Is Christ's Penal Substitution Unjust? | Azusa Pacific University - September 2018

In September 2018, The Department of Philosophy and the Honors College of Azusa Pacific University invited Dr. Craig to speak at their Sophia Forum. In this lecture, Dr. Craig addresses the topic, "Is Christ's Penal Substitution Unjust?"

MODERATOR: It is my great honor to introduce this afternoon’s speaker. William Lane Craig is a Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University. Dr. Craig holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham and a doctorate of theology from the University of Munich. He has authored or edited over 30 books including The Kalam Cosmological Argument, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom, Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology, God, Time and Eternity. Of course I could go on, including a most recent book on the atonement. He's also authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and professional journals of philosophy and theology. Professor Craig is also known around the world for his debates about the existence of God and other theological matters. In 2016, Dr. Craig was named by The Best Schools as one of the 50 most influential living philosophers. If I could just add an anecdote. I first discovered Craig's work when I was a freshman in college, and it was unlike anything I had seen before in part because I didn't know that one could investigate the ultimate questions like what is the nature of God or what is the nature of time with such precision and technical rigor. This may sound strange to you, but I remember reading one of the articles (and I'm not an emotional person) but I just welled up with tears as Dr. Craig unlocked for me a new insight related really to what Rico just mentioned about how you can have a connection with an ultimate being that is either in time or outside of time. How do you make sense of that? He gave me new tools for even thinking about that; tools I didn't even know were possible. The excitement and the joy that I had from reading that article was part of this new discovery of philosophy for me. So it is a great honor and a pleasure to have Dr. Craig with us today. Join me in welcoming him for today’s talk.

DR. CRAIG: Thank You, Josh, for those very kind words. We were reminded yesterday that this month is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish calendar. So these lectures on the atonement are especially appropriate for this time of year. Before we turn to the subject today, Josh asked me to repeat some of my comments yesterday concerning the value of the study of philosophy for the Christian life because the audience today is somewhat different than the group that was here yesterday. Those of you who were here, I beg your indulgence for repeating what I said then.

I'm only too happy to say something about the value of philosophy for the Christian life because I'm convinced that philosophy is vital for the articulation and defense of central Christian doctrines. When I think of what I call the Big Three Christian doctrines (the Trinity, the incarnation, and the atonement of Christ), philosophical concepts permeate each one of these three doctrines. When you think about the Trinity, the very modern concept of what a person is was forged in the debates between the church fathers over the Trinity and what it means to say that God is three persons in one substance. With respect to the incarnation, the church fathers affirmation that Christ is both truly divine and truly human was explicated in terms of one of those divine persons possessing or exemplifying two natures – a human nature and a divine nature – each complete and unattenuated, which presupposes the philosophical concept of natures. When you come to the atonement, if Dr. Rasmussen had asked me to showcase the relevance of philosophy for theology, I couldn't have picked a better subject than the atonement. As we saw yesterday, and as I think we'll see today, the atonement just bristles with interesting philosophical issues. This is a Christian doctrine that has been under such philosophical attack that it is absolutely crucial that those who believe in the doctrine be able to answer these philosophical criticisms on the same ground. So I think that Christian philosophy is a vital task for the church to be engaged in. In fact, I would say that I am a philosopher because I am a Christian, not in spite of the fact that I am a Christian. It was being a Christian that led me into the discipline of philosophy. I remember when I was a freshman at Wheaton College in my Intro to Philosophy class with the late Stuart Hackett, Dr. Hackett said to us, “In virtue of being a Christian, you are already committed to certain philosophical views such as the existence of God, the objectivity of moral values, the knowability of truth, and so forth. Therefore, the question that you face is not whether you will be a philosopher. The question you face is whether you will be a good philosopher.” And being a good philosopher, of course, requires study. So I want to second Rico's invitation to avail yourself of the opportunity of classes offered here at APU in Christian philosophy. You will probably never have this opportunity again for the rest of your life. God has called you during these four years to set apart these years of your life for full time study as a university student. So exploit this opportunity for all that it's worth. Use it to educate yourself philosophically and so equip yourself for a whole life of ministry that lies ahead of you. For that reason I am enthusiastic about the importance of the study of philosophy for the Christian life.

To turn then to today's subject: The Justice of Penal Substitution.

Although some have objected to the coherence of the doctrine of penal substitution, by far and away the most prevalent and powerful objection to the doctrine is the Socinian objection that penal substitution is unjust and therefore immoral. Unfortunately, the detractors of penal substitution who press this objection almost never develop it in any depth. 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 someone else's sins. End of discussion. We need to go deeper. So let's talk then 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. Since God is perfectly just, he cannot therefore have punished Christ.

The critical 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 wrong-doers. It is common coin that on consequentialist theories of justice punishment of the innocent 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 the innocent. 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 (at least on an orthodox doctrine of hell) 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 (in the Greek: ekdikēsis and avtapodoma) for our 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, 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,^[1] 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 are circumstances under which it is just to punish innocent people. 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.

Consider then some responses to the alleged injustice of penal substitution.

Number one: 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. These theorists reject premise (6). 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 the objection is pressing only for penal substitution theorists who hold that God did punish Christ for our sins.

Number two: Meta-ethical Considerations.

Suppose that we do accept that God punished Christ. 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 fulfill. He can act in any way consistent with his own nature. He does not have the moral duties we have, and he 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 (Genesis 22:1-19).

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,^[2] then the present objection will have difficulty even getting off the ground.^[3] As Hugo Grotius observed in his classic defense of penal substitution^[4], 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 in 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.

Number three: Retributive Justice and the Divine Nature.

Perhaps the best face that can be put on the present objection is to claim that, contrary to Socinus,^[5] 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 theorist might maintain that God is only qualifiedly a negative retributivist, since even if he has prohibited human beings from punishing innocent persons (Deuteronomy 24:16), and even if he is too good to himself punish innocent human persons (Genesis 18:25), 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 deal with the objection. But even more can be said.

Number four: 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.”^[6]

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 sin. In fact, many of the church fathers freely embraced this possibility, as did Aquinas and Grotius after them.^[7] 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 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 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.

Number five: 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 now consider premise (4) (“Christ was an innocent person”). Up to this point we have acquiesced in the assumption that Christ was, indeed, innocent. But for penal theorists like the Protestant Reformers, who affirm the imputation of our sins to Christ, there is no question in Christ’s case of God’s punishing the innocent and so violating even the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice. For Christ in virtue of the imputation of our sins to him was legally guilty before God. Of course, because our sins were merely imputed to Christ and not infused in him, Christ was, as always, personally virtuous, a paradigm of compassion, selflessness, purity, and courage, but he was declared legally guilty before God. Therefore, he was legally liable to punishment. Thus, given the doctrine of the imputation of sins, the present objection to penal substitutionary theories is a non-starter, being based on the false assumption of (4).

Of course, critics of penal substitution are apt to be unsympathetic to the claim that our sins were imputed to Christ. Whether one holds that our sins, that is to say, our wrongful acts, were imputed to Christ, or one holds that our guilt for our wrongful acts was imputed to Christ, the complaint in both cases is the same: we have no experience of the transfer of either moral responsibility for actions or of guilt in isolation from actions from one person to another.^[8]

But are we so utterly bereft of analogies to imputation as critics allege? I think not. Consider first the idea that our wrongful acts were imputed to Christ. On this view, although Christ himself did not commit the sins in question, God chooses to treat Christ as if he had done those acts. Such language is formulaic for the expression of legal fictions.^[9] The nearly universal understanding of a legal fiction is that it is something that the court consciously knows to be false but treats as if it were true for the sake of a particular action. The use of legal fictions is a long established, widespread, and indispensable feature of systems of law.

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

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

Take, for example, the classic case of a legal fiction employed in Mostyn v. Fabrigas (1774). Mr. Fabrigas sued the governor of the Mediterranean island of Minorca, then under British control, for trespass and false imprisonment. Since such a suit could not proceed in Minorca without the approval of the governor himself, Mr. Fabrigas filed suit in the Court of Common Pleas in London. Unfortunately, that court had jurisdiction only in cases brought by residents of London. Lord Mansfield, recognizing that a denial of jurisdiction in this case would leave someone who was plainly wronged without a legal remedy, declared that for the purposes of the action Minorca was part of London! Frederick Schauer observes, “That conclusion was plainly false and equally plainly produced a just result, and thus Mostyn v. Fabrigas represents the paradigmatic example of using a fiction to achieve what might in earlier days have been done through the vehicle of equity.”^[10]

Or consider the legal fiction that a ship is a person.^[11] 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 produced innocent manifests while denying any knowledge of the illegal activity of the captains and crews. The courts responded by making the ship itself (herself?) the person against whom charges were brought. By the end of the 19th century this fiction became the settled view of ships in maritime law, so that the “offending ship is considered as herself the wrongdoer, and as herself bound to make compensation for the wrong done.”^[12] According to Douglas Lind, the “ontologically wild” fiction of ship personification had profound and beneficial results, facilitating the condemnation and forfeiture of offending vessels and producing a more just, coherent, and workable admiralty jurisprudence.^[13]

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

Consider now the second alternative, that God imputes to Christ, not the wrongdoing itself, but the guilt of our wrongdoing.^[14] It is worth noting that the question does not concern the transfer of guilt from one person to another, in the sense that guilt is removed from one person and placed on another. For the defender of the doctrine of imputation does not hold that when my guilt is imputed to Christ, it is thereby removed from me. Guilt is merely replicated in Christ, just as, according to the doctrine of original sin, Adam’s guilt was replicated in me, not transferred from Adam to me. Adam remains guilty, as do I when my guilt is imputed to Christ. The entire rationale of penal substitution is, after all, the removal of guilt by punishment.

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

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

It might be said that in such civil cases guilt is not imputed to another person but mere liability. This claim may be left moot, for vicarious liability also makes an appearance in criminal law as well as civil law.^[15] There are criminal as well as civil applications of respondeat superior. The liability for crimes committed by a subordinate in the discharge of his duties can also be imputed to his superior. Both the employer and the employee may be found guilty for crimes which only the employee committed.^[16] For example, in Allen v. Whitehead the owner of a café was found to be guilty because his employee, to whom management of the café had been delegated, allowed prostitutes to congregate there in violation of the law. In Sherras v. De Rutzen a bartender’s criminal liability for selling alcohol to a constable on duty was imputed to the licensed owner of the bar. In such cases, we have the guilt of one person imputed to another person, who did not do the act. Interestingly, vicarious liability is a case of strict liability, where the superior is held to be guilty without being found blameworthy.^[17] 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.

Imputation of wrongdoing or guilt to a blameless party is thus a widely accepted feature of our justice system. Now sometimes the ascription of vicarious liability is denounced as unjust, though tolerated as a sort of necessary evil due to practical considerations arising from the human impossibility of administering a system of pure justice. But when would the imposition of vicarious liability be even prima facie unjust? Arguably, it could be only in cases in which it is non-voluntary. If an employer knows that the exaction of justice’s demands from his employee would ruin him and out of compassion for his employee and his family wishes to act mercifully by voluntarily being held vicariously liable for his employee’s wrongdoing, how is that unjust or immoral? In the same way, if Christ voluntarily invites our sins to be imputed to him for the sake of our salvation, what injustice is there in this? Who is to gainsay him?

Conclusion

In sum, the objection to penal substitution based on the justification of punishment is no more successful than the objection to penal substitution based on the definition of punishment. 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. And it takes it for granted that Christ was legally innocent, in opposition to the doctrine of imputation. It thus fails to show any injustice in God’s punishing Christ in our place.

There are many other issues arising from the doctrine of penal substitution apart from the coherence and justification of penal substitution, principally whether substitutionary punishment can satisfy the demands of justice. Alas, time does not permit discussion of such issues at present. So I must content myself with referring you to my published work on the atonement and thanking you for your attention.

QUESTION: I actually had three questions. As far as sin . . . well, I'm not fully convinced that sin can't be infused in Christ. My reasoning comes from when Jesus says that it's not what goes into the man that defiles him but what comes out. So could it be possible that his human nature can be infused with sin but not express it to make him sinful?

DR. CRAIG: To me, to say that Christ possessed a human nature that was literally sinful would be unacceptable because it seems to me that sin lodges primarily in the person, and here we have a divine person – the second person of the Trinity – and therefore that person could not be evil, could not be sinful. So if we think that sin is something that lodges primarily in the person I don't think you can sequester it into the human nature of Christ. Now, of course, if you can make such a move, that would make the defense of penal substitution all the easier because in that case Christ would be sinful. But I would be extremely reluctant.

FOLLOWUP: I don't hold that view but it was something that I was thinking about. The next question would be a lot of the legal fictions that you were pointing to as examples of how our sin is imputed to Christ, it's hard because the relationship from employee to employer – the sins created after the relationship is made is imputed to the employer because that relationship was made. The employee’s sins prior to being employed are not imputed to the employer. So why is it that all our sins before we came to relationship with Christ are imputed to him?

DR. CRAIG: Because Christ has always stood to us in the relationship of superior-to-subordinate. That's part of the creator-creature relationship. In fact, here's an interesting feature of vicarious liability in the law. In order for the guilt or liability to be imputed to the employer from the employee, the employer has to have either the right, the power, or the duty to prevent the wrongdoing. Clearly, Christ has both the right and the power, if not the duty, to prevent our wrongdoing. So he actually fulfills the condition in our legal system for standing in this relationship of vicarious liability.

FOLLOWUP: My third and final question: Has anyone ever been tempted to touch the trim of your cloak to rid themselves of all logical fallacies?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, goodness sake! [laughter] No, no, they have been far more apt to expose my fallacies!

QUESTION: The Bible says that God sent his Son in the fullness of time. I've heard that at that time there was an exponential population growth which made it better timing. But I think that the same thing was also happening in the time of Noah. So I wonder why didn't God send his Son at that time and what the point of the Flood was?

DR. CRAIG: Here one can only speculate, but I would say that in addition to the social conditions in the first century (and I'm thinking principally of the Pax Romana (the Roman peace) which enabled the Gospel to spread rapidly throughout the Mediterranean world, what was really critical by way of preparation was Israel and the Old Testament and the Levitical sacrifices that were offered for centuries in the tabernacle and later in the temple which were types of the sacrifice of Christ. The personal animal sacrifices involved a worshiper laying his hands upon the head of the goat to be slain thereby identifying himself with the animal symbolically, and then he himself would slay the animal on the altar so that the animal symbolically suffered the fate of the worshiper. The animal suffered the fate that would have been the worshiper’s punishment for sin had it been inflicted on him. So I think that through the Levitical system of sacrifices God was preparing the nation of Israel and the world as a whole for the introduction of Christ who would give his life then as a sacrificial offering for the sin of the world.

QUESTION: There is an apparent tension about claiming God using legal fictions. It sounds like God is lying to himself like a pathological liar? Could you refute that please?

DR. CRAIG: Remember that when the court adopts a legal fiction, it adopts this fiction with full consciousness that it is false. So it's not a matter of self-deception or lying to oneself. The court adopts a proposition which it consciously knows to be false for the sake of a particular action. And that assumption then will not be adopted for other cases. It will be discarded. But for the sake of that particular action it will adopt this legal fiction. God's not lying to himself in doing this.

FOLLOWUP: In that line of thought, it sounds a bit consequentialist to say that, doesn't it or not?

DR. CRAIG: No. What this is a response to is the objection that we have in our experience no analogy to imputation. That's all I'm trying to show – that we do, in fact, have analogies in our legal system to the imputation of guilt and liability. Yet, it is universally repeated by theologians and others that we have no such experience. And that seems to me to be patently false, and these two devices that I shared with you today illustrate that we do have pretty close analogies to the idea of imputation.

FOLLOWUP: And those experiences you take that as evidence, I guess, you're appealing to our conscience?

DR. CRAIG: It is important again to understand the purpose for offering these analogies. I am responding to an objection. The objection is that imputation of sins makes no sense because we have nothing in our experience like the imputation of guilt or responsibility from one person to another blameless person. And I'm simply saying that's not true. Our legal system pervasively has devices for that sort of imputation or replication of guilt in another one.

QUESTION: I had a question or just a thought that had come up when you were talking, and I just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on it. I seem to notice some sort of circular pattern in God's morality and justice, I suppose. We discussed how God does not have moral duties, but that God also created justice and therefore was also obeying his own rule on justice. I just thought that was really interesting. It felt or seemed like a circle of some sort, and I wasn't sure what to think about that.

DR. CRAIG: If you are interested in this, there are wonderful articles on what's called divine command theory of ethics that I have found very illuminating. One article I would really recommend was written by William Alston, and it's called “What Euthyphro Should Have Said.” It is in a book I edited called Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide. According to this theory moral values are grounded in God. God is the paradigm of moral goodness. He's loving. He's kind. He's fair. And so forth. So moral values are grounded in God. God's moral nature is then expressed to us in the form of divine commandments: You shall love the Lord your God, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, and so forth. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. These divine commands then become our moral duties – our obligations and prohibitions. So moral duties are rooted in God's commands, but God's commands are rooted in his nature and that's where it stops. There isn't any circularity. It goes back to the divine nature, and that's bedrock. The point that I was making is one that divine command theorists have made – it is because God presumably doesn't command himself to do things, he doesn't have any moral duties. He can do anything he wants as long as it's consistent with his nature. But he couldn't do something that would be inconsistent with supreme goodness. That will mean that there are some things God cannot do. He couldn't make another god and fall down and worship him, for example. But it seems to me that he's perfectly free to give and take human life as he wills.

FOLLOWUP: I just had a follow up. I suppose in that thought pattern it seems as if God could decide if blood was what needed to be paid for sin. Does that make sense?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

FOLLOWUP: So God could choose . . . it didn't have to be blood. It could be something else. But I think yesterday you touched on the fact that because it's blood it shows how serious God is about these values. Would that be right?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that's right. God can issue certain commands that are not necessitated by his own nature. A pastor friend of mine gave a wonderful illustration. He said God could have commanded that we tithe 11 percent rather than 10 percent. And then that would have been our moral duty he had commanded that. So God can issue commands which are not strictly necessary but nevertheless become our moral duties. The one you mentioned – through blood atonement – that could well be an example of something like that.

FOLLOWUP: OK. I just have one last one and then I’m done. I know that you had previously done debates with, I believe, Christopher Hitchens.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

FOLLOWUP: I was just curious if you had ever talked or debated atonement – if there were any objections that he had brought up. I was just curious.

DR. CRAIG: No, that never came up in our discussions. Our discussions were primarily about whether God exists – theism – and not about specific Christian doctrines. It's also been only within the last couple of years that I have devoted myself to a study of the atonement and so have been able to speak to this issue with some knowledge.

QUESTION: I wanted to kind of preface it with the premise that if everyone is created in God's image and that's where we get our sense of justice, mercy, or capability to make moral decisions and things like that, how would you respond to the common atheist quip that a lot of us humans are able to forgive somebody without calling for any type of justice, and connecting that to God's need to satisfy his justice?

DR. CRAIG: I'm not sure I see the force of the atheist objection. If the atheist objection is how can atheists do good things without God's help, I would agree with what you said – in virtue of being created in the image of God we have an instinctual grasp of what is right and wrong. And there are lots of atheists who live good and decent lives. Many of us probably come from homes where our parents are like that – good, decent people but not believers. It would be in virtue of the common grace of being created in God's image and having a sense of the requirements of the moral law that they would be able to do good. If you look at my defenses of the moral argument for the existence of God, for example, you'll notice I never make the claim that atheists cannot live good and decent moral lives. My claim is that if there is no God then there is no foundation for objective moral values and duties. But that doesn't mean that atheists can't recognize the objective moral duties and values that do, in fact, exist.

FOLLOWUP: I think my confusion is a little bit . . . yesterday you made a statement that if God were to just rely on his mercy and forgive somebody without dishing out any punishment for his justice then he would be unjust.

DR. CRAIG: That was addressed in today's talk as well. That was one of the alternatives. I acknowledged that among the church fathers as well as Aquinas and Grotius, there are Christian theologians who think that God could have just issued a general pardon without the satisfaction of his justice. But what I pointed out was that that's no guarantee of universal salvation. Indeed, it's plausible that a more optimal number of people would be saved in a world in which the passion of the Christ takes place than a world in which this general pardon without cost is offered to people. I also said that by relaxing the demands of negative retributive justice and punishing Christ rather than relaxing the demands of positive retributive justice and pardoning everyone it enables God to relax much less his essential character and justice and to display more fully his holy love, his mercy, and his justice. So while I acknowledge the possibility of what you just said, I think I've given some reasons for thinking that that's not such an attractive option that it's incumbent upon.

FOLLOWUP: This has been great; very fascinating. I think I understood maybe 50%, so we'll see where this question goes! The only reading I've done – I haven't read your stuff, but I'd like to – is mostly like Tom Wright’s stuff on the atonement and justification and things like that. And one of the things I remember him saying is he's on a bit of a mission not to so much debunk penal substitution atonement as he is to dethrone it, and so he's off talking about Christus Victor and other things. I am curious kind of your thoughts on that in terms of should penal substitutionary atonement be the only way we think about the atonement, and interactions with Tom Wright and his thoughts.

DR. CRAIG: I read Wright’s book, The Day the Revolution Began, in manuscript form before it was published. And I was appalled at the misrepresentation and caricature of traditional atonement theorists that occurs in that book. I pled with him to revise those chapters of the book. I said, “Your contribution doesn't depend upon misrepresenting these other persons. You can make your positive contribution without caricaturing these traditional atonement theories.” And he wouldn't make these changes. He characterizes traditional atonement theories as neo-Pagan. He says in one place that it is as though they hold to the view that God so hated the world that he killed his only Son – a caricature of John 3:16. Anyone who has read Origen or Augustine or Anselm or Aquinas or Turretin or Grotius knows that that is a terrible caricature and misrepresentation of these thinkers. So I disagree with him very much with respect to the traditional atonement theories that he wants to dethrone. When I protested to him about this, I said, “Can you name anyone who has held to these so-called neo-Pagan theories of the atonement?” And he couldn't name anybody. He said, “Well, this is popular preaching. When I speak to lay audiences, they nod in approval because they recognize this in popular preaching.” And yet he wasn't able to give any examples in popular preaching either of where this occurred. The only example he gave was one pastor who said, “Someone had to die.” Well, that's just an expression of a necessitarian view of the atonement – that satisfaction had to be made. But that's not characterizing God as a cruel and angry and bloodthirsty deity bent on vengeance. So I would dispute that even on a popular level. I've been a Christian for almost 50 years and I've never heard preaching like this – that God is bloodthirsty, cruel, and vengeful, and therefore he killed Christ in our place. Having said that, I affirm in the book and believe wholeheartedly that the doctrine of the atonement is like a multi-faceted jewel that includes all of these rich motifs found in the New Testament – not only penal substitution, but redemption, satisfaction, moral influence, Christus Victor. All of these are facets of this jewel. But gemologists call the central facet of a gem the table of that gem. And I believe that penal substitution is the table of the gem that is the doctrine of the atonement. It is through penal substitution that all these other facets are reflected and anchored and they cluster around it. So while it is not the whole of one's atonement theory, I do think it's the central facet that anchors everything else and that helps to give the beauty to all of the other facets. So, for example, take Christus Victor. Why is Christ victorious over sin and death and the devil? Well, it's because he paid the penalty for our sins thereby satisfying God's justice and freeing us from bondage to sin and Satan. So it seems to me that it provides a kind of mechanism for redemption and Christ's great victory. If you look at the book I think you'll find an appreciation and articulation of many different facets of this jewel which is the doctrine of the atonement.

QUESTION: I had two questions. My first one is: How do you reconcile Jesus' initial unwillingness to self-sacrifice as shown through his prayer on the eve of his crucifixion?

DR. CRAIG: I take that to be an expression of the true humanity of Christ. We shouldn't think of the incarnation on the model of Superman disguised as Clark Kent. That is an inadequate understanding of the incarnation. Jesus of Nazareth had a normal human consciousness of a first century Jew, and as such experienced all of the anxieties and emotions and pressures that any human being does. So, of course, in Gethsemane he would struggle with his impending fate because he knew, as we see in the Last Supper, that he was going to the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the people.

FOLLOWUP: Thank you. I appreciate that. My other question is: Might the cruelty of the Jews and Romans who crucified Jesus circumvent God's liability in unjustly punishing Jesus, or is this ascribe to God as well?

DR. CRAIG: I understand the question, and it's tempting to think that we can attribute the punishment meted out to Christ simply to the Romans who executed him so cruelly. But I think for two reasons at the end of the day that's not adequate. One would be that Isaiah 53, which I spoke of yesterday, makes it very clear that it was the will of the Lord to bruise him. It was God's will to afflict him with pain and to crush him. This is what's so startling about Isaiah 53 – it is God who inflicts this upon his righteous Servant. So we need to take that full measure of what Isaiah 53 teaches. But then, secondly, I don't think that the physical pain of crucifixion adequately exhausts what Christ suffered for the sins of the world. In being made sin and having the sin of the world imputed to him and being legally liable for God, it seems to me that Christ experiences a relational rupture with his Father and hence the cry of dereliction on the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?” So the suffering that Christ endures is of infinite measure and proportion and therefore is sufficient to cover the sins of the whole world past, present, and future.

QUESTION: I think this question could be again answered by the good nature of God, but I think what many people see problematic with the idea of substitution is the idea that it's addressed to God. If I were to put it in an analogy, if a doctor was to be very wrathful of cancer, would I be able to draw the parallel that what penal substitution is equivalent of . . . let me rephrase this. Sorry. If a doctor were to be very angry about cancer, is penal substitution not appeasing the doctor’s wrath towards cancer rather than actually curing the patient with cancer?

DR. CRAIG: I guess I don't understand the analogy. What is the analogy here with the doctor and cancer? The doctor is like God? Right? And cancer is like sin? Is that right? So how does the analogy then proceed?

FOLLOWUP: Basically the penal substitution would be appeasing the doctor’s anger towards cancer rather than actually curing the patient.

DR. CRAIG: I don’t see any substitution there. It seems to me to take the analogy (if we could) is that the doctor, seeing that his patient has cancer, would somehow transfer the cancer to himself and he would die rather than the patient, so that the patient could be healed. That would be closer to penal substitution.

QUESTION: I think maybe what I have in mind might be in the vein that the last person was getting us. I appreciate this image of the atonement having various facets. But you want to say not all facets are equal but that penal substitution is kind of the most basic facet. It seems like you may want to say that the other facets somehow flow from or are downstream effects from or are fundamentally altered by penal substitution.

DR. CRAIG: I want to say that penal substitution anchors the gem. It's the table. So it does influence the others in how they're seen. Yes.

FOLLOWUP: OK. So I guess I wanted to invite you to explore the topology of that gem a little bit further for us. So let's go with this analogy. Suppose your son takes your car without asking and goes and wrecks it. This could ruin your child's summer. They would have to spend all summer doing some terrible work to recompense you. But you qua as father voluntarily take the punishment on yourself and you pay the penalty for the wrecked car, or, if you’d like, it could be someone else's car. Now, the point of the analogy is you might think on a purely forensic level – forensic interpretation of the substitution going on here – we've removed a debt that would otherwise be in play that would make your son's life worse. But it's still possible that there will be a relational rift on top of this. Right? Just because we have taken away the negative consequence doesn't necessarily mean that the positive state of a relationship is restored. Right? You can see that clearly by moving to other kinds of relationships like marriage relationships where there can be various kinds of forgiveness while yet the positive relationship is not restored. Now in this case the debt that is remitted we have this forgiveness of sin, but if all that does is bring me back to zero – as not having a debt in God's eyes – one might well think this does not fulfill all the functions that one might hope the atonement would. You might think the atonement shouldn't just take us out from the red to zero, but it should somehow also give us this bridge to enter this life with God. How does that work on your view? Because I'm not sure why a forensic interpretation of substitutionary atonement – a penal substitution – should automatically get us there. It seems like some other elements would be needed to get the positive relationships.

DR. CRAIG: You're absolutely right. Let me say one corrective. The doctrine of double imputation would hold that when I'm justified in Christ I do not simply go from the red back to zero but rather Christ's righteousness or God's righteousness is imputed to me so that I go into the black. So I have a positive ascription of righteousness to me. But as you quite rightly point out, this does nothing to mend the relational rupture. This is purely legal. This is forensic. And in that sense the analogy with a legal pardon is very close. When the governor or the president pardons a criminal, that abolishes the criminal’s liability to punishment and restores to him his civil rights, but it doesn't do anything to establish a relationship between the president or the governor. A great illustration of this is Pontius Pilate and Barabbas. Pontius Pilate pardoned Barabbas and let him go, but he had nothing but disdain for this insurrectionist. There was no relationship there. So in addition to this sort of forensic justification, there needs to be a work of the Holy Spirit of regeneration and rebirth and renewal that puts one into a right relationship with Christ, and then that will be the work of sanctification as the Spirit remakes you into the image of Christ and restores that relationship with him. So certainly there are these other elements that will be involved in bringing us into a full and harmonious relationship with God, but the Protestant Reformers, I think, rightly distinguished between justification (which is a forensic notion) and sanctification (which is this moral and relational transformation that takes place).

FOLLOWUP: OK. So you are not committed to the claim that a forensic understanding of penal substitution on its own gives you the second half of the double imputation.

DR. CRAIG: Not at all. In fact, I affirm that it does not.

FOLLOWUP: This may seem like an obvious question, but I just want to see your view on it. I noticed that there are some events in the Bible that may have wrong actions in them such as Rahab lying to save the spies. Could we follow from this that other actions in contemporary times that may be seen as wrong to save lives or to achieve some good – could they be seen as justified, and where's the line drawn?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I am not an ethicist, especially not a practical ethicist, so I'm hardly the person to ask this question. But I do think that the distinction we drew earlier between prima facie and ultima facie demands would be relevant here. Prima facie I have an obligation to tell the truth, but if there are Jews hiding in my cellar and the Nazis are at the door asking me if there's anyone being sheltered in my house, I don't think I'm under any obligation to tell them the truth. I think there's an ultima facie justification for lying to the Nazi soldiers, namely, my love of my neighbor in the basement that I am sheltering. So I do think there are cases where one chooses for the greater good, and this could involve doing something that prima facie would not be just.

QUESTION: You were talking about the second option for how our sins could be imputed to Christ – that our guilt is replicated in him rather than transferred. I might have just been confused but in that case I can see how Christ's death would pay for basically the copy of our sin that is in him, but how would that pay for the one that's still on us since it's replicated rather than transferred?

DR. CRAIG: All right. This gets into the question that I said at the last comment I wasn't going to have time to discuss: How does it satisfy justice? I do think that in the case of vicarious liability it can be the case that the employer or the superior will pay the full penalty for the crime especially if the subordinate can't do it. Think of cases, for example, like the BP oil spill that cost something like 13 billion dollars. Obviously, the engineers on board the rig couldn't pay for that themselves, but the liability can be imputed to the corporation. Corporations, like ships, are regarded as legal persons, and so it can be the corporation that will be held entirely liable and the individual who was responsible for the accident won’t pay anything. Now there you have a perfect example of penal substitution because the punishment is meted out entirely on the superior, and the entire penalty is paid by him. The subordinate pays nothing. So that would be a good example of how justice could be discharged by Christ. He can pay the full and entire punishment for us. But there's a second element here that is important, and I think it comes out in Romans 6 where Paul talks about how we are in Christ and that Christ represents us before God. He is not merely our substitute. He is also our representative. Let me illustrate this. A substitute would be someone who takes the place of another person but doesn't represent him. Think of a pitch hitter in baseball. The pinch hitter comes into the lineup to bat as a substitute for another hitter, but he doesn't represent that hitter. That's why his performance at the plate does nothing to affect the batting average of the man he replaces. He's a mere substitute, but not a representative. Now, that player will also have an agent who will represent him in negotiations with the team. The agent is not a substitute for the player, but he is his representative. A representative speaks on behalf of someone else. Now, what we have in Christ, I think, is someone who is both our representative and a substitute. These two roles coalesce. The best illustration I can think of for this is a proxy at a shareholders meeting of stockholders. If you can't attend the shareholders meeting, you'll get a letter in the mail with a proxy form in it where you will sign the agreement to have someone else be your proxy at the meeting and vote for you. The proxy is both your substitute and your representative. He goes to the meeting instead of you so he substitutes. But he doesn't vote for himself. He votes for you. His votes are your votes. He votes on your behalf. He represents you at the shareholders meeting. So the proxy is both a representative and a substitute. And I think that's what Christ is. Christ is our proxy before God. And so insofar as I am in Christ and Christ is punished, I am punished. I am punished for my sins by proxy. Therefore, the demands of justice are fully discharged because they have been met by my proxy.

QUESTION: The main people that I talk to and evangelize are Muslims, and they have a lot of problems with everything you've been saying today.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, yes.

FOLLOWUP: In particular, they do have actually a sort of a doctrine of penal substitution in that they believe the Christ did not die on the cross but that God sent somebody else and that Christ was maybe lifted up to heaven. There's a few different variations of this kind of belief. Quite often the question I get as I'm traveling around various places speaking to Muslims is why would God die? Why did God have to die? Why did it have to be the divine being that died? If you could just pretend I'm a Muslim for a minute and answer that.

DR. CRAIG: Well, because I would say God is absolutely just and therefore the demands of justice must be met in some way. And every human being being sinful cannot meet the demands of divine justice. If God judged us by our just desserts every one of us would be consigned to hell. But God himself, in the person of Christ, bears the penalty for our sin and pays the punishment that we deserve so that we can be set free. So critical to understanding the atonement will be the deity of Christ. Then here you need to talk, of course, with the Muslim about his inadequate view of who Jesus is and explain to him that Jesus is indeed God incarnate.

FOLLOWUP: Yes. I do attempt to do that. Quite often the answer that I get is God would never do that to his Son. God would never allow that to happen to his Son. God is merciful. God is loving. God would never allow that to happen.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. Well, what one would say is, yes, of course God is loving, but he loves us so much that he's willing to make that sacrifice himself. Again, the Muslim thinks of Jesus as a human being distinct from God. We need to help him see that, no, no, it is God the Son who voluntarily says, “I will be their proxy.” Christ voluntarily offers to be our proxy in paying the penalty for our sins because he loves us so much. So drive home this affirmation of God's love which the Muslim doesn't understand. I mean, the idea that God would love us is something that is utterly foreign to the Muslim. So this would be an opportunity to emphasize the loving nature of God.

FOLLOWUP: I'll give you one more objection that I often hear as I'm having these conversations. Sin isn't that big of a deal. God is merciful. If I sin, I just pray to God, God forgives me, and that's enough. This old, horrible punishment and torture of Jesus Christ is just overkill.

DR. CRAIG: This is related to what we talked about earlier – whether God could just issue a general pardon for sin. And that is sort of the Muslim view, isn't it? Allah is merciful, and therefore he simply offers a pardon to all those who will accept it and believe in him and become faithful followers of Islam. Then I would say what I said in the talk. Some Christian theologians would agree that that's possible, but that God had good reasons for the passion of the Christ and doing it that way instead. It will win more people to his Kingdom. And here you could rub some empirical facts under their nose by saying that Christianity has filled the world since its inception and that there's been no other religion in the world that has been so widely disseminated and believed in the world as the Christian faith. This has been a very, very effective means that God has chosen for bringing people into his Kingdom.

QUESTION: I just wanted two clarifications so I understand it right. What's the difference between consequentialism and prima facie, or is there a difference? Or am I comparing two things that shouldn't be compared?

DR. CRAIG: I'm not sure I see the connection. The prima facie demands would be the demands “all things being equal.” All things being equal, what should you do? But not all things are equal in many cases. There are extenuating circumstances that would mean that your moral duty is different particularly if there are conflicting moral principles. I gave the example of “You shall not bear false witness” but “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If those come into conflict like with the Jews being sheltered in my basement then the one duty takes precedence over the other, and I should protect them and love them rather than tell the truth to the Nazis. That's not consequentialism. That's still comparing these moral principles and saying that one supersedes the other.

FOLLOWUP: My second question: As far as sin being replicated in Christ, the replication (just so I understand) is so Christ can legally enter the courtroom to pay the penalty. Because it's not like I can just grab some random stranger that's crazy and he wants to take my sin, and I say, “Hey, judge, give it here.” The judge has to replicate that sin in him. Right?

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. This is an objective reality of the notion of the ascription of vicarious liability or guilt and similarly the imputation of sin to Christ.

QUESTION: If we go back to premise (2) in the discussion of divine command theory. When you invoke divine command theory . . . it is something like “If God is just, he wouldn't punish an innocent person.” Then you invoked divine command theory to think, well, maybe not. Maybe if he's the ultimate source of duties and obligations then maybe God could decide that that was OK. But we, of course, have to have the caveat in there that it has to be consistent with his divine nature.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

FOLLOWUP: Now, at other points in the talk and in the discussion in the book it seems like you want to emphasize certain features of Christ that go beyond his mere innocence, namely that he volunteers for it, he's not coerced into it. Right? So these play a role in certain threads of the argument.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

FOLLOWUP: Would it be in keeping with the divine nature to make Christ the sacrifice if he involuntarily . . .? Presumably not, right?

DR. CRAIG: Presumably not [laughter].

FOLLOWUP: But if we specify that then we disambiguate the second premise along these lines where: “If God is just, he will not punish an innocent person unless that innocent person is down with the project.”

DR. CRAIG: I think that’s all right. The premise would still be false that if God is perfectly just he will not punish an innocent person because we can think of cases in which he would.

FOLLOWUP: That's the set up. What I'm wondering is if we disambiguate things along these lines that it's only the case that God would be just and could choose to punish the innocent if the innocent is also not coerced and volunteering to be part of the program then I wonder why would divine command theory have a role here? Why couldn't, for instance, a natural law theorist be completely at home here? Because you might think that where these two theological-ethical systems divide is typically thinking that there's more latitude on the divine command theorist to revise the moral landscape as it were. So I'm just wondering if we're going to disambiguate the second premise along the lines I suggest, why do we need divine command theory to defend the move where you invoked it?

DR. CRAIG: I'm perfectly happy if the natural law theorist can enunciate a moral theory that will meet the demands of penal substitution. Since that's not my view I've not pursued that. It just seems to me that the premise as stated is false because we can think of cases in which God could and would do this. And that's enough to defeat the argument. But I'm very open to some natural law theorist developing an alternative view.

FOLLOWUP: So then to clarify then – there's not a backdoor argument for divine command theory here so much as if divine command theory is already your moral view here's where you might invoke it.

DR. CRAIG: What I said was if it's coherent then it shows that this is a possibility and that it defeats the argument. I think it is true, but if it's even coherent then it shows that it's possible for God to do things that we might think otherwise would be unjust because he's the one who determines what is just.