Bishop Barron + William Lane Craig - Symposium Part 2 - Atonement

Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig joined around 20 scholars and academics for a symposium at Claremont McKenna College on January 13, 2018. The symposium was hosted by the Claremont Center for Reason, Religion, and Public Affairs and featured two sessions. In the first session, Bishop Barron spoke on the divine simplicity. In this second session, William Lane Craig spoke on the atonement. Both presentations were followed by roundtable discussion among the attendees.

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INTRODUCTION: Hey, this is Brandon Vogt, the content director for Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. We're happy to present you with this part two of a recent symposium featuring Bishop Robert Barron and Dr. William Lane Craig. The symposium was hosted by The Claremont Center for Reason, Religion and Public Affairs and featured around twenty different scholars and academics. In the first part, which was shared above this audio link, Bishop Barron presented a paper on the divine simplicity and then received a response from Dr. Craig and the other academics in attendance. In the second part of this symposium (which you are listening to now), Dr. Craig will present a paper on the atonement, and then we will hear a response from Bishop Barron and the other attendees. Once again we apologize for the poor audio quality here. It seems that the air conditioning sound was picked up quite heavily. But we still think you can make out what each of the speakers are saying. So we hope you enjoy this audio. If you missed part one of the symposium, be sure to go back and listen to that as well.

DR. CRAIG: The title of my paper is “Why Catholics and Protestants Should Unite Behind the Doctrine of Christ's Penal Substitution.”

Introduction

The message of the New Testament is that God, out of his great love for us, has provided the means of atonement for sin through Christ’s death. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, Paul quotes the earliest known summary of the Gospel message that was proclaimed by all the apostles:

I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

Notice that Christ is said to have died for our sins. How is it that Jesus’ death dealt with our sins? How did his death on the cross overcome the estrangement and condemnation of sinners before a holy God so as to reconcile them to him? In handling this question we should distinguish between the fact of the atonement and a theory of the atonement. A great variety of theories of the atonement have been offered to make sense of the fact that Christ, by his death, has provided the means of reconciliation with God. The church fathers, embroiled as they were in debates over the person of Christ (namely the Trinity and incarnation), devoted little time to reflection on what later theologians would call the work of Christ (for example, his achieving atonement). As a result, no ecumenical council ever pronounced on the subject of the atonement leaving the church without conciliar guidance. Competing theories of the atonement need to be assessed by (1) their accord with biblical teaching, and (2) their philosophical coherence. Today I want to argue that Catholics and Protestants have common cause in articulating and defending a theory of the atonement that includes at its heart the doctrine of penal substitution.

The Doctrine of Penal Substitution

Penal substitution is the doctrine that God inflicted upon Christ the suffering which we deserved as the punishment for our sins, as a result of which we no longer deserve punishment. Penal substitution is central to the account of the atonement enunciated by the Protestant Reformers. But penal substitution has not loomed large in traditional Roman Catholic theology. This is doubtless due to the enormous influence of St. Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the atonement which set the course for medieval theology. Anselm’s driving question is whether it were proper for God to put away sins by compassion alone without any payment of the honor taken from him. Anselm responds negatively. To remit sin in this manner is nothing else than not to punish, and since it is not right to cancel sin without compensation or punishment if it be not punished then it is passed by undischarged.

The concern here is not merely with propriety but with justice. He says truly such compassion on the part of God is wholly contrary to the divine justice which allows nothing but punishment as the recompense of sin. The character or nature of God himself necessitates that the demands of justice be met. But how? Anselm allows two ways of meeting the demands of God's justice: punishment or compensation (satisfactio). Anselm thus presents the atonement theorist with a choice. Since the demands of divine justice must be met, there must be either punishment of or compensation for sin. Anselm chose the second alternative since he naturally assumed that punishment would result in mankind's eternal damnation. By contrast, the later Protestant Reformers chose the first alternative, holding that Christ bore the punishment we deserve. Anselm and the Reformers are very much on the same footing. In order for salvation to be possible, divine justice must somehow be satisfied. But they differ in how the demands of God's justice are met. Is it by substitutionary punishment or by offering a compensation? I want to argue that any biblically adequate theory of the atonement must include penal substitution as a central feature in discharging the demands of divine justice.

Isaiah's Servant of the Lord

One of the most important New Testament motifs concerning Christ's death is Isaiah's Servant of the Lord. New Testament authors saw Jesus as the Suffering Servant described in Isaiah 52:13-53:12. Ten of the twelve verses of Isaiah 53 are quoted in the New Testament which also abounds in allusions and echoes of this passage. Jesus’ words over the cup at the Last Supper – “This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many” – echo Isaiah's prophecy of the Servant of the Lord who “poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors yet he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.” Earlier that evening, Jesus had applied Isaiah 53:12 to himself, “For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless,’ and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled” (Luke 22:37). In Acts 8:30-35 Philip, in response to an Ethiopian official’s question concerning Isaiah 53 (“about whom does the prophet speak?”) shares the Good News about Jesus. 1 Peter 2:22-25 is a reflection on Christ as the Servant of Isaiah 53 who “bore our sins in his body on the tree.” Hebrews 9:28 alludes to Isaiah 53:12 in describing Christ as “having been offered once for all to bear the sins of many.” The influence of Isaiah 53 is also evident in Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Timothy, and Titus. New Testament scholar William Farmer concludes, “This evidence indicates that there is an Isaianic soteriology deeply embedded in the New Testament which finds its normative form and substance in Isaiah 53”.^[1]

The suffering of the Servant is agreed on all hands to be punitive. In the Old Testament, the expression “to bear sin” when used of people typically means to be held culpable or to endure punishment.

What is remarkable, even startling, about the Servant in Isaiah 53 is that he suffers substitutionally for the sins of others. Some scholars have denied this claiming that the Servant merely shares in the punitive suffering of the Jewish exiles. But such an interpretation does not make as good sense of the shock expressed at what Yahweh has done in afflicting his righteous Servant, and is less plausible in light of the strong contrasts reinforced by the Hebrew pronouns drawn between the Servant and the persons speaking in the first person plural:

Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:4-6).

The substitutionary, as well as the punitive, nature of the Servant’s suffering is clearly expressed in phrases like “wounded for our transgressions,” “bruised for our iniquities,” “upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,” “the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all,” and “stricken for the transgression of my people.”

The idea of substitutionary suffering for sin is already implicit in the animal sacrifices prescribed in Leviticus and conducted in the tabernacle and later in the temple. The personal Levitical offerings were accompanied by a telling hand-laying ritual. The offerer of the animal sacrifice was to lay his hand upon the animal's head before slaying it. The Hebrew expression samak yado indicates a forceful laying of the hand. One was to press his hand upon the head of the beast to be sacrificed. Although Jakob Milgram has argued that this “hand-leaning” ritual was meant merely to indicate ownership of the sacrificial animal, such an interpretation is implausible and trivializes an apparently important feature of the ceremony. Someone pulling an animal by a rope around its neck up before the altar is just as obviously the person bringing his sacrifice as someone who carries in his hand a bird or grain for sacrifice. And if there were any doubt, a verbal affirmation would suffice. Rather, this emphatic gesture is plausibly meant to indicate the identification of the offerer with the animal so that the animal’s fate symbolizes his own. Death is the penalty for sin, and the animal dies in the place of the worshipper. This is not to say that the animal was punished in the place of the worshipper; rather, the animal suffered the fate that would have been the worshipper’s punishment had it happened to him. The priest’s sprinkling the blood of the sacrifice on the altar, whatever its exact meaning, indicates minimally that the animal's life has been offered to God as a sacrifice to atone for the offerer’s sin. Similarly, in Isaiah 53 the Servant is said to make himself an offering for sin (verse 10).

It is sometimes said that the idea of offering to God a human substitute is utterly foreign to Judaism. But that is, in fact, not true. The idea of substitutionary punishment is clearly expressed in Moses’ offer to the Lord to be killed in place of the people who had apostatized in order to “make atonement” for their sin (Exodus 32:30-34). Although Yahweh rejects Moses’ offer of a substitutionary atonement saying that “when the day comes for punishment, I will punish them for their sin,” the author is nonetheless clear, and Yahweh simply declines the offer but does not dismiss it as absurd or impossible. Similarly, while Yahweh consistently rejects human sacrifice in contrast to the practice of pagan nations, the story of God's commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (whom the New Testament treats as a type of Christ) shows that such a thing is not impossible (Genesis 22:1-19). In Isaiah 53, moreover, the idea of the Servant’s substitutionary suffering is treated as extraordinary and surprising. The Lord has inflicted upon his righteous Servant what he refused to inflict on Isaac and Moses.

By bearing the punishment due the people, the Servant reconciles them to God. While atonement language (in the Hebrew, kippur) is not used, the concept is clearly present. The Servant, by his suffering, brings wholeness and healing (verse 5). He makes many to be accounted righteous (verse 11). And he makes intercession for the transgressors (verse 12).

Returning to the New Testament, we find Christian authors interpreting Jesus to be the sin-bearing Servant of Isaiah 53 as in 1 Peter 2:24-25. In light of Isaiah 53, texts like 1 Corinthians 15:3 (“Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures”), ambiguous when taken in isolation, become pregnant with meaning. There is no other passage in the Jewish Scriptures apart from Isaiah 53 that could be construed as even remotely about Messiah's dying for people's sins. The formulaic expression “died for our sins” thus refers to substitutionary punitive suffering. Similarly, 2 Corinthians 5:21 (“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”) is seen to echo in all its parts Isaiah 53. The expression “who knew no sin” recalls “the righteous one, my Servant, in whose mouth was no deceit.” The expression “for our sake he made him to be sin” recalls “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” And the expression “in him we might become the righteousness of God” recalls “the righteous one, my Servant, shall make many to be accounted righteous.” Again, no other Old Testament passage remotely approaches the content of this sentence. The New Testament authors then, following Jesus in his own self-understanding, saw Christ as the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 who died in the place of sinners bearing the punishment they deserved that they might be reconciled to God.

The Testimony of the Church Fathers

The church fathers reflect the multiplicity and diversity of the New Testament motifs with respect to the atonement including penal substitution. Eusebius, for example, wrote,

The Lamb of God . . . was chastised on our behalf, and suffered a penalty He did not owe, but which we owed because of the multitude of our sins; and so He became the cause of the forgiveness of our sins, because He received death for us, and transferred to Himself the scourging, the insults, and the dishonour, which were due to us, and drew down on Himself the apportioned curse, being made a curse for us. And what is that but the price of our souls? And so the oracle says in our person: “By his stripes we were healed,” and “The Lord delivered him for our sins” (Demonstration of the Gospel, chapter 10 section 1).

Echoing Isaiah 53 and Galatians 3:13, Eusebius employs the motifs of sacrifice, vicarious suffering, penal substitution, satisfaction, divine justice, and ransom price. Similar sentiments were expressed by Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, and others. Like many of his predecessors, Augustine, notwithstanding his adherence to the so-called Christus Victor theory of the atonement, affirms Christ's being substitutionally punished. He says, “Christ, though guiltless, took our punishment that he might cancel our guilt and do away with our punishment” (Against Faustus). He interprets Galatians 3:13 to mean by “curse” the punishment of death which is due for sin:

And as He died in the flesh which He took in bearing our punishment, so also, while ever blessed in His own righteousness, He was cursed for our offenses, in the death which He suffered in bearing our punishment. . . .

The believer in the true doctrine of the gospel will understand that Christ is not reproached by Moses when he speaks of Him as cursed, not in His divine majesty, but as hanging on the tree as our substitute, bearing our punishment . . .

Augustine says, “The curse is pronounced by divine justice, and it will be well for us if we are redeemed from it. Confess then that Christ died, and you may confess that He bore the curse for us.”

The notion that the fathers were singularly committed to a Christus Victor theory of the atonement is a popular misimpression generated by the secondary literature. A reading of the primary sources makes it clear that they were also committed to the understanding of Christ's death as a substitutionary punishment for human sins. Indeed, according to Joseph Mitros, “By the fourth and fifth centuries in both the Latin West and the Greek East the sacrificial theory of salvation combined with the idea of penal substitution constituted the mainstream of thinking.”

The Anselmian Turn

Anselm was pivotal in turning medieval theology in a quite different direction. On Anselm's view, Christ does not die in our place or pay the penalty for our sins. Rather, he offers a compensation to God on our behalf. The gift that the incarnate Christ presents to God can be found in nothing other than himself, and so he must give himself to God. Since Christ was sinless, he was under no obligation to die. By voluntarily laying down his life, he gives to God a gift of infinite value which he did not owe. Divine justice requires God the Father, in turn, to reward the Son for the gift of his life, but how can a reward be bestowed on someone who needs nothing? The Son therefore gives the reward to those for whose salvation he became incarnate. He remits the debt incurred by their sins and bestows on them the beatitude they have forfeited.

Although Thomas Aquinas followed Anselm in adopting the satisfaction theory of the atonement (albeit with the caveat that God requires satisfaction for sin contingently, not necessarily), it is noteworthy for our purposes that he also finds room for the motif of penal substitution. So Aquinas affirms in various places that Christ has borne the punishment for our sins and paid the penalty we deserve. From the Compendium Theologiae,

Christ willed to submit to death for our sins so that, in taking on Himself without any fault of His own the punishment charged against us, He might free us from the death to which we had been sentenced, in the way that anyone would be freed from a debt of penalty if another person undertook to pay the penalty for him.

From the Summa Contra Gentiles,

Christ had to suffer death not only to give an example of holding death in contempt out of love of the truth, but also to wash away the sins of others. This indeed took place when He who was without sin willed to suffer the penalty due to sin that He might take on Himself the penalty due to others, and make satisfaction for others.

And the Summa Theologiae,

Christ set the highest example to penitents, since He willingly bore the punishment, not of His own sin, but of the sins of others.

It remains unclear how Aquinas thought to combine these motifs into a coherent whole, nonetheless it is indisputable that he at least uses the language of penal substitution.

So far as I am aware, there is nothing that requires Catholics to accept a satisfaction theory of the atonement nor to reject penal substitution. The Council of Trent, in responding to the Reformers' doctrines is, so far as I can tell, silent on the theory of the atonement. The decree on justification says merely, “Our Lord Jesus Christ . . . merited justification for us by his most holy passion on the wood of the cross, and made satisfaction for us unto God the Father.” Protestants would affirm that Christ made satisfaction to God by bearing the punishment for our sins and so meeting the demands of divine justice. They would concur with the Catechism of the Catholic Church that,

Jesus’ redemptive death fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy of the suffering Servant. Indeed Jesus himself explained the meaning of his life and death in the light of God’s suffering Servant.

...

By his obedience unto death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who "makes himself an offering for sin", when "he bore the sin of many", and who "shall make many to be accounted righteous", for "he shall bear their iniquities". Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.

So far as I can see this is quite compatible with a penal substitutionary theory of the atonement.

Concluding Remarks

The doctrine of penal substitution is a biblical doctrine rooted in Isaiah 53. New Testament authors and indeed Jesus himself identified Christ with the suffering righteous Servant of the Lord who bore the punishment for our sins. Any biblically adequate theory of the atonement must therefore include penal substitution as a central facet.

But biblical though it may be, ever since the time of Socinus the doctrine of penal substitution has faced formidable, and some would say insuperable, philosophical objections. In a recent doctoral dissertation done at Loyola University in Chicago written in defense of penal substitution, Blaine Swen lists no fewer than fourteen philosophical objections against the theory!^[2] Seeing such a plethora of formidable objections lodged against penal substitution, the Catholic theologian might well breathe a sigh of relief that he is not committed to such a doctrine. But my contention is that such relief would be misplaced. He is committed to the doctrine of penal substitution, not indeed by church councils but by the Bible itself. I therefore invite Catholic theologians to join me in defending the coherence and plausibility of the doctrine of penal substitution.

BISHOP BARRON: Thank you, Bill, very much for that. I've been following your work on this now for a little while. Your videos and other articles and so on. I go back to when I was about a senior in high school and in a basic religion class, the teacher laying out the cross of Jesus saved us. And I remember from that moment just wrestling with this. What does it mean that the cross of Jesus saved us? What are the mechanics by which this happens? So this issue has been on my mind as just a Christian for most of my life. I must confess I continue to wrestle with it. Your work has brought this dimension of the teaching to the fore. I don't have a real formal response; just some notes I want to share with you.

First of all, my gratitude for the very thought-provoking and generous paper – the outreach to Catholic theologians. Also the distinction that runs through your paper is very important to Catholic theology – that we distinguish between the doctrine that we are saved from our sins by the cross and resurrection of Jesus, and then the various theories of it. So we'd hang on to that pretty strongly that we don't want to commit ourselves to a particular theory; that we allow many different theories to emerge. And that's okay. If I can rely on the great Avery Dulles and speak of models here. Catholic theology is kind of at home with models of the cross, models of understanding. How this happens. I think penal substitution is one of those, but we're not committed to reducing it to any one. I think from our perspective it reflects the diversity within the biblical witness itself. Certainly, as you say, Isaiah 53 and other texts, too, speak very clearly in this manner. But I think you've got justification, salvation, atonement, redemption, substitution, etc. And versions of the Christus Victor. I, myself, lean that way, and I think you can find Christus Victor elements certainly in the Bible itself. Colossians 2 – the Lord making a public display of the conquered powers, and so on. I think that the Catholic Church recognizes that biblical diversity, and then how it's been reflected up and down the tradition.

I found really interesting, and I think dead right, your observation about the early councils doing a lot of work for us with the Trinity and incarnation but not in a similar way with the atonement, which allowed for a greater flexibility. The councils certainly eliminated lots of options with regard to christology and the Trinity, but it wasn't as restrictive when it comes to this doctrine.

Here's a second observation, and just again reflections of my time of coming of age as a seminarian and student of theology. When I was coming of age in the late 70s into the 80s of the last century, there was among my teachers almost an allergy to Anselm, much less penal substitution! There was an allergic reaction to anything like that – God the Father as a raging angerholic and dispelling his anger on the Son. And what about God so loved the world? It seems like God so hated the world. I heard that. It was axiomatic when I was coming up. Anselm just reflected the prejudice of his own time, feudalistic hang-ups, maybe his own psychological problems. [laughter] You think I'm kidding! That was standard. I remember – I won't name the person – but a very prominent Catholic theologian in 1995 at the CTSA meeting (the Catholic Theological Society) laid out a paper (it was the keynote paper) that Anselm’s satisfaction theory represented the prototype of cosmic child abuse. That was pretty standard stuff when I was coming of age. We were typically taught, I would say, some version of the Abelardian “love awakening love” theory. That what's displayed on the cross is a great act of love, and as we gaze upon this act of love, love is awakened in us. But what my response was, my teachers hardly ever referred to the question-begging quality of Abelard, namely, without something like Anselm or something like penal substitution, how is that an act of love? How is that not just the tragic end of an idealistic life? How is that not just a Roman execution? If it is an act of love, Abelard doesn't explain that. But Abelard came through with almost no Anselm. I was taken very recently – I don't know if you read Fleming Rutledge's book on the crucifixion – it reminded me of Avery Dulles in a way where she lays out models really of the cross, different approaches. One of her observations was about Anselm. Namely, go back to his interlocutor in the Cur Deus Homo (Boso) who says, “Why couldn't God just have done this out of the kindness of his heart from heaven? Just forgiven us without all the [...] of the cross? Just pronounce us forgiven, for God's sake.”  That's an old medieval problem. Certainly all my teachers would have held that in the 1970s. Then she cites Anselm’s famous answer which I love – “You have not considered the weight of sin.” I think that's dead right. That's what I find attractive in the recovery of not just the Anselmian but even penal substitution. It takes seriously the fact of sin. My teachers, I think, tended not to. Love awakening love. Yeah, but why in the world would the Son of God have to go to the limits of God forsaking him (I'm using Baltazar language now). I think that's a good thing. It's a good thing if we recover that part anyway of the discussion.

Think of Anselm’s great image from the Cur Deus Homo of the diamond having fallen to the bottom of the muck. I always found that . . . that God in a way had to go all the way down to get it. You can't just pronounce forgiveness from on high. We'd say in Chicago that and three bucks gets you on the CTA. That doesn't accomplish the thing. Someone's got to get down and dirty here, you know? Someone's got to go down to get the diamond. I think that's what she's driving at – we need to recover that sense. Think of Tolkien – of Frodo going into Mordor. You have to go into the dysfunction to solve it. You can't pronounce it solved from the outside. I think all of that I really like. I think it is very important.

To no one's surprise, I'll share some of Aquinas's theorizing on this. Since Thomas had this great summarizing sort of mind, it's no surprise that in his treatment of the cross you'll find a lot of the tradition there. You'll find all the different elements or models represented. So you find in Thomas, for example, satisfaction, atonement, redemption, forgiveness, sacrifice, and, yes, I quite agree penal substitution language is in Thomas. But they're all there. I think in a more typically Catholic manner he does not reduce any one to any other. Quite right, Dr. Craig points out his certain allergy to Anselm’s necessitarianism both in regard to the cross and the incarnation. Thomas balks or he sees this as a hyper-logical approach – that it had to be this way. So Thomas distinguishes between necessity in that double-sense as you were saying – strict logical necessity and then necessity by way of what he calls [convenience] – the most fitting way. So just as in the incarnation, God didn't have to save us through the incarnation but it was the most fitting way he could. The same with the cross. God could have forgiven us some other way, Thomas says, but there was no more fitting way. I think that's also something that is reflected in a lot of Catholic theologizing. The master text in the Summa Theologiae anyway (question 48, Article 2 of the third part). Just a word there. My great love for Thomas. People skip very important parts of the Summa, and one of them is there I think in the Tertia Pars. After the opening questions on nature and persons . . . all the technical language of incarnation – is that wonderful Vita Christi section. Dozens of questions in the third part of the Summa from the birth of Jesus all the way through the resurrection. That section is very rarely read, but that's where you find this business – Question 48 – where he talks about atonement. Here's what he says. He doesn't there talk about penal substitution, though he does elsewhere. I quite agree with that. But he says this. Atonement properly speaking involves offering to an offended party “something that he loves equally or even more than he detested the offense.” So atonement happens when the offended Father is presented something that he loves more than what offended him. Guess how Thomas handles it there? Namely “by suffering out of love and obedience, he offers to the Father something that pleased him infinitely more than the world’s sin offended him.” In that sense he made atonement; he set things right. So it is not quite penal substitution of the Father (visiting upon the Son punishment), but the Son giving to the Father something so beautiful that it compensated for the sin of the world.

Now, why is this the case? Here's how Thomas explains it. The intensity of the love that was demonstrated. The love of the Son on the cross. The love for humanity and the love for the Father. Secondly, he says because of the surpassing dignity of the one who suffered who's both God and man. So the dignity of the sufferer is so impressive to the Father. Then thirdly, “On account of the extent of the passion and the greatness of the grief endured.” So the intensity of the suffering of the Son of the cross. All of that is like a pleasing sacrifice. Think of the smoke of the sacrifice comes to the nostrils of God – it's a pleasing sacrifice unto the Father which compensates for sin.

Just a couple of closing remarks. I think, first from the Catholic perspective, this question of atonement. I love the fact that Dr. Craig has alluded to this, too. It's one of the only great theological terms that comes from English. We can sort of claim it as our own – “at onement.”  That’s great, and that's beautiful. I think Catholic theology loves to ground it therefore in the incarnation. I think we have a certain allergy against isolating the cross too much – from the incarnation, from the resurrection. The great act of “at onement” is the hypostatic union of two natures in one person when divinity and humanity come together, which was the purpose of Torah, the purpose of prophecy, and above all the purpose of temple sacrifice. It was to bring divinity and humanity together. And this happens the great “at onement” is the incarnation. One thing I always loved in Calvin was by the whole course of his obedience the Son saves everyone. I always loved that line. I think that's true of Aquinas, too. So the incarnation and then this whole course of the “at onement” between divinity and humanity culminating in the cross.

I'll say this just to be fair. I think, as I laid out Aquinas from question 48, he might be susceptible to that same Abelardian question-begging problem. You say, OK, a great act of love and self-offering. Well, how was it an act of love and self-offering unless you also add something like Anselm. So that's a question I’ll leave there.

The last remark is I've been influenced here by N. T. Wright and the way he's recovered the Christus Victor theory for our time. Gustaf Aulen we all read back in the day. I think you are right, Bill, suggesting there was some distortion of Anselm in the secondary literature. But I’ve always responded to the Christus Victor approach, that somehow a battle with the powers took place. Not just on the cross – that was a culminating moment – but throughout the whole vita Christi. The opposition to Christ and his calling out the powers, so to speak, and then engaging them. The cross – the moment when the powers overwhelmed him. He allowed them to conquer him, so to speak. But then in the great word of forgiveness, the mercy that comes as sin overwhelms now like the scapegoat in the temple. The sins of the world on him. And then from inside of that, offering the divine forgiveness which breaks the power of sin. I find that persuasive. Could that be the act of love and obedience that the Father finds so pleasing? If it's an act – the Christus Victor, that dimension – but also something like this pleasing sacrificial language coming to the fore as well.

These are a few odd musings around, I think, a centrally important theme. I like the recovery of, call it, the harsher, the more hard edge side of it. I really like that. But I want to hang on to a variety of models. Maybe to my mind Christus Victor had been perhaps the best englobing sort of quality. OK. End of response.

MODERATOR: Dr. Craig, would you like to respond to that before we open it up?

DR. CRAIG: Briefly. The doctrine of the atonement has been very aptly compared to a beautiful multi-faceted jewel. All of these different motifs, I think, are properly part of a full orbed theory of the atonement. In the book that I'm developing on the atonement I want to include Abelard's moral influence as one facet of the gem. Christus Victor is one facet, as well. But I think a central facet is going to be penal substitution based on what I've already said. Indeed, I think it gives the substance to, for example, Abelard’s theory. It's because of penal substitution that this is such a tremendous demonstration of God's love for us that it kindles in our hearts our response. Similarly with Christus Victor, the way in which Christ achieves victory over Satan, death, and hell is through dying for our sins and bearing the punishment that we deserve. Augustine, who presses the Christus Victor theory, has this wonderful expression. I think it's so apt. He says, “Victor quia victima” – he is the Victor because he is the sacrificial victim. And that paradox, I think, is captured by this multifaceted theory which has penal substitution as a central facet, but then also Christus Victor, satisfaction of divine justice, moral influence, and redemption as part of a full orbed atonement theory.

QUESTION: I wanted to raise a question, and it's not an objection. It is not an expression of disagreement, but a real question to Professor Craig, and also Bishop Barron might want to speak to this as well. What would you say to the argument that there's a conceptual problem with the penal substitution theory that doesn't exist with satisfaction? We take an example like suppose a young man steals a car, crashes the car (it's a Ferrari or something), and so he's caught. Now he owes satisfaction to the person whose car he stole, and he also deserves punishment for having committed this offense against the social order and so forth. Suppose a rich guy comes along, Bill Gates, and says, “I will pay to replace the car. I will replace the guy's car, and so this young man doesn't have to do it.” There doesn’t seem to be injustice in that any more than there is in any sort of gift that someone decides to give. But if, on the other hand, Bill Gates were put in prison (got six months or a year jail time), the argument would be that seems to be unjust. His taking on the punishment of the offender is unjust in a way that his paying for the victim’s lost property is not unjust. There's a conceptual problem with penal substitution that doesn't exist with satisfaction.

DR. CRAIG: This is one of the central Socinian objections to penal substitutionary theory. I don't think it's an objection to the coherence of the doctrine so much as it is an objection to the justice and morality of penal substitution – that it is inherently unjust. I think there's quite a number of responses that are available to the penal substitution theorist here. One is – this is just one response – in fact, this notion of substitutionary punishment is not without precedent in our human legal system both in civil law and criminal law. It would be in examples that are quite different from your example. The problem would be your example would not fulfill the conditions for this. But in criminal law, as well as civil law, there's something called vicarious liability where a superior can be held liable and even criminally guilty for crimes committed by his subordinate in the discharge of his duties as subordinate. This has led in the law to a universally accepted principle of the vicarious liability of employers for deeds done by their employees in the discharge of their services. For example, in one case the owner of a cafe was found criminally liable because the manager of the cafe to whom management had been delegated allowed prostitutes to consort in the cafe in violation of the law. The owner had nothing to do with this, but the liability of the manager was imputed to the owner of the cafe in virtue of this relationship. In another case, the owner of a bar was found to be vicariously liable for his bartender selling alcohol to a policeman on duty in violation of the law. Again the owner had no knowledge. He wasn't negligent or complicit, but the liability of the subordinate was vicariously imputed to the superior. So we actually do have this very widespread feature of criminal and civil law that features this vicarious liability. In order to be vicariously liable the superior has to stand to the subordinate in such a relationship that he has either the power, the responsibility, or what is it?^[3] The power, the responsibility, or the duty. No, the duty is the same as responsibility. Opportunity? Maybe that’s it. The power, the opportunity, or the duty or responsibility to prevent the wrong deed. Interestingly enough, Christ stands to us in precisely such a superior-subordinate relation. He doesn't have the duty to prevent our sins, but he certainly has the power and the ability or the opportunity to prevent them. So this is really quite in line with Western systems of justice as it turns out.

The other thing, and this is perhaps even more important I think, is that the Reformer's doctrine involves the doctrine of the imputation of sins to Christ. Our sins are not infused in Christ. Christ remains a paradigm of compassion, goodness, selflessness, courage, and love. But he is found legally guilty of our sins and therefore in his case there's simply no question of God punishing an innocent person in our place. He is legally liable for those sins – this sort of vicarious liability. So if you have a doctrine of the imputation of sin, that removes the objection based on punishing an innocent person. So those who decry the doctrine typically say we don't have any experience of the imputation of guilt or wrongdoing to an innocent person, and that is demonstrably false as I say.

BISHOP BARRON: Catholics are going to get jumpy because of the imputation language – we don't like it with forensic righteousness either. It sounds as though God is playing a game rather than actually accomplishing something. In a similar way, I get kind of reactive to that. If the sin of the world was imputed in that sort of forensic manner to Christ. I don't know.

UNKNOWN: St. Thomas actually presses this objection. I could read it very briefly. He raises the objection against his view that:

Article 2. Whether Christ's Passion brought about our salvation by way of atonement?

Objection 1: It would seem that Christ's Passion did not bring about our salvation by way of atonement. For it seems that to make the atonement devolves on him who commits the sin; as is clear in the other parts of penance, because he who has done the wrong must grieve over it and confess it. But Christ never sinned, according to 1 Pt. 2:22: "Who did no sin." Therefore He made no atonement by His personal suffering.

Reply to Objection 1: The head and members are as one mystic person; and therefore Christ's satisfaction belongs to all the faithful as being His members. Also, in so far as any two men are one in charity, the one can atone for the other as shall be shown later (Supplement:13:2). But the same reason does not hold good of confession and contrition, because atonement consists in an outward action, for which helps may be used, among which friends are to be computed.^[4]

 

So there's something parallel there to how he explains the rather difficult question of how are we born in sin and not right with God exactly because of something Adam did that I wasn't there for. When I first taught my kids the catechism when they were very young, I was telling them about Adam and original sin. My son Max said, “Oh, this! I didn't do anything!” And I actually realized this is kind of hard to explain. But I think St. Thomas said something similar about that. We were all in Adam.

BISHOP BARRON: He's a pre-modern there, and I mean that as a compliment. I mean he's a pre-modern before the great shift to a very individualistic way of looking at life. Biblical people certainly had that. Isaiah 53 depends upon it. I think pre-moderns were generally much more at home with that idea of someone could represent the whole – that head and members relationship. So I get that. I love that Jewish temple business, too. I know it seems very unfair. Why would this poor animal have to die for my sins? But this call it mystical symbolism, of the placing of our sins upon it and what's happening to the animal by right should be happening to me. I get that. Obviously, all the writers of the New Testament were awash in that world. So of course they reach for that imagery with Jesus. I get that.

UNKNOWN: There's a minor point that I want to make, and that is I think it would be a mistake to think that all atoning transactions when transferred to the human realm have to make sense morally and ethically in the human realm for them to make sense. I don't think that follows.

BISHOP BARRON: That's interesting to me. Say more about that, please.

UNKNOWN: I think God has moral rights that we do not have and can make moral judgements that we cannot ethically make. I think it would be equally wrong to use that as your whole defense of atonement. I was talking to a rabbi one time and his question was, “Why did anybody have to die on any cross? Why didn't God just forgive them?” There's a text just like it in Bernard of Clairvaux – God created the world by his Word; why didn't he just forgive us by the Word? I said to my rabbi friend, look, obviously you're a rabbi. You know a little bit of [...] and the sacrificial system. I think it probably has something to do with the text that he wouldn't have accepted as sacred Scripture but it says in Hebrews forgiveness only comes about by the shedding of blood. Does that make sense on the human realm? No. Maybe it does of God. So that was kind of where I'm going with that.

BISHOP BARRON: Let me just make another Catholic observation here about the Mass which we characterize as a sacrifice. Part of the piety of the Mass is for each participant to enter into the sacrifice of Jesus; we identify with it. There's something there of that corporate sensibility again. It's not just this thing that happened long ago, but even now as that sacrifice is re-presented I enter with my suffering and my anguish and my sense of sacrifice into it. So I think that's very good, and that's essential to understanding what's happening.

UNKNOWN: That fits with the difficulty as why do we still have to die if death is a punishment for sin and Christ bore our punishment. It seems like we are still being punished. But we have to be configured to him in order to participate in the satisfaction he made for us.

UNKNOWN: It seems to me that it is a commonality. I think Dr. Craig referred to this between the Catholic satisfaction position and the penal substitution position and then all those that accept neither. I think you said the punishment was the thing which both of those views had in common. So it seems that the great divide is between those that accept maybe Christus Victor or an Abelardian view but definitely don't want anything to do with satisfaction or penal substitution on the one side. And then on the other side those who accept something like satisfaction or penal substitution. I think that's the major division. It is not really between penal substitution or satisfaction per se but those two are aligned contrasted with the views that do not have that as part of . . .

DR. CRAIG: As I said, Anselm and the Reformers, I think, are on the same footing. That is to say that the demands of divine justice must be met. That's very different than Christus Victor or the Abelardian moral influence theory. So I think you're right. It sets those two apart. Despite my criticisms of Anselm, he's one of my heroes. I think it's fantastic the way he develops the need for Christ's death. I think he missed the penal substitutionary element, but nevertheless he's got the footings right which is that divine justice cannot be just compromised by blinking at sin.

BISHOP BARRON: Right. Is that how you read the divine anger? It's kind of a symbol of God's justice?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

BISHOP BARRON: That it's a desire to set things right. I always read Anselm that way.

DR. CRAIG: . . . justice upon sin.

QUESTION: For those of us who are less familiar with some of this terminology, could maybe one of you say a little bit more about the Christus Victor understanding of atonement?

BISHOP BARRON: I think there was an idea of Christ taking on the powers. Some of the versions of the fathers is tricking the powers. So think of the devil in one of those theories as kind of holding us hostage. Here's the body and the soul of Jesus offered, and the devil lets go of all of us that he might take Christ. But in the act of taking Christ, he doesn't sense his divinity and the divinity overwhelms the devil and defeats the devil. It's sort of a pictorial way to look at. I think a very good contemporary portrayal of it – look at Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood’s movie. When this Christ-figure kind of draws out the dark powers, engages them in a non-violent way, they kill him but in the very act of killing him they themselves are done in and the young man is liberated from their grasp. When I saw that, I thought, boy, there's the Christus Victor theory. And he ends, of course, in the cruciform position as he dies.

UNKNOWN: The bad guys are going to get punished at the end of that.

UNKNOWN: The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe is another example where Aslan goes down to the White Witch . . . there’s deeper magic. He’s onto that.

BISHOP BARRON: In its more contemporary form, I mentioned N. T. Wright and people like that, they would see the life of Jesus the embodiment of the kingship of Yahweh. Yahweh coming as King now in human form awakening the power. So whether it's Herod in all Jerusalem from the beginning – they're shaking with trepidation – and then the human authorities, and then the dark powers, the spiritual powers, all coming out to meet him. He draws them out in opposition. The cross – he kind of allows himself to be overwhelmed, but the divinity, his own divine power of forgiveness, as it were, breaks them from the inside. Here I see the resurrection as well. If Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. That is a very important text. It can’t just be the cross, like a transaction happened and that did it. If Christ has not been raised, you're still in your sins. The resurrection as the great signal of the victorious Christ having gone, as it were, all the way down, having borne sin, now breaking it from the inside, the shalom of the risen Jesus to those who abandoned him and killed him and betrayed him is the great victory of God over sin. So I'm certain neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor anything else can separate us, because we killed God and God came back in forgiving love. I think that'd be a way of stating a Christus Victor maybe in our terminology. Anyway, that's a rambling answer to your pointed question.

UNKNOWN: Dr. Craig, I’d like to just ask you a question. If I was to read the paper and give it a title, I might title it something like “An invitation to Catholic theologians to join the Protestants in defending the penal substitution theory.” But you titled it, “why they should do this.” I’m curious if you would elaborate a little more about why you think it's an important thing. It's not just an invitation, but you're saying in your title why it's important for Catholics to do this. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more on the why. It's not just an invitation, but you're saying this is an important thing, and you ought to do this. What's the rationale for this?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I guess I think it's because the atonement is the very heart of Christian theology. It's what brings about our salvation. So it's important to understand the meaning of the cross. Paul said, “I decided to know nothing among you but Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He would call the message he preached “the Word of the Cross.” So the central weight of the Gospel message is on Jesus’ substitutionary death for our sins. Christ died for our sins. So it seems to me that since Catholics and Protestants are equally committed to Scripture as God's Word that we should unite behind the teaching of Scripture with regard to this facet of the atonement. Is that not a satisfactory answer to your question? I want to hear from him what he thinks.

UNKNOWN: In the discussion, you have all these kind . . .  these variety of ways that we can understand it. This is a central way; that you understand it in a central way of Protestantism and so forth.

DR. CRAIG: And the church fathers.

UNKNOWN: Right. You're saying maybe there's a special urgency today to recover it. There's a special urgency to . . . I mean there's some reason why particularly now is a good time to recapture that. Or is that to kind of show unity between Catholics and evangelicals?

DR. CRAIG: Actually, although this wasn't at the top of my mind, I think you are right. The reason I took up this study is because for years I have been very unsatisfied with the work of Christian philosophers on the doctrine of the atonement. Instead of giving a robust defense of a doctrine of the atonement that includes in its heart penal substitution, atonement theorists like Eleonore Stump and Richard Swinburne and others are offering these unbiblical, anemic atonement theories. I have just longed for someone to give a robust defense of a biblical atonement doctrine, and I finally decided “do it yourself.” So I began to take up this challenge. I had no idea how rich this study would prove to be. The doctrine of penal substitution, as I indicated from Blaine Swen’s Loyola University thesis, is under tremendous attack philosophically. To be candid, some of the severest critics of penal substitution are Catholic thinkers. And I think that's so unfortunate. So I do think the time is ripe for us to come to the defense of this doctrine which is under such attack.

QUESTION: What is the nature of the criticism?

DR. CRAIG: I think the central criticism is the one that Dr. Feser raised; namely, it is unjust. This is based upon a very almost axiomatic principle of negative retributive justice – that the innocent ought not to be punished, and therefore for God to punish an innocent person for our sins would be immoral and unjust.

UNKNOWN: Richard Dawkins called it a repellent doctrine.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. So I think that would be the central objection that needs to be met. But the funny thing is that the critics of the theory almost have nothing to say in terms of developing this criticism. It's usually stated in a single paragraph, even a single sentence, and that's the end of the discussion. I think we can go much deeper in this.

QUESTION: So do you think this is part of a larger – and I think this is true within Catholic circles – movement against legitimacy of retributive punishment?

DR. CRAIG: I don't know about Catholic circles. You can speak to that. But here's one of the interesting things. You read some of these liberal theologians and they hate retributive justice. They think this is monstrous. And yet philosophers of law know that over the last half century or so there has been a tremendous renaissance of retributive theories of justice such that this . . . well, you are a professor of law – right? – of criminal justice . . . such that these consequentialist theories of justice have now receded and are in the minority compared to retributivism in legal theory.

UNKNOWN: The legal theory but not on the street.

DR. CRAIG: No. I'm talking about among philosophers of law and legal theorists. The results of earlier 20th century dominance of consequentialist theories of justice in our penal system has been horrendous. For example, just to name one that I read about. It was thought that the reason you incarcerate people in prison is to rehabilitate them, not to punish them. It's to rehabilitate them. Well, the consequence of this was that it was thought that women were more rehabilitatable than men, and so as a result women were given longer prison sentences than men so that they could be the beneficiaries of this rehabilitation. The consequence of this theory of justice was horrible in our penal system. I think these theologians who are hostile to retributivism are really behind the curve now because among legal theorists the weaknesses of consequentialism and the strengths of retributivism are beginning to emerge.

UNKNOWN: I just had one point. Then we have this other concept which is fairly new –  restorative justice – which is a big deal these days in criminal justice circles. Restorative justice. This is pushed by Christians across the board, many of them are very well intended. When it began it was an alternative to retributive justice. But as things have developed there are restorative justice theorists who accept retributive justice but then see this as a kind of add-on. You do want to restore the person to the community after you punish the person. But for a lot of the restorative justice theorists, this is an alternative to punishment.

DR. CRAIG: As a supplement, I could see great theological capital there. Couldn't you? In terms of what Christ's bearing our retributive punishment (our just desert) does in terms of restoring us.

QUESTION: I wonder if we could put a distinction on the table. The distinction would seem to be between the difference between intrinsic punishments and extrinsic punishments. So to give an example. If I killed my parents, the extrinsic punishment might be capital punishment or life in prison or 40 years in prison. But the intrinsic punishment for killing my parents is I make myself into an orphan. Or to use a different sort of analogy, the camp leaders say don't get away from the campfire, somebody wanders away from the campfire. Well, the extrinsic punishment might be you can't go to canoeing tomorrow. But the intrinsic punishment of moving away from the campfire is that you're in the dark and you're in your cold. I tend to think of God not as a traffic cop kind of imposing on us extrinsic punishments. Rather, as Augustine said, the punishment for sin is sin. The moving away from the source of goodness just is getting yourself a lack of goodness. If we use this sort of distinction between extrinsic punishments and intrinsic punishments, what difference if any would that make for the penal substitution theory?

DR. CRAIG: Two comments. I think that that is an illicit distinction. What you're confusing are the consequences of sin with punishment for sin. It's generally agreed that in order for harsh treatment or bad consequences to count as punishment it has to be imposed by a legitimate authority in response to perceived wrongdoing on the part of a person. So when a person simply suffers the consequences of wrongful choices, that's not properly speaking “punishment.” With respect to the Bible, it seems to me very clear that in the Bible, though sin has its deleterious consequences, nevertheless there is definitely retributive punishment. The Scripture speaks of words like retribution with respect to God. And God's eschatological judgment seems to me to be clearly retributive because a punishment imposed at that point couldn't serve any other purpose than retribution. So we mustn't lose, I think, the notion of what you call extrinsic retributive punishment.

UNKNOWN: One way to think of the eschatological punishment would be this. If someone in this life lives a life alienated from God, lacking love of God, lacking love of neighbor, and they die in that situation. At death there's no longer the possibility of a conversion or a change of heart. So they maintain that alienation from God from all eternity. So it wouldn’t be that God drags people down to hell, that somehow they're doing their thing and then there is an extrinsic matter again like a traffic cop. Like you've been really naughty, now you're going to go to hell.  That makes God sound like, again, a traffic cop . . .

DR. CRAIG: Well, traffic cops are agents of the state, a legitimate authority tasked with enforcing the law. The Scripture uses words like “antapodoma” – retribution – or, what is the other one? I can't remember the Greek, but it means vengeance. “Vengence is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” This is thought to be punitive, not just the consequences of sin. And I think depending on your doctrine of hell, if it's just the consequences of sin that the damned suffer, then God might as well just annihilate them. There wouldn't be any reason to preserve them in existence if it were not retributive suffering. So I think that it's really inescapable to say that the Scripture teaches that God's justice is retributive, not simply that people suffer the deleterious consequences of sin.

UNKNOWN: Interestingly, in Ed Feser’s and my book on the death penalty, we quote Pius XII who actually spent quite a lot of time trying to restore the legitimacy of a retributive understanding of criminal justice which seemed to be disappearing in the 1940s and 1950s. One of his arguments is exactly that – about ultimate punishment. The only reason to punish at the end is for retribution. All those utilitarian reasons – deterring others, incapacitating, rehabilitating. They're long gone. The only reason left is retribution.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, I think that’s right.

QUESTION: In the beginning of the essay, you make a distinction between the fact of the atonement and theories of the atonement. I think everybody in the room understands and agrees with the fact of the atonement. There is disagreement on how to rate the theories of the atonement. One of the things you talked about in the first session was trying to figure out what were the consequences or implications [...]. What are the stakes or other implications for other debates in the church with this theory of penal substitution?

DR. CRAIG: I don’t know if it has implications for other debates. I think this one is important in and of itself, but I think the point that Bishop Barron was making about the Abelardian theory is that it's empty. It's sort of an empty shell without penal substitution. R. W. Dale in his book on the atonement says if my brother went into a burning house to save my child and himself perished in the flames, I would regard this as a tremendous demonstration of his love for me and mine. But, he says, if I were told that my brother went into the burning house even though there was nobody in the house, just to say, “Look how much I love you” he said it would be unintelligible. And I think that's right. It's penal substitution that gives the moral influence theory its bite. When we see the depths of what Christ has been willing to go through for us then that evokes and kindles in us this response of love. And I would similarly say, with Augustine, that the heart of the Christus Victor theory lies in Christ's paying the penalty for our sin and thereby releasing us from the grip that death and sin and the devil and hell have on us. It’s the substance that makes the victory possible – Victor quia victima. I compare the atonement theory to a multifaceted jewel, but I'm told by gemologists that the sort of central facet of a gem, like on your ladies diamond rings, that central facet is called the table of the gem. And I would say penal substitution is the table of the gem which is the doctrine of the atonement, and the other facets are seen through it and reflected around it.

BISHOP BARRON: I'd probably shift it there and put something else in the center. I probably put Christus Victor and then understand penal substitution in light of that. Certainly from an evangelical standpoint, it’s a hard sell. I think if we lead with . . . Most people today, younger people, if we lead with penal substitution . . . we all understand the right distinctions but they're going to fall into an “angry God venting his frustration.” I think it's kind of a hard sell. Also, for me, as I said before, I think that Christus Victor is a more satisfactory englobing approach to it. I always like to have Scripture passages – to your image there of the burning house – “how I long to gather you under my wings.” It's interpreted by some as an image from a mother hen during a fire. A fire sweeping through the barnyard and the mother hen gathers the chicks under and takes the flame and dies but protecting the chicks. I think you can give that a Christus Victor sort of reading of Christ himself taking upon himself the fury of the power of sin and death, protecting us in the process as he takes us under his wing, taking on, if you want, the weight and power and negativity of sin, saving us from it. I try to bring some of the satisfaction appeal to substitution language under that heading. So maybe the diamond thing is good as a gem. I’d put a different thing in the center maybe. But I like – I do, as I said before – I like bringing the harder edge thing into it. I think it is very important.

UNKNOWN: [...]

BISHOP BARRON: I'm balking with imputation language. It always sounds unreal to me. It's an as-if situation for my Catholic perspective. This thing of protecting – that's a very real engagement. I think it happened not just on the cross but the whole “at onement” I think was in some ways God taking on the powers of sin and death. So it's very real to me. It's not like a legal fiction, but it's a very real battle that was engaged.

UNKNOWN: [...]

BISHOP BARRON: To my mind it doesn't speak with a sufficient ontological density. I don't want my righteousness just imputed to me. I want it in me.

UNKNOWN: So imputation and more?

BISHOP BARRON: I don't like imputation. I like infused righteousness, if we want to use 16th century language. I think Christ affects something in me and really changes me, not just imputes righteousness to me.

UNKNOWN: Do you each have a different view, as a Protestant and as a Catholic, about how we in our spiritual lives can benefit from or receive the benefit of atonement?

BISHOP BARRON: Go to Mass. I would say in the sacraments. That’s precisely how we’d say it.  That is how you enter into the dynamics of the cross and resurrection.

DR. CRAIG: I would say receive Christ as your Savior and Lord and be born again! Then you become instantly a beneficiary of his atoning death, your sins are remitted, you are forgiven. I like the doctrine of the imputation of righteousness. I don't think it's essential, but I think it's true. So I would say then God imputes to me the righteousness of Christ, and so he sees me clothed in his righteousness legally.

UNKNOWN: My student, Derek Rishmawy, whom I learn so much from my daily read of his blog (whenever he does it) – reformedish. Even though I’m not Reformed. He very much argues for penal substitution, and he's writing to young people. He is leading with that, but he also brings in Christus Victor and various others. He discusses the church fathers. His blog reformedish has lots of blog posts on the atonement which also then just will lead you to further resources on that. But he is one who does not shy away from it and does not see it as necessarily a hard sell.

QUESTION: I wonder for purposes of sharing the Gospel with others if it could be rephrased. Maybe it can’t, but I'm wondering if it could. And that is – penal substitution is the doctrine that God inflicted upon Christ the suffering we deserved. In a sense, it's true that God's providence included that, but I wonder. Is it important to say God inflicted it rather than God in his love for seeing the good that would come from this allowed the evil intentions of the Romans and the religious leaders of the day, etc.? Or is something really lost when you don't actually say God inflicted it?

DR. CRAIG: Penal substitution theorists actually differ among themselves on this, and this isn't widely known, I think. Some penal substitution theorists (for example, John Stott) recoil at the idea that God the Father punished his beloved Son. So their doctrine would be more subtly stated. It involves a nice counterfactual, namely God inflicted on Christ the suffering which would have been our punishment had it been inflicted on us instead. So God did not punish Christ, but nevertheless Christ bore the suffering that would have been our punishment had we endured it. Certainly it is within God's sovereign right to inflict suffering on people. I mean, look at Job. That's the paradigm example in the Scripture. But in that case they would say he didn't punish Christ. I'm more inclined though to take the hard edge and say, yes, like with Anselm, this is God's retributive justice and this is an expression of divine love – that God so loved the world that he gave his Son, and that the Son voluntarily says, “I will bear the punishment for their sin. I will do it.” So, this, again, like the Abelardian theory, this to me kindles in me a response of love to my Savior that he would go and die in my place bearing the punishment I deserved. In my paper, I think I give a quotation from Calvin that I didn't read in the footnote on the front page that expresses this I think very well. So, it's open. You don't have to believe that God punished Christ to be a penal substitution theorist.

MODERATOR: Bishop Barron, any final words?

BISHOP BARRON: No, just of gratitude to everybody. I enjoyed both parts of the conversation immensely. I think it's a sign of hope. I love the fact that we can get together like this and talk about some pretty important things. I mean, the nature of God, the nature of our salvation. What's more important than that? So I'm just very grateful.

MODERATOR: Well, you're not nearly as grateful as we are. Thank you very much.

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