Did Jesus drink the sour wine and gall?

I would also like to make two other points which my learned friend @ewq1938 might find interesting, if he is not already aware of them (which would not surprise me, as he is one of the most learned members of the forum on questions of theology): firstly, the penal substitutionary atonement soteriology was unknown to the early church, but first appears in the writings of Anselm of Canterbury and his contemporaries, and secondly, this doctrine, which is not of the Patristic era, and which most Christians do not adhere to, but which is rather in its fullest form limited to a subset of the evangelical and fundamentalist reformed communities, is also that which New Atheists like to charicature when they blasphemously refer to God the Father as “the ultimate child abuser.”

Now this last point is entirely false even if we accept the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, but since we do not have to accept that doctrine, and since the doctrine, because of the distortion of the New Atheists, becomes something of a stumbling block for non-Christians, it seems to me better to rely on a richer, more ancient, more incarnation Soteriological model which does not separate the Passion of our Lord from His incarnation.

friend of said:

It was shown to Christ at the time of His suffering atonement. If there is no penal substitutionary atonement, then we can expect God's wrath against our sin in the next life.

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That’s not true, because when we are baptized in Christ, mystically participating with Him in the Jordan, we cease to be an enemy of God subject to the wrath of God as expressed by @ewq1938 and instead put on Christ, having died and been born again in Him. Or as the Orthodox baptismal hymn goes “As many who have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ. Hallelujah!”

And when we partake of the last supper, we partake of the sacrifice Christ made, which was indeed a propitiation for our sins, but not by the Son to the Father, but rather, God Himself suffering for our sake. We must not forget that Christ our God is of one essence with the Father, being the Word made Flesh.

friend of said:

The liturgist just said that God is not, by nature, wrathful. That is clearly false in view of the OT.

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That is untrue.

What I said is that since God is love (1 John 4:8) and a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29), that the wrath of God is the experience of God’s all consuming love by those who are filled with hate, for whom the experience of such infinite love would be an extreme torture.

As far as the events of the Old Testament are concerned, if we interpret the Old Testament in a literal-historical, Antiochene manner, as opposed to reading it as Christological, typological prophecy in the manner of the Alexandrian school*, they can be seen either as manifestations of the infinite love of God experienced in a temporal way as wrath, for example, the mercy of death being provided so that we would not continue to suffer in sin eternally, and for that matter, the merciful reduction in our lifespan, and also the merciful destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah so as to spare them, in their cold-hearted evil, from further self-inflicted suffering, and/or as examples of God acting as the custodian of infant humanity as explained in Galatians 3:23-4:7

*We should I think seek to read the Old Testament using both the Alexandrian and Antiochene exegetical methods, for it is both historical literature and typological prophecy, in every event and detail. The purely Antiochene-literalist approach has been a stumbling block for many, and at the same time, excesses of Alexandrian allegorical interpretation, such as some of the more controversial writings of Origen, or the psuedepigraphical Epistle of Barnabas, drive people away from the Alexandrian method, when of course, both were relied on by the great theologians of the Christian church, such as the Cappadocian Fathers, Sts. Athanasius and Cyril, St. Severus of Antioch, Sts. Isidore, Ambrose, Augustine and Vincent of Lerins, St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. John Damascene.