“But please be it noted: I have always, always, stressed penal substitution as being right at the heart of things, both for Jesus and for Paul. I do that in preaching and teaching as well as writing. It is one of the saddest slurs I encounter when people suggest I don’t really believe or teach this. It’s a way of saying ‘we don’t understand Tom Wright and he’s saying things we didn’t hear in Sunday School so he’s probably a wicked liberal, and since wicked liberals don’t believe in penal substitution he probably doesn’t either.’ In fact, chapter 12 of Jesus and the Victory of God is, I think I’m right in saying, the longest ever modern justification of seeing Isaiah 53 at the very centre of Jesus’ own self-understanding — which is at the very heart of everything else about the meaning of the cross. That is not to say, of course, that I agree with every way in which penal substitution is expressed. Like all doctrines, it’s possible to state it in less than fully biblical ways, which then introduce their own new distortions. Put it back in its biblical context — which includes Jesus’ message about the kingdom of God, though you’d never know it from some evangelical writing — and it makes glorious sense. Gospel sense.”