WLC on Eleonore Stump’s Critique of Reformation Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theories

Dr. Craig joined a panel of speakers for the annual joint conferences of the Evangelical Theological/Philosophical Societies in November 2017. The conference theme was the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Here he presents a paper defending the Reformers’ doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement against the attacks of some contemporary critics, namely, Eleonore Stump.

DR. CRAIG: There is no doctrine of the Protestant Reformation under greater attack today than the doctrine of penal substitution. Ever since the publication of Faustus Socinus’ On Jesus Christ Our Savior (1578), the doctrine has faced formidable and some would say insuperable philosophical challenges. For example, the opening section of Eleonore Stump’s forthcoming book Atonement^[1] is a vigorous critique of what she—misleadingly, I think—calls “Anselmian” theories of the atonement, including classic penal substitutionary theories.^[2] Her attack is actually directed at what we may more accurately call “necessitarian” accounts of the atonement, that is, atonement theories which hold that some sort of satisfaction of God’s justice was necessary for the reconciliation of sinners to God.^[3]

Stump calls penal substitutionary theories “the most disadvantaged” of the theories she characterizes as “Anselmian.”^[4] Stump gives three groups of objections to penal substitutionary theories. Time precludes a discussion of each of her several objections taken individually. Fortunately, some of the objections can be dealt with and dismissed collectively. For example, her second and third groups of objections, labeled “external” problems and “further problems” are based upon what an atonement theory is allegedly designed to do.

Stump charges that penal substitutionary theories fail to provide a complete solution to achieving union with God lacking a role, for example, for the Holy Spirit, for the life of Christ, and for a connection between Christ's passion and the concerns of theodicy. These objections are misdirected for at least two reasons.

First, penal substitution is not usually intended to be one’s entire atonement theory but just a central facet thereof. Sacrifice, ransom, governmental and judicial motifs, moral influence, and so on, are all facets of a full atonement theory.

But secondly and more fundamentally, Stump’s indictment of penal substitutionary theories of the atonement hinges upon a crucial ambiguity, or even equivocation, concerning the meaning of the word “atonement.” The word “atonement” derives from the Middle English phrase “at onement,” designating a state of harmony. But there is a narrower sense of atonement which is expressed by the biblical words typically translated by this English word. In the Old Testament, “atonement” and its cognates translate words having the Hebrew root kippēr. To atone in this sense takes as its object sin or impurity and has the sense to purify, to cleanse. While the result of atonement in this narrow sense may be said to be atonement in the broad sense of reconciliation, nevertheless the biblical words translated “atonement” or “to atone” need to be understood in the narrower sense if we are to understand the meaning of the texts.

The doctrine of the atonement among the Protestant scholastics concerns atonement primarily in the narrower, biblical sense and has traditionally been treated under the work of Christ.^[5] Among the three offices (Prophet, Priest, and King) traditionally ascribed to Christ, atonement belongs to his priestly office. One seeks to explain how Christ’s passion and death were an expiatory sacrifice offered to God on behalf of sinners.

By contrast, Stump treats atonement in an extremely broad sense as signaled by her use of the hyphenated “at-onement” designating a state of union with God.^[6] Accordingly, her book is not focused on Christology but on soteriology and above all pneumatology. The Holy Spirit displaces Christ as the central figure in her account of achieving union with God. The death of Christ plays a relatively minor role in her theory of at-onement, and atonement in the narrow sense no role at all. Seen in this light, Stump's book is not really a book about the atonement at all in the biblical sense of the word, but a book about how human beings can come to experience union with God. She and the Reformers are simply addressing different questions.

This is not to say that the Reformers did not have much to say about regeneration, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, infused grace, and so on, but just that these topics did not belong to the doctrine of the atonement but to soteriology and especially pneumatology. Thus it is no indictment of theories of the atonement in the narrower, biblical sense that they do not address issues about achieving at onement in the broad sense of union with God, issues that are addressed in other loci of the theological curriculum. Accordingly, Stump’s second and third groups of objections to penal substitutionary theories may be simply dismissed.^[7]

We come, then, to Stump’s first group of objections to penal substitutionary theories.^[8] These are labeled “internal problems.” Strikingly, these are all neo-Socinian objections which Stump endorses.^[9]

Her first objection Stump calls “the central and irremediable problem” with necessitarian atonement theories.^[10] She charges that such a theory of the atonement is “incompatible with God’s love.”^[11] Since necessitarian theories affirm God’s love, however, it follows that any such theory is incoherent. Such a theory is thereby reduced to absurdity and is therefore unsalvageable.^[12]

Stump’s argument for the incompatibility of necessitarian theories of the atonement with God’s love and forgiveness seems to be based upon three simple premises:

1. God is perfectly loving.

2. If God is perfectly loving, He is perfectly forgiving.

3. If God is perfectly forgiving, His forgiveness has no preconditions.

According to necessitarianism, however, God’s forgiveness does have preconditions, namely, the satisfaction of God’s justice. Accordingly,

4. If any necessitarian atonement theory is true, God’s forgiveness has preconditions.

From these premisses it follows that

5. No necessitarian atonement theory is true.

There are, it seems to me, two fundamental problems with Stump’s argument. First, given Stump’s definitions of love and forgiveness, it is not true that God, as characterized by necessitarian atonement theories, fails to be perfectly loving and forgiving. Stump’s explications of love and forgiveness are so thin that God as described by necessitarian atonement theories meets the conditions necessary for being perfectly loving and forgiving.

On Stump’s view love involves both a desire for the good of the beloved and a desire for union with him. Just as a person can love unrequitedly, so he can forgive unilaterally, despite the wrongdoer’s rejection of that forgiveness. So, Stump says, “If God is perfectly loving than for any human person (Jerome) God desires the good for Jerome and union with Jerome. If it turns out that Jerome is a perpetrator of moral evil than what more could be wanted by way of forgiveness of Jerome than for someone affected by his evil to want what is good for him and to want union with him. On anyone's account of what forgiveness comes to, these conditions are sufficient for forgiveness.”

It should be obvious that there is nothing in necessitarian atonement theories that precludes that wholly independent of the satisfaction of divine justice, God both wills the good of every person and desires union with him. Hence, on Stump’s definition God forgives them unilaterally and, hence, unconditionally. Therefore, premise (4) is false, given Stump’s understanding of forgiveness.

Stump’s characterization of forgiveness has the odd implication that the exercise of God’s retributive justice in punishing wrongdoers is compatible with his also forgiving those wrongdoers. He both forgives their sins and punishes them for those sins! So on her account of love and forgiveness, she concludes, “it is possible to hold that imposing . . . retributive punishment on a wrongdoer is . . . sometimes [required by justice], and still to maintain that love and forgiveness are . . . obligatory, even . . . for wholly unrepentant wrongdoers.”^[13] Now if it seems odd that a person can be both punished for his sins and forgiven for those sins, this oddity ought to make us question whether something has not gone wrong with Stump’s account. That forms a nice segue to the second fundamental failing of her argument against necessitarian atonement theories.

The second fundamental problem with Stump’s objection is that her entire approach to the doctrine of the atonement is based on conceiving God on the analogy of a private person involved in an inter-personal relationship rather than as a Judge and Ruler. She frequently compares God and human persons with two friends Paula and Jerome, who have to deal with wrongs committed by one against the other. Hugo Grotius had already identified this same assumption as the fundamental failing of Faustus Socinus’ critique of necessitarian atonement theories. Grotius maintains that we should not think of God as an offended party in a personal dispute. For such a private person has no right to punish another. Certainly, God is offended by sin, but he does not act as merely the offended party in punishing it. Rather God is to be considered to act as a Ruler. “For to inflict punishment, or to liberate any one from punishment . . . is only the prerogative of the ruler as such, primarily and per se; as, for example, of a father in a family, of a king in a state, of God in the universe.”^[14]

Like far too many contemporary atonement theorists, Stump neglects legal analogies of the atonement and turns instead to private, personal relationships to motivate or criticize theories of the atonement, thereby overlooking God’s status as Ruler and Judge.

Rather than thinking of God’s forgiveness of sins on the analogue of human friendships, Stump ought to be thinking of divine forgiveness in terms of legal analogies like pardon.^[15] Pardon is a legal act which cancels a person’s liability to punishment and restores his civil rights. On necessitarian theories, while God's pardon is based on the precondition of the satisfaction of divine justice, his personal forgiveness in Stump's sense is not. Stump, however, claims with Socinus that God's pardoning our sin precludes the satisfaction of divine justice by Christ on our behalf. She says, “For someone to forgive a debt or forego a penalty is for him to fail to exact all that injustice is owed him. But on interpretations of the Anselmian kind, God does exact every bit of what is owed him by human beings. He allows none of it to go unpaid. . . . Therefore, the penal substitution theory of the atonement does not in fact present God as forgiving human sin.”

In fact, however, pardons are typically given after a person's sentence has been fully served and his guilt expiated by punishment in order to restore fully his civil rights. Analogously, God's pardon of us is based on Christ's fully discharging substitutionally our sentence and restores to us or bestows upon us the full privileges of children of God. Significantly, pardons can be conditional and can be refused. Similarly, God's pardon on the basis of Christ's sacrifice can be either freely accepted (in which case it is efficacious) or freely rejected (in which case we remain liable for our sins).

On penal substitution theories, whether necessitarian or non-necessitarian, God as Judge and Ruler, while willing our good and desiring union with us, does not merely pardon but exacts the punishment demanded by retributive justice. He does not exact it from us, but from himself in Christ. We who accept Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice are thereby freed from our liability to punishment and therefore declared not guilty. As mentioned above, pardons are usually issued to persons whose guilt has been expiated by punishment. Seeing that Christ has vicariously satisfied the demands of retributive justice on our behalf, God can in turn pardon us of our sins. Forgiveness in this legal sense is the declaration that the penalty has been fully paid and therefore we are free.

Stump realizes that the penal substitution theorist will insist that, “God's justice precludes his overlooking the debt and therefore he has shown mercy and forgiveness by he himself paying the debt owed him.” But her response falters at this point. Rather than showing that such an act does not count as forgiveness, Stump instead turns to a different Socinian objection, namely that it would be unjust of God to punish an innocent person like Christ. She thereby fails to sustain her first objection that God's legally canceling our debt does not plausibly count as forgiveness.

That brings us to the second objection to penal substitution which is that substitutionary punishment of an innocent person is unjust. Stump writes,

On the Anselmian kind of interpretation, it is a violation of God’s. . . justice . . . not to punish the sins of a human person guilty of those sins. . . . But, according to interpretations of the Anselmian kind, what God does to act compatibly with his. . . justice is in fact to fail to punish the guilty. . . . Worse yet, instead of punishing the guilty . . . , God visits their merited punishment on the innocent. . . . How is justice. . . served by punishing a completely innocent person. . . ?^[16]

Notice how carefully Stump has characterized the necessitarian position on divine retributive justice: it would be a violation of divine justice not to punish the sins of a guilty person.^[17] It does not follow that that very person must be punished for those sins; someone else might be punished in his place. The objection, then, is the familiar Socinian objection that it would be unjust of God to punish Christ, an innocent person, in our place. Since penal substitution theories affirm that God is perfectly just, such theories are therefore incoherent.

Those who press this objection almost never develop it in any length, and Stump is no exception to the rule. There is nothing here to interact with apart from the single question “How is justice served by punishing a completely innocent person?” I shall be addressing this question at the EPS session Saturday night at the AAR/SBL meeting. Here I content myself with a single observation. Stump assumes that Christ was an innocent person. But for penal substitution theorists 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, our sins were merely imputed to Christ and not infused in him. Therefore, 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 a false assumption.

Stump will doubtless have difficulties with the doctrine of the imputation of our sins to Christ. But she has not explicated those reservations. Here I note in passing that if she does oppose the justice of the imputation of sins, then she sets her face against the whole system of Anglo-American and indeed Western justice in which the vicarious liability of an otherwise innocent person for the crimes of a subordinate is a firmly established and accepted practice.

The third alleged internal problem for penal substitutionary theories is again a neo-Socinian objection and concerns the punishment inflicted on Christ: “On orthodox theological doctrine, the penalty for sin is damnation. . . . And yet it is not the case on any version of the Anselmian interpretation . . . that Christ suffered [damnation].”^[18]

It seems to me that the Reformed thinkers like Francis Turretin adequately responded to Socinus on this score. According to Turretin, Christ was forsaken by God the Father by his withdrawing from him the beatific vision and by suspending the joy and comfort and sense and fruition of full felicity.^[19] While Christ’s punishment was not infinite as to duration, still it was equivalent to the eternal suffering of the damned in hell on account of the infinite dignity of the person suffering.^[20] Turretin says that we cannot doubt the infinite value of Christ’s satisfaction, for although his human nature was finite, the satisfaction is infinite, since it is relative to the person, who is the efficient cause and to whom the obedience and suffering are to be attributed.

Stump objects to the sort of view Turretin espouses by recurring to the previous objection: “interpretations of the Anselmian kind emphasize both God’s justice and Christ’s [innocence]. . . . But how could [an innocent] man be abandoned by a good and just God?”^[21] In this comment we see again Stump's failure to understand the Reformers’ doctrine of forensic imputation and justification. For the Reformers, Christ was legally guilty before God and therefore justly punished by the Father's withdrawal of the blessings listed by Turretin.

The fourth and final objection is that Christ's atoning death ought to have been sufficient for universal salvation which is inconsistent with the doctrine that some persons are not saved. “God’s justice or goodness . . . are satisfied completely by Christ’s atoning work. If so, however, then no human beings owe anything further to satisfy God. Why then . . . are there any human beings who are not saved?”^[22] Ironically, just this sort of consideration led Reformed thinkers like Turretin to embrace the doctrine of limited atonement, which holds that Christ died only on behalf of the elect. Thus, Stump’s objection is not to penal substitution per se but to the universality of Christ’s atonement.^[23] So the objection fails to show any incoherence in penal substitution as such.

But why think that Christ’s suffering the full punishment for humanity’s sins implies universal salvation? The assumption seems to be that our actual redemption was achieved that fateful day on Golgotha rather than our potential redemption. But since we did not even exist at that time, it is difficult to see how we could have been actually redeemed at that moment. Christ suffered what would have been the punishment for our sins, had it been inflicted on us, thereby meeting the demands of God’s justice, but that payment of our debt needs to be freely received by faith in order to accomplish our actual redemption. A pardon may be granted but it does not become efficacious unless it is accepted by the person pardoned.

In fact, Reformed thinkers themselves recognize this truth in distinguishing between redemption as accomplished and as applied. They will say that our redemption was accomplished at the cross but that it is applied individually when persons are regenerated and place their faith in Christ. This distinction is vital because otherwise the elect would be born redeemed. They would never be unregenerate sinners but would be justified and saved from the instant of their conception. But Scripture teaches that believers, too, once were “children of wrath like the rest of mankind” (Eph 2.3). The distinction between redemption accomplished and applied makes sense only if we say that Christ’s death wins our potential redemption and that that potential is actualized in individual lives through repentance and faith.

Stump is puzzled by what she calls “the problem of application”: “Even on the Anselmian kind of interpretation, a human being needs to do something to apply the benefits of the at onement to himself. He needs to have faith, or appropriate Christ’s payment of the debt to himself in some other way. But why?”^[24] It seems to me that the answer is that redemption is a historical process which takes place in individual lives as people are born, called and convicted by the Holy Spirit, and by faith actualize the redemption potentially won for them by Christ.^[25] As Stump herself emphasizes, faith is just the non-meritorious acquiescence to the prevenient grace of God. By freely refusing God’s gracious pardon, people can prevent their redemption’s actualization. The situation is really no different than the situation on Stump’s view that God has forgiven everyone’s sins, and yet not all are saved because of their refusal of God’s grace.

In summary, Stump’s first group of neo-Socinian objections prove to be inconclusive, while her second and third groups of objections are irrelevant to a theory of the atonement in the biblical sense. Since none of the objections of groups one, two, or three is compelling, I conclude that penal substitution has not been shown to be incoherent or untenable.

[Applause]

QUESTION: [off mic] Do you understand the rejection of penal substitution to be demanded by the theology of Roman Catholicism?

DR. CRAIG: I do not think it is demanded by Roman Catholicism. In fact, on January 13 I have a dialogue with the Catholic bishop, Robert Barron, at Claremont on theology, and I'm going to present a paper why Roman Catholics should include penal substitution as a facet of their atonement theory. I think you can show that not only is penal substitution biblically justified, but that the church fathers like Eusebius and Oregon also affirmed it as part of their atonement theories.

QUESTION: [off mic] Do you think the controversies at the time of the Reformation are more sociologically motivated because you do see the Reformers championing it and it seems like Roman Catholicism is a bit . . .?

DR. CRAIG: I must confess I haven't looked at what Trent has to say about this, but I'm going further back, as I say, to the fathers and appealing to that to show that Catholics have affirmed in the past penal substitution. I hope that the way of doing that hasn't been blocked. I don't think it has.

QUESTION: [off mic]

DR. CRAIG: Ah, OK.

QUESTION: [off mic] . . . Why might you think that we should understand a retributivist understanding of justice as the better one? And why favor the legal analogies rather than some of the other ones you might find in Scripture? Sacrifice may or may not be legal. You separate those.

DR. CRAIG: With respect to the first point, I think that the biblical view of divine justice is retributive. The clearest indication of that is that it's eschatological. The ungodly are said to be storing up wrath until the day of judgment and at that point it's too late for consequentialist theories of justice to operate. Besides that, Paul will affirm, for example, in Romans 1:32 after a list of sins “those who do such things deserve to die.” That is just an expression of retributivism, that the guilty deserve punishment. I think that's the biblical view of divine justice. With respect to the legal metaphor, while a full-orbed atonement theory will definitely include sacrifice as a very important element and the expiation wrought by sacrifice and substitutionary atonement, I think any adequate exegesis of Paul's theology is going to require forensic categories – that this is a legal declaration. It's a legal pardon of God that removes our liability to punishment. It's just misconceived to think of divine forgiveness as merely a sort of change of attitude on God's part, a relinquishing of anger or resentment or hostility. There is this legal pardon that takes place whereby our liability to punishment is dissolved. So that's got to be, I think, included.

QUESTION: [off mic] Could Stump replace retributive justice with reparative justice so that one can be forgiven and punished simultaneously as in the case of disciplining children? . . .

DR. CRAIG: Let's remember that I'm not offering a critique of her atonement theory. I've said nothing by way of criticism. I'm responding to her attacks on penal substitutionary theories. If you do want to adopt a consequentialist theory of justice then problems just evaporate because it's common coin that on consequentialist theories of justice it can be just to punish the innocent in view, for example, of its deterrence value. And that's one of the major reasons that consequentialism has receded so dramatically in recent decades, and there's been a resurgence of retributive theories of justice because consequentialism justifies the punishment of the innocent! So in the case of Christ, it would be easy to get consequentialist justification for punishing Christ – namely, it prevents the destruction of the entire human race. So if you go that route, I think that the opponent of penal substitution is just shooting himself in the foot. He needs retributivism in order to make his objections against punishing the innocent and so forth to go through.

QUESTION: [off mic] When you were talking about forgiveness, you used several different phrases after it. . . . Can you just define forgiveness?

DR. CRAIG: Forgiveness is a very rich concept. What I'm pleading for is that we think of divine forgiveness of sins as involving legal pardon. Here the legal literature on pardons is very helpful. Chief Justice John Marshall described a pardon as an act of grace whereby the executive power tasked with enforcing the laws absolves the criminal from punishment due for that crime and restores to him his civil rights. For example, the ability to vote, to serve on a jury, to practice law, things of that sort. It seems to me it's exactly analogous – theologically, a pardon by God is an act of grace whereby God who is the ruler and the executive power of the universe forgives condemned sinners of their sins, absorbs them from their liability to punishment, and then bestows upon them rights of the children of God like an inheritance in heaven, adoption as children of God, being co-heirs with Christ – all of which are legal notions, aren't they? Things like adoption, inheritance, and so forth. These are all legal categories as well. So that's the way I would understand divine forgiveness of sins wholly apart from the question of the propitiation of God's wrath by Christ's sacrificial death.

QUESTION: [off mic] So you would take the legal term “pardon” and forgiveness to mean exactly the same thing?

DR. CRAIG: No, not exactly the same. In the literature, pardon is usually distinguished from forgiveness as a different category. It's a legal category that is not like the sort of forgiveness that you and I extend to one another. But I would say that God exhibits both in his dealings with us. Christ's sacrifice puts away God's wrath and indignation with sin, but more fundamentally it involves this absolution of guilt and liability to punishment. So it will be a multi-faceted concept. We can see it in that the Scripture speaks not only of God's forgiving sinners but forgiving sins. When it talks about forgiving sins, there the notion is pardon.

QUESTION: [off mic] I’m personally troubled by something I’m hearing. Maybe I’m hearing it wrong. I’m hearing God legally pardons us – and that’s in the legal realm. But the interpersonal is separate and distinct. What I’m bothered by . . . is the atonement then guarantees that legally I’m pardoned, but interpersonally it doesn't do anything for my sense that God actually loves me. . . . I mean, an executive could pardon a former criminal for political expediency and he might really dislike the guy.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Absolutely. And that was why I said it will involve these personal dimensions as well. But in terms of your experience, that's where we come back to the Reformers’ point. The doctrine of justification is a forensic doctrine about what God legally declares to be the case. It is sanctification, regeneration, rebirth that involves the work of the Holy Spirit in producing in you a new heart and new spiritual life, a new creation that then will grow more and more into the image of Christ. As a Catholic, Stump has no forensic doctrine of justification. It's all about infused grace and infused righteousness. I'm suggesting that the Reformers’ view is more Pauline and does involve this conceptual distinction, but it doesn't leave out those other important elements about overcoming my enmity with God and giving me a heart that is yearning for God's Word. That's all the work of the Holy Spirit. And here Stump’s book is excellent. It's very helpful on those kinds of matters.

Matt indicates to me that time is up, so thank you very much for your attention today.