Philosophical Objections to the Atonement

KEVIN HARRIS: Hey, thanks for stopping by! This is Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m your producer guy and co-host Kevin Harris. You’ve heard Dr. Craig say many times that God seems to have so ordered the universe that we have the privilege of filling in the blanks in the great questions of life. For example, when studying the Scriptures the Bible may not exhaustively address an issue. So we utilize systematic theology and philosophy to flesh out an area the Scripture teaches. Does this mean that philosophy or theology takes precedence over Scripture? No. It just means that when studying the Bible (or anything for that matter) we can pursue it and uncover some truths that may not be immediately obvious. OK, that’s my layman’s way of putting it, and I’m a rank amateur so I’ll let Bill do the talking.

Today, Dr. Craig is examining some philosophical objections to the atonement of Christ – his sacrifice for us on the cross. You don't have to look very far before you’ll run into misunderstandings and misinterpretations of what exactly God did for us at the cross. It is crucial that we understand this. That’s why Dr. Craig has spent so much time on this subject lately. And that reminds me – if you agree that accurate teaching and understanding of the atonement of Christ is important then please consider supporting us financially as well as prayerfully. We appreciate your gifts. Take a moment, go to the Reasonable Faith website, and click on the donation link. Just click on “Donate” at the top of the page at ReasonableFaith.org. Thank you for that blessing. Now here’s Dr. Craig filling in some possible blanks you may have on the atonement.[1]

DR. CRAIG: The message of the New Testament is that God, out of his great love, has provided the means of atonement through Christ. The word “atonement” comes from the early English expression “at onement” signifying a state of unity or harmony or reconciliation. The message of the New Testament is that God, by Christ's death on the cross, has made possible the reconciliation of alienated and condemned sinners to God. But how did Christ's death on the cross overcome the estrangement and condemnation of sinners before a holy God so as to reconcile us to him?

A great variety of atonement theories have been offered over the centuries to make sense of the fact that Christ by his death has provided the means of reconciliation with God – ransom theories, satisfaction theories, moral influence theories, penal substitution theories, and so on and so forth. Competing theories must be assessed by two criteria. First, their accord with the biblical data, and then secondly their philosophical coherence.

No atonement theory which omits penal substitution – that is to say, the idea that Christ bore the punishment for our sins – can hope to account adequately for the biblical data, particularly Isaiah chapter 53 and it's employment in the New Testament. Isaiah says, He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquity. Upon him was the punishment that made us whole. By his stripes we are healed.

The doctrine of penal substitution, however, ever since the time of Faustus Socinus in the late 1500s, 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, particularly questions about one's theory of punishment.

One's theory of punishment should include first a definition of punishment, and then secondly it should include a justification of punishment. A definition of punishment will enable us to determine whether some act counts as punishment, while a justification of punishment will help us to determine whether a punitive act is permitted or perhaps even required. Although both of these aspects of the theory of punishment are relevant to penal substitution, I want to focus today on problems arising specifically from the justification of punishment. Let's talk first about the justification of punishment.

What justifies the state or any legitimate authority in punishing people? One's answer to that question will be determined by one's overarching theory of justice. Theories of justice can 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 benefits that can be accrued from punishment, for example, deterring crime or isolating dangerous persons from society or the reformation of the criminal.

With that in mind, let's talk about the alleged injustice of penal substitution. Critics of penal substitution frequently assert that God's punishing Christ in our place would be an injustice on God's part, for it is an axiom of retributive justice that it is unjust to punish an innocent person. But Christ was an innocent person because he was sinless. Since God is perfectly just, he cannot therefore have punished Christ. It does no good to say that Christ willingly undertook this self-sacrifice on our behalf, for the nobility of his self-sacrifice doesn't annul the injustice of punishing an innocent person for deeds he did not do.

One very quick and easy way to answer this objection would be to adopt a consequentialist theory of justice. For on a consequentialist theory of justice, the punishment of the innocent may in fact be justified. For example, it may lead to the deterrence of further crime. In fact, one of the main criticisms of consequentialist theories of justice is that such theories may make it just to punish the innocent. A consequentialist penal theorist could fairly easily provide justification for God's punishing Christ for our sins, namely doing so prevents the loss of the entire human race, and certainly there could be no greater benefit from punishment than that.

Unfortunately, consequentialism seems ill-suited to serve as a basis for divine punishment because God's judgment is described in the Bible as ultimately final. The ungodly, says Paul, are “storing up wrath” for themselves for God's final day of judgment (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. Paul says those who do such things deserve to die (Romans 1:32). So retributive justice must be at least in part some of the justification for divine punishment. God's justice must be in some significant measure retributive.

During the first half of the 20th century, under the influence of social scientists, retributive theories of justice were widely frowned upon in favor of consequentialist theories. Fortunately, there has been over the last half century or so a renaissance of retributive theories of justice accompanied by a waning of consequentialist theories. So we don't need to be distracted this morning by the need to justify a retributive theory of justice. This is today the mainstream position among legal theorists. This change of mind is no doubt due in no small part to the unwelcome implication of pure consequentialism that there are circumstances under which it can be just to punish the innocent. Unfortunately, it's precisely that conviction that the innocent ought not to be punished that lies behind the claim that penal substitutionary atonement theories are unjust and therefore immoral.

What responses might we give to the alleged injustice of penal substitution? An assessment of this objection requires that we put it into the context of an ethical theory about the grounding of objective moral values and duties. Who or what determines what is right and wrong in the first place? The proponents of penal substitution were all proponents of some sort of Divine Command Theory of ethics according to which moral duties are constituted by God's commandments. These commands from God are in turn a  reflection of God's own nature. He is by nature compassionate, fair, loving, merciful, and so forth. There is no external law hanging over God to which God must conform. Since God presumably does not issue commands to himself, it follows that God literally has no moral duties to fulfill. He can act in any way that he wants to as long as it is consistent with his own nature. He doesn't have the moral duties that we have, and he will have unique prerogatives such as giving and taking human life at his discretion. This is the lesson, I think, of the astonishing story of God's commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, an act which in the absence of a divine command would have been murder. But given God's command to Abraham, it now became Abraham's moral duty.

If such a Divine Command Theory of ethics is even coherent, not to say true as I've argued elsewhere for quite independent reasons that it is, then this present objection against penal substitution will have difficulty even getting off the ground. Even if God has established a system of justice among human beings which forbids the punishment of the innocent and therefore substitutionary punishment, he himself is not so forbidden. In the Old Testament he refused Moses's offer of himself as a substitutionary sacrifice for the people of Israel just as he ultimately refused the sacrificing of Isaac. But if God wills to take on human nature in the form of Jesus of Nazareth and to give his own life as a sacrificial offering for sin, who is to forbid him? He's free to do anything he wants as long as it is consistent with his own nature. 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 pay the penalty for sin that was exacted by his own justice. The self-giving sacrifice of Christ exalts the nature of God by displaying his holy love.

Perhaps the best face that could be put on this objection by the critic is to claim that retributive justice is part of God's nature so that it is impossible that God act contrary to the principles of retributive justice.

But what is retributive justice? The fact is that there are different accounts of retributive justice. The essence of retributivism as a theory of justice is the positive thesis that the punishment of the guilty is an intrinsic good because the guilty deserve punishment. The God of the Bible is a positive retributivist who, as Exodus 34:7 says, “will by no means clear the guilty.” By contrast, a so-called negative retributivism holds that the innocent should not be punished because they do not deserve it. But the essence of retributivism as a theory of justice lies in positive retributivism which holds that the guilty should be punished because they deserve it. The defender of penal substitution may maintain that God is an unqualified positive retributivist but he is only qualifiedly a negative retributivist. Even if he has prohibited human beings from punishing innocent persons (for example, Deuteronomy 24:16), 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 disposes, I think, of the objection completely, but even more can be said.

Up to this point I've simply assumed that Christ was indeed innocent, but for classic 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 therefore violating the demands of negative retributive justice. For Christ, in virtue of the imputation of our sins to him, was legally guilty before God. Because he was legally guilty before God, he was therefore liable to punishment. 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, and therefore he was legally liable to punishment. Thus, given the doctrine of the imputation of sin, the moral objection to penal substitutionary theories is a non-starter because it is based on a false assumption, namely that Christ was innocent.

The typical complaint by critics of penal substitution at this point is that we have no experience of the transfer of either moral responsibility for actions or of guilt in isolation from actions from one person to another. For example, the German Old Testament scholar Otfried Hofius argues strenuously that Isaiah 53 can only be properly understood as the substitutionary punishment of the suffering servant of the Lord for the sins of the people of Israel. But Hofius characterizes this idea as, and I quote, “simply outrageous.” He asks, “Are guilt and punishment transferable between persons in the legal realm?” He says, “Personal guilt is non-transferable. The punishment to be borne by any given person can under no circumstances be substitutionarily taken over and atoned for by another person.”

But is that really the case? Are we so utterly bereft of legal analogies to imputation as Hofius alleges? I think not. Consider first the idea that our wrongful actions were imputed to Christ. On this view, although Christ himself did not commit the sins in question, God chooses to treat Christ as if he had done those acts. This sort of “as if” language is formulaic for the expression of what is called legal fictions. The nearly universal understanding of a legal fiction is that it is something that the court consciously knows to be false but which it treats as true for the sake of a particular action. The use of legal fictions is an established, widespread, and indispensable feature of systems of law.

Penal substitution theorists have been understandably leery of talk of legal fictions in connection with their views on the atonement lest our redemption be thought to be something unreal – a mere pretense or fiction. But such a fear is misplaced. The claim is not that penal substitution is a fiction, for Christ was really and truly punished on such a view. Nor is his expiation of sin or propitiation of God's wrath a fiction, for his being punished for our sins really removed our liability to punishment and satisfied the demands of God's justice. All of these things are real. What is fictitious is that Christ himself did the wrongful acts for which he was punished. Every orthodox Christian believes that Christ did not and could not commit sins, but on the present view God adopts for the administration of justice the legal fiction that Christ did such deeds.

Penal substitution theorists will sometimes object to the employment of legal fictions in the doctrine of the atonement because they say God's legally justifying us has real objective effects. For example, someone whose debt has been legally remitted really becomes free of financial obligation to his former creditor. But such an objection is based upon a misunderstanding of the role of legal fictions in the achievement of justice. A legal fiction is a device which is adopted precisely in order to bring about real and objective differences in the world.

Take, for example, the classic instance of a legal fiction employed in the case Mostyn v Fabrigas (1774). Mr. Fabrigas sued the governor of the Mediterranean island of Minorca, which was then under British control, for trespass and false imprisonment. Since such a suit could not proceed in Minorca without the approval of the governor himself, Mr. Fabrigas filed suit in the Court of Common Pleas in London. Unfortunately, that court had jurisdiction only in cases brought by residents of London. Lord Mansfield, recognizing that a denial of jurisdiction in this case would leave someone who was plainly wronged without a legal remedy, declared that for the purposes of this action Minorca was part of London! Frederick Schauer observes and I quote, “That conclusion was plainly false and equally plainly produced a just result, and thus that Mostyn v Fabrigas remains the paradigmatic example of using a fiction to achieve [justice].”

Or consider the legal fiction that a ship is a person. The adoption of this fiction by U.S. federal courts in the early 19th century came about because of the efforts of ship owners to evade responsibility for violating embargo laws and carrying unlawful cargo including slaves. When the ships were seized, the captains and crews passed on legal responsibility to the ship owners, who in turn would produce innocent manifests of the cargo while denying any knowledge of the illegal activity that was being carried on by the captains and crews. So what do you do? Well, the courts responded by making the ship itself (or should I say, “herself”) the person against whom the charges were brought. By the end of the century, this fiction became the settled view of ships in maritime law so that, to quote the court, “offending ship is considered as herself the wrongdoer, and as herself bound to make compensation for the wrong done.” According to Lind, the “ontologically wild” fiction of ship personification had profound and beneficial results, facilitating the condemnation and forfeiture of offending vessels and producing a more just, coherent, and workable admiralty jurisprudence.

Holding that God, as the supreme Judge, adopts for the purposes of our redemption the legal fiction that Christ himself had done the deeds in question in no way implies that our forensic justification before his bar of justice is unreal. Thus, through the device of legal fictions we do, indeed, have some experience of how legal responsibility for acts can be imputed to another person who did not really do the actions, thereby producing real differences in the world outside the fiction.

Consider now the second alternative, that God imputes to Christ, not the act of wrongdoing itself, but the guilt of our wrongdoing. It's worth noting that the question here does not concern the transfer of guilt from one person to another, in the sense that the guilt of one person is removed and placed on another. For the doctrine of imputation does not hold that when my guilt is imputed with Christ, it is thereby removed from me. Guilt is merely replicated in Christ just as, according to the doctrine of original sin, Adam's guilt was replicated in me, not transferred from Adam to me. Adam remains guilty, as I do when my guilt is imputed to Christ. The entire rationale of penal substitution is rather the removal of guilt by punishment.

What is at issue then is whether we have any experience of the replication of guilt in a person different than the person who did the act. The question is not the removal of the primary actor’s guilt, but rather the imputation of the guilt for his wrongdoing to another person as well. So understood, we are not in fact wholly without analogies in our justice system.

In civil law there are cases involving what is called vicarious liability. In cases of vicarious liability the principle of respondeat superior (or loosely translated “the master is answerable”) is invoked to impute the liability of a subordinate to his superior, for example, a master may be held liable for the acts done by his servant. On the contemporary scene this has given rise to a widespread and largely uncontroversial principle of the vicarious liability of employers. An employer may be held liable for acts done by his employee in his role as an employee, even though the employer did not do the acts himself. Cases typically involve employers being held liable for the illegal sale of items by employees but may also include torts like assault and battery, fraud, manslaughter, and so on. It needs to be emphasized that in such cases the employer is not being held liable for other acts, such as complicity or negligence in supervising the employee. Indeed, he may be utterly blameless in the matter. Rather, the liability incurred by the employee for certain acts is imputed to him in virtue of his relationship with the employee, even though he himself did not do the acts in question. The liability is not thereby transferred from the employee to the employer; rather the liability of the employee is replicated in the employer. In cases of vicarious liability, then, we have the responsibility of an act imputed to another person than the actor.  

It might be said that in such civil cases guilt is not imputed to another person but mere liability. This claim, I think, can be left moot, for vicarious liability also makes an appearance in criminal law as well as civil law. There are criminal as well as civil applications of the principle of respondeat superior. The liability for crimes committed by a subordinate in the discharge of his duties can also be imputed to his superior. Both the employer and the employee may be found guilty for crimes which only the employee committed. For example, in the case Allen v Whitehead the owner of a café was found to be guilty because his employee, to whom management of the café had been delegated, allowed prostitutes to congregate there in violation of the law. In the case Sherras v De Rutzen a bartender’s criminal liability for selling alcohol to a constable on duty was imputed to the licensed owner of the bar. In such cases, we have the guilt of one person imputed to another person who did not do the act. Interestingly, vicarious liability is a case of so-called strict liability, where the superior is found to be guilty without being found blameworthy. He is thus guilty and liable to punishment even though he is not culpable.

Thus the vicarious liability that exists in the law suffices to show that the imputation of our guilt to Christ is not wholly without parallel in our experience. In the law’s imputation of guilt to another person than the actor we actually have a very close analogy to the imputation of our guilt to Christ.

In conclusion, penal substitution will be a central facet of any atonement theory that aspires to be Christian. Objections to penal substitution based on the justification of punishment are insufficiently nuanced and so fail to show any injustice in God's punishing Christ in our place.[2]