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In Defense of Penal Substitution | EPS Plenary Lecture - November 2018

In November of 2018, Dr. Craig was honored to give the Plenary Lecture of the Evangelical Philosophical Society conference in Denver, Colorado. In his lecture to a packed house, Dr. Craig gives a defense of penal substitutionary atonement by outlining its coherence, its justice, and its satisfactoriness.


MODERATOR: Welcome everyone to the Evangelical Philosophical Society plenary session this year. It's my distinct honor to introduce this year's speaker, Dr. William Lane Craig. He is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University and founder of the international apologetics ministry ReasonableFaith.org. He holds a Doctor of Theology degree from Munich, a PhD in philosophy from the University of Birmingham, and also studied for seven years at the University of Louvain. He is author of over a hundred and fifty journal articles, and author and editor of more than 40 books on the kalam cosmological argument, the historicity of the resurrection, the philosophy of time, and many works in apologetics. His most recent work is on the atonement, the subject of today's presentation. This is a marvelous book. I read it recently. It's a lucid, tightly argued analysis of the key elements which any biblically grounded and philosophically coherent account of Christ's atoning work must take into account. It sets out the critical biblical data. It compares various theological accounts, and shows that many objections to the penal substitution theory have ignored the insights of jurisprudence on the nature and purpose of punishment. I would say that every serious Christian thinker, philosopher, theologian, or apologist should buy this wonderful book. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. William Lane Craig.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you very much. I am deeply appreciative of the invitation to deliver the plenary lecture at this year's conference of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Having been a member of the Society since its inception and having served as its president for several years, I remain deeply committed to the value and vision of the EPS. It is therefore an honor to address the Society and our guests today. I would encourage any ETS members who are not yet also members of the EPS but who are interested in keeping abreast of the exciting developments in the field of Christian philosophy to avail themselves of our journal Philosophia Christi. It comes free of charge with membership in the EPS, so I would encourage you to avail yourself of this opportunity.

The doctrine of the atonement is one of the best illustrations of the value of Christian philosophy for theology. 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. Notice that this definition leaves it an open question whether God punished Christ for our sins. Thus, even the definition of penal substitution is a matter of careful philosophical conceptual analysis.

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 the sins of others. The substitutionary, as well as punitive, nature of the Servant’s suffering is expressed in phrases like “he was wounded for our transgressions,” “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 “stricken for the transgression of my people.” According to Otfried Hofius, substitutionary punishment “is expressed several times in the passage and should undoubtedly be seen as its dominant and central theme.”[1] New Testament authors took Jesus to be the sin-bearing Servant of Isaiah 53. For example, 1 Peter 2:24-25 states, “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.”

Unfortunately, the doctrine of penal substitution, ever since the time of Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), has faced formidable, and some would say insuperable, philosophical challenges. A discussion of such challenges takes us into lively debates over questions in the philosophy of law – the field of philosophy where the theory of punishment is most thoroughly discussed. A theory of punishment should offer both (1) a definition of punishment and (2) a justification of punishment. Challenges to penal substitution arise with respect to both. Thus, philosophical objections to penal substitution tend to fall into two broad categories of challenges to the coherence of penal substitution or challenges to the justice of penal substitution. So 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 an expressivist theory of punishment that it is conceptually 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 since 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. Thus premise (2) of the argument is undercut.

Let's talk now about 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 cannot therefore 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 so-called negative retributivism 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 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 to himself punish an innocent human person, 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 suffices to dispense with the objection. But even more can be said.

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? 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 upon the false assumption of (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 critics allege? I think not. Consider first the idea that our wrongful acts were imputed to Christ. On this view, although Christ himself did not commit the sins in question, God chooses to treat Christ as if he had done those acts. Such language is formulaic for the expression of legal fictions.[2] 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 law.

Penal substitution theorists have typically been 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 his propitiation of God's wrath a fiction, for his being punished for our sins removed our liability to punishment and 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 in 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 burden of financial obligation to his former creditor. But 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 achieve 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 about 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.”[3]

Or consider the legal fiction that a ship is a person.[4] 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 illegal cargo, including slaves. When the ships were seized, the captains and crews passed on legal responsibility to the ship owners, who in turn produced innocent manifests while denying any knowledge of the illegal activity of the captains and crews. The courts responded by making the ship itself (herself?) the person against whom such charges were brought. By the end of the 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.”[5] 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.[6]

Holding that God, in his role as 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: God imputes to Christ, not the wrongdoing itself, but the guilt of our wrongdoing.[7] 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 was 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 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 (or 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 those 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.[8] 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.[9] 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 strict liability, where the superior is held to be guilty without being found blameworthy.[10] 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 guilt to Christ.

Imputation of wrongdoing or guilt to a blameless party is thus a widely accepted feature of our 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 be only 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 being voluntarily 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 this? 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 penal substitution based on the definition of punishment.

That brings us, third, to 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. David Lewis claims that although criminal law does not permit substitutionary punishment, nevertheless civil law does. A friend can pay a person’s fine if both agree to the arrangement. Lewis says, “Yet this is just as much a case of penal substitution as the others.”[11] Lewis rejects the view espoused by expressivist theories of punishment that these penalties are not really punishments. Some of these fines, Lewis remarks, are just as burdensome as prison sentences and, we might add, 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.[12] Lewis draws the lesson that penal substitution may sometimes satisfy justice’s demands, just as the Reformers maintained.

Indeed, in civil law penal substitution is much more common than Lewis seemed to realize. Being not merely condoned, but actually enjoined by the law. I have reference once more to cases involving so-called vicarious liability. An employer may be held liable for acts done by his employee in his role as employee even though the employer did not do those acts himself. In cases in which the employee cannot pay the penalty exacted by the court for the wrong done to the plaintiff, the employer will be held solely responsible for the satisfaction of justice’s demands.

Moreover, pace Lewis, criminal law also involves cases of penal substitution. For as we have seen, vicarious liability also appears in criminal law as well as civil law. The liability for crimes committed by a subordinate in the discharge of his duties can also 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. 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.”[13] 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 are punished for that wrong. Accordingly, we should revise premise (1) to:

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 Reformers’ view, Christ did not merely suffer the punishment due us 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 them.[14]

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.

The above considerations alone suffice to dispense with the objection. 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 (exkludierende Stellvertretung) and inclusionary place-taking (inkludierende Stellvertretung).[15] 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 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 represents that other player. That is 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 merely advocates for him.[16]

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 the 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 on our behalf, so that we vote. The combination is an 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.”[17] 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 union, the one natural (namely, 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.[18] In that case, divine justice is satisfied.[19]

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 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've encountered nothing that would rationally undermine the doctrine of penal substitution as a central facet of a biblically adequate theory of the atonement. Thank you.

I've deliberately allowed some time for questions. There's a central microphone here in the aisle that you can line up behind, and we'll take a few minutes of questions.

QUESTION: Why can't God just forgive me?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I haven't argued that he cannot. In fact, I was surprised to learn that many of the church fathers thought that God could just forgive sins without the satisfaction of divine justice. This was also the view of Aquinas and Hugo Grotius, as well. But Aquinas and Grotius maintained that God had good reasons for substitutionarily punishing Christ. It shows his hatred of sin and the depth of his self-sacrificial love for mankind in a way that nothing else could do. So, although I am inclined to the view that divine justice must necessarily be satisfied as a precondition of forgiveness, that is not something I've argued for today nor is it a necessary feature of an adequate doctrine of the atonement.

QUESTION: I'm curious if Robert Adams’ definition of God's justice would be helpful. Maybe you're assuming it; I'm not sure. Robert Adams who defends divine command theory says God's justice is . . . so he's not advocating a circular theory where justice presupposes God has any obligations . . . so Adams says God's justice is simply his judging in accordance with the facts.

DR. CRAIG: I think that Robert Adams’ divine command theory is not only true but also is one more objection to these objections to penal substitution. Because on a divine command theory, who determines what is just or unjust? How can we say to God, who determines what is just or unjust by his commands, that he's doing something unjust? The objection can't even get off the ground, it seems to me, on a divine command theory. Moreover, on a divine command theory God doesn't have any moral duties because he doesn't issue commands to himself. So how can God be said to be acting unjustly when he has no duty to act in a certain way? It seems to me that he's perfectly at liberty to punish Christ in our place should he so will, and therefore if you have a divine command theory it seems to me the objection is just a non-starter.

QUESTION: My question is related to the question that was just asked. With respect to premise (2) if God is perfectly just he cannot punish an innocent person. You've mentioned as a possible response that there are no moral laws that God must fulfill. He does not have any moral duties. He can act in any way consistent with his nature. Elsewhere you said that moral duties are grounded in his will or commands. His will is not independent of his nature, but must express his nature. If true, penal substitution implies that it is consistent with the nature of God to punish an innocent person. It seems to me a little bit contradictory to say that the divine command given to humans “Do not punish an innocent person” expresses a nature of God and at the same time it is consistent to say that it is consistent with the nature of God to punish an innocent person.

DR. CRAIG: All right, now, Raul because of your accent it's a little difficult for me to understand. Your claim is that even if God has no moral duties (because he doesn't issue commands to himself), nevertheless on divine command theory he cannot act inconsistent with his own nature. I think you're asking or claiming that it would be in some way inconsistent with his nature to punish an innocent person. Is that right?

FOLLOWUP: Yeah.

DR. CRAIG: Why is that?

FOLLOWUP: As I understand what you've said, mainly in response to the Euthyphro Dilemma, you said that God's command to us must be consistent with his nature.

DR. CRAIG: God’s commands must be consistent with his nature. OK. And so the question is: Could he command that Christ be punished in our place? Or could he punish Christ in our place? Would that be inconsistent with his nature? So how would that be inconsistent with his nature?

FOLLOWUP: Because he has given us the command not to punish the innocent.

DR. CRAIG: Oh! Now, see, God doesn’t have the same moral duties that we have. That's the lesson of the command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. If Abraham had done this on his own initiative, this would have been murder – killing his son. But given a divine command, it became his moral duty. So the whole point of divine command theory is that God may have prerogatives that we as human beings don't have. As I said, even if God has instituted a system of justice among human beings whereby it is immoral and unjust for humans to punish other innocent humans for a wrong, and even if God is too good by his own nature to punish an innocent human person for another person's wrongs, why can't he reserve for himself the prerogative of punishing an innocent divine person for the wrongs committed by humans? I can't see any reason to think that that's incompatible with the divine nature unless you say the demands of negative retributive justice are essential to God's nature. And that's a very ironic twist because the critics of penal substitution are usually vehemently anti-retributivist, but it turns out that their objection really depends upon ascribing to God's essence the demands of retributive justice and therefore claiming he can't violate them. But then I gave a response to that. Even if it is essential to his nature, he can meet the demands of negative retributive justice while punishing Christ because Christ wasn't innocent.

QUESTION: I have a question about N. T. Wright. In his Jesus and the Victory of God, he maintains penal substitution, but when you look at his Evil and the Justice of God and even in his newer work, in his explanation of what penal substitution is, it looks as though it's not penal substitution. I would just like for you to talk about that.

DR. CRAIG: I especially think of his book, The Day the Revolution Began, which he sent me graciously in pre-print. When I read the vicious caricature of traditional atonement theories in that book, I plead with him to revise the book before submitting it to Harper, and he declined to do so. But I think that is a terrible hatchet job on traditional atonement theories. At last year's AAR-SBL meeting in a session in which he spoke, I challenged him from the floor on this. I said, “Can you name a single traditional atonement theorist in the history of Christendom who has held to this so-called neo-Pagan view of the atonement that you opposed?” He couldn't name one. So I do not think that he has treated fairly the great traditional atonement theorists like St. Anselm and Augustine and Hugo Grotius and Turretin and so many others. We need to get back to these primary sources because the secondary literature, frankly, is very misleading on these great thinkers of the past. Thank you very much.

 

[1] Otfried Hofius, “The Fourth Servant Song in the New Testament Letters,” in The Suffering Servant, p. 164.

[2] The seminal treatment of contemporary discussions is L. L. Fuller, “Legal Fictions,” Illinois Law Review 25 (1930): 363–399; idem (1931): 513–546; idem (1931): 877–910. The more distant progenitor is Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As if,’ [1911] trans. C. K. Ogden, 2d ed. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method (London: Kegan Paul, Treach, Trubner, & Co.; n.d.).

[3] 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.”

[4] 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.

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


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

[7] 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.

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

[9] 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.

[10] Indeed, the superior is entirely innocent, having neither an actus reus nor a mens rea, but is declared guilty by imputation.

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

[12] 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?”.

[13] David Ormerod, Smith, Hogan, and Ormerod’s Criminal Law, 15th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 245.

[14] Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology [Institutio theologiae elencticae 1679-85], 3 vols., trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison (Phillipsburg, N. J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), 14.13. Contrast in this regard Augustine, who affirms penal substitution but appears to deny imputation of our sin to Christ. In Against Faustus he says to his opponent, “Confess that he died, and you may also confess that he, without taking our sin, took its punishment” (14.7). Perhaps he is here speaking ex concessis. But elsewhere he says, “By taking on your punishment, while not taking on your guilt, he canceled both guilt and punishment” (Sermon 171.3). According to Franks, this sentence “Suscipiendo poenam et non suscipiendo culpam et culpam delevit et poenam” is frequently repeated with slight variations in Augustine’s writings (Robert S. Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ in its Ecclesiastical Development, 2 vols. [London: Hodder & Stoughton, (1918)], I:126.) See, e.g., Augustine, The Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1. 61, where he says that Christ transferred to his own flesh death but not sin. Advocates of the Reformers’ doctrine have questioned the justice of penal substitution without imputation of sin, a somewhat ironic concord with their Socinian opponents. See, e.g., Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical, and Practical Perspectives, ed. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James III (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 450.

[15] Alternatively, ausschliesschende vs. einschliessende Stellvertretung. See, e.g., the influential work of Hartmut Gese, “The Atonement,” Essays on Biblical Theology, trans. Keith Crim (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1981), p. 106; Otfried Hofius, “Sühne und Versöhnung: Zum paulinischen Verständnis des Kreuzestodes Jesu,” in Paulusstudien, 2nd rev. ed., WUNT 51 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994), p. 41.

[16] Representation in this sense needs to be distinguished from representation in the sense of symbolization. A baseball scorecard is a representation of the playing field and marks on it represent hits, outs, runs, and so on. Christ’s death as a representation in this sense would be akin to the popular misunderstanding of Grotius’ governmental theory of the atonement as a representation to the world of what it would look like if Christ were punished for our sins.

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

[18] 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.

[19] As for Socinus’ several arguments against Christ’s death’s being sufficient to satisfy for humanity’s sins, I consider Turretin’s response based upon the deity of Christ to be entirely adequate. Because of the divinity of his person, the suffering of God the Son, who had never experienced anything other than intimacy with the Father, has an infinite value, more than sufficient to pay the penalty due for every sin that ever has been or will be committed. Turretin’s analysis of Christ’s punishment as God the Father’s withdrawing from him the beatific vision and suspending the joy and comfort and sense and fruition of full felicity comports well with the model of the incarnation I have proposed, whereby the Logos in his waking, human consciousness is bereaved of these blessings (William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2d ed. [Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 2017], chap. 32). It is the divine Logos himself who suffers these bereavements in his human nature.