Penal Substitution: Coherence and Justification

This essay will be summarizing William Lane Craig’s work.  Christ stands as a representative head that can take the penalty despite not having committed any wrongdoing.  Business examples.

The problems with penal substitutionary atonement are well known and may seem intractable.  It just seems wrong to say that the death of an innocent could satisfy the just demands against a guilty party.  

The Rando-Objection:

Consider the following caricature:  We collect all of the world’s debt and place the responsibility for that debt on some single individual who himself did not have any debt.  We then kill that individual and claim that the world’s debt is paid.  That seems odd at best. And probably abhorrent as well.  Or consider the scenario in which I serve the life-sentence of a convicted murder in his stead.  Would it be just for the murderer to be let free? Would it be just to let me serve that sentence?  It seems not.

But a good defense of penal substitutionary atonement can be made by drawing out the various elements of the doctrine and showing that they cohere well with our prior intuitions concerning justice.  Such a defense could provide an independent motivation for the doctrine.  

What’s an actual approach?  What’s an influence approach?  An actual approach is one that achieves a result regardless of whether any agents are aware of it--the mechanism of the atonement not being dependent upon an agent's awareness.  An influence approach depends upon the influence of an action upon an agent for its result.  Moral influence theories fall under influence approaches.  Penal substitution falls under an actual approach.

The Pieces:
Propriation: The discharge of divine retributive justice. 
Imputation:  The idea that our sins are legally accounted as the sins of Christ.
Penal substitution:  The punishment of Christ substitutes for the punishment we should have received.
Federal representation: Jesus is our representative substitute.  
Vicarious liability:  An agent can be punished on behalf of another (substitute) given that they stand in the proper relationship to them (represent) even if they are personally guiltless.  
Pardon:  The dispensation of a lawful ruler to free a guilty party from the requirement of punishment.  

Non-Imputative (Influence) Approach:

One such approach would be a broadly governmental view:  Work from the idea of pardon back. God wishes to save sinners and decides to pardon us. We’re saved due to the pardon--a concept well established and understood in our legal tradition. But pardoning us without a demonstration of the heinous nature of sin threatens to make sin seem trivial. The pardon paired with the atonement both secures our freedom and demonstrates the heinous nature of sin.

The “seem”-trivial is key to this variant of the doctrine.  The crucifixion of Christ is a demonstration, and not an actual guilt-satisfaction.  Guilt-satisfaction is achieved by the pardon.  The seeming-integrity of justice is achieved by the cross demonstration.  

There are different ways to cash out the reason for the cross demonstration; whether it’s based on considerations of justice or whether it’s required as a result of our mental constitutions and its influence upon us.  We might consider this to be an influence-based or an actual propriation-based approach to the atonement depending on the answer to that question.

Imputative (Actual) Approach:

Actual imputation.  Christ was literally not legally innocent, though was personally innocent and did not have a subjective infusion of sins.

Vicarious liability, as in cases of respondeat superior, offers itself as an example of a blameless third party being held guilty for the actions of another.  These sorts of cases rely on a proper relationship between the blameless third-party and the wrongdoer, that of some kind of representation.  They also may rely on a relationship of substitution if the blameless third-party’s liability is offered instead of the wrong-doers. We are punished by proxy.

Jesus willingly assumed such a relationship with sinful humanity, both by sharing our human nature by becoming incarnate and identifying with sinful humanity by his baptism.  He was appointed as our representative before God.  He is both a representative substitute and a substitutive representative.  It is this relationship between the innocent party and the guilty party that allows for imputation and penal substitution--and this is the relevant difference between the innocent Rando objection.