Objections to Hell and Penal Substitution

I wanted to respond to an issue Mike and Heath raised in the above-linked discussion, so I'll repeat their comments here. First Mike:

This just doesn't square with our asymmetrical views on justice and beneficence/mercy. It is not generally considered unjust for an agrieved person S not to exact a punishment from someone S' who (say) has violated his rights.

I can certainly decide not to demand what is due to me, and no one views that as unjust. And that is because it isn't unjust. On the contrary, it is the prerogative of the aggrieved person not to demand everything due to them. It can certainly exhibit the virtue of mercy or beneficence not to make such a demand.

But there is an obvious asymmetry when it comes to demanding more (rather than less) than is due to me. I cannot do that without injustice.
Similarly, it is not unjust to allow a person S freely to make reparations to you for another S'. First, S does nothing unjust in not demanding what is due to you from S'. And second you do nothing wrong or unjust in allowing the sacrifice. But the asymmetry again holds. It would be unjust for S to demand more from S' than is due to you. And it would be unjust for you to allow that.

But I'm obviously saying nothing new here. These asymmetries very familiar and entrenched phenomena in moral experience.

Heath responds to Mike:

Mike suggests that if Jesus is freely "making reparations" on your behalf then there is no injustice going on. But here I think the problem is that we do not ordinarily think of punishment as a version of debt-payment. I can pay your debts; I cannot serve your jail time. This connects with my earlier point about teleology trumping deontology. The whole point of debt-payment is to restore money to the creditor, so it doesn't really matter where the money comes from. Whereas the point of jail time is to punish, or express wrath at, or morally transform, or whatever, the offender; so it matters a great deal who serves the jail time and it would undermine the whole point of the institution if we allowed substitute prisoners.

My response:

I think the NT authors would see the relevant kind of atonement as debt payment, but I think they also see it as substitution for deserved punishment, ransom payment, and several other things. That means that the criticism does seem to apply to what they say, unless somehow it's not in the deserved punishment sense that Jesus is a substitute but only in the sense of ransom payment and/or debt payment.

A theology student who occasionally posts at my personal blog defends exactly that view and thus retains both penal and substitutionary elements in the atonement but says that the penal elements aren't substitutionary and the substitution elements aren't penal. Maybe he could be pressed into saying they they aren't punishment-penal but might be penal in the sense of payment of a legal debt. He denies flat-out that the punishment is substitutional and insists that it's union with Christ. He sees substitution as the opposite. I think he does dodge this problem very nicely.

It is misleading to say that "I cannot serve your jail time". In the mix are questions about rehabilitation, special and general deterrence, preserving the safety of others and so on. But none of these has much to do with the punishment itself. So it is perfectly possible that the punishment part of the jail time translates directly into dollars and cents (I can't see why it wouldn't). That part I can pay for you. The remaining jail time is devoted to ensuring that you do not harm others, that you are rehabilitated, that you and others are deterred from acting similarly in the future and so on. But I can pay for the specific punishment that is exacted from you.

Jeremy,
I'm having a little trouble tracking what you say above. Maybe you could say more about how the problem is dodged.

Jeremy,

I would like to see more of Wink's argument (previous and follow-up posts), but the links at your site are by IP address, not domain name, and that gives me an error.

Mike,

I wasn't trying to be misleading at all...I just meant, in the ordinary legal sense, I can pay your debts but not take your jail time.

Maybe here is a way to focus my thoughts. Why does God (feel the need to) punish sin at all?

One thought might be that punishment is a means to rehabilitation / moral reform--the same reason I punish my son. This is more or less the concept of discipline in this life and purgatory in the next. It makes sense as far as it goes, but it's hard to see how it could account for God punishing Jesus on the cross, or why he would send irreformables into eternal punishment (hell).

Another thought might be that God just gets really mad about sin and has to take it out on somebody. He's nice enough to not take it out on (all of) us, but on his son instead. But this sounds morally horrible on two counts. (a) it's generally considered a moral excellence to forgive, and God is supposed to have this excellence. I wouldn't be considered holy if I felt the need to take out my wrath at wrongdoing every time I saw something done wrong--why is God? (b) It makes God sound like a man who has a hard day at work and comes home and takes it out on his wife and kids. No matter how justified his anger about work, and no matter how willing his wife and kids are to take that anger, it's a rotten thing to do.

A third thought would be that God is not so much angry (numerous biblical references to the contrary) but just--it's the cosmically righteous thing to do to punish sin. This is a kind of answer I'm not very impressed with; it's a version of "them's the rules". _Why_ is that the righteous thing to do? It raises the same question again: what is the point of (having this rule for) punishing sin?

I'm open to other suggestions.

My motives for pushing this question are simply that I've been puzzled about the (alleged) penal aspects of the atonement ever since I started thinking hard about them in grad school. On the one hand, I'm impressed that the non-Protestant churches have never been formal about the atonement; more or less, at the dogmatic level they leave it at "Christ died for our sins" because it's a great mystery. On the other hand, I've become convinced that understanding the atonement, insofar as that's possible, is a very valuable thing. Most of the great controversies in the early church were driven by issues around salvation. It seems to me that the better one understands atonement, the better one understands all sorts of things about Xty, and this has benefits both intellectual and spiritual.

Heath, you write,
"it's hard to see how it could account for God punishing Jesus on the cross"

I don't think that this correctly describes the event. There's a thread here on this question (or one closely related) in the recent past.

On the central point, "why does God feel the need to punish sin at all", I don't see any mystery. The justification of punishment I take it is based on the assumption that sin transgresses against the person God. So it is not difficult to see a basis for punishment in retributivist principles. Perhaps the story is one on which forgiveness is available for anyone who asks--in this way God exercises mercy or beneficence--but not everyone asks. I hasten to add that I really don't know. But it doesn't seem to rise to the level of mystery.

Heath, the links are by domain name but were the old Ektopos domain name (mt.ektopos.com). Like all the old links to this blog, all the old links at my personal blog have become dead unless I've gone back and fixed them. I've just done that with the post I linked to from here, so all the links in that post should now work.

I suppose it might be good just to link to all the posts in the series Wink did on my blog:

Critiquing Penal Substitution
Penal Union
my own post Thoughts on the Atonement Discussion So Far
What Substitution Do I Deny?
Why I Think We Are Punished in Christ

Jeremy,

I'm still unclear what the objection above is supposed to be. What exactly is problematic about believing (a) and (b)?

(a) It's morally abhorrent to allow people to suffer eternally when it can be avoided.
(b) God would be unjust to allow Jesus to take people's penalty when they deserve it.

(a) is supported by both particular intuitions, for example,"That is a paradigm example of a moral abomination" and general principles, for example, "One ought, morally speaking, to prevent an easily preventable serious loss if one can do so without bringing about a something equally bad or worse."

So (a) strikes me as very plausible. (b) on the other hand follows from gneral principles of justice, for example, "It is unjust to punish an individual for doing x, when it is known that that individual did not do x" and "If an individual does x, then no other individual deserves punishment for doing x."

Now, the wording in (b) is very elusive and this is because it hasn't been explained what "taking someone's penalty" entails.

One can only guess. On the one hand, (1) it could mean taking someone's punishment, like serving someone's jailtime. On the other, (2) it could mean taking one's deserved punishment in such a way that, one thereby deserves it, like deserving someone else's jailtime. We would all agree that (2) is bad, because Jesus did not deserve the punishment. But, understood as (1) it is unclear how God's allowing Jesus to die is a special problem for (a). Allowing someone to be unjustly punished is certainly bad, but this is a daily event and is just a species of the problem of evil.

So, I don't see why we should think putting forward both (a) and (b) is problematic like you suggest above. What is the problem?

Thanks, Jeremy, for the links. It's a helpful discussion. I think one would want to know more about what "being united with Christ" amounted to, but in fairness, one would want to know that anyway.

Mike, the reason I'm doubtful about the bare appeal to retributivist principles is that it's a version of my #3. Put it this way. In every case of retributivist principles I can think of, the principles are in place in the service of some intelligible higher/common good. My son gets retribution in order to form his character and keep the household running smoothly. Criminals get retributively punished to promote a harmonious and well-ordered society. There is always a bigger context. And in cases where the bigger context is not well served by having any retributivist principles in place--friendships, marriages, cases where it's vital that everyone get along--we don't have such principles. So when someone appeals to retributive justice, I want to know what context they see that makes retribution a good idea; it isn't always a good idea.

For instance, in the case of the ongoing relationship between God and the Israelite nation, you can see why God would engage in retributive punishment. It has to do with weaning them off idols and developing their fidelity to him. OK, that makes sense. In the case of an individual sinner going to hell, however, I can't see the sense. In the case of transferring my punishment to Christ on the cross, I again can't see the sense in it.

Maybe there is a fundamental parting of the ways here, in that some people think that retributive justice, and the idea that God has individual rights that can be transgressed (so to speak), is fundamental and ungrounded, and I do not think this makes sense. I would just reply that this view--and the priority of right to good on which it is grounded--strikes me as very post-medieval, classical liberal thinking, not something that would have been available to the early church or the NT writers.

Heath,
The first question you raise is whether retributivism is coherent. You suggest that you cannot make sense of the view or that, in my terms, the view is incoherent.
Retributivist theories might be false, but I doubt they're incoherent. Suppose punishment and reward are distibuted on the exclusive basis of desert (a typical and simple retributivist position). You suggest that I cannot sensibly punish or reward someone simply because he deserves it. To make the justification coherent, according to you, I have to have some additional goal or telos or some "larger context" or something. But this is pretty clearly mistaken.
Suppose Smith wins the road race and I distribute to him the first prize trophy.
What justifies giving Smith the trophy? I say, what justifies giving him the trophy is that he won the race and deserves it.
That's supposed to be an incoherent thing to say? On pain of incoherence, am I compelled to specify some additional goal that is achieved, apart from Smith's deserving the trophy, that justifies my distributing the trophy to him? Do I have to add something like, "well, I distributed the trophy to Smith because doing so contributes to the goal of making better citizens in the future? Or distributing the trophy to Smith contributes to the goal of making more psychologically stable people? None of this is true. It is plainly coherent to say that my exclusive reason for distributing the trophy to Smith is that he won the road race and deserves it. And of course the very same reasoning applies to the distribution of punishment based exclusively on desert.

Mike,

My view would be better put by saying that bare, ungrounded retributivism is incoherent. (Actually, I would prefer "unreasonable" to "incoherent" but we'll not quibble.)

Why did you give the tropy to Smith? Because he won. [And it's the rule we've instituted that we'll give a trophy to the winner.] That's fine; nothing incoherent about that.

What I am claiming is that the follow-up question makes sense, and needs an answer: Why are you giving out trophies to winners? Presumably, the answer is something like, because everybody likes it better if there's some tangible reward for winning; or, because we want to honor the winner; or even, that's the custom. Since giving out trophies is not really a morally loaded action, lots of answers will do.

But consider the case where the trophy is made of pure gold and the country is regularly impoverished in order to pay for it. Then the question, Why are you giving this kind of trophy to the winner? had better have an extremely good answer.

Punishing sin is a case where, morally, a lot is at stake. So it is a situation of the second kind; retributive justifications, while not per se incoherent, need further justification and cannot stand by themselves.

Heath, you write: "Punishing sin is a case where, morally, a lot is at stake. So it is a situation of the second kind; retributive justifications, while not per se incoherent, need further justification and cannot stand by themselves."

So does this mean on your view, the possibility of giving retribution itself always needs to be based on some further reasons? If this is what you mean, then I think this is untrue. In fact, there was a recent thread over at the Garden of Forking Paths on this topic. Unfortunately, it is a huge thread, but I defended a Reidian view there (look under "Why Should We Believe We're Morally Responsible," Feb. 2nd, 2006). Whether I'm right or wrong, it looks like from those discussions that your position isn't obvious. The relevant stuff there is between myself and Tamler Sommers, and later between Tom Clark and I.

Heath,

"What I am claiming is that the follow-up question makes sense, and needs an answer: Why are you giving out trophies to winners?"

Honestly, it looks to me like you're setting up a straw man against retributivists. Obviously every retributivist has an answer to that question. Retribitivism is a principled moral position and they can provide the principle that is at the basis of their moral reasoning. The answer they give is this:

P. The moral basis for the distribution of reward and punishment is desert.

In the road race case (which is a moral case, by the way) I distribute trophies in accordance with principle P. Nothing unreasonable about that.

Now to the modified case where the trophy is gold and it minimizes overall utility to distribute according to the gold trophy to winners of road races. The obvious reply is that the runner does not deserve any extravagant reward you can imagine. And he obviously does not deserve the wildly expensive gold trophy. So giving him the gold trophy violates P. How does this present a problem for retributivism?

But then you say,
"Punishing sin is a case where, morally, a lot is at stake."
Ok. But IF it is true that each person who receives eternal damnation deserves eternal damnation, then principle P is fulfilled. And a retributivist needn't say more by way of justification. What you seem to be getting at is that no *one could deserve eternal punishment* given the extreme disvalue of it. Of course that might be true, and I'm more or less in agreement with it. But that conclusion entails nothing about the retributivist principle P.

James,

I glanced over the thread (in which I participated too). I take it that you want to claim that the appropriateness of retribution can be just basic, for no further reasons. For example, maybe the wages of sin is death--if you sin, you deserve to die--period. No reasons offered or needed.

I wouldn't quite say that *beliefs about* the appropriateness of retribution (for short, desert) are never basic. What I would claim is that facts about desert are never brute, that is, it is never the case that they have no explanation.

(And Mike, here is where I'm connecting to your previous post.)

Why do I believe this? Because in ordinary life it is *never* the case that we rely on brute facts about desert. In *every* case of retributive (desert-responsive) action, there is a case to be made, whether or not everyone can make it, for the general practice of being retributive in that kind of case. And where there is no such case to be made, there is excellent reason not to be retributive. I've mentioned children and criminals before; the case of race-runners is another example. Surely it is not just a natural brute fact of the universe that winners of footraces deserve trophies. (But many people seem to think that it is a natural brute fact that sinners deserve death.)

So I am not opposed to Mike's principle P, that the moral basis for reward and punishment is desert. It's that when S deserves X because of P, I want to know in virtue of what is P a reason for deserving X. In the case of the race-runner, the winner deserves a trophy because he won, in virtue of a decision or convention that winners get trophies. My son deserves a time-out for his bad behavior in virtue of a general household policy to that effect. Criminals deserve jail for their crimes because they have violated a law which the legislature has passed.

Now, these are all cases where some authority has made it the case that some behavior deserves X. And there are reasons for such decisions, which can be articulated and evaluated. What bugs me is when someone tries to tell me either that (a) the fact that sinners deserve death is just a natural brute fact, or (b) that it is true by divine fiat for no particular reason. *From everything we know* about how desert is apportioned, there ought to be an explanation of why sinners deserve death or hell. And furthermore, if we believe in penal substitution, it is a constraint on this explanation that punishment is transferable. I think that's a pretty hard hurdle to overcome, which is why I'm doubtful about penal substitutionary accounts.

I've tried really hard to make this position clear. I hope I'm succeeding....

"In the case of the race-runner, the winner deserves a trophy because he won, in virtue of a decision or convention that winners get trophies"

I have no idea what this means. It is not in virtue of any convention whatsoever that winners are more deserving than non-winners. It is virtually an analytic truth that winners of races are more deserving of rewards for the race than nonwinners. Are you actually suggesting that it is simply a matter of convention that losers are not more deserving?? This is altogether puzzling.

But you add,
"Because in ordinary life it is *never* the case that we rely on brute facts about desert. In *every* case of retributive (desert-responsive) action, there is a case to be made, whether or not everyone can make it, for the general practice of being retributive in that kind of case"

I'm lost. What is a "brute fact" about desert and when did I ever suggest there was one??

Here is perhaps another way to put the same worry. Take again the principle P.

P. The moral basis for the distribution of reward and punishment is desert.

Certainly we need to specify what makes someone deserving. Winning a race or contest or game, etc. pretty clearly makes one more deserving than losing one. But in more interesting cases a retributivist might add,

P'. S deserves p iff S merits p.

Given P' we are to understand desert in terms of merit. P' applies equally well to backward-looking theories of distributive (rather than retributive) justice. There are any number of backward-looking theories that differ with respect to notion of desert in P'. Other backward-looking theories distribute on the basis of need or effort or, as Nozick at one time would have had it, choice, and so on. Rawls endorses a principle designed to ensure that the distribution of social goods is determined by individual merit (rather than by chance or luck).
The point is that none of these backward-looking theories (whether of retributive justice or dsitributive justice) appeals to teleological considerations in specifying the basis of desert. Most of these theories make a special point of denying that justice makes any appeal to teleological considerations at all.
Insofar as I am tracking your view, any such backward-looking theory (or at least, any such backward-looking retributivist theory) must be either incoherent or unreasonable. This would of course show that several very prominent theorists have developed incoherent or unreasonable theories of justice, and that would be a major discovery. But, for all the discussion devoted to it, I don't see that either one of these conclusions follows.

Perhaps a concrete example will help. Consider the question of how to distribute health-care. There are several backward-looking, or at least non-teleological, answers on offer, e.g.

(Nozick) S deserves health care iff S can pay for it.
(Rawls) S deserves health care iff we’d all choose for S to have health care when we weren’t sure whether we were S or not.

These answers both have the merit of providing an analysis of “deserves��?, or at least “deserves health care��?, thus not leaving desert facts brute and unexplained. But now consider standard criticisms of them.

Against Nozick: why should mere ability to pay determine whether someone gets health care? In particular, that criterion leaves a lot of people out in the cold, and that would be bad. Against Rawls: why should we embodied, fully knowledgeable, actual people accept any conclusions drawn by some hypothetical ignorant avatar? What makes the original position so compelling as a criterion for desert, when none of us are in it? In particular, considering the values and attachments we do have, we ought to be reasoning on the basis of those, not ignoring them. Rawls asks us to ignore, for purposes of figuring desert, a lot of the goods we know of and values we have. But that is stupid.

Both of these are, broadly, teleological critiques. And they have the same logical form. Against proposals of the form, S deserves X iff P, they ask why P is a reason for deserving X, especially when it appears that taking P to be such a reason is a lousy or dumb way to run a society. Particularly in Rawls’ case, I think his ultimate justification for using the veil of ignorance is that, in the pluralist society we’re in, the VofI actually is the best way to run the society for all concerned, in order to secure peace and reasonable living conditions for everyone. That is, I suspect that Rawls, if not the early Nozick, has a teleological defense up his sleeve. (I’ll be subject to correction by Rawls scholars.) This doesn’t make his theory of justice teleological itself; but it does so to speak give it a teleological undergirding.

Of course, Nozick and Rawls don’t have to answer such questions. But refusal to answer them amounts to table-thumping. Answering by appeal to more backwards-looking considerations (P is a reason for deserving X because Q obtains) invites a regress: what’s the big deal about Q obtaining? Moreover, wouldn’t it be better if we took R to be the relevant reason instead? (Note the teleological meta-critique.)

Now, for the record, I think that any question of justice is ultimately a question of how people are going to live together. Inspection of any actual use of justice-concepts will, I think, vindicate that assertion. Answering that question depends on ideas of what would be a better or worse way to live together. And then you are appealing to goods, particular or common. I am here following the broad sweep of the natural law tradition of justice (and social thinking generally); I think there are pretty good arguments for it.

Back to the main thread: when people say that sinners deserve death, or that God punishes sinners out of justice, or that God’s justice had to be satisfied on the cross if nowhere else, they are generally not using these concepts in ways that have any bearing on how people (including God) are going to live together. Usually, they simply haven’t thought that far. And it’s not impossible that someone think that far: here is an example. One might say that (a) divine justice is a matter of giving free agents what they really want; this is because (b) God aims to create the best possible society, and (c) in the best possible society, no one’s desires are unfulfilled; (d) as a matter of contingent fact, some people don’t want to be around God, but (e) as a fact about human nature, the members of the best possible society will be around God. It follows that out of justice, God has to do something else with the people who don’t want to be around him. That does not explain the eternality or bad-as-it-could-possibly-be aspects of hell, and it doesn’t sound like punishment. No doubt it needs to be cleaned up in other ways. But it’s a start.