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The Truthfulness and Goodness of the Cross of Christ | Fulfilled Conference

In January of 2020, Dr. Craig participated in the Fulfilled Conference at Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, California. In this video, he gives a lecture in defense of penal substitution followed by a time of Q&A.


ERIK THOENNES: Welcome back. We are thrilled to have Dr. William Lane Craig with us tonight again. Last year I got to interview him. It was a highlight of our year as a church, and so good to hear some of his story – how in high school he came to Christ because there was a girl who was so happy in high school with him that he found her highly annoying, and couldn't believe it was real. And as he got to know her, he realized it was real, and the source of that joy she had was Jesus. And so this girl in high school was used by God in a powerful way to lead one of the most influential and important philosophers and apologists of our day to Christ and to the truth. And I'm so grateful for her. What was her name again, Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Sandy.

ERIK THOENNES: Sandy, yes. And what was your high school?

DR. CRAIG: East Peoria Community High School.

ERIK THOENNES: What was your mascot there? Your mascot at East Peoria Community High School? So you obviously weren't . . . you weren’t the mascot.

DR. CRAIG: Red Raiders! That’s who it was.

ERIK THOENNES: Red Raiders, all right! East Peoria Community High School. Something amazing happened, and Bill began the quest of not just knowing God and his truth but seeking to know it well and equip God's people and to reach the culture with that truth. I'm so grateful. That took him to Wheaton College, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, the University of Munich, and, what's the other one? You got two PhDs.

DR. CRAIG: Birmingham.

ERIK THOENNES: Birmingham, Yes. In England. So, Bill got two PhDs because one wasn't enough. And he's a professor at two different schools because one isn't enough obviously. Houston Baptist, but also Talbot Theological Seminary at Biola where he is a professor of philosophy – Distinguished Professor of Research of Philosophy. We are so grateful to have him with us. Some of his areas of research interests are right at the heart of the Christian worldview. The idea of creationism, the historicity of the resurrection, how we understand God's relationship to the world, time and eternity, so many important topics he's jumped into. Well, he's lately been having a deep interest in the whole idea of the atonement. What is the cross all about? As Jesus is dying on the cross, what's that about? And we're thinking this weekend about not just the truthfulness of the Gospel, but the goodness of it. There are a few things in particular that a lot of people in our culture not only don't agree with about the Christian faith but they find it reprehensible. Whether it's the sexual morality the Bible teaches, or that there's only one way to God through Jesus, but that punishment is actually necessary and right and good, and the sacrifice of the atonement is a right and good thing. I can't think of anyone better to help us think about a good solid argument for penal substitution – the rightness of Jesus taking our place and his punishment and death for us. This has been an interest of Bill’s for quite a while. He's considered one of the world's 50 most influential philosophers. As he said last time, it doesn't say “best” philosophers, just “influential.” But I think he's one of the very best, so I'm grateful for him that he’ll bless us tonight.

DR. CRAIG: Good evening everybody! As Erik mentioned, the evening service that we had together last year at this time at Grace was such a memorable experience, and so many thousands of people have watched it on YouTube that I'm just delighted to have the chance to come back again this year and to share this evening with you.

The British philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked that Christianity is arguably the worst of the world's religions because it rests, in Ayer’s words, “on the allied doctrines of original sin and vicarious atonement, which are intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous.” Well, never mind the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of the vicarious atonement is widely reviled today, not just by secularists, but even by theologians. I recently completed a major book on the doctrine of the atonement entitled Atonement and the Death of Christ. I submitted it to several major theological publishers. One editor responded almost immediately without even looking at the proposal. He wrote, “I look forward to the day when we do a project together, but I don't think it will be this day. When N. T. Wright said he wanted to do an atonement book, I made sure he hardly ever used the A-word. I think theologians have scared away any Christians curious about the subject. So I don't see how we could make this work.” Can you imagine? Theologians – theologians! – have scared away Christians from the doctrine of the atonement. The precious doctrine of Christ's atoning death is so reviled that the word “atonement” must not be pronounced in polite society, but rather substituted with an abbreviation like “the A-word” – like the N-word or the F-word. That's how bad things have become.

Ayer was right that Christianity rests on the doctrine of Christ's vicarious atonement. At the heart of any biblical doctrine of the atonement lies the notion of penal substitution. Penal substitution may be defined as the notion that Christ voluntarily took upon himself the suffering which we deserved as the punishment for our sins thereby releasing us from our liability to punishment. Penal substitution is rooted biblically in the vicarious suffering of the Servant of the Lord described in Isaiah 53 and in its New Testament application to Jesus. The suffering of the Servant is agreed on all hands to be punitive. What is remarkable, even startling, about the Servant of Isaiah 53 is that he suffers substitutionally for others. The substitutionary, as well as the punitive, nature of the Servant's suffering is expressed in such phrases as “he was wounded for our transgressions,” “he was crushed for our iniquities,” “upon him was the punishment that made us whole,” “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all,” and “he was stricken for the transgression of my people.” According to the German New Testament scholar Otfried Hofius, substitutionary atonement is, “expressed several times in this passage and should undoubtedly be seen as its dominant and central theme.”

New Testament authors took Jesus to be the sin-bearing Servant of Isaiah 53. For example, 1 Peter 2:24-25 says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

So Ayer was right that vicarious atonement lies at the heart of the Christian faith, but was he also right that the doctrine is intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous? A lot of people seem to think so. Objections to penal substitution tend to fall into three broad classes of challenges: challenges to the coherence of penal substitution, challenges to the justice of penal substitution, and challenges to the satisfactoriness of penal substitution. A discussion of these challenges takes us into lively discussions in the philosophy of law – that's the field of philosophy where the theory of punishment is most thoroughly discussed. Tonight, I want to examine these challenges with you.

Let's talk first about the coherence of penal substitution. With respect to the coherence of penal substitution, some critics have claimed on the basis of a so-called expressivist theory of punishment that it is impossible that God punished Christ for our sins, for according to an expressivist theory of punishment for an act to count as punishment it must send a message of condemnation or censure for what is believed to be a wrongful act or omission. Some critics have argued that God could not condemn or censure Christ because he was sinless. Therefore, God could not have punished Christ for our sins. The crucial premises of this argument seem to be the following.

  1. If Christ was sinless, God could not have condemned Christ.
  2. If God could not have condemned Christ, God could not have punished Christ.
  3. If God could not have punished Christ, penal substitution is false.

Thus it follows from the sinlessness of Christ that penal substitution is false.

I think that this criticism of penal substitution is multiply flawed and therefore without merit. To mention but one shortcoming, it seems to be based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the expressivist theory of punishment. An expressivist theory does not require that the person punished is condemned or censured for the act or omission believed to be wrong. Censure could be either of the person who did the act or of the act itself. It is no part of expressivism that the censure expressed by punishment target a particular person. Expressivist theories of punishment as typically formulated are thus perfectly consistent with penal substitution, and thus premise (2) of the argument is undercut.

Turn to the justice of penal substitution. Although a few critics have objected to the coherence of penal substitution, by far and away the most common objection is to the justice of penal substitution. Critics of penal substitution frequently assert that God's punishing Christ in our place would be an injustice on God's part, for it is an axiom of retributive justice that it is unjust to punish an innocent person. But Christ was an innocent person. Since God is perfectly just, he therefore cannot have punished Christ. The crucial premises and inferences of this objection appear to be the following.

  1. God is perfectly just.
  2. If God is perfectly just, he cannot punish an innocent person.
  3. Therefore, God cannot punish an innocent person.
  4. Christ was an innocent person.
  5. Therefore, God cannot punish Christ.
  6. If God cannot punish Christ, penal substitution is false.

It follows that if God is perfectly just then penal substitution is false. Again, I think that this objection is multiply flawed. Let me highlight just two shortcomings. First, the objection does not sufficiently differentiate various accounts of a retributive theory of justice. While a so-called negative retributive theory holds that the innocent should not be punished because they do not deserve it, the essence of retributive justice lies in so-called positive retributivism which holds that the guilty should be punished because they deserve it. What distinguishes retributivism as a theory of justice is the positive thesis that the punishment of the guilty is an intrinsic good because the guilty deserve it. God is a positive retributivist who will by no means clear the guilty (Exodus 34:7). But the penal theorist may maintain that God is only qualifiedly a negative retributivist since even if he has prohibited human beings from punishing innocent persons, and even if he is too good himself to punish innocent human persons, still he reserves the prerogative to punish an innocent divine person, namely Christ, in the place of the guilty. This extraordinary exception is a result of his goodness, not a defect in his justice. Premise (2) is therefore undercut.

This response alone serves to dispense with the objection, but even more can be said. Let's suppose that the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice are essential to God and could not be overridden, would God be unjust to punish Christ? Well, not necessarily. For consider premise (4): Christ was an innocent person. Up to this point we have acquiesced in the assumption that Christ was indeed innocent. But for penal theorists like the Protestant Reformers who affirm the imputation of our sins to Christ, there is no question in Christ's case of God's punishing the innocent and so violating even the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice. For Christ, in virtue of the imputation of our sins to him, was legally guilty before God. Of course, because our sins were merely imputed to Christ, and not infused in him, Christ was, as always, personally virtuous – a paradigm of compassion, selflessness, purity, and courage. But he was declared legally guilty before God. Therefore, he was legally liable to punishment. Thus, given the doctrine of the imputation of sins, the moral objection to penal substitutionary theories is a non-starter being based on the false assumption of premise (4).

Of course, critics of penal substitution are apt to be unsympathetic to the claim that our sins were imputed to Christ. Whether one holds that our sins (that is to say, our wrongful acts) were imputed to Christ, or one holds that our guilt for our wrongful acts was imputed to Christ, the complaint in both cases is the same: we have no experience of the transfer of either moral responsibility for actions or of guilt in isolation from actions from one person to another.

But are we so utterly bereft of analogies to imputation as the critics allege? I think not. Consider first the idea that our wrongful acts were imputed to Christ. On this view, although Christ did not himself commit the sins in question, God chooses to treat Christ as if he had done those sins. Such language is formulaic for the expression of legal fictions. The nearly universal understanding of a legal fiction is that it is something that the court consciously knows to be false but treats as if it were true for the sake of a particular action. The use of legal fictions is a long-established, widespread, and indispensable feature of systems of justice. Penal substitution theorists have been typically understandably leery of talk of legal fictions in connection with their views lest our redemption be thought to be something unreal, a mere pretense. But such a fear is misplaced. The claim is not that penal substitution is a fiction, for Christ was really and truly punished on such a view. Nor is his expiation of sin or propitiation of God's wrath a fiction, for his being punished for our sins removed our liability to punishment and it satisfied God's justice. All these things are real. What is fictitious is that Christ himself did the wrongful acts for which he was punished. Every orthodox Christian believes that Christ did not and could not commit sins, but on the present view God adopts for the administration of justice the legal fiction that Christ did such deeds.

Penal substitution theorists will sometimes object to the employment of legal fictions and the doctrine of the atonement because God's legally justifying us has real objective results. Someone whose debt has been legally remitted, for example, really becomes free of the burdens of financial obligation to his former creditor. But, again, such an objection is based upon a misunderstanding of the role of legal fictions in the achievement of justice. A legal fiction is a device which is adopted precisely in order to bring about real and objective differences in the world. Take for example the classic case of a legal fiction employed in Mostyn v. Fabrigas. Mr. Fabrigas sued the governor of the Mediterranean island of Minorca, then under British control, for trespass and false imprisonment. Since such a suit could not proceed in Minorca without the approval of the governor himself, Mr. Fabrigas filed suit in the Court of Common Pleas in London. Unfortunately, that court had jurisdiction only in cases brought by residents of London. Lord Mansfield, recognizing that a denial of jurisdiction in this case would leave someone who was plainly wronged without a legal remedy, declared that for the purposes of the action Minorca was part of London. Frederick Schauer observes, “That conclusion was plainly false and equally plainly produced a just result, and thus Mostyn v. Fabrigas represents the paradigmatic example of using a fiction to achieve what might in earlier days have been done through the vehicle of equity.”[1]

Or consider the legal fiction that a ship is a person.[2] The adoption of this fiction by U.S. federal courts in the early 19th century came about because of the efforts of ship owners to evade responsibility for violating embargo laws and carrying unlawful cargo, including slaves. When the ships were seized, the captains and crews passed on responsibility to the ship owners, who in turn produced innocent manifests while denying any knowledge whatsoever of the illegal activity of the captains and crews. The courts responded by making the ship itself (or should we say herself?) the person against whom the charges were brought. By the end of the 19th century this fiction became the settled view of ships in maritime law, so that the “offending ship is considered as herself the wrongdoer, and as herself bound to make compensation for the wrong done.”[3] According to Douglas Lind, the “ontologically wild” fiction of ship personification had profound and beneficial results, facilitating the condemnation and forfeiture of offending vessels and producing a more just, coherent, and workable admiralty jurisprudence.[4]

Holding that God, in his role as the supreme Judge, adopts for the purposes of our redemption the legal fiction that Christ himself had done the deeds in question in no way implies that our forensic justification before his bar is unreal. Thus, through the device of legal fictions we do, indeed, have some experience of how legal responsibility for acts can be imputed to another person who did not really do the actions, thereby producing real differences in the world outside the fiction.

Consider now the second alternative, that God imputes to Christ, not the wrongdoing itself, but the guilt of our wrongdoing.[5] It is worth noting that the question does not concern the transfer of guilt from one person to another, in the sense that guilt is removed from one person and placed on another. For the defender of the doctrine of imputation does not hold that when my guilt is imputed to Christ, it is thereby removed from me. Guilt is merely replicated in Christ, just as, according to the doctrine of original sin, Adam’s guilt is replicated in me, not transferred from Adam to me. Adam remains guilty, as do I when my guilt is imputed to Christ. The entire rationale of penal substitution is, after all, the removal of guilt by punishment.

What is at issue, then, is whether we have any experience of the replication of guilt in a person different than the person who did the act. The question is not the removal of the primary actor’s guilt but the imputation of guilt for his wrong-doing to another person as well. So understood, we are not wholly without analogies in our justice system.

In civil law there are cases involving what is called vicarious liability. In such cases the principle of respondeat superior (meaning roughly, “the master is answerable”) is invoked in order to impute the liability of a subordinate to his superior, for example, a master’s being held liable for acts done by his servant. On the contemporary scene this principle has given rise to a widespread and largely uncontroversial principle of vicarious liability of employers. An employer may be held liable for acts done by his employee in his role as employee, even though the employer did not do these acts himself. Cases typically involve employers’ being held liable for the illegal sale of items by employees but may also include torts like assault and battery, fraud, manslaughter, and so on. It needs to be emphasized that in such cases the employer is not being held liable for other acts, such as complicity or negligence in, for instance, failing to supervise the employee. Indeed, he may be utterly blameless in the matter. Rather the liability incurred by his employee for certain acts is imputed to him in virtue of his relationship with the employee, even though he did not himself do the acts in question. The liability is not thereby transferred from the employee to the employer; rather the liability of the employee is replicated in the employer. In cases of vicarious liability, then, we have the responsibility for an act imputed to another person than the actor.

It might be said that in such civil cases guilt is not imputed to another person but mere liability. This claim may be left moot, for vicarious liability also makes an appearance in criminal law as well as civil law.[6] There are criminal as well as civil applications of respondeat superior. The liability for crimes committed by a subordinate in the discharge of his duties can also be imputed to his superior. Both the employer and the employee may be found guilty for crimes which only the employee committed.[7] For example, in Allen v Whitehead the owner of a café was found to be guilty because his employee, to whom management of the café had been delegated, allowed prostitutes to congregate there in violation of the law. In Sherras v De Rutzen a bartender’s criminal liability for selling alcohol to a constable on duty was imputed to the licensed owner of the bar. In such cases, we have the guilt of one person imputed to another person, who did not do the act. Interestingly, vicarious liability is a case of so-called strict liability, where the superior is held to be guilty without being found blameworthy.[8] He is thus guilty and liable to punishment even though he is not culpable.

Thus, the vicarious liability that exists in the law suffices to show that the imputation of our guilt to Christ is not wholly without parallel in our experience. In the law’s imputation of guilt to another person than the actor, we actually have a very close analogy to the doctrine of the imputation of our sins to Christ.

Imputation of wrongdoing or guilt to a blameless party is thus a widely accepted feature of our American justice system. Now sometimes the ascription of vicarious liability is denounced as unjust, though tolerated as a sort of necessary evil due to practical considerations arising from the human impossibility of administering a system of pure justice. But when would the imposition of vicarious liability be even prima facie unjust? Arguably, it could only be in cases in which it is non-voluntary. If an employer knows that the exaction of justice’s demands from his employee would ruin him and out of compassion for his employee and his family wishes to act mercifully by voluntarily being held vicariously liable for his employee’s wrongdoing, how is that unjust or immoral? In the same way, if Christ voluntarily invites our sins to be imputed to him for the sake of our salvation, what injustice is there in that? Who is to gainsay him?

In sum, the objection to penal substitution based on the justification of punishment is no more successful than the objection to the coherence of penal substitution based on the definition of punishment.

Finally, the satisfactoriness of penal substitution. A third sort of objection to penal substitution concerns what we might call its satisfactoriness. Some critics have objected that punishing Christ in our place could not possibly meet the demands of divine retributive justice, for punishing another person for my crimes would not serve to remove my liability to punishment. So how can penal substitution satisfy God's justice?

We can formulate this objection as follows:

  1. Unless the person who committed a wrong is punished for that wrong, divine justice is not satisfied.
  2. If God practices penal substitution, then the person who committed a wrong is not punished for that wrong.
  3. Therefore, if God practices penal substitution, divine justice is not satisfied.

It follows that penal substitution is thus unsatisfactory.

Perhaps some progress can be made toward answering this question by considering how penal substitution is regarded in our secular justice system. After all, if we are talking about retributive justice as we know and understand it, then divine justice must be significantly analogous to enlightened human justice systems.

The Anglo-American system of justice, in point of fact, does countenance and even endorse cases in which a substitute satisfies the demands of retributive justice. The eminent American philosopher David Lewis points out that a friend can pay a person's fine if both agree to the arrangement. Yet, says Lewis, “this is just as much a case of penal substitution as the others.”[9] Some of these fines, Lewis remarks, are just as burdensome as prison sentences and just as censorious. If we were single-mindedly against penal substitution, Lewis says, then we should conclude that fines are an unsatisfactory form of punishment, that such punishment, in other words, fails to satisfy justice’s demands. But we do not.[10] Lewis draws the lesson that penal substitution may sometimes satisfy justice's demands just as the Reformers maintained.

Indeed, penal substitution is much more common than Lewis seems to realize, being not merely condoned but actually enjoined by the law. I have reference once more to cases involving so-called vicarious liability. For, as we have seen, the liability for crimes committed by a subordinate in the discharge of his duties can be imputed to his superior. Note, moreover, that in a criminal case involving vicarious liability, the punishment of the employer may satisfy for the employee as well. In fact, the employer may actually be charged as the principal in the crime and his employee as a mere accessory in which case only the punishment of the employer can satisfy for both. Such cases of substitutionary punishment are especially common when a corporation is held vicariously liable for crimes committed by employees. Criminal law theorist David Ormerod explains,

Corporations have a separate legal identity. They are treated in law as having a legal personality distinct from the natural persons–members, directors, employees, etc–who make up the corporation.[11]

In cases in which the demands of justice are too heavy for individuals to bear, the corporation will be held solely responsible for satisfying justice’s demands.

The lesson to be learned from cases of vicarious liability is that the demands of retributive justice are frequently met by persons other than the person who committed the wrong. What is required for the satisfaction of justice is that only persons who are liable for a wrong should be punished for that wrong. Accordingly, premise (1) should be replaced by (1*): Unless a person who is liable for a wrong is punished for that wrong, divine justice is not satisfied. But then given the Protestant Reformers’ doctrine of the imputation of our sins to Christ, Christ is legally liable for our sins and so may satisfy divine justice by being duly punished for those sins. In the Reformer's view, Christ did not merely suffer the punishment due for our sins. Rather, as the Swiss Reformed theologian Francis Turretin explained, our sins themselves were imputed to Christ so that he might be justly punished for those sins.

We can think of the imputation of our sins to Christ as a case of vicarious liability of a superior for his subordinate. Just as in civil and criminal law, a superior can be held vicariously liable for the wrongdoing of his subordinate, so God held Christ vicariously liable for our sins. Therefore, he was legally liable to punishment for our sins. Since in Christ's case someone who was liable for a wrong was punished for that wrong, his punishment for our sins does not violate a necessary condition of the satisfaction of divine justice as the critic of penal substitution maintains.

But now consider premise (2). If God practices penal substitution then the person who committed a wrong is not punished for that wrong. In cases of penal substitution, is it always the case that the person who did the wrong is not punished for that wrong? Contemporary theologians have disputed the point by distinguishing between exclusionary place-taking and inclusionary place-taking. This important distinction requires a word of explanation about substitution and representation, respectively.

In cases of simple substitution, someone takes the place of another person but he does not represent that person. For example, a pinch hitter in baseball enters the lineup to bat in the place of another player. He is a substitute for that player, but in no sense does he represent that other player. That's why the batting average of the player whom he replaces is not affected by the pinch hitter's performance. On the other hand, a simple representative acts on behalf of another person and serves as his spokesman but is not a substitute for that person. For example, the baseball player has an agent who represents him in contract negotiations with the team. The representative does not replace the player, but he merely advocates for him. Now, these roles can be combined in which case we have neither simple substitution nor simple representation but rather substitutional representation or representative substitution. A good illustration of this combination of substitution and representation is to be found in the role of a proxy at a shareholders’ meeting. If we cannot attend the meeting ourselves, we may sign an agreement authorizing someone else to serve as our proxy at the meeting. He votes for us, and because he has been authorized to do so his votes are our votes. We have voted, via proxy, at the meeting of shareholders. The proxy is a substitute in that he attends the meeting in our place, but he is also our representative in that he does not vote instead of us but rather on our behalf so that we vote. This combination is what is called inclusionary place-taking.

Turretin believes that Christ, in bearing our punishment, was both our substitute and our representative before God. He states, “the curse and punishment of sin which he received upon himself in our stead secures to us blessing and righteousness with God in virtue of that most strict union between us and him by which, as our sins are imputed to him, so in turn his obedience and righteousness are imputed to us.”[12] This relation is not one of simple substitution; there is an inclusive union here which is the basis of the imputation of our sins to Christ and his righteousness to us. According to Turretin, so long as Christ is outside of us and we are out of Christ we can receive no benefit from his righteousness. But God has united us with Christ by means of a twofold bond, one natural (namely, the communion of nature by the incarnation), and the other mystical (namely, the communion of grace by Christ’s mediation), in virtue of which our sins might be imputed to Christ and his righteousness imputed to us. Christ was punished in our place and bore the suffering we deserved, but he also represented us before God, so that his punishment was our punishment. Christ was not merely punished instead of us, rather we were punished by proxy.[13] For that reason, divine justice is satisfied.

Herein we see the organic connection between Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection.  God’s raising Jesus from the dead is not only a ratification to us of the efficacy of Christ’s atoning death; it is a necessary consequence of it. For by his substitutionary death Christ fully satisfied divine justice. The penalty of death having been fully paid, Christ can no more remain dead than a criminal who has fully served his sentence can remain imprisoned. Punishment cannot justly continue; justice demands his release. Thus, Christ’s resurrection is both a necessary consequence of and a ratification of his satisfaction of divine justice.

In conclusion, I think that the critics’ attempts to prove the incoherence, injustice, or unsatisfactoriness of penal substitution should be adjudged failures. There remains vastly more to be said about the rich and variegated doctrine of the atonement, but so far forth we have encountered nothing that would rationally undermine the doctrine of penal substitution as a central facet of a biblically adequate theory of the atonement.

ERIK THOENNES: Thank you, Bill. So, so helpful. A couple questions for you. I was talking to Greg a couple weeks ago and he said something was so helpful. He said in Luther's time, like Luther, maybe the pressing question was: How is a man made right with God? It doesn't seem to plague people today as much as it used to. It seems like “How does a man get lots of likes on Facebook” seems like a much bigger concern. We just seem to have very different things plaguing us. How can I be liked? How can people think highly [of me]? But to be made right with God – even if that's a subconscious concern people have – it doesn't seem to be a very prevalent conscious concern. You've beautifully laid out the rationality of justice being made by Jesus taking our place. But if we back that up, how will it not fall on deaf ears? Because it doesn't seem to be a very big concern.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I take that to be more your problem than mine, Erik! [laughter] Because you're a pastor and I'm a philosopher. Very seriously, my burden and calling is to defend the rationality of the Christian faith and worldview, and your job is to so preach the Gospel in a persuasive and winsome manner that folks respond to it. You're much more expert in that area than me.

ERIK THOENNES: Well, I don't know about that. So let me ask you another question. Along similar lines, I've been told and read by theologians that among the varied, as you said at the end, ways of thinking about the atonement that even the Bible offers – we've got battlefield imagery, we've got marketplace imagery. Yours is obviously emphasizing this thoroughly biblical emphasis of courtroom imagery, legal imagery. And I've been told that's a thing of the past. Again, that's something that just doesn't carry any weight these days because people don't think . . . that's a Western way of thinking. It's not the kind of apologetics we need to be doing today. How would you respond to that?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think the fact that I'm able to show so many parallels between the classic doctrine of the atonement and our Anglo-American justice system is very telling in terms of the relevance of this. I just couldn't believe my eyes as I read these court cases and studied how this works in our justice system. I find that this is tremendously relevant to the culture in which we live. Our whole justice system is permeated with these same considerations.

ERIK THOENNES: So what do you think's behind even that publisher's aversion to publishing on the atonement? What's behind that?

DR. CRAIG: There is a real hatred almost – a revulsion – at the idea that God would punish Jesus in our place. I think it's that second objection is that it would be unjust of God to punish an innocent person for someone else's sins. It would be as if I were to drag somebody out of the audience and beat him up or something and said this is the punishment for this other fellow since. That's the way they think of it. And so many theologians will caricature the atonement as cosmic child abuse of God the Father. I think these are just cheap shots myself. That's why I've tried to treat it in an intellectually respectable way rather than with sound bites and these kind of cheap shots. If I could tell a story. I gave a pair of lectures – the Sophia lectures up at Azusa Pacific – a year or so ago on this subject. There was a woman theologian in the audience who's on the faculty there. The first day she was very aggressive in the Q&A time – challenging me and so forth. And then she came the second day and listened to the lectures. And then the faculty went out for dinner together that night and she sat across the table from me. She sat there for a while and then she said, “I just want to say one thing. You have made the doctrine of penal substitution more attractive than I ever would have thought possible.” I took that to be a tremendous compliment from a theologian.

ERIK THOENNES: That’s great. It doesn't mean you should go to Azusa [laughter]. But I'm glad they're making some progress thanks to you. Total joke! It’s fine.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, boy! Now he stuck his foot in it.

ERIK THOENNES: I'm wondering . . . so when I was a kid, it was called a penal institution. A penitentiary. And now it's a correctional facility. Now it's correction; it's rehabilitation. It's almost as if the rightness of punishment is completely lost.

DR. CRAIG: Well, you would be very interested to know that among philosophers of law (which is what I've been reading), there has been a renaissance of retributive theories of justice where punishment is justified by the state because the guilty deserve it. It is an intrinsic good because the guilty deserve punishment. This has come to replace these rehabilitative theories of punishment, these consequentialist theories of punishment, which says that the state is justified in punishing people because of the good consequences like deterrence of crime, isolation of dangerous criminals, rehabilitation. Under the influence of social scientists and psychologists during the 20th century that came to be the main rationale for punishment in our justice system. And the consequences on our penal system were disastrous, just horrible. Just to mention one. Women were thought to be more rehabilitatable than men. They weren't so incorrigible. Women could be more easily rehabilitated. So as a result women got longer prison sentences because it's for rehabilitation.

ERIK THOENNES: Because if they had more time, you could actually make progress.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. The purpose of prison is to rehabilitate the criminal. These women are more susceptible to rehabilitation, and therefore they got longer prison sentences than men. And now legal theorists are just pulling back from this. These consequentialist views are waning. There is a resurgence of interest in retributive theories of justice. This is very, very good for the penal substitution theorist because I think that God's justice in the Bible is in very large measure retributive. I think that's especially evident when it comes to hell. It's hard to see how that could have a rehabilitative purpose.

ERIK THOENNES: Exactly! Right. If you back it up and don't have a place for punishment, hell is absurd.

DR. CRAIG: On a rehabilitative or consequentialist theory of punishment. And this has led some people to adopting a kind of universalism where hell really turns out to be a kind of purgatory and that ultimately everyone is saved.

ERIK THOENNES: Isn't it fascinating that in the society and even in the church there's an increasing appreciation for social justice and a decreasing appreciation for divine justice at the same time. Very often the biggest champions of social justice are the ones who want to downplay the divine justice that's needed.

DR. CRAIG: Well, it would be really important to see what theory of justice lies behind this. Is it consequentialist, or is it retributive?

ERIK THOENNES: Those are such helpful categories.

DR. CRAIG: Who would think that these airy fairy intellectual things make such a profound difference culturally. But they really do.

ERIK THOENNES: Which leads me to a background question. You're up here helping us think through something that many of us have never thought through even though it's at the heart of the Gospel. I was so grateful that a long time ago you decided not to just believe things because the Bible says it and “I don't understand it, but there it is.” You really want to dig deeper beyond just accepting it even though “it makes absolutely no sense to me.” I was just grateful for that. Do you want to just help us understand, not just in this issue, but in general why that is a vital perspective to have?

DR. CRAIG: Francis Schaeffer once remarked, “I love the Christian system as a system.” There is a kind of intellectual delight that one can take in God's truth and in the body of Christian doctrine because it makes so much sense and coheres so well together. It would be hard to rejoice if your view of the world and reality or your religion was at its heart an incoherence.

ERIK THOENNES: That's ugly. It's not beautiful. Incoherence is an ugly thing, and truth is a beautiful thing. I was just listening to a theologian this week, and we hear about goodness, truth, and beauty, but it's so important to realize that if something's true, it's beautiful and it's good. And if something's good, it's true and it's beautiful. Those always go together. You can't isolate those. And so when you get to truth, you get to beauty, and you get to goodness. They're never independent of each other. So helpful. All right, folks. Comments or questions?

QUESTION: I'm Jonathan. When you were talking about how Jesus can't stay dead – he has to be raised because of the reasons that you gave. More than just being efficacious to show us that God's plan worked, I guess. Can you talk about how . . . I think there seems to be a similar logic in the verse in Romans where it says God is not just just, but the justifier of the ungodly. Can you talk a little bit about that verse and how that plays into penal substitutionary atonement.

DR. CRAIG: I thought you were going to refer to another verse in Romans that I would like to talk about.

ERIK THOENNES: Just answer that question. [laughter]

DR. CRAIG: Right, but there's a beautiful pun in Romans 3:21-25 where he says that God is both just and the justifier of him who has faith in Christ Jesus. And that would connect with this in that it's on the basis of Christ's satisfaction of divine justice that then God can impute righteousness to us, forgiveness of sins, and all the rest. He doesn't compromise his justice in justifying us. He is both just and the justifier. But in another passage in Romans, I think it's 4:23, Paul says that Christ was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification. The Greek there is very similar in both cases. It's the word dia plus the accusative which means “on account of.” So the first part would mean he was put to death on account of our trespasses. That's why he died. On account of our trespasses. But then the second one – it doesn't seem to make sense to say “and he was raised on account of our justification.” So typically Bible scholars will go against the Greek and the normal usage there, and they will say, well, he was raised for the purpose of our justification. It's prospective. It doesn't mean on account of it; it means prospectively. But on the view I've suggested, it is literally correct. He was put to death on account of our trespasses, and he was raised on account of our justification. Right? Because justice has been fully satisfied, and therefore he must be raised from the dead. He can't continue to be punished.

QUESTION: Hello. My name is Logan. I think you may have touched on this when talking about the necessity of Christ's resurrection, but my question is: If our sins were imputed to Christ, wouldn't he be required to endure the same punishment that we would have had to serve? For example, spending an eternity in hell, or at least being annihilated in hell. Why would Jesus' mere physical death satisfy the punishment requirements for our sin?

DR. CRAIG: OK. Great question. Notice the last phrase in your question – his mere physical death. For theologians like Francis Turretin that I quoted before, Christ's punishment – his being forsaken by the Father – was not merely his physical death. Many people have been crucified or brutally tortured to death. Rather, Turretin says the punishment that Christ experienced was that the full felicity and blessing and joy and fellowship with God the Father was taken away from him, and he experienced separation from God for us. So it was really that bereavement of those divine blessings that constituted the punishment that Christ bore which is the same thing that the damned bear in hell – separation from God. What Christ suffered can more than make up in intensity for the brevity of the duration. I could have a sore foot that would last, say, for years, and you might have a broken leg in which the pain that you bore in that brief instant would be just as much or more than what I bore over a long period of time. I would say that Christ's punishment was infinite in being bereaved of these blessings and the vision of God, the knowledge, the fellowship with God.

ERIK THOENNES: Or as my favorite rapper, Shai Linne, says: Jesus suffered more in three hours than any sinner ever will in hell.

DR. CRAIG: If I might add something to that. One reason why that's a profound statement is hell is potentially infinite in that it will go on forever. But at no point will a person have experienced more than a finite amount of pain or finite suffering. Right? It will go on forever but he'll never know infinite pain. At every point along the line he will have only experienced finite suffering.

QUESTION: My name is Ralph. I've had arguments with people on penal substitutionary atonement, and not being familiar with the legal side of things, what I've resorted to is familial relationships. I'm wondering if these are as helpful in that regard? So, for example, a man can marry a wife with a huge amount of debt, and he can become in some sense liable for that debt and he's willingly married and therefore he can be made accountable to pay the debt. And a child can knock a baseball through a window and the father can become liable for the repairs of the broken window.

DR. CRAIG: That actually is vicarious liability because there is a subordinate and a superior – the parent and the child.

FOLLOWUP: So these are things that people are familiar with in terms of familial stuff. You say the second one seems to be, but is the first one also a fair description, or does that fall too far short?

DR. CRAIG: I think it's inadvisable to use personal relationships as analogies because it abstracts from God's role as judge and ruler of the moral universe. I think this is one of the most important things to keep in mind – God is not a private party to a personal dispute. Therefore, theories of the atonement based upon how friends reconcile with each other or private persons reconcile are all inadequate because friends are not tasked with the moral government of the universe, with administering justice. It's really important to keep this legal metaphor of God as judge and ruler clearly in place and in mind.

ERIK THOENNES: That's so helpful. I remember Don Carson pointed out once that God refers to Abraham as a friend of God, but God is never called our friend in the Bible because he does the befriending. He wasn't saying you shouldn't use it, but there is something about the direction of the initiation and the befriending. We never say, “God, do you want to be my friend?” It's always the other way around. He brings us to himself because he's the superior in this. Good stuff. All right.

QUESTION: My name is Veriella. I was wondering how the doctrine of the Trinity makes everything you told us more complex or maybe simplifies it.

DR. CRAIG: It does underline the divinity of Christ which is important in terms of his ability to satisfy divine justice. His sinlessness, his infinite goodness. And so I do think that the Trinity is helpful here in reminding us that it's God himself who becomes the substitute for our sin. What we mustn't do is to play the Father and the Son off against each other as though it were the mean Father sending the Son into the world. N. T. Wright has characterized these views of the atonement by saying “God so hated the world that he killed his only Son” which is just a terrible caricature. The Trinity can be helpful, but we have to be careful not to misuse it.

QUESTION: My name is Spencer. I'm just really excited right now. If you talk to people like Muslims, they would say God sending his Son is like a mean thing or it doesn't really make sense that way. I guess the real crux of the question is that the Trinity does I guess kind of complicates it a little bit in that where is the real justice if Jesus himself was not capable of sinning, capable of doing any of that stuff? Why go through all the bloodshed and all the pain and all that stuff when Christ is incapable of sinning or actually feeling that punishment? . . . There's this aspect when you talk with Muslims – how they come and how they throw that piece in.

DR. CRAIG: I think you're quite right in reminding us that these objections to the atonement do not issue merely from secularists or liberal theologians, but Muslims as well. Muslims are very offended by this doctrine. So this does have a lot of apologetic value toward different segments of the culture. I think the sinlessness of Christ, as I indicated before, is absolutely essential to him being the Savior – the one who could pay the penalty for our sins because he had no sins of his own to pay for. Although Christ is impeccable (that is to say, he's incapable of sin) that doesn't imply that he didn't freely resist sin. I would say that Christ freely resisted temptation even though he was, in fact, incapable of sin. In this case, freedom means that he is free from any kind of causal constraints or determinism outside himself. He makes the decision himself, and nothing determines him to do so. In that sense he makes a full and free decision to do righteousness and not sin.

ERIK THOENNES: Which is another reason he truly represents us – in obedience. Because he's not depending on his divine nature constantly to accomplish something on our behalf. Right?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

QUESTION: To help with this discussion, I was wondering what is your working definition of justice, and in particular kind of focusing on what kind of requirements need to be satisfied when there's a violation of that justice?

DR. CRAIG: I'm adopting here, as I said, a retributive theory of justice. And the heart of a retributive theory of justice is in positive retributivism which says that the guilty deserve punishment and that therefore the state is justified in punishing people. Negative retributivism would say that the innocent should not be punished because they do not deserve it. These are the definitions of justice with which I'm working. There are further axioms of justice. For example, that the punishment should fit the crime; that the punishment should not be excessive given the nature of the crime. So there are other aspects of retributive justice, but those are the most important ones for this topic.

ERIK THOENNES: Let’s thank Bill. Thank you.

 

[1] Frederick Schauer, “Legal Fictions Revisited,” in Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice, ed. Maksymilian Del Mar and William Twining, Law and Philosophy Library 110 (Switzerland: Springer Verlag, 2015), p. 122. By “equity,” Schauer has reference to recourse to “an elaborate series of Chancellor’s courts known as courts of equity, in order to gain equitable relief from the rigidity of law.”

[2] Described colorfully by Douglas Lind, “The Pragmatic Value of Legal Fictions,” in Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice, ed. Maksymilian Del Mar and William Twining, Law and Philosophy Library 110 (Switzerland: Springer Verlag, 2015), pp. 95-96.

[3] The John G. Stevens 170 U.S. 113 (1898), p. 122, cited by Lind, “Pragmatic Value of Legal Fictions,” p. 95.


[4] Lind, “Pragmatic Value of Legal Fictions,” p. 96.

[5] What follows could have also been said with respect to the vicarious liability of corporations as persons in the eyes of the law. Ormerod explains, “Corporations have a separate legal identity. They are treated in law as having a legal personality distinct from the natural persons–members, directors, employees, etc–who make up the corporation. That presents the opportunity, in theory, of imposing liability on the corporation separately from any criminal liability which might be imposed on the individual members for any wrongdoing” (Ormerod, Smith and Hogan’s Criminal Law, p. 256). But because corporate persons might be thought by some to be legal fictions (in which case they furnish another illustration akin to ship personification of the imputation of sins), I leave them aside to focus on the vicarious liability of human beings. It is also worth noting that vicarious liability may also, via the so-called delegation principle and attributed act principle, involve the imputation of acts and not just guilt to innocent persons (Ibid., pp. 277, 279). In that case appeal to legal fictions as an analogy to imputation of sins becomes superfluous.

[6] See L. H. Leigh, Strict and Vicarious Liability: A Study in Administrative Criminal Law, Modern Legal Studies (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1982).

[7] Leigh notes that vicarious liability takes two forms. In one, a person is held liable for the acts of another who has a mens rea, while in the other, more typical case, a person is held liable for the act of another where the act of the other person amounts to an offense of strict liability (Leigh, Strict and Vicarious Liability, p. 1). For the two examples here see Ormerod, Smith and Hogan’s Criminal Law, pp. 274, 277.

[8] Indeed, the superior is entirely innocent, having neither an actus reus nor a mens rea, but is declared guilty by imputation. Note, moreover, that in a criminal case involving vicarious liability, the punishment of the employer may satisfy for the employee as well. In fact, the employer may actually be charged as the principal in the crime and his employee as a mere accessory, in which case only the punishment of the employer can satisfy for both. This looks for all the world like penal substitution.

[9] David Lewis “Do We Believe in Penal Substitution?”, Philosophical Papers 26/3 (1997): 207.

[10] In response to Lewis, Quinn makes the interesting observation that courts have sometimes expressed diffidence about allowing companies to purchase insurance policies to cover possible penalties (Philip L. Quinn, “Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy by David Lewis,” Noûs 38/4 [2004]: 722-30). For in such cases the insurance company pays the penalty demanded by the law rather than the guilty party.  But such cases do not show that penal substitution is unsatisfactory; quite the contrary, in fact. Rather such cases furnish a good example of the way in which ultima facie considerations can justify penal substitution, thereby meeting justice’s demands in a specific action. On the interplay of prima facie and ultima facie considerations see my “Is Penal Substitution Unjust?”.

[11] Ormerod, Smith, Hogan, and Ormerod’s Criminal Law, p. 245.

[12] Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 16.3.

[13] Atonement theorists have identified examples of such punishment by proxy even in human affairs, such as a team captain’s being punished for his team’s failings or a squad leader’s being punished for his troops’ failings (Steven L. Porter, “Swinburnian Atonement and the Doctrine of Penal Substitution,” Faith and Philosophy 21/2 [2004]: 236-7). Of course, Christ has been uniquely appointed by God to be our proxy, which may make his case sui generis.