelle (1996) has identified three basic variants in patristic ransom theologies: those in which the devil accepts Christ’s death as a payment, those in which the devil loses his authority over sinners because he abuses it in taking Christ’s life as a ransom, and those that partially ‘demythologize’ Christ’s ransom by presenting it as a triumph of good over evil, life over death, or the like, rather than as a transaction with the devil.

Much like the NT and OT, ransom theologies rely on various senses of the term redemption. They can present the bondage from which Christ frees sinners, for example, as debt slavery (e.g. Gregory of Nyssa 2019; see Singh 2018), the obligation of a legal verdict (e.g. Augustine of Hippo 1991), or captivity for prisoners of war (e.g. Origen of Alexandria 2001: 215–216; see Waldow 2019). They also integrate the idea of sin as debt to varying degrees. Debt language is less common and typically not central in ransom theologies that rely on martial imagery (which would become dominant in the medieval period; see Southern 1959: 234–245) and in ransom theologies of TeSelle’s third type. The idea of sin as debt often proves essential, however, in TeSelle’s first two types. Many such accounts explain human bondage in terms of a debt to the devil resulting from sin. Christ then saves humans from bondage to the devil and their impending eternal death through the payment – or the apparent payment – of this debt.

As an example of TeSelle’s first type, Origen of Alexandria commented in a homily on Exodus that the devil ‘buys and makes slaves’ of those who sin; ‘Christ came, however, and “bought us back” when we were serving that lord to whom we sold ourselves’ (Origen of Alexandria 1982: 295). Ambrose of Milan’s Lenten homilies on Israel’s patriarchs assume the same framework for humanity’s enslavement (Best 1996: 100–105), then provide an expanded explanation of Christ’s ransom payment:

He made a contract at a price for our debt [...]. He took away the debtor’s bond, set aside the moneylender, freed the debtor. He alone paid what was owed by all. It was not permitted us to go out from bondage. He undertook this on our behalf, so that He might drive away the slavery of the world, restore the liberty of paradise, and grant new grace through the honor we received by His sharing of our nature. (Ambrose of Milan 1972: 201)

In accounts like this, social and legal expectations about debt slavery provide structuring logic for the soteriological narrative (Singh 2018). Like ordinary debt slavery, humanity’s enslavement to the devil was voluntary and thus considered just, requiring the payment of one’s debt or purchase by another. Equating it with the ‘wages of sin’ in Rom 6:23, Ambrose taught that the debt of sin is death (Smith 2011: 83–84). Sinners therefore could not pay for their own redemption. Christ’s death, however, could purchase them from the devil – much like a free person in the Roman empire might purchase or manumit another’s debt slave – because he did not owe this debt. For Ambrose, the ultimate result for the redeemed is service to a new master who ennobles his servants and gives them gifts, rather than degrading and ultimately killing them.

The ransom account in Augustine’s De Trinitate, an example of TeSelle’s second type, follows another pattern, casting debt as the obligation of punishment from God’s legal verdict against sin. Here the devil still administers the debt, holding humanity in bondage, but not by way of a creditor’s or master’s rights over a debtor. Rather, the devil acts ‘as it were [tanquam]’ by right based on the permission God gives to deliver the punishment of death and thereby make humans pay the price for sin (Augustine of Hippo 1991: 165). Augustine’s note about divine permission stresses God’s sovereignty over all, perhaps to refute dualistic conclusions one might draw from images of God transacting with the devil.

Many of the same theological ideas survive this change in imagery. Augustine’s talk of debt and redemption/ransom still serves claims that humanity is in bondage because of sin and that sinners cannot simply be released. Augustine’s framework brings a few key changes, however. For instance, Augustine uses the language of debt, price, and the like to explain why Christ’s death is not a payment to the devil but a sacrifice that saves sinners. As sinless, Christ was not liable to death. He therefore went to his death willingly, demonstrating his union of will with the Father and cleansing the faithful (who are made one with him) of the guilt by which the devil held sinners. As a result, the devil loses his authority over them. In this picture, Christ’s blood is only ‘a kind of price’, for ‘when the devil took it he was not enriched by it but caught and bound by it’ (Augustine of Hippo 1991: 359).

Another key difference in Augustine’s framework comes from his explicit discussion of justice. The devil exercises a kind of justice – what Nicholas Lombardo aptly calls ‘justice by analogy’ (2014: 194) – insofar as God justly allows him to bind and punish sinners as a consequence for sin. But because the devil acts out of malevolence and the love of power, in truth he acts unjustly. True justice for Augustine is the property of a good will, perfected by love, and he stresses that this is the kind of justice seen in Christ’s work on the cross. Strikingly, this suggests that the kind of ‘justice’ that simply requires debt payment (or, in a legal register, retribution) is not ultimate. Indeed, Christ saves by subverting it, not paying the demanded price but instead demonstrating proper love and enabling the faithful to participate in it (Burns 2010) so they are no longer liable to the devil’s bondage.

Whatever economic and/or legal frameworks patristic ransom theologies use to process scriptural metaphors for sin and salvation, they use these frameworks in large part to explain the justness of Christ’s work on the cross by way of human analogues. Yet it is also characteristic of these theories that, to quote Ligita Rylišketé on Augustine, ‘the justice of the cross does not follow the logic of a mutually profitable exchange: Christ’s “payment” is our gain, not God’s nor the devil’s’ (2023: 125). Indeed, many patristic theologies beyond Augustine’s stress that Christ does not truly give the devil anything. Even for thinkers like Ambrose and Origen, who seem to depict a more straightforward exchange, the theological emphasis falls on what the redeemed receive in being liberated.

3.2 Satisfaction

The ransom motif remained predominant in Western atonement theologies until the High Middle Ages, after Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo articulated a new framework. Much like the lord of a manor holds an irrevocable claim on his serfs, Anselm argued, the Lord of the universe holds an irrevocable claim on all creatures, so the devil has no ‘rights’ over sinners that God must respect in securing their release (Anselm of Canterbury 1998: 272; Sutherland 2021). The central problem (which structures and brackets other redemptive concerns; see Cresswell 2022) was instead that humans owe God a debt for which they could not make satisfaction. Christ then redeems by making satisfaction on sinners’ behalf.

Anselm’s theory involves two distinct debts. First, humans owe God total voluntary submission of their wills (righteousness). Failure to pay this debt is sin, which incurs a second debt for the harm done by refusing to render what is due to God. Anselm explains by way of a comparison to theft: when one steals, justice requires that the thief ‘pay back more than he took, in proportion to the insult which he has inflicted’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1998: 283) – which in the case of sin is infinite in magnitude. Strictly speaking, humans cannot truly take anything from God, who is immutable. However, sinning detracts from God’s honour as it is reflected in the created world’s order and beauty, and it would not be fitting for God (as just) simply to let this harm go (see Holmes 2001). God will therefore either punish sin or receive satisfaction for the debt of sin.

Merely punishing all sinners would not be fitting, either, since it is ‘inevitable’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1998: 262) that humans attain the beatitude God intended. Yet humans cannot make satisfaction, for they already owe God everything they might offer. Thus the God-man. Because Christ had no debt of sin to pay, his obedience unto death on the cross counts as a supererogatory (and, because of his divinity, infinitely valuable) gift. The Father then justly gives Christ an infinite recompense, of which believers are made heirs. In the Eucharist, they follow Christ’s instruction to ‘take me and redeem yourself’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1998: 354; Williams 1957: 265), with the result that the debt of sin is excused (dimitti).

Anselm’s imagery for debt and redemption is difficult to pin down. Some have argued that the ideas come from feudalism (e.g. Southern 1990: 225–226); others, from Benedictine monastic order and duty (Mansini 1987; Fortin 2002; Whidden 2011). Still others claim that Anselm draws from the biblical metaphor of sin as a debt (Anderson 2009: 189–202) or patristic concepts of justice and debt (McMahon 2001). It seems likely that more than one of these frameworks influenced Anselm’s thought. As Visser and Williams (2009: 224) note, the Latin debere can be translated ‘owe’ and ‘ought’, and debitum can mean ‘debt’ in the economic sense familiar today or in a broader legal or moral sense. Anselm uses both senses of both words for both of humanity’s debts. Both can be paid or resolved (solvere), and additional images like theft reinforce potential economic connotations, but the logic cannot be exclusively economic, given Anselm’s considerations of honour and order.

Whatever the metaphorical framework, Anselm uses the language of debt to make vital claims not only about divine justice but also about the nature and restoration of creatures in relation to the Creator. Humans depend upon God for life and therefore owe God their very being (1.20; see Anselm of Canterbury 1998: 304). Moreover, the debt of a righteous will is ultimately a matter of what is natural to rational creatures and necessary for their flourishing. Arguably, this is the fundamental reason why God requires satisfaction for debt: to restore humans to righteousness, a constitutive component of their beatitude (Sonderegger 2007; Peterson 2016).

These and other theological points often subvert apparent economic connotations of debt and redemption. As Katherine Sonderegger comments, ‘[t]he metaphysical character of the God-world relation in Anselm’s theology forbids any real exchange of payment or restitution’ (2017: 183) of the sort seen in monetary (or feudal) frameworks. Nothing can accrue to the immutable God, and in ‘paying’ the debt of a righteous will, creatures experience no true loss. Moreover, the payment of satisfaction ultimately enriches debtors as a step toward beatitude. Neither is Christ’s redemptive work a debt payment in any typical sense of the word, for Christ secures sinners’ forgiveness by giving a gift he did not have to give (Jones 2010: 272–74). In contrast to Anselm’s suggestion that only Christ’s infinite worth can cover humanity’s infinite debt, these themes suggest that redemption does not depend on commutative justice or the strict settling of accounts (Hart 1998).

Christ’s satisfaction for the debt of sin eventually became a standard component in scholastic atonement theology, as well as in the work of mystics like Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe, Hadewijch of Brabant, and Catherine of Siena (Shea 2010; McAvoy 2000). For many of these theologians, as for Anselm, sin incurs a debt for its personal offence to God as a disruption of the ordo essendi (order of being), and God as just requires payment or satisfaction for this debt. Indebtedness also remains characteristic of creaturely life, typically distinguishing humans (whose existence is owed) from God – albeit with at least one exception in Hadewijch’s presentation of humans and God alike as having an amor debitus (Landrith 2025).

The content of and reasons for satisfaction, however, vary. For example, J. Patout Burns (1975) argues that for Peter Abelard and Hugh of St Victor, Christ makes satisfaction by enduring sinners’ due punishment, rather than by giving a supererogatory gift. Later scholastics then found a middle way in which satisfaction included an element of punishment, as seen in Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. Aquinas affirmed that sin incurs a debt of punishment, a sort of legal penalty that must be paid to restore God’s just ordo. But instead of ‘punishment simply’, which is entirely against the will, Christ vicariously bears ‘satisfactory punishment’, which one accepts voluntarily (Aquinas 2012a: 169). Through this movement of the will toward God, satisfactory punishment not only restores order by paying a penalty but also heals the sinner (see Waldow 2022). In this case, satisfaction means ‘offer[ing] something which the offended one loves equally, or even more than he detested the offense’ (Aquinas 2012b: 517) – Christ’s supreme charity for God and humans. Although not simply a matter of penal substitution, such understandings of redemption from a debt of punishment may have helped pave the way for the penal substitution framework that this article examines next (O'Collins 2007; Peterson 2013).

3.3 Penal substitution

Penal substitution theories of atonement centre on the idea that Christ satisfies the righteousness of God by suffering the penalty of sin in sinners’ stead (see Jesus as Substitute). Contemporary proponents (e.g. Craig 2020) argue that ideas of Christ bearing sinful humanity’s punishment appear as early as the patristic period. Atonement theologies that centre this idea, however, appear first during the Reformation. John Calvin’s Institutes mark an influential step in this direction, as their atonement theology included penal substitution as one essential element. For Calvin, God as a just judge can regard sinners only as unfit for eternal life, so God imposes the penalty of eternal death as a debt for sin. Christ takes this debt from sinners and pays it as their substitute. Having removed the penalty imputed to them, God then declares believers righteous because of their union with Christ, the righteous one. The central debt in this picture is the eternal death due to sinners as a just legal penalty, but Calvin combines forensic images with others from scripture (see Edmondson 2004: 96–101), including ‘ransom’, ‘price’, and ‘redemption’, which imply some form of economic exchange. All such concepts in his view rest on the same basic truth: Christ ‘paid the price to redeem us from the penalty of death’, thereby securing believers’ justification and releasing them from bondage to sin and death (Calvin 2006: 532).

Calvin’s Institutes do not attempt a precise explanation of how penal and economic debt relate, nor do they offer a technical explanation of how Christ’s one innocent, bodily death can count as payment for the eternal death that every guilty sinner owes. Later Protestant theologians, however, would devote careful attention to such details and utilize precise economic and legal concepts of debt to help refine or refute penal substitutionary atonement. Faustus Socinus, for example, argued against penal substitution in part based on the observation that ‘the scriptures call our transgressions “debts” or “money we owe to someone else”’ (Gomes 1990: 62). By this token, Christ’s death could not cover the debts of all believers for the same reason that a man with 100 coins can only pay the 100-coin debt of one other man – but God can and does simply forgive sin, as is the prerogative of any creditor. Socinus’ arguments provoked hundreds of responses, many of which tried to clarify which concepts of debt best apply to sin and redemption and how so. In one such response, the Remonstrant lawyer Hugo Grotius argued that unlike a debt of restitution to a creditor, which has its basis in the private right of an owner, the debt of sin cannot justly be remitted, for punishment ‘has as its object the common good, viz. the preservation of order’ (Grotius 1889: 146). Christ’s death can cover the entire debt of sin, however, because it is of equal worth (tantundem) to sinners’ eternal deaths in preserving order. By defining the worth of Christ’s death in terms of the good it achieves, Grotius arguably departed from traditional penal substitution theories (see van den Brink 2017). Nonetheless, similar appeals to legal concepts of debt and the idea of Christ’s death as tantundem to the penalty of eternal death for all became common in mainstream penal substitution theories.

An authoritative example can be found in Francis Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology gathered and codified Reformed orthodoxy up to the mid-seventeenth century (Muller 2003: 144–145). Turretin stressed that Christ offered a ‘true and proper satisfaction made by the payment of a full price’ (1994: 426) as required by God’s retributive justice. This was the essential point he saw in all of the economic terms, from ‘redemption’ to ‘price’, that the NT uses to describe Christ’s saving work – though Turretin also insisted that the payment was unlike that of a monetary debt. Key to Turretin’s thought was a scholastic articulation of three ways in which sin must be viewed: as a debt that must be paid to divine justice, a principle of enmity between sinners and God, and a crime against the universe deserving eternal death. The debt of sin cannot be settled in the same ways a monetary debt could, for guilt and enmity must also be resolved. A difference between penal and monetary debt also served Turretin’s explanation of how Christ’s one temporal death was in fact of equal worth (tantundem) to the eternal death of all: with the payment of penal debt, he claimed, the dignity of the person influences value, and Christ’s dignity is infinite. Arguably, however, Turretin’s debt of sin remains like a monetary debt in the crucial dimension that it is not merely paid by but first transferred to Christ as believers’ surety (for a detailed study of this term, see Gwon 2018) – a practice well precedented with monetary debts but not with the death penalty.

In penal substitution theories (before and after Turretin) that follow this framework, the central image of God as a just judge is meant to limit many of the apparent economic implications of ‘debt’ and ‘redemption’. Such terms pertain not to commutative justice but to retributive justice, which is understood as an immutable attribute of God. The Creator/creature distinction and divine immutability also subvert the typical economic logic of these terms, as it was with satisfaction theory. When Christ vicariously ‘pays’ the debt of sin, nothing accrues to God. Many of satisfaction theory’s other twists on the metaphor of debt, however, do not carry into penal substitution theory. Although they may present the enforcement of justice as good for cosmic order, penal substitution theories do not explain the necessity of payment in terms of sinners’ restoration. Consistent with Protestant ideas of forensic justification, the payment of a penal debt does not itself reorient the sinner’s will, nor is there any sense in which sinners offer Christ to redeem themselves (as Anselm suggested) through the Eucharist. Redemption from the debt of sin means liberation from its consequences due to Christ’s vicarious payment of believers’ debts and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. These changes also reflect the understanding of eternal death as a debt that can be transferred. Sin remains personal insofar as it involves enmity and guilt, but the debt of sin in penal substitution theories is not bound to the person of the sinner in the ways many medieval satisfaction theories articulated (Sutherland 2017: 105–106).

4.1 Traditional uses in modern worship and atonement theology

In popular, ecclesial, and academic contexts alike, many Christians effectively extend traditional depictions of sin and salvation in terms of debt and redemption. At the ecclesial level, for instance, the idea of sin as debt is common in worship music both traditional and contemporary. One might note the hymn ‘He Paid a Debt He Did Not Owe’ (unknown author) or the Catholic Church’s Easter Exsultet, according to which Christ ‘paid Adam’s debt to the eternal Father’ (quoted in United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 2010). As a more recent example, Hillsong Worship’s ‘Man of Sorrows’ (2013) includes lines whereby worshippers proclaim that Christ has fully paid their debt with his blood. Such worship music drives home the idea traced above that salvation from sin depends upon payment in the form of Christ’s death, even if the short-form nature of the lyrics prevents an in-depth exposition of sin and salvation. Indeed, singing such lines in the formative context of communal worship may teach Christians to see themselves as morally and spiritually indebted, both for their sin and for the costly work of Christ to redeem them.

In academic theology, some scholars also draw on debt and redemption metaphors to exposit or defend the traditional atonement frameworks examined above – most often, penal substitution. Much like Turretin, modern proponents of penal substitution who use the language of debt typically distinguish between the debt of sin and monetary debt, arguing that the primary framework for redemption from sin is judicial rather than commercial (e.g. MacLeod 2014). Many also stress that Christ’s death ‘is no mere balancing of accounts’ (McNall 2019: 141) because God saves graciously and gives excessively. Yet modern defences of penal substitution also lean on economic ideas of debt and its payment as part of their internal logic. After highlighting the metaphorical nature of ransom and manumission language in the NT, for example, Donald MacLeod immediately adds that

we must be equally careful not to reduce the idea of redemption to a mere metaphor. There is a real deliverance, and there is a real price [...]. God himself meets the cost of liberating moral and spiritual debtors; and he pays it to himself, because it is to himself the debt is owed. (MacLeod 2014: 235)

Some scholars defend traditional debt and redemption metaphors, however, without insisting on a specific framework for atonement. Instead, they focus on some of the more general theological ideas that the terms can express. For example, Rutledge claims that the traditional idea that Christ redeemed Christians by paying a price is often ‘deeply heartfelt and preachable’, that it effectively represents key scriptural ideas, and that it captures a sense of ‘deliverance at cost’ that is essential to atonement (Rutledge 2017: 288–289, original emphasis). Luke Bretherton (2019: 339) argues that ‘the potency of a story about a God who forgives debts can be heard afresh’ in a world where debt serves as a tool of domination. Similarly, former Anglican bishop Peter Selby (1997) contends that the idea of a God who cancels his debtors’ debts strikes a crucial contrast to the morality of modern monetary economies. One common theme among such arguments is that traditional Christian claims about debt and redemption effectively witness to God’s character today because God’s gracious work in the economy of salvation differs from the extractive work of typical creditors in our contemporary world.

4.2 Critiques of traditional uses

Other contemporary theologians have critiqued the metaphors of debt and redemption in soteriology, whether in a specific atonement theory or in general. Such critiques stem from a wide range of concerns, including the worry that these depictions of God in fact lack the communicative value claimed by Rutledge and others. To provide a loose organization for these concerns, one might distinguish between primarily theological and primarily political foci – though of course theological and political concerns can rarely be entirely separated.

Theologically-focused critiques raise the concern that traditional frameworks for redemption from the debt of sin have problematic implications for other doctrinal loci, such as God’s character. These critiques can be found as early as the patristic period, when Gregory of Nazianzus objected to the idea of Christ’s blood as a payment, arguing that it would be an ‘outrage’ for God to pay a ransom to Satan ‘the robber’ and that the Father would take no pleasure in the blood of the Son (Gregory of Nazianzus 2008: 182). Recent works, however, have registered additional theological challenges. Especially (but not exclusively) regarding penal substitution, some have argued that the language of debt and payment negate forgiveness. In this vein, Greg Boyd quips, ‘If you owe me a hundred dollars and I hold you to it unless someone or other pays me the owed sum, did I really forgive your debt?’ (Boyd 2014, original emphasis). Others argue that if God collects the payment of a debt from Christ who owes no debt, this does not demonstrate but rather compromises God’s justice and goodness, or that if Christ has paid all of humanity’s debt to God, it is not clear why humans must do anything to appropriate or respond to Christ’s saving work (e.g. Stump 2018: 24–25). Perhaps the most sweeping theologically-focused critique is Kathryn Tanner’s argument that ideas of sin as debt and salvation as payment compromise God’s grace and the noncompetitive nature of divine giving. In this case, the problem is not limited to specific frameworks for atonement. Indeed, Tanner claims that all ideas of conditional exchange and ‘[n]otions of debt, contractual obligation, loan, even stewardship should be written out of the Christian story about God’s relations to the world’ (Tanner 2005: 56). (She has since softened this position; see Tanner 2019: 55, 61.)

Politically-focused critiques, on the other hand, argue that traditional debt- and redemption-based frameworks have contributed to or reinforced the development of political-economic assumptions, practices, and systems around monetary debts. Marcella Althaus-Reid (2007), for example, argued that depictions of Christ’s work as a sacrificial payment of debt partake of a reductionistic economic ethic that justifies the parallel sacrifice of poor people to pay their countries’ external debts. Adam Kotsko argues for genealogical connections between Christian claims about the guilty debt of sin, on the one hand, and neoliberal capitalism’s demonization of debtors (Kotsko 2018) and the absolute requirement of debt repayment (Kotsko 2011), on the other. Devin Singh argues that soteriologies structured by the logic of debt incorporate debt into the identity of God, thereby offering cues for human sovereigns to reinforce their power through debt and legitimizing their doing so (Singh 2018; 2019). Most recently, Hollis Phelps (2025) has argued that by making debt a universal moral condition from which one must be redeemed, Christian atonement theology plays an essential role in the creation of subjects who understand themselves as morally indebted to others – a power relationship of creditors over debtors – and thus pay their economic debts, as financial profit requires. Further politically-focused critiques of ‘debt’ in Christian theology can be found in continental philosophy (e.g. Nietzsche 2008; Benjamin 1996; Stimilli 2017), which has influenced some of the arguments of scholars like Kotsko, Phelps, and Singh.

4.3 New soteriological trajectories

The critiques noted above invite new trajectories in soteriology and atonement theology. One proposed response has been to expunge any suggestion that Christ redeems by paying a debt. This may involve an appeal to another form of economic life and/or an explicit negation of the questioned language. Althaus-Reid, for instance, looks to the Anyi gift economy of Peruvian peasant societies, calling for a redemption narrative based on the sort of mutuality and reciprocity found therein (2007: 295–298). (Similar appeals to some notion of ‘gift’ are also found in theologians who do not directly critique the language of debt and redemption; see, for example, Milbank 2003.) Taking a different tack, Tanner puts forth a vision of God’s saving economy based on an account of grace as unconditional:

If anything, the cross saves us from the consequences of a debt economy in conflict with God’s own economy of grace by canceling it. We are [...] returned to our original owner God, to God’s kingdom of unconditional giving. (Tanner 2005: 65)

If used at all in such soteriologies, the term ‘redemption’ functions only in a generalized, non-economic sense.

Other constructive routes begin with a return ad fontes (to the sources), conceived in various ways. Some argue that political and theological concerns about debt and redemption dissolve when seminal texts like Cur Deus Homo are read rightly (Bell 2012; Hart 1998). Others favour strategic uses and/or creative reinterpretation of traditional texts. Phelps has suggested that by reclaiming the wider use of debt language in patristic theology – which at times presents God, too, as a debtor – Christian theology can counter one-sided moralizations of debt that vilify debtors (Phelps 2016). (More recently, Phelps has favoured the rejection of atonement altogether; see Phelps 2025.) In another vein, Marion Grau draws on postcolonial and feminist theory to interpret traditional redemption texts in non-traditional ways, trying to challenge the colonial logic of modern economies by drawing on the ambivalence of theology’s economic metaphors. For example, Grau highlights ‘trickster’ Christologies in ransom accounts like Gregory of Nyssa’s, which uses the logic of a slave purchase but ultimately depicts humanity being freed because Christ is sold into slavery as a ‘stealth investment [that] explodes the diabolic bank, breaks the chains, and buys redemption for all’ (Grau 2004: 159). Key to Grau’s argument is the recognition that redemption metaphors will be interpreted and used differently by different audiences. Thus,

[i]t is the responsibility of the interpreting community to decide whether an image in a certain context becomes damaging or whether a theological locus [...] may not enrich the contemporary debate [about atonement] and add new insights. (Grau 2004: 165; see also Grau 2021)

Each of these new trajectories shows promise for speaking effectively of God’s saving economy amid the challenges with and assumptions about debt and redemption in our contemporary economic context. One need not tread a single path exclusively, nor should one expect any soteriological framework to be impervious to abuse or unanticipated economic implications. Debt itself is morally complex, operating at a range of ontological and economic registers and facilitating relations that range from mutuality to domination (Bretherton and Singh 2018). Moreover, when debt and redemption serve as economic metaphors for sin and salvation, there will always be complex patterns of ‘resonance, resistance, and reconfiguration’ between human economic practices and God’s administration of the divine economy (Bretherton 2016: 76) – that is, ways in which God’s economy of salvation appears both like and unlike monetary economies, for good and for ill. This is an unavoidable effect of metaphorical language. Theologians therefore do well to acknowledge all such patterns in a given account of sin and redemption, as well as to analyse which specific theological and rhetorical features contribute to such resonance and resistance (Sutherland 2022). From this detailed analysis, further constructive uses of debt and redemption metaphors may follow.