11. Satisfaction of Divine Justice

In addition to penal substitution, any biblically adequate atonement theory must include the notion of propitiation, that is to say, the appeasement of God’s just wrath against sin. The source of God’s wrath is His retributive justice, and so appeasement of wrath is fundamentally a matter of the satisfaction of divine justice. How are the demands of divine justice satisfied? Biblically speaking, the satisfaction of God’s justice primarily takes place, not as Anselm thought, through compensation, but through punishment.

We have seen that some penal substitution theorists deny that God punished Christ for our sins. Christ on such accounts stands in as our substitute and suffers the harsh treatment that we deserved and that would have been our punishment had it been inflicted on us, thereby freeing us from punishment. An attractive feature of this kind of account is that it enables the Christian theologian to avert so easily the standard objections against both the coherence and justice of penal substitution. For on such accounts it is false that God punished an innocent person for our sins, an assumption that lies at the root of the standard objections. Even Socinus recognized that God might inflict nonpunitive harsh treatment on an innocent person, Job being the paradigmatic biblical example, and the discussion of such treatment takes us out of the philosophy of law and the theory of punishment and into the familiar concerns of theodicy.

Unfortunately, a penal substitutionary theory that does not affirm that God punished Christ for our sins seems less promising when it comes to satisfying the demands of God’s justice. Penal substitutionary theories hold that the satisfaction of divine justice, whether by a necessity of God’s nature or by a free choice of God’s will, is a precondition of God’s pardon and salvation of sinners. Here the superiority of a theory involving Christ’s punishment emerges over penal substitutionary theories according to which God does not punish Christ. For it is hard to see how divine justice could be satisfied by Christ’s voluntarily taking suffering upon himself if it were not a punishment meted out for our sins. If the punishment for an offense were, say, deportation, how could justice be satisfied by someone else’s voluntarily going or even being sent into exile unless it were intended to be a punishment for the wrongdoing in question? If the suffering or harsh treatment is not punishment, then the demands of retributive justice seem to go unsatisfied.

Socinus objected, however, that neither could punishing Christ in our place possibly meet the demands of divine retributive justice. For punishing another person for my crimes would not serve to remove my liability to punishment. So how can penal substitution satisfy God’s justice? We can formulate this objection as follows:

The above response might seem to imply an unsettling account of satisfaction as so-called acceptation. John Duns Scotus suggested that God might have accepted any sacrifice He pleased as satisfactory for the demands of His retributive justice (Distinctiones in quatuor libros Sententiarum 3.19.1). Defenders of penal substitution have not been sympathetic to acceptation accounts. For then God might have accepted as satisfactory the death of any ordinary human being or even an animal. But then it is not true, as Scripture affirms, that “it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins” (Heb 10:4). Retributive theories of justice require not merely that the guilty deserve punishment but also that the punishment be proportionate to the crime if justice is to be satisfied. The objector to substitutionary satisfaction would find a sympathetic ear among penal substitution theorists if he affirmed that retributive justice, as we know and understand it, is essential to God’s nature and so could not be satisfied by mere animal sacrifices. But then the question persists: How does the punishment of Christ satisfy the demands of retributive justice?

The Anglo-American system of justice, in point of fact, does countenance and even endorse cases that are significantly analogous to substitutionary punishment. David Lewis claims that although we do not think that a criminal offender’s friend can serve his prison sentence or death sentence, we do believe that a friend can pay a criminal’s fine if both agree to the arrangement. “Yet this is just as much a case of penal substitution as the others.” Lewis rejects the view that these fines are not really punishments. Some of these fines, Lewis remarks, are just as burdensome as prison sentences and convey the same opprobrium. If we were single-mindedly against penal substitution, Lewis says, then we should conclude that fines are an unsatisfactory form of punishment, that such punishment, in other words, fails to satisfy justice’s demands. But we do not. Lewis draws the lesson that both secularists and Christians agree that “penal substitution sometimes makes sense after all, even if none can say how it makes sense. And if both sides agreed to that, that is some evidence that somehow they might both be right.”

We can press the analogy even further. For as we saw in chapter 10, in criminal law there are cases involving vicarious liability for criminal acts. One lesson to be learned from cases of vicarious liability is that what is required for the satisfaction of justice is that only persons who are liable for a wrong are punished for that wrong. Accordingly, (1) should be revised to:

Now in affirming that justice is satisfied only if a person who is liable for a crime is punished for that crime, we have not yet arrived at an analogy to penal substitution. For in a case involving vicarious liability both parties, the subordinate who did the wrong and the blameless superior to whom the wrong is imputed may be found guilty and punished for the crime.

Intriguingly, however, it is sometimes the case that only the vicariously liable superior is prosecuted and punished. The state may forgo prosecution of the subordinate or forgo exacting a penalty at his hand in favor of the employer’s satisfying justice’s demands. Such cases are especially common when a corporation is held vicariously liable for crimes committed by employees. In cases in which the demands of justice are too heavy for individuals to bear, the corporation may be held solely responsible for satisfying justice’s demands. Such a case seems to be as much an instance of penal substitution as Lewis’ example of fines being paid by a third party. At the least, we can say that it appears that (1) is false in our Anglo-American justice system. Sometimes the demands of justice are met not by the wrongdoer himself but by someone held vicariously liable for that wrong.

I mentioned in the previous chapter that Emmanuel Mwale disputes the relevance of vicarious liability to Christ’s vicarious atonement on the ground of various disanalogies. He claims that the relationship subsisting between employer and employee “is completely different from that between God and man.” For example, God is not some third party but the Creator of the human being who has offended Him. In civil cases involving vicarious liability three parties are involved: the employer, the employee, and the person who suffers damage as a result of the employee’s act or omission, whereas in the case of the atonement only two parties are involved: God and man. Again, an innocent employer cannot choose, as Christ did, to die in place of an employee who has committed a capital offense. Again, while the employer may be held vicariously liable for the criminal offense or tort of the employee, the employee is not always released from personal liability. Vicarious atonement is different in that “Christ’s death releases the offender from all liability.”

Disanalogies, however, are always to be expected when an analogy is drawn, so the question is whether they are so significant as to subvert the analogy that does exist between penal substitution and certain cases involving vicarious liability. I think not. The number of parties involved in a case is irrelevant to the fact that a blameless person may be found vicariously liable for another’s wrong and punished instead of him (not mention the fact that in a criminal case only two parties are involved). The divine status of the superior party is again just not relevant to the analogy. The fact that in our justice system an employer cannot choose to die in the place of his employee does not subvert Lewis’ point that cases of penal substitution are to be found in our justice system. Finally, Mwale recognizes that there are cases involving vicarious liability in which only the employer is prosecuted and punished—and, moreover, that it is up to each jurisdiction to decide.

Mwale seems to assume that in appealing to certain cases involving vicarious liability as analogous to penal substitution, one is trying to construct a doctrine of the atonement based on human justice systems. But one is not engaged in such a silly project. Theological construction of a doctrine of the atonement will be based on the teaching of Scripture. Rather, in appealing to the analogy of certain cases involving elements of vicarious liability, one is merely offering a defeater of the objection raised to penal substitution that it is unsatisfactory because our legal system allows only the wrongdoer to be punished for his wrong. In fact, we do sometimes penalize or punish in place of the wrongdoer blameless persons held vicariously liable for wrongs they did not commit.

Now the objector might reply at this point that in cases of vicarious liability in which only the superior is punished the demands of justice are not really satisfied but merely waived. When the state declines either to prosecute a subordinate for his wrongdoing or to exact the penalty from him that justice demands, it is not because his superior has met the demands of justice on his behalf. Rather, the demands of justice are just overlooked. Hence, (1) remains true.

It seems to me, however, that intuitions can reasonably differ here. It is the state that determines whether justice has been satisfied in a particular case. If the state is satisfied in such cases with the penalty exacted from the superior and requires nothing further from the subordinate, then the demands of justice are met. Even in cases in which both parties are convicted and sentenced, we can imagine scenarios in which only the superior discharges justice’s demands. Criminal law theorist Antony Duff explains:

In Duff’s view, even in the case in which the state prosecutes both parties, just desert is not absolute but relative to the defendants’ means. If the employee for some reason had no means, then the demands of justice would be fully met by the employer alone.

We as condemned sinners are, as Anselm saw, utterly bereft of any means of satisfying divine justice apart from enduring the punishment of hell. If God does not want to send His children to hell, then He must alone satisfy the demands of justice instead of us. It is God, as the analogue of the state, who determines whether the demands of divine justice have been met by Christ’s substitutionary punishment. God may be satisfied with the infinite penalty exacted from Christ for my sins. He may therefore issue a pardon to us, freeing us from condemnation.

The objector’s reply, then, is not decisive. We do seem to have some analogy in our justice system to penal substitution. In any case (1) seems to be defeated.

Contemporary theologians have disputed the point by distinguishing between exclusionary place-taking (exkludierende Stellvertretung) and inclusionary place-taking (inkludierende Stellvertretung). This important distinction requires a word of explanation about substitution and representation, respectively. In cases of simple substitution, someone takes the place of another person but does not represent that person. For example, a pinch hitter in baseball enters the lineup to bat in the place of another player. He is a substitute for that player but in no sense represents that other player. That is why the batting average of the player whom he replaces is not affected by the pinch hitter’s performance. By contrast, a simple representative acts on behalf of another person and serves as his spokesman but is not a substitute for that person. For example, the baseball player has an agent who represents him in contract negotiations with the team. The representative does not replace the player but merely advocates for him.

These roles can be combined, in which case we have neither simple substitution nor simple representation but rather substitutional representation (or representative substitution). A good illustration of this combination of substitution and representation is to be found in the role of a proxy at a shareholders’ meeting. If we cannot attend the meeting ourselves, we may sign an agreement authorizing someone else to serve as our proxy at the meeting. He votes for us, and because he has been authorized to do so, his votes are our votes: we have voted via proxy at the meeting of shareholders. The proxy is a substitute in that he attends the meeting in our place, but he is also our representative in that he does not vote instead of us but on our behalf, so that we vote. This combination is an inclusionary place-taking.

Turretin believes that Christ, in bearing our punishment, was both our substitute and our representative before God. He states, “The curse and punishment of sin which he received upon himself in our stead secures to us blessing and righteousness with God in virtue of that most strict union between us and him by which, as our sins are imputed to him, so in turn his obedience and righteousness are imputed to us.” This relation is not one of simple substitution; there is an inclusive union here that is the basis of the imputation of our sins to Christ and of his righteousness to us. According to Turretin, so long as Christ is outside of us and we are out of Christ, we can receive no benefit from his righteousness. But God has united us with Christ by means of a twofold bond, one natural (namely, communion of nature by the incarnation), the other mystical (namely, the communion of grace by Christ’s mediation), in virtue of which our sins might be imputed to Christ and his righteousness imputed to us. Christ was punished in our place and bore the suffering we deserved, but he also represented us before God, so that his punishment was our punishment. Christ was not merely punished instead of us; rather, we were punished by proxy. For that reason, divine justice is satisfied.

How does it come to pass that we are so represented by Christ? As mentioned, Turretin proposes two ways in which we are in union with Christ, first, by way of his incarnation and, second, by way of our mystical union with him. Although theologians often appeal to this latter union of believers with Christ to explain the efficacy of his atonement, such an account seems to be viciously circular. Turretin emphasizes that it is our union with Christ that is the basis of the imputation of sins to Christ and of our justification. But the problem is that the mystical union of believers with Christ is the privilege only of persons who are regenerate and justified. There is here a vicious explanatory circle: to be in mystical union with Christ, one must first be justified, but to be justified one must first be in mystical union with Christ. What is needed is a union with Christ that is explanatorily prior to (even if chronologically simultaneous with) imputation and justification.

Turretin’s first proposal is therefore to be preferred. In virtue of Christ’s incarnation (and, I should say, his baptism, whereby Jesus identified himself with fallen humanity), Christ is appointed by God to serve as our proxy before Him. The Logos, the second person of the Trinity, has voluntarily consented to be appointed, by means of his incarnation and baptism, to serve as our proxy before God so that by his death he might satisfy the demands of divine justice on our behalf.

Herein we see the organic connection between Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection. God’s raising Jesus from the dead is not only a ratification to us of the efficacy of Christ’s atoning death; it is a necessary consequence of it. For by his substitutionary death Christ fully satisfied divine justice. The penalty of death having been fully paid, Christ can no more remain dead than a criminal who has fully served his sentence can remain imprisoned. Punishment cannot justly continue; justice demands his release. Thus, Christ’s resurrection is both a necessary consequence and a ratification of his satisfaction of divine justice.

In summary, while proponents of penal substitutionary theories that do not feature Christ’s being punished for our sins may have difficulty rebutting the charge that on such theories Christ’s suffering is unsatisfactory, the proponents of penal substitutionary theories that do feature Christ’s being punished for our sins are not so clearly vulnerable to this charge. We need to keep in mind that God, as the supreme Legislator, Judge, and Ruler, Himself determines what satisfies the demands of His justice. If we insist that retributive justice, as we know and understand it, belongs essentially to God, the question will then become why substitutionary punishment cannot satisfy the demands of retributive justice so known and understood. We saw that in both civil law and criminal law we find cases of penal substitution that are regarded as satisfactory of justice’s demands because guilt or liability is vicariously borne. We may think of Christ as being held vicariously liable for our sins and his punishment as satisfying for us, just as an employer might satisfy justice’s demands on behalf of his employee.

Moreover, an inclusionary penal substitutionary theory does not preclude that we are punished for our sins in Christ’s being punished for our sins. For Christ’s being divinely and voluntarily appointed to act not merely as our substitute but as our representative enables him to serve as our proxy before God, so that when he is punished, we are punished by proxy, to the satisfaction of divine justice.

It will be recalled that Socinus pressed other objections against the satisfactoriness of Christ’s substitutionary punishment. These have been rehearsed afresh by Eleonore Stump in her important study of the atonement.

So formulated, this is hardly an objection to penal substitutionary theories. Indeed, the genius of such a theory is that it enables the demands of divine retributive justice to be fully met, not simply swept under the rug, while giving full expression to God’s love for condemned sinners. What God forgoes is punishing sinners in their proper persons; instead, out of His love for them He bears their punishment Himself. As Grotius rightly saw, the acceptance of a substitute for what is owed does require a special dispensation on the part of the creditor or judge.

In a later iteration of this objection, Stump objects that penal substitution shows God to be unmerciful. “Mercy . . . is a matter of foregoing at least some of what is owed; and, contrary to what it intends, the penal substitution theory of the atonement does not, in fact, present God as foregoing what is owed him because of human sin.” This surprising claim depends on her loose characterization of mercy, which fails to take account of the fact that mercy is person-directed. If Christ’s freely giving his life so that justly condemned persons might live does not count as mercy toward such persons, that only goes to call into question Stump’s characterization of mercy. Stump notes that the penal substitution theorist might say that “God’s foregoing what is owed to God consists precisely in God’s not requiring that human beings endure the punishment for their sins,” but she responds that “it remains the case that on the penal substitution theory no part of the punishment due is omitted.” That is right on both counts, and it is one of the great strengths of the theory that it thus fully expresses God’s justice as well as His mercy toward sinners.

Stump notes that the penal substitution theorist might say that God’s justice requires that sin be punished, and so Christ’s enduring our punishment for us constitutes mercy even though God does not forgo punishment for sin. Significantly, Stump’s reply to this necessitarian perspective is faltering. She does not deny that God is in such a case merciful; rather, she falls back onto the objection that penal substitution would be unjust. Her objection therefore ultimately collapses into the objection to the justice of penal substitution and so fails to stand as an independent objection. We have already addressed the justice of penal substitution at some length in chapter 10.

It seems to me that Reformed thinkers like Turretin adequately respond to Socinus on this score by doing exactly as Stump suggests. According to Turretin, Christ was forsaken by God the Father by His withdrawing from him the beatific vision and by suspending the joy and comfort and sense and fruition of full felicity. While Christ’s punishment was not infinite as to duration, still in its intensity it was equivalent to the eternal suffering of the damned in hell on account of the infinite dignity of the person suffering. Interestingly, in the American criminal justice system, this sort of difference is recognized though not, to my knowledge, countenanced. It is recognized that different prisoners may experience the same sentence in radically different ways. For a hardened criminal the punishment may be a mere annoyance, but for a person who is frail or sensitive, the same punishment may occasion terrible suffering. Our legal system will not allow these differences in persons to come into play in sentencing for obvious reasons: it could lead to outrageous exploitation of the system by certain persons. So the subjective suffering of persons is not allowed to play a role in the assigning of punishment. But God is obviously not susceptible to the sort of abuses that a human legal system is and so may take into account such subjective differences. In that case, Christ could be said to suffer subjectively the same pains as the damned. Turretin says that we cannot doubt the infinite value of Christ’s satisfaction, for although his human nature was finite, the satisfaction is infinite, since it is relative to the person, who is the efficient cause and to whom the obedience and suffering are to be attributed.

Stump objects to the sort of view Turretin espouses by recurring to her objection to the justice of penal substitution: “Interpretations of the Anselmian kind emphasize both God’s justice and Christ’s perfect sinlessness. . . . But how could a sinless man be abandoned by a good and just God? What goodness or justice would there be in God’s separating himself from a human person who is himself perfectly good and just?” So this objection, like the first, also collapses into the objection to the justice of penal substitution. Moreover, we see again Stump’s failure to understand the Reformers’ doctrine of forensic imputation and justification. As a result she interprets Calvin’s view to imply that God deceived Christ into thinking that he had been forsaken when in fact he was not: “On Calvin’s explanation, God brings it about that Christ experiences as real what is in fact not real. . . . On this view, then, God causes Christ to have an illusory experience; and to this degree God deceives Christ.” This is a misunderstanding; for Reformed thinkers like Calvin and Turretin, Christ is legally guilty before God and therefore justly punished by the Father’s withdrawal of the blessings listed by Turretin.

So the objection fails to show any unsatisfactoriness of penal substitution as such. But why think that Christ’s suffering the punishment for all humanity’s sins implies universal salvation? The assumption seems to be that our actual redemption was achieved on Golgotha that fateful day rather than our potential redemption. But, as Turretin sees, since we did not even exist at that time, it is difficult to see how we could have been actually redeemed at that moment. Christ suffered the punishment due to all humanity’s sins that God had previously passed over, thereby meeting the demands of God’s justice, a payment that is of infinite value and therefore more than sufficient to pay for all humanity’s sins yet to be committed as well; but that payment of our debt needs to be freely received by faith in order to achieve our actual redemption.

In fact, Reformed thinkers themselves recognize this truth in distinguishing between redemption as accomplished and as applied. They will say that our redemption was accomplished at the cross but that it is applied individually when persons are regenerated and place their faith in Christ. This distinction is vital because otherwise the elect would be born redeemed. They would never be unregenerate sinners but would be justified and saved from the instant of their conception. But Scripture teaches that believers once were “children of wrath like the rest of mankind” (Eph 2:3). The distinction between redemption accomplished and applied makes sense only if we say that Christ’s death wins our potential redemption and that that potential is actualized in individual lives through repentance and faith.

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

Given the doctrine of the imputation of sin, to which parallels exist in our own justice system, the demands of divine justice may be satisfied by Christ’s substitutionary punishment. Moreover, since Christ’s substitutionary suffering is inclusionary, rather than exclusionary, we are punished in his being punished, to the fulfillment of divine justice.

God’s graciously accepting a substitute for what we by justice owed is an expression of God’s mercy toward us. We should not, in any case, think of our sinful condition primarily on the analogy of the debt owed by a debtor to a creditor nor of God’s forgiveness in terms of remission of a debt; rather, our condition is like that of a condemned criminal before the court and divine forgiveness like a legal pardon, which is not at all incompatible with satisfaction of divine justice as a precondition of a full pardon. Penal substitution enables God to be both merciful and just. Because Christ is God Himself, the suffering of the Son in his human nature is ample to satisfy justice’s demands for all humanity. Christ’s atoning death on behalf of all mankind need not entail that all people will freely avail themselves of redemption. For while Christ’s death has the potential to wipe away all men’s sins, it does so only for those who avail themselves of it.