Did the Father punish the Son, pour out His divine anger/wrath upon Him ?
There are various Penal Atonement theorists-and Craig do not advocate that God "poured out His wrath on the Son"-your problem, not mine brother. Indicative you did not listen to the clips
With regard to propitiation, the protracted debate over the
linguistic meaning of hilastērion in Rom 3.25, “whom God put
forward as a hilastērion in his blood,”
6 has unfortunately diverted
attention from the conceptual necessity of propitiation in Paul’s
thinking. Whatever word Paul might have used here – had he
written, for example, peri hamartias, as in Rom 8.3, instead of
hilastērion – the context would still require that Christ’s death
provide the solution to the problem described in chapters 1–3.
Paul’s crowning statement concerning Christ’s atoning death
(Rom 3.21–26) comes against the backdrop of his exposition of
God’s wrath upon and condemnation of mankind for its sin.
Something in Paul’s ensuing exposition of Christ’s death must
solve this problem, averting God’s wrath and rescuing us from the
death sentence hanging over us.
The solution is found in Christ,
“whom God put forward as a hilastērion in his blood” (3.25).
6 For an overview of the debate, see Bailey (forthcoming). It is not disputed that
we find quite different meanings of hilastērion in the LXX and in extra-biblical
Greek literature, including the literature of Hellenistic Judaism. What is disputed is which is the relevant meaning of the word as used by Paul on this one
occasion. The predominant meaning in extra-biblical literature is “propitiation”
or “propitiatory offering.” Especially noteworthy are the deaths of the
Maccabean martyrs, which allayed God’s wrath upon Israel (2 Macc 7.38),
and thus served as “a propitiatory offering” (4 Macc 17.22 codex S; cf. Sibylline
Oracles 3.625–28, where God is propitiated by the sacrifice of hundreds of bulls
and lambs). This case belies any claims that hilastēria had to be concrete,
inanimate objects. The LXX, on the other hand, uses hilastērion to refer to the
kapporet or lid of the ark of the covenant, where the blood of the Yom Kippur
sacrifice was splashed, or, more widely, to altar faces where sacrificial blood was
smeared (Ezek 43.14, 17, 20; Amos 9.1). On this interpretation Christ is the locus
of atonement for sin.
Even if we take hilastērion to carry here its LXX meaning as
opposed to its extra-biblical meaning, Paul is obviously using the
expression metaphorically –
Christ is not literally a piece of Temple
furniture! Taken metaphorically rather than literally, however, the
expression could convey a rich variety of connotations associated
with sacrifice and atonement, so that the sort of dichotomistic
reading forced by literal meanings becomes inappropriate. Paul
was a Hellenistic Jew, whose writings bear the imprint of
Hellenistic Jewish thought (e.g., the natural theology of Rom 1 or
the Logos doctrine behind Rom 11.36), and he might have
expected his Roman readers to understand hilastērion in the customary sense. At the same time, by borrowing an image from
the Day of Atonement rituals, Paul also conveys to his hearers the
OT notion of expiation by blood sacrifice. Thomas Heicke comments that already in the OT, “by means of abstraction, the ritual
itself turns into a metaphor,” thus building “the basis and starting
point for multiple transformations and further abstractions as well
as metaphorical charging in Judaism ... and Christianity (Rom
3:25: Christ as hilasterion – expiation or sacrifice of atonement,
etc.)” (Heicke 2016).
Christ’s death is thus both expiatory and propitiatory: “Since,
therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be
saved by him from the wrath of God” (5.9).
Given the manifold
effects of Christ’s blood, hilastērion is doubtlessly multivalent in
Paul’s usage, comprising both expiation and propitiation, so that
a vague translation, for example, “an atoning sacrifice,” is about
the best one can give (cf. Heb 2.17; 1 Jn 2.2; 4.10).
