Famed professor John Warwick Montgomery comments on Dr. Craig's work on The Atonement

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, we found an article by Dr. John Warwick Montgomery discussing your lecture on the atonement at the ETS/EPS meeting in 2018.^[1] He said he was your first apologetics professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. What are your memories of him?

DR. CRAIG: That’s right. I had a number of courses with Professor Montgomery during my time at Trinity. He was a very eccentric character. He had quite a reputation on campus as someone that was very difficult to get along with but I must say that when Jan and I joined him on a Luther tour over the Christmas and New Year holidays to Reformation sites which were all behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany controlled by that dark Marxist state we saw quite a different side of Dr. Montgomery. He was so attentive and even doting on all of us who were on the tour that it just showed a real personal side to the man that we really came to appreciate.

KEVIN HARRIS: He writes in the article,

In subsequent years, he has become one of the leading evangelical philosophers [talking about you, Bill]. In Scripture, we are given the Pauline model—that wherever Christ is preached, we are to rejoice (Philippians 1:15-18). And so I rejoice in Craig’s debates and publications; but I am uncomfortable with his style and approach. I was particularly bothered by his E.P.S. address, based on his little book, The Atonement (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Let me explain my misgivings.

The lecture, like most of Craig’s presentations, was dense to the extreme and reminded me of the scholastic arguments characteristic of medieval theology. I go with the Wittgensteinian adage that “anything that can be said can be said clearly.” To be sure, this is a problem with most professional philosophers, but if one is also doing apologetics (as is Craig), extreme care needs to be exercised so that the results are more like the writings of C. S. Lewis than those of Thomas Aquinas.

Wait a minute, Bill! I thought that our professors wanted us to be dense!

DR. CRAIG: I must say that I was very surprised at this criticism of what was an academic paper at a scholarly conference. This was not a popular level talk on a university campus or in a church. This was a scholarly paper read before scholars. And honestly, I have to say in all candor, I didn't think it was very difficult. I wonder what he found hard to understand? I thought I was extremely clear in my defense of the justice of penal substitution against the attacks upon it made by its detractors.

KEVIN HARRIS: He continues,

On one occasion years ago, I attended a Craig presentation focusing on metaphysical questions such as the relationship of time to creation. (Craig loves these issues, but I have never found a single non-Christian whose objections to the faith lie at that level.) To Craig’s irritation, I cited Saint Augustine, who, when dealing with the question as to what God was doing before he made heaven and earth, cited someone who responded facetiously, “Preparing hell for those who pry into mysteries” (Confessions, XI, 12).

He doesn’t think those issues are relevant in current apologetics?

DR. CRAIG: Apparently not. As an example of someone who does press this sort of objection against theistic belief I would cite the extremely influential author Paul Davies who in his books argues that God can be neither in time nor timeless and that therefore the God described by the Bible simply does not exist. But in any case my interest in this topic is not simply for the sake of apologetics. I am genuinely interested in these subjects. This is part of philosophical theology. It's a portion of theology dealing with the doctrine of God or the attributes of God. I think there's no excuse at all when doing systematic theology for sloppiness and poor thinking with regard to the divine attributes. So I think it's very important to consider God's relationship to time carefully and integratively taking account of what modern philosophy and science tell us about the nature of time and then trying to craft a doctrine of divine eternity that is both biblical and philosophically coherent.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing,

Craig’s atonement paper focused particularly on legal analogies to vicarious punishment and substitution. Craig is not a lawyer or legally trained, and in his book he thanks an Edinburgh law professor for “directing him to legal literature on various subjects” and a legal practitioner “for help in obtaining court opinions.” The result, sad to say, is poor legal argumentation and reliance on a narrow range of cases, most of them not of a leading nature. I myself, though holding a certificate in medical librarianship, do not possess an M.D. degree, and would not presume to write on the theology of, say, medical aspects of Jesus’s crucifixion. Craig could have shown parallel humility.

Bill?

DR. CRAIG: For many years I was frustrated by the absence of a robust defense of a Reformation doctrine of the atonement. I kept waiting for someone to tackle this subject. But to my frustration no one ever did. So I finally decided, “I'm going to simply have to do it myself.” And what I discovered is that the area of philosophy which deals most with the theory of punishment is the philosophy of law. I want to emphasize here that this is a discipline of philosophy, which is my area. Every discipline at the university, whether it be philosophy of education or philosophy of science or philosophy of law, has a philosophical component that explores the philosophical foundations of that discipline. So I think it was entirely appropriate for me as a philosopher to begin to read the philosophy of law and then in concert with Professor Descheemaeker at Edinburgh School of Law to see if there were, contrary to what I had been told, legal analogies to penal substitution in the Anglo-American justice system. I do not think at all that my conclusions are based on an overly narrow range of cases. On the contrary, what I show is that, for example, the use of legal fictions, but especially the notion of vicarious liability, is a very widespread feature of both civil law and of criminal law — particularly governing the relationship between employers and employees. So Dr. Montgomery is simply mistaken in thinking that these are outliers or non-representative of mainstream law. I would dispute that and say that I am dealing here with a very important facet of our legal system.

KEVIN HARRIS: Warwick continues,

One example: Craig’s lecture and book stress the concept of “legal fiction”—the occasional use in the Anglo-American common law of fictional categories (e.g., a corporation is regarded as having legal personhood). Craig does not seem to realize that this notion of legal fiction is not employed to any significant degree in the major Civil Law systems of continental Europe, and, more important, that such fictions do not constitute a source of law per se but derive their value solely from precedent and tradition. They must be used only to a limited degree and in strict accord with the established law.

Then he cites some cases and he says,

“Piercing the corporate veil” is a common technique to bypass the legal fiction that a company is equivalent to an actual person.

Wow, Bill! Speaking of dense. That’s rather dense!

DR. CRAIG: Yes, it is rather dense. It's important to understand that my appeal to legal fictions is based upon its role in the Anglo-American system of justice where it does play a significant role. Dr. Montgomery says that the idea of a legal fiction is not employed to a significant degree in the major civil law systems of continental Europe. Presumably he's thinking of France and Germany and other continental European countries. Well, that just was outside the purview of my study. The point is that they do play an important role in Anglo-American justice systems. And of course it has to be in accord with established law. You couldn't use a legal fiction to overrule some established law. That's fine. But the analogy that I use it for is perfectly acceptable. What I point out is that you could think of the imputation of our sins to Christ as akin to a legal fiction. Christ didn't actually commit our sins. He is perfectly righteous and virtuous, and so he did not actually do our sins. But for the sake of justice, God could adopt the legal fiction that Christ committed our sins so that he might be punished in our place. And that would be perfectly within God's ability to do, it seems to me.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next up he writes,

In Craig’s attempts to use vicarious liability, respondeat superior, and legal fictions to justify the biblical atonement, he does not seem to realize that, in law, all such instances require a real and substantive connection between the punisher (on earth, the State or Crown) and the person at fault who is therefore justly declared guilty and subject to punishment. The fact that one’s fine can be paid by another is irrelevant. There must be a punishable act or omission and the one punished for it must be responsible for that act or omission. This is the key issue in any attempt to analogize from what a human legal system does and what occurs in the divine economy of salvation. The best one can do is perhaps to theorize that placing the sins of the world on Christ’s shoulders might be justifiable because God-in-Christ, though as to his human nature the Second Adam was indeed a sinless Lamb, as to his divine nature he created all things (John 1:1-3; Colossians 1:15-17) and, out of love, gave humanity freewill (which the human race misused)—thus making God-in-Christ, as to his divine nature, in a sense responsible for the sinful history of the race. Of course, this suggestion entails a cosmic mystery, hardly resolvable by any human system of jurisprudence.

Bill, your response?

DR. CRAIG: It's important to understand the argument here. I maintain, based upon biblical exegesis, that Christ is presented as a vicarious sacrifice for our sins. He died in our place, and he bore the punishment for sin that we deserved. Now, many detractors of Christ's vicarious atonement dispute this doctrine by saying it is immoral – it would be unjust of God to punish Christ (an innocent person) for sins that he did not commit but that were committed by others. The claim is made over and over again that we have no experience of some third party who did not commit the crimes being punished for the crimes that someone else has committed. What I was astonished to discover is that that is in fact not true at all. This notion of vicarious liability which permeates Anglo-American justice allows the wrongdoing and guilt of a subordinate to be vicariously imputed to his superior so that the superior (even though he did not do the acts; did not commit the crimes) is held vicariously liable for the crimes and wrongdoing of his subordinate. So what’s critical here is not, as Dr. Montgomery says, that there be some sort of a connection between the punisher and the person at fault. That obviously exists in the case of the atonement – God is the punisher and the person at fault is us, and obviously there is a connection there. Rather, what's critical in cases of vicarious liability is the relationship between the superior and his subordinate. In order for vicarious liability to apply, the superior must have either the right, the duty, or the power to prevent the wrongdoing of the subordinate. What's interesting is in the relationship between Christ and us, although Christ doesn't have the duty to prevent our sins, he certainly has the power and the right to prevent our sins if he wanted to. So Christ actually fulfills the conditions in our American justice system for being held vicariously liable for our sins. And so my suggestion is that Christ is vicariously punished for the sins that we commit, and that we do have a very close analogy to this in our Anglo-American justice system and in this notion of vicarious liability. So the critique of the detractors of penal substitution are just simply ignorant of the law when they say that we have no experience of someone who did not commit a crime being punished for a crime that somebody else committed. Now, as for Dr. Montgomery's suggestion, I think it's quite wrong-headed when he says that God in Christ as to his divine nature is held responsible for the sins of the human race. That's quite wrong. In his divine nature, Christ is impeccable and sinless and could not be held responsible for our sins. Rather, it is in his human nature, as a human being like us, that Christ can be held vicariously liable for our wrongdoing. Our crimes are imputed to Christ according to his human nature so that he can bear the punishment on the cross that you and I deserved, thereby freeing us from our liability to punishment and affording us the possibility of a divine pardon.

KEVIN HARRIS: He then writes,

Sadly, Craig passes rapidly and superficially over the great “Christus Victor” atonement motif, dominant in the Patristic age and revived during the Protestant Reformation—the theory that on the Cross our Lord conquered sin, death, and the devil—the powers of darkness arrayed against humanity. . . .

Indeed, characteristic of the scholasticism of his presentation, Craig cites the Swiss Reformed theologian Turretinus (often called the “Thomas Aquinas of Calvinism”). How much better off Craig would have been to rely on Lutheran theologians, since they, unlike their Calvinist counterparts, are well aware that in the high matters of faith, mystery is unavoidable (as with the Holy Trinity, divine election, and the real presence of our Lord in the Eucharist). Calvinistic double-predestination and Arminian/Molinist, semi-pelagian “middle knowledge” both suffer from a fallacious insistence that high matters of faith can be rationally explained—if we just try hard enough.

What are your conclusions, not only on what he just wrote there but on this entire article in general?

DR. CRAIG: I think here Dr. Montgomery shows his true colors. As a Lutheran theologian he basically says we shouldn't think about these things – we shouldn't try to understand them. These are divine mysteries which we simply accept on the authority of Scripture, and we shouldn't try to rationally make sense of them. I'm not opposed to mystery at all, but it seems to me that we would appeal to mystery only after trying our best to understand these doctrines and to make sense of them. After all, how could you know that it's a mystery if you haven't thought hard about it and found that you can't explain it? So it seems to me that rigorous, careful thinking about these matters is essential. In fact, Lutheran theologians in the post-Reformation period were very scholastic like their Reformed brethren, and they held to a doctrine of penal substitution and vicarious atonement. That was what motivated me to do this study; it was to defend a Reformation doctrine of the atonement. So it's a little bit odd that Dr. Montgomery wants to champion the Christus Victor theory of the atonement. Certainly Christus Victor is a facet of a complete atonement theory, and in my book, Atonement and the Death of Christ, I go into some length describing that Christus Victor motif and incorporating it into my full atonement theory. But clearly the Christus Victor model of the atonement is not a standalone theory of the atonement. As a standalone theory it is utterly inadequate because Christus Victor is all about power – about Christ conquering Satan and liberating his captives from death and hell. But it has nothing to say about divine pardon and cleansing of sin and absolution of guilt, of reconciliation to God. Those are elements of the atonement theory which are indispensable to a full-orbed theory of the atonement. So in addition to the Christus Victor emphasis on Christ's power and conquering of Satan death and hell, we also need to have these atonement motifs – that Christ's death was a sacrifice for sin that cleansed us of our guilt and afforded us a divine pardon, therefore reconciling us to God. So this is a motif that is essential to Lutheran theology. I do want to affirm an essentially Reformation theory of the atonement. But I just disagree with Dr. Montgomery very much that these are matters that we should not think about rigorously and try our best to explain. I think when we do so we can make very good sense of the doctrine of the vicarious atonement of Christ contrary to its many detractors today.^[2]