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Is Penal Substitution Unjust? | Harding University - February 2018

Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas hosted Dr. Craig in February of 2018 for a series of lectures and discussions, including this lecture titled "Is Penal Substitution Unjust?"


DR. CRAIG: Thank you very much. Although Dr. Martin mentioned the website, he didn't give you the address. It's ReasonableFaith.org. The homepage is pictured on the slide behind me on the screen. So if you're interested in obtaining information pertinent to the defense of the Christian faith, ReasonableFaith.org supplies tens of thousands of pages of material all free to anyone who would avail himself of it.

This is my first visit to Harding University, and I'm delighted to have the invitation to give the spring lecture here. We've enjoyed a wonderful day speaking in chapel, and then meeting with students and faculty as well. The topic for this evening is, “Is Penal Substitution Unjust?”

Introduction

Penal substitution in a theological context 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.

In my chapel address this morning, I asked the question, “Is penal substitution biblical?” And by way of review, we found that penal substitution is firmly rooted in Isaiah's fourth Servant Song –  the story of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 who suffers substitutionally and punitively for the sins of the people. Isaiah writes,

Surely he has borne our infirmities
  and carried our diseases;
yet we esteemed him stricken;
  smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
  He was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
  and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
  we have turned everyone to his own way,
and the Lord has laid on him
  the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:4-6).

We saw that New Testament writers followed Jesus himself in thinking of Jesus as the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 who, in the words of 1 Peter 2:24-25, himself “bore our sins in his body on the tree.”

Despite its substantial biblical foundations, however, the doctrine of penal substitution, ever since the time of Faustus Socinus in the 16th century, has faced formidable, and some would say insuperable, philosophical challenges. A discussion of such challenges takes us into lively debates in the philosophy of law over the theory of punishment. Unfortunately, most theologians, and in fact most Christian philosophers, have little familiarity with these debates. The doctrine of penal substitution is almost invariably dismissed by its critics in a single paragraph, even a single sentence, to the effect that it would be unjust of God to punish an innocent person for others’ sins, end of discussion. We need to go deeper.

The Alleged Injustice of Penal Substitution

A theory of punishment should offer both a definition of punishment and a justification of punishment, aspects of the theory of punishment which legal theorists have teased apart only in recent decades.

Although some have objected to the coherence of the doctrine of penal substitution on the grounds of the definition of punishment,[1] the more important and influential objection by far has been to the justice of penal substitution on the grounds of the justification of punishment. 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.

One quick and easy way to deal with this objection would be to adopt a consequentialist theory of justice. Theories of justice may be classified as broadly retributive or consequentialist. Retributive theories of justice hold that punishment is justified because the guilty deserve to be punished. Consequentialist theories of justice hold that punishment is justified because of the extrinsic goods that may be realized thereby, such as deterrence of crime, sequestration of dangerous persons, and reformation of wrongdoers. It is common coin that on consequentialist theories of justice punishment may be justified in view, for example, of its deterrence value. In fact, one of the main criticisms of consequentialist theories of justice is precisely the fact that on such theories it may be just to punish innocent persons. A consequentialist penal substitution theorist could fairly easily provide justification for God's punishing Christ for our sins, namely, so doing prevents the loss of the entire human race.

But consequentialism seems ill-suited to serve as a basis for divine punishment because God’s judgement is described in the Bible as ultimately eschatological. The ungodly are said to be “storing up wrath” for themselves for God’s final day of judgement (Romans 2:5). Punishment imposed at that point could seemingly serve no other purpose than retribution. In any case, the biblical view is that the wicked deserve punishment (Romans 1:32) and ascribes to God retribution (ekdikēsis; avtapodoma in the Greek) for sins (Romans 11:9; 12:19), so that God’s justice must in some significant measure be retributive.

During the first half of the twentieth century, under the influence of social scientists and psychologists, retributive theories of justice were frowned upon in favor of consequentialist theories. Fortunately, there has been over the last half-century or so a renaissance of theories of retributive justice, accompanied by a fading of consequentialist theories,[2] so that we need not be distracted by the need to justify a retributive theory of justice. This change is due in no small part to the unwelcome implication of pure consequentialism that there may be circumstances under which it is just to punish the innocent. Unfortunately, it is precisely the conviction that the innocent ought not to be punished that lies behind the claim that penal substitutionary atonement theories are unjust and immoral.

Responses to the Alleged Injustice of Penal Substitution

1. Penal Substitution without Punishment

It is not widely appreciated that the present objection has no purchase against penal substitution theorists who hold that God did not punish Christ for our sins. Christ may be said to have voluntarily taken upon himself the suffering which would have been the punishment for our sins, had it been inflicted on us. Since Christ was not punished for our sins, his voluntarily suffering on our behalf cannot be said to be unjust on God’s part. So these theorists would deny premise (6) in the argument. The objection, therefore, is pressing only for penal substitution theorists who hold that God did punish Christ for our sins.

2. Meta-Ethical Contextualization

Suppose that we do accept that God punished Christ in our place. An assessment of premise (2) – if God is perfectly just, he cannot punish an innocent person – requires its contextualization within a meta-ethical theory about the grounding of objective moral values and duties. Who or what determines what is just or unjust? The Protestant proponents of penal substitution were, like Anselm, all advocates of some sort of Divine Command Theory of ethics, according to which moral duties are constituted by divine imperatives. There is no external law hanging over God to which he must conform. Since God does not issue commands to himself, he literally has no moral duties to perform. He can act in any way he wants consistent with his nature. He does not have the moral duties that we have, and will have unique prerogatives, such as giving and taking human life as he wills. This is the lesson of the astonishing story of God’s commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Now if such a meta-ethical theory is even coherent, not to say true, as able proponents like Robert Adams, William Alston, and Philip Quinn have argued it is,[3] then the present objection will have difficulty even getting off the ground.[4] As Hugo Grotius observed in his classic defense of penal substitution[5], even if God has established a system of justice among human beings which forbids the punishment of the innocent (and, hence, substitutionary punishment), he himself is not so forbidden. He refused Moses’ offer of himself as a substitutionary sacrifice (Exodus 32:30-34), just as he refused the sacrificing of Isaac; but if he wills to take on human nature in the form of Jesus of Nazareth and give his own life as a sacrificial offering for sin, who is to forbid him? He is free to do so as long as it is consistent with his nature. And what could be more consistent with our God’s gracious nature than that he should condescend to take on our frail and fallen humanity and give his life to satisfy the demands of his own justice? The self-giving sacrifice of Christ exalts the nature of God by displaying his holy love.

3. Retributive Justice and the Divine Nature

Perhaps the best spin that can be put on the present objection is to claim that, contrary to Socinus,[6] retributive justice is part of God’s nature, and therefore it is impossible that he act contrary to the principles of retributive justice.

But that raises the question: What is retributive justice? The present objection does not sufficiently differentiate various accounts of retributivism. While a 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 substitution 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 innocent human persons, still he reserves the prerogative to punish an innocent divine person, namely, Christ, in the place of the guilty. This extraordinary exception is a result of his goodness, not a defect in his justice.

This response alone suffices to dispense with the objection; but even more can be said.

4. Prima Facie vs. Ultima Facie Justification of Punishment

The objection also fails to reckon with the fact that the prima facie demands of retributive justice can be outweighed in specific cases by weightier moral considerations, so that an exception to justice’s demands may be justified ultima facie.

Feinberg and Gross observe that there are occasions in which a person can be fully justified in voluntarily producing an unjust effect upon another person. Person A may be justified in violating person B’s rights when there is no third alternative open to him; but that justification does not cancel the injustice done to B. They state, “In that case, we can say that B was unjustly treated although A’s act resulting in that effect was not an instance of unjust behavior.”[7]

Similarly, even if God’s essential justice includes unqualified negative retributivism, the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice may be overridden in the case of Christ. In the case of the death of Christ the penal theorist might claim that God is fully justified in waiving the demands of negative retributive justice for the sake of the salvation of mankind. For God, by waiving the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice and punishing Christ for our sins, has mercifully saved the world from total destruction and was therefore acting compatibly with moral goodness.

Now it might be asked why, if there are weightier considerations prompting God to waive the demands of negative retributive justice in Christ’s case, he did not instead waive the demands of positive retributive justice and offer everyone a general pardon for their sins. In fact, many of the Church Fathers freely embraced this possibility, as did Aquinas and Grotius after them.[8] But these thinkers also held that God had good reasons for achieving atonement through Christ’s passion. As Abelard and Grotius saw, so doing was a powerful display of both God’s love of people and his hatred of sin, which has proved powerfully attractive throughout history in drawing people to faith in Christ, especially as they themselves face innocent suffering.

God’s pardoning sin without satisfaction does not, despite first appearances, imply universal salvation, for God’s pardon may still require its free acceptance by people, and it is not at all implausible that in a world in which the great demonstration of God’s love and holiness in the vicarious suffering and death of Christ occurs is a world in which a more optimal number of people come freely to embrace salvation than a world in which free pardon without cost or consequence is offered men. The counterfactuals involved are too speculative to permit us to claim that a general pardon would have been more effective in accomplishing God’s ends. Besides, substitutionary punishment of Christ permits God to relax far less the demands of his essential retributive justice for the sake of mercy than would be the case with a general pardon, thereby expressing more fully his essential character of holy love.

5. Punishment and the Imputation of Sins

But 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 substitution 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 present objection to penal substitutionary theories is a non-starter, being based on the false assumption of premise (4).

Detractors to the doctrine of imputation typically protest that we have no experience of the imputation of responsibility or guilt from a wrongdoer to an otherwise innocent person. Such an assertion is, however, simply uninformed. In both civil law and criminal law there exist cases of what is called vicarious liability in which the liability or guilt of a subordinate is imputed to his superior even though the superior is entirely blameless in the matter. Cases in civil law typically involve employers being held liable for their employees’ illegal sale of items, but may also include torts like assault and battery, fraud, manslaughter, and so on.

Now, someone might say that civil law concerns only liability, not guilt. That may be left a moot point, for vicarious liability also makes an appearance in criminal law.[9] Crimes committed by a subordinate in the discharge of his duties can be imputed to his employer even though the employer is entirely blameless in the matter. It needs to be emphasized that in such cases the employer is not being held guilty for other crimes such as negligence or failure to supervise the subordinate. No, the employer in such cases is entirely blameless and not culpable. But he is found to be criminally liable because the criminal liability of the subordinate is imputed to him.[10] For example, in the case of Allen v. Whitehead the owner of a café was found to be criminally liable because the man to whom he had entrusted management of the café allowed prostitutes to gather 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.

The vicarious liability that exists in the law shows that the imputation of guilt to Christ is not wholly without parallel in our experience. In the law’s imputation of guilt to another person than the wrongdoer, we are actually very close to the doctrine of the imputation of our sin to Christ.

Conclusion

In sum, the objection to penal substitution based on the justification of punishment is insufficiently nuanced. It applies only to theories which affirm that Christ was punished for our sins. It makes unwarranted assumptions about the ontological foundations of moral duty independent of God’s commands. It presupposes without warrant that God is by nature an unqualified negative retributivist. It overlooks the possibility that the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice might be overridden by weightier consideration in Christ’s case. And it takes for granted that Christ was legally innocent, in opposition to the doctrine of the imputation of sin. It thus fails to provide any proof of injustice in God’s punishing Christ in our place.

QUESTION: My question is – you talked about the imputation of sin from a legal viewpoint. There are two points I’d like to make about that. The first of which is – when you talk about sin being imputed from one person to another, how exactly does that work? What's the physical parallel to it? I mean, you can just say that sin is being imputed from us to Christ. But how does that actually work? How can he be held responsible in the same way that an employer is held responsible for his employees? And the second point that I kind of want to juxtapose with that – you can answer either one of these as fully as you want – the second point is, doesn’t it correspond more closely to the psychological phenomenon of scapegoating where we feel the need to punish someone, so we punish them? Doesn’t there need to be a deeper seeded need rather than the legal concept of liability?

DR. CRAIG: The second question is easy to answer. No. It’s not at all psychological. It is a legal or forensic transaction. The use of judicial language in the book of Romans sets the context of the law court for this transaction before God as the Judge of the world. Humanity stands condemned guilty before him. But Christ provides a means of obtaining a divine pardon. And I would say he does that through substitutionary punishment – by bearing our sin himself. Imputation or vicarious liability in the law is a legal transaction or a judicial transaction that takes place in the context of a court. And that is the context for the book of Romans. It is the law court. God declares Christ vicariously liable for the sins of the whole world. So it's a legal transaction.

QUESTION: Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, to assume that Christ had a principal-agent kind of relationship with that of God, and almost a utilitarianistic approach that God took to say “For the greater good of mankind, I will allow this innocent individual to be liable for the principles at hand,” is that what you are trying to explain?

DR. CRAIG: I don't advocate any kind of utilitarian ethic. What I'm saying is that Christ’s substitutionary atonement is an expression of both God's love and justice – what I call his holy love. His love is expressed in that God, rather than allowing us to perish (which would have been our just desert), initiates this rescue operation to save us. That's his love. But in so doing he satisfies the demands of retributive justice by punishing Christ in our place. So neither his love nor his justice is sacrificed in his achieving atonement.

QUESTION: A common criticism that I hear for substitutionary theories of atonement would be the embedded statements it makes about the moral character of God. Of God having this wrath that has to be satisfied, and it takes the form of occurring through rather violence ends. Because of that, I know your response to that would be probably to appeal to some form of Divine Command Theory that “What is the ontological basis for this criticism? And there can't be one other than appealing to the commands of God which God himself is commanding as long as it's consistent with his nature.” Given that response, how would you respond to someone who is experiencing a severe disconnect between their own world convictions about the moral character of God under this theory and the current sort of philosophical defense that you're giving of this being a consistent moral reality for God?

DR. CRAIG: This is difficult for me because I would just repeat the points that I've made this evening. I think what I've shown this evening is that there just is no inconsistency with the love and the justice of God both being met in Christ. In fact, one of the things that struck me in this study is that the critic of penal substitution needs retributive justice to be essential to God in order to launch his objection. If you say that the demands of retributive justice are not essential to God then what's the problem with punishing an innocent person in our place? God's free to do that if he wants to. He has no moral duties, right? Because he doesn't issue commands to himself. So, really, oddly enough, it's the critic of penal substitution who, in order to save this objection, has to say negative retributive justice is essential to God and therefore he cannot operate contrary to it. So I find that to be rather ironic. Those who decry the wrath of God and the retributive justice of God actually need it in order to launch the objection. Is that clear? Do you see why I'm saying that?

FOLLOWUP: Yes.

DR. CRAIG: OK.

QUESTION: This is just as a clarification more than a question. In your talk this morning you mentioned animal sacrifices in the Old Testament and how laying on hands was symbolism to identifying with the animal. You kind of brought it up as, on a smaller scale, an example of penal substitution, if I understood correctly.

DR. CRAIG: Not exactly. I made a point of saying that this is not the claim that the animal was punished for my sins. Rather, the animal experienced the fate which would have been the punishment for my sins had it been inflicted on me. So what I am suggesting is there is an example here of substitutionary suffering. But it's not punitive.

FOLLOWUP: OK. But wouldn’t it be kind of like the liability? I understand how Jesus (or God, I guess) could be related as the employer and us the employee being liable. The employer entrusted the employee, and if the employee isn’t good enough then the employer should be punished. I understand that. Wouldn’t it also be like saying with the animals – we don't own the animals, we can't hold them liable for our actions. It can be like: I sin so . . . you are going to be punished.

DR. CRAIG: I think you are underscoring exactly the point that I was making. As a non-rational brute, an animal can't be punished and can't be held liable. So we shouldn't think that this is that the animal is being punished for the sin of the offerer. But he does die in the place of the offerer. But in the case of Christ and ourselves, we are both persons. Christ is a person, and we are persons. So there can be this kind of vicarious liability of the crime of the subordinate imputed to the superior. The analogy is even closer than I explained. In the law, in order for the employer to be vicariously liable for the wrongdoing or crimes of his subordinate, the employer has to be related to the subordinate in such a way that he has either the duty, the power, or the right to prevent the subordinate’s wrongdoing. Now, if you think of Christ's relationship to us, he doesn't have the duty to prevent our sin, but he certainly has the power and he certainly has the right to do so. So Christ actually fulfills the legal conditions laid down in the Anglo-American justice system for standing in a relation of vicarious liability to us!

FOLLOWUP: I understand that. But saying that he fulfills the conditions set by the legal system, wouldn’t that kind of also be blaming him for letting us sin? Because saying that the employer is guilty of letting the employee do the wrongdoing is kind of saying he is guilty of not being good enough to stop it.

DR. CRAIG: No. See, that's what I emphasized. He is not being held responsible for negligence or failure to supervise. Vicarious liability is an instance of what in the law is called strict liability. Crimes of strict liability are crimes that are committed without blame, without fault. Examples of crimes of strict liability would be things like possession of narcotics or possession of an illegal firearm. You do not have to be blameworthy in order to be in strict violation of the law. By having narcotics in the trunk of your car or a firearm in your purse even if you didn't know it was in there. It's a crime of strict liability. These are crimes for which you are punishable without a blameworthy mental state. In the law, there are two factors that typically go to make up a guilty verdict. One would be what's called an actus reus, an act of wrongdoing. The other would be a mens rea. That is to say, a blameworthy mental state. Defense attorneys will try to show that a person doesn't have a blameworthy mental state in certain cases due to things like insanity or coercion or things of that sort – he did it in ways that don't involve a blameworthy mental state. But in crimes of strict liability and crimes of vicarious liability, no mens rea is required. It's actually excluded. The employer does not have a blameworthy mental state. He is not in any way culpable or blameworthy. It is simply that the wrongdoing of the subordinate is imputed to him, and he is held to be also guilty or liable for the wrongdoing of the subordinate.

QUESTION: I had a question that I have been thinking about since this morning. I was wondering if you could clear this up for me. Turretin argues that Christ's suffering was equivalent to our eternal damnation on account of the infinite dignity of Christ. So he appeals to the divine nature of Christ and that absolves the issue. But earlier this morning you mentioned that when Christ experienced the loss of fellowship with the Father it was through his human nature and not the divine. What I am having a difficult time understanding is how we can appeal to the divine nature of Jesus in order for the sacrifice to be sufficient while denying involvement of his divine nature.

DR. CRAIG: This is a tremendous subtlety of Chalcedonian orthodoxy concerning the two natures of Christ. And that is that there is only one person who Christ is, and that is a divine person. It is the second person of the Trinity. There is no human person who is Jesus of Nazareth. There is a divine person who has a human nature as well as a divine nature. So it's not that in virtue of his divine nature that Christ makes atonement. It is that you have a divine person who, in his human nature, bears our sin and punishment. It's the person that is divine and is the one who suffers and dies and so forth for our sins. But he does so with respect to the human nature.

QUESTION: How can you use our American judicial law system and apply it to the divine, as if that makes it all OK? Who is to say we got that right? You are taking our set of laws and applying it to that and saying, “Therefore, it’s right.

DR. CRAIG: I don’t. You've misunderstood the dialectic of the argument. Here's the dialectic of the argument. The Protestant Reformers maintained that the Bible teaches that our sins are imputed to Christ, and therefore Christ is held legally liable for our sins to punishment. The objector says, “That can't be true. We have no experience whatsoever of the guilt or responsibility for wrongdoing being imputed to another person than the one who did it. This is something that is utterly contrary to human experience.” It is in answer to that objection that then one says, “Wait a minute. That's just uninformed. We do have such experience in the law.” In both civil law and criminal law we have cases of vicarious liability where the wrongdoing of someone is imputed to an innocent party. So the objection fails that we have no comparable experience to this doctrine. Good question.

QUESTION: The metaphor you are using – it does seem to play on a lot of our Western understanding of the judicial system that has only been around for the past couple hundred years. Do you use this metaphor for the sake of your audience in the context? The metaphor for the judicial system and reality. Do you use it because you are speaking to a Western audience and that is how we best understand it?

DR. CRAIG: No. This is the book of Romans. You read the book of Romans and you exegete what Paul has to say about justification, and it is a forensic verdict on the part of God, the righteous Judge. Before the bar of God's justice, humanity stands condemned. But then God offers a pardon whereby, although we could not earn righteousness, it is through faith that we are reckoned righteous. We are declared righteous by God. Therefore, Paul says, there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. The book of Romans is through and through a forensic treatment of justification and atonement. And that's why I take that approach. Not to connect with modern-day audiences.

QUESTION: I don't have too much of a problem with the idea of vicarious redemption or with penal substitution. Something you haven't really touched on is the idea of punishment. With God being the moral dictator – he's the one who's defined the terms of punishment – given that, thinking in the finite terms of human understanding, we can kind of pick a form of punishment that fits the crime. But with the idea of eternal damnation, it seems a bit drastic in comparison to earthly crimes.

DR. CRAIG: I think they are a couple of ways one could respond to this. One thing you could say would be that eternal damnation is not in fact the penalty for sin or rejecting Christ. It's simply separation from God or spiritual death, and its length is simply an accidental function of the fact that the damned will live forever. For example, suppose someone is incarcerated and sentenced to life imprisonment and he dies within 3 years. In that case, he served three years for his crime. But somebody else might live in prison for 80 years and served a much longer sentence. The length of the sentence is just an accident of how long that person endures. So it could be that the penalty for sin is simply spiritual death, separation from God, and its going on forever is just an accidental byproduct of the fact that the damned will perdure forever. On the other hand, I, myself, have absolutely no problem with thinking that there could be a sin of infinite gravity and proportion that would merit eternal punishment. It would seem to me that the creature’s rejection of God himself would be an example of such a sin. For the creature to raise his fist in the face of God and reject God seems to me to be a sin of infinite gravity in proportion and plausibly merits eternal punishment.

FOLLOWUP: So it would be like annihilation theory?

DR. CRAIG: This would be contrary to annihilationism which is the view that the damned are simply vaporized as it were and cease to exist.

QUESTION: I heard of the two types of justices in the broad categories – retributive and consequentialist. I have two questions. One: Would you say the nature of God’s justice is both retributive and consequentialist? Or would you say that it is one or the other? I kind of heard that it was both, so I was curious.

DR. CRAIG: There are mixed theories of justice that are neither pure consequentialism nor pure retributivism. I want to be open to that, so that was why I couched my conclusion as I did. I said given God's eschatological judgment, divine justice must in some significant measure be retributive. That would be the modest conclusion I would want to stick with. It doesn't rule out that there could be consequentialist elements, but it's going to have to be in some significant measure retributive, I think.

FOLLOWUP: My second question would be toward the consequentialist idea. If it was that there was some measure of consequentialist justice in the penal substitution act, I'm just curious what you have to think about what would be the intrinsic good for society. Is there any deterrent for society in seeing that act?

DR. CRAIG: The obvious consequentialist justification for penal substitution would be that it saves the world – the human race – from total destruction. It's hard to imagine any greater consequence that could justify an act than that – that it prevents the entire human race from going eternally to damnation.

QUESTION: My question is sort of a “Do you agree or disagree?” In listening to some of the questions about the judicial systems, whether it's Western or Eastern, it has been my fond belief for quite some time that regardless of the culture, regardless of generation, regardless of the millenia, any judicial system that is in place tends to be implemented in the same way. The consequences may be different and the crimes may possibly be different, beyond that which is murder and theft, but the reason behind the judicial systems was a staple that goes back to the Code of Hammurabi would be equivalent to what is our Western system that we have today.

DR. CRAIG: I can't give an informed answer to that question because I am not sufficiently learned in non-Western systems of justice to be able to answer that. But my suspicion would be that the principles that govern Western justice are deeply rooted in our moral intuitions of right and wrong and what justice is. These are probably universal to a certain degree. So I would expect at least to find great commonality among systems of justice throughout the world. But that is something I've never looked into.

QUESTION: Earlier you were talking about a competing model of understanding the atonement where, as opposed to this being any sort of divine satisfaction, some have suggested that this actually is a display of power or a display of God's hatred of sin and love for humanity that is in play here. The suggestion is that this is a better state of affairs than the satisfaction sort of suggestion which you said was too speculative of a claim to make, if I remember correctly.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think you remember correctly. I think you're conflating a number of things, and that's easy to do in a paper like this that goes by rather quickly. I was speaking of what I call non-necessitarian theories of the atonement where God's essential justice does not require him to satisfy divine justice in order to forgive. If he wanted to, he could just issue a general pardon to everyone and the demands of divine justice will go unsatisfied, frankly. He just wouldn't do it. And what I pointed out was that for thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius, they affirm this view. They think that there is no inner-essential necessity in God requiring him to meet the demands of divine justice. But both Aquinas and Grotius think that God has chosen satisfaction as a prerequisite for the pardon of sin because of the great goods that would be realized by that; namely, the passion of Christ is a tremendous demonstration of God's love for humanity and of his hatred of sin. So it's not a theory that is contrary to satisfaction. Quite the opposite, actually. It's a theory that would motivate God's freely choosing to exact satisfaction of justice because of the great goods that would be brought about by doing it that way instead of just saying, “All right, I forgive everybody.” Is that clear?

FOLLOWUP: Sure. That clarifies that. My followup to that then would be given that there are competing models that do see perhaps a part of what you just outlined and that they do see the crucifixion as this display rather than a metaphysical change or something that necessarily is involved with divine satisfaction.

DR. CRAIG: No, wait. OK. Go ahead. You’re right. You used the word “necessarily” and that was correct. It is involved with divine satisfaction, but contingently.

FOLLOWUP: Right. I'm curious as to what your perspective is on looking at sort of the . . . when comparing these competing models under the sort of the ethos of Jesus through his life, ministry and teachings. This is sort of what I was alluding to earlier when I asked my first question where I find myself personally having a little bit resistance to satisfaction because on a certain level it doesn't seem to resonate with me as clearly with what I learned from the life of Jesus and how to live my life based on that as maybe some competing models of the atonement might offer. So I'm just curious what your reflections are on that.

DR. CRAIG: I would say that the key here would be Jesus’ words at the Last Supper. I think in the final Passover meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples, we see Jesus’ understanding of the rationale for his death. He saw this as the fulfillment of Isaiah 53. In Luke 22:37, he quotes Isaiah 53:12 which says, “He was numbered with the transgressors.” He says, “This scripture must be fulfilled in me and is now being fulfilled.” And then at the Last Supper he says, “This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many.” Again, echoing the words of Isaiah 53. So I think that Jesus saw his death as a sacrificial offering to God which involved his being Isaiah's Suffering Servant bearing the sins of the people punitively and thereby inaugurating a new covenant between God and the people that would involve the forgiveness of sins. So while I grant you that much of what we read in the parables of Jesus wouldn't lend itself to a penal substitutionary atonement theory, I think when we see Jesus’ heart expressed at the Last Supper, his final words before his arrest, I think there we really do see this penal substitutionary element expressed.

QUESTION: Thank you for making a very complex question simple.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, great! I'm pleased to hear that!

FOLLOWUP: My question is simple, too, which is: Is there not in Scripture some indication that the death of Christ is a payment of debts. If so, to who or what is the debt paid?

DR. CRAIG: Certainly in some of Jesus’ parables he uses the analogy of a debt to be paid to talk about divine forgiveness. But I find that analogy less useful because paying debts is a matter of civil law, and I think that what we have in our condemnation before God is more akin to criminal law. We are criminally liable before God. I take “debt” there to be a metaphor for the punishment that we are due – our just desert – for the crimes that we have committed. Sometimes we will say of a criminal who has fully discharged his sentence that he has now paid his debt to society and so is released from prison. The debt that he paid there is the debt of punishment that he owed. He was sentenced to a certain punishment. Similarly, the debt (if you want to use that metaphor) that we owe to God is a debt of punishment that Christ then discharges on our behalf.

QUESTION: I know you’ve done a lot of studying on the atonement for a while. This is kind of a broad question, but I was wondering: how do you figure your study of the atonement affects our teaching and preaching in churches? Are there things that we’ve underemphasized or overemphasized or are there things we need to tweak or things like that?

DR. CRAIG: I think in evangelical circles we generally do preach the atonement of Christ as a penal substitution. It's in our hymns, and I think it's almost unavoidable when ministers say Christ paid the penalty for your sin. So I think this is really deeply embedded in evangelical consciousness. But where I see its ramifications as significant would be insofar as it connects with the doctrine of justification. I think that many evangelicals do not understand that justification is a forensic act on God's part. It is a declaration that we are now righteous before him; that we are pardoned and no longer liable to punishment. And a pardon is a legal act by the executive authority – the executive power – which God is in the universe. This is in contrast to a Catholic view of justification which thinks of justification as God's actually doing a moral transformation in our lives to infuse grace into us and change us morally for the better. I think the Protestant Reformers rightly saw that what that is is not justification but sanctification and that these two are conceptually distinct. Justification is a forensic, legal declaration by God of pardon and being not guilty. Sanctification then takes place through the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, his indwelling and filling and then conforming us gradually to the image of Christ so that we become experientially what we already are in Christ insofar as we are united with him. I think those two are not often clearly understood by evangelicals. I was sitting in a Sunday School class just this past year where the guest speaker was saying that, as Christians, we have no sin nature anymore. He was quoting all of these passages about how you are now justified, you are cleansed, you are righteous before God. So he was telling the people in the class you've got no sin nature to deal with. To me this is just mad. I can't imagine how he could think that. In talking to him it was very clear that he basically had a Catholic view of justification. He thought that our sin nature had been abolished by God and that now we are transformed morally. He had no understanding of the idea of a forensic or legal pardon. Think of what a legal pardon does when the governor or the president pardons a criminal. It absolves the criminal from guilt and removes any liability to punishment, but it does absolutely nothing to reform the criminal’s character and make him a better person. That's a separate task. Similarly, justification doesn't make us into better people. That's the role of the regeneration and filling of the Holy Spirit that will take place over time. So keeping those two notions, I think, straight is one of the unexpected ramifications of my study of the atonement that I didn't expect to see. In fact, I would say I think one of the strengths of penal substitution as a theory of the atonement is that it fits hand in glove with the forensic doctrine of justification of the Protestant Reformers.

QUESTION: I think everybody remembers the scene in the book of Narnia when the lion comes out of the tent and has decided to substitute for the young man who committed the sin. How does the C. S. Lewis point of view come in to your arguments as far as the idea that the Queen was the devilish prosecutor that expected and demanded that someone be punished?

DR. CRAIG: It has been so many years since I've read The Chronicles of Narnia I no longer recollect that to be able to answer your question. I would just say that as evangelicals we should not think of God as the prosecuting attorney. That's Satan. Satan is the accuser of the brethren.

FOLLOWUP: She is in that position.

DR. CRAIG: That's correct. Unfortunately, sometimes I have heard evangelicals treat God the Father as though he were the prosecuting attorney which is quite wrong. He is the Judge, but the one who is against us is Satan – the accuser of the brethren. And Christ then is our advocate. Remember John says that if we do sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins and not ours only but also for those of the whole world.

FOLLOWUP: At least in that scene of the movie, you get the feeling that the reason he (the lion) is accepting to be the sacrificial lamb is doing it to satisfy the debt that the young man would owe with respect to this evil queen.

DR. CRAIG: So be it. I haven't seen the movie, and it's been a long time since I read the book so I can't comment intelligently.

QUESTION: I have a question regarding your response to an earlier question. How do you see Satan as the prosecutor? At least in my understanding, God is not necessarily the prosecutor but he is the judge but the debt I guess is owed to him through our sins against him. Therefore, how does Satan fit into this? How does the prosecutor fit into this?

DR. CRAIG: Well, Satan is called the accuser of the brethren in Scripture. That's where I get that from. This is a scriptural name for him. He wills and desires our destruction and demise. In that sense he is ranged against us. But God is not against us. We are guilty before the bar of his justice, and the sentence that we deserve is death. Our just desert is death. And that's the product of God's righteous justice. But God, in his love and mercy, has provided a substitute for us so that we can be pardoned and be free from that sentence of death.

FOLLOWUP: So why the need of a prosecutor?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, I think it's just a metaphor. Don't press it too hard. It’s just a metaphor.

QUESTION: Ezekiel 18:20 says, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” How does that relate to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ?

DR. CRAIG: What Hugo Grotius suggests, as I said, is that God may have instituted a system of justice among human beings which precludes punishment of the innocent. But the genius of a Divine Command Theory of ethics is that since God doesn't issue commands to himself he has no moral duties. Who is to forbid him from punishing an innocent person for the crimes of somebody else? No one. God himself determines what is just and unjust. There is no higher authority than God. What Ezekiel describes would be what God has instituted among human beings, but it doesn't govern God.

QUESTION: This is a bit out there so I’m not making an assertion. I am just interested in if you’ve heard this. I’m just going to make the assertion and see what you think. In terms of the vicarious liability, if I said part of the reason Jesus had to die is that the omniscient, omnipotent being created this world of suffering and sin knowing what would become of it. Perhaps the Father and the Son are guilty in a sense because they have created a world in which they are responsible for the world that this then occurred. God knows we are dust and he knows we don’t always know what we are doing. Does that connect with anything that you’ve heard of to say part of what's going on, not to even doubt what you said, but part of what's going on is that God is responsible for a world of suffering . . . ?

DR. CRAIG: This is a question that really belongs to the broader problem of evil or suffering as opposed to atonement theory. Here I would say that this objection might have some purchase against Calvinistic or Reformed views of God where God unilaterally determines everything that happens including the choices of creatures to sin or not. But on the view I take (which affirms libertarian freedom) God, though knowing that you would sin in a particular set of circumstances, does not will that you sin in those circumstances. In any circumstances that you find yourself, God always wills that you do the good and that expresses his unconditional will. But he knows that in certain circumstances you will sin and so he allows you the freedom to do that even though this is contrary to his absolute intentions. So God is not responsible for evil in the world. We are.

FOLLOWUP: But if he created the world knowing that this would occur and knowing all the pain that would occur that somehow or other Jesus being united with the pain, even if not the guilt – those are two different things – but united with the pain, that somehow or other that’s part of the reason. But he knew it was occurring.

DR. CRAIG: I don’t see that knowing it would occur makes God responsible for it in a moral sense because it is a freely chosen act on the part of human beings, and God's will is that they not do those evil acts. So they act contrary to the will of God in doing those things. So I don't think you can hold God morally responsible for their evil actions.

QUESTION: I know we have free will, but according to John 10 he comments on Psalm 82. . . . According to 1 John, second chapter, . . . This gives us a tremendous responsibility . . . for where we go and what we do.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. His citation is of the passage where Jesus said that the psalmist says, “Ye are gods, and he calls them gods to whom the Word of God came, why do you say that I'm blaspheming because I say I'm the Son of God.” I think this does emphasize that we human beings are created in God's image, we bear the divine image, and therefore are moral agents and do have tremendous responsibility with respect to good and evil choices. So, yes, this does underline the difference between humanity and the rest of the animal creation.

QUESTION: When we talk about this topic of divine justice and the death of Christ, dying for our sins, do you think justice can be found in Christ being risen and seated on the right hand of God?

DR. CRAIG: The question arises as to the connection between the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ. If it is the death of Christ that is the basis of our pardon from God then what role does the resurrection play? Certainly one role the resurrection could play would be that it is a kind of divine ratification of Jesus’ sacrificial death. It shows that his sacrificial death on our behalf was accepted by God and deemed worthy. So the resurrection of Jesus would be a divine ratification and confirmation of the work of the cross. But in the course of my studies of the atonement it occurred to me that the resurrection is even more organically connected to the atonement than that. Namely, if Jesus truly has satisfied divine justice on our behalf then the penalty has been fully paid and therefore Jesus cannot be held by death. He must be raised again. Think of a criminal who has fully served his sentence. The sentence has been paid. He cannot remain in prison justly. He must be set free. In exactly the same way Christ, having fully paid the penalty for our sins, cannot remain dead. He must be raised from the dead. So the resurrection is intimately connected, it seems to me, with the full satisfaction of divine justice that the death of Christ achieves. Isn't that wonderful?

QUESTION: Stepping back again to the problem of evil, believing that God knew the counterfactuals of the world before he created the world, what is your response to the idea of God being able to create a world, or I guess the impossibility of God being able to create a world, such that people are perfectly free and also sinless and will always choose the sinless path. How would you address that?

DR. CRAIG: Alvin Plantinga has dealt with this problem. What Plantinga points out is that there may be possible worlds which are in and of themselves logically possible. For example, a sinless world where everyone in every moral choice always does the right thing. That's logically possible. But it may be that such worlds are not what Plantinga would call feasible for God. That is, given the counterfactual propositions you mention about how people would behave if they were in various circumstances, it may be that there is no feasible world for God involving this much good without also this much evil. I would say the same is true of universal salvation. While worlds of great populations where everyone is freely saved are certainly logically possible, it may well be the case that there are no feasible worlds for God in which universal salvation is achieved that do not have other overriding disadvantages that make them less preferable.

FOLLOWUP: I notice you said that there may be such that there is no feasible world. Is there any sort of evidence against a state that there cannot be?

DR. CRAIG: No, it’s not a matter of whether it can or cannot be. For the person who is objecting, “Why didn't God create a world involving this much good but without evil in it?”, he has the burden of proof to show that such a world is feasible for God. The Christian need only say for all we know such a world is not feasible for God. And there's no way to know who's right about that because we don't know what worlds are feasible to God, not being God.

I think with that we'll bring our evening to a close. Thank you very much for your attention. I have enjoyed our discussion.

 

[1] See Mark C. Murphy, “Not Penal Substitution but Vicarious Punishment,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (2009):  255-60.

[2] See, e.g., Mark D. White, ed., Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael Tonry, ed., Retributivism Has a Past; Has It a Future?, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).  Ironically, some theologians, unaware of this sea change, denounce in the strongest terms a God of retributive justice (Steven Finlan, Options on Atonement in Christian Thought (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007), pp. 97-8), not realizing that their objection to the justice of penal substitution depends on a view of divine justice as retributive, lest God punish the innocent on consequentialist grounds. Kathleen Dean Moore, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 5, gives a moving account of the horrendous results of consequentialism for our penal system.

[3] Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); William P. Alston, “What Euthyphro Should Have Said,” in Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide, ed. Wm. L. Craig (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 283-98; Philip L. Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

[4] I have since discovered a forceful statement of this point by Alvin Plantinga, “Comments on ‘Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ’,” in Divine Evil?: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, edited by Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 113-14.

[5] See A Defence of the Catholic Faith concerning the Satisfaction of Christ, against Faustus Socinus (1617).

[6] Socinus holds that what he calls punitive justice (or vengeance) is not an essential property of God, any more than is his mercy. If punitive justice were an attribute of God, then God could under no circumstances forgive sins; likewise were mercy a divine attribute, God could under no circumstances punish sins. Rather what is essential to God is his uprightness (rectitudo) or fairness (aequitas). But whether he punishes sin is up to his free will. Similarly, mercy (misericordia) is an essential property of God only in the sense that God is loving. But whether God chooses to pardon sinners is up to his free will. Ironically, objectors to penal substitution need retributive justice to belong essentially to God, lest the Divine Command Theorist say that God freely determines that it is just to punish Christ, however innocent he may be.

[7] Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross, eds., Philosophy of Law, 2nd ed., (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1980), p. 286. An anonymous referee for this journal furnishes the example of the state’s exercise of eminent domain. In such a case a home owner may suffer the terrible injustice, which may be deeply felt and bitterly resented, of being stripped of his home, but the state does not act unjustly in bringing about this effect because of overriding justificatory reasons.

[8] For the most vigorous contemporary defense of a non-necessitarian penal substitution theory, see Blaine Swen, “The Logic of Divine-Human Reconciliation: A Critical Analysis of Penal Substitution as An Explanatory Feature of Atonement” (Ph. D dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, 2012).

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

[10] 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.