The main problem with the idea of Christ's suffering as substitutionary punishment is the agent-centeredness of punishment (to use Mike's idea): justice does not say that someone is to be punished but that the malefactor is to be punished. I want to offer three considerations which go some way--probably not all the way--towards alleviating this concern. I suspect they are complementary parts of the truth.
1. The Church: It is a mistake to think of justification as simply something individual between me and Jesus. Salvation is through incorporation in the Church, the Body of Christ. But Christ is the Head of the Church. He suffers on behalf of the whole Body of Christ of which we are members. The punishment of a sin committed with the hand need not involve the hand. If we take seriously the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ, we might have the resources to understand how the Head can take on the sufferings due to the rest of the Body. Of course we have to be careful. The idea is a metaphor. But it indicates a reality, and it is not, I think, implausible that the reality of identification between Christ's body and his Church be sufficient for an account of substitutionary sacrifice.
2. Love: Nozick in "Love's Bond" particularly clearly brings out an aspect of love already found in Aristotle's account of friendship and central to Aquinas' account of how we love God in loving neighbor: When x loves y, the increases and decreases in y's welfare are directly (i.e., constitutively, and not mediated through any sentiment of sympathy) increases and decreases in x's welfare. (Nozick takes this to be the definition of love, but he's wrong. For then by definition everyone would love herself, but that is false. However, he is right that this is a part of the concept of love.) There is a union between lover and beloved: the beloved is another self. Aquinas talks of the mutual interpenetration of lover and beloved in intellect and affection: we see things from our beloved's point of view, we will things from our beloved's point of view, and we embrace the beloved with our intellect and affection. These four aspects of the mutual interpenetration of will and intellect are present even when the love is not reciprocated, and so even unreciprocated love involves a union of will and intellect with the beloved. Reciprocation heightens the union by providing the four converse aspects: the beloved wills things from the lover's point of view, and so on.
Take all these ideas of the closeness of lover and beloved seriously.
Now, take these ideas of the unitiveness of love really seriously. Then I think it is at least not entirely implausible that in mutual love, one might be able to take on the other's punishments. When one's welfare is decreased, so is the other's. Each sees from the other's point of view; each acts in some way from the other's point of view. When by grace we accept Christ's love, we return love for love, since without love salvation is impossible. We are united with Christ in love, and in this love's union it may well be that his innocent sufferings are appropriately credited to us.
3. Sanctification: The previous two considerations pointed towards ecclesiology and the believer's grace-moved response as important to an account of substitutionary punishment. Both of these moves manifest something about the believer's "closeness" to Christ, a closeness that seems to me important to the substitutionary sacrifice. And just as we should not divorce an account of justification from its ecclesial dimension and the believer's response, we should also not divorce it from sanctification. We should, instead, see justification and sanctification either as the same thing or as two aspects of the same thing. If we do this, we see another closeness between Christ and the believer. Sanctification consists in its coming to be the case that in a mysterious way "it is not I who live, but Christ that lives in me" (Gal. 3:20). But if the Christian's life is no longer her but Christ's, if it is Christ living here in her, manifest in her actions, then it is no surprise that his punishment is credited to her. For it is not credited to someone alien to Christ: it is credited to someone who, in the very act of being credited, is sanctified, is made such that it is Christ who lives in her. We might even look at the substitutionary sacrifice here as closely tied to the fittingness of such union: if the Christian's life is lived by Christ in an intimate and deep sense, then there would almost be a kind of responsibility for the Christian's sins in Christ, her life having been taken on by him.
All three of your responses include something related to union with Christ, but isn't there a more robust notion of union with Christ that most defenders of penal substitution have considered central to the whole idea? The substitute is in one sense taking the punishment of the one substituted for, but this happens in another sense because the one being substituted for is vicariously taking part in being punished. If there's something more substantial to being identified with Christ because he's my substitute, then my dying with him on the cross and being raised with him in his resurrection is more than just a metaphor. The substitution becomes justified because I received my punishment in his receiving it. This kind of language appears throughout the New Testament.
Jeremy:
I was trying to find ways in which there is something substantial about the identification with Christ... I am not sure just the fact that I am dying with Christ does the job, because that need not involve any actual suffering. Sometimes repentance is painful, and sometimes it is a joy.
What about mystical union? Or do you think that's just a placeholder for things like what you've outlined here? Something seems more substantial about mystical union, as if these things don't go as far. But then you did say that these might only be part of the true story.
Jeremy:
What kind of mystical union? I assume you don't mean the sort of thing that the high mystics have, since not every Christian has that, and here we're talking about something that every Christian has. I grant that there is a deep and mysterious union between the believer and Christ. And this union may be relevant. But my feeling is that the things that I've listed are all aspects of that deep and mysterious union. There may be further aspects. And these further aspects may be even more helpful.
The bigger point is that a focus on the way that the believer is united with Christ can give us insight into the substitutionary sacrifice. It is not simply a case where God picks two people out of a hat, and miraculously brings it about that the punishments of the one get credited to the other (that is, I think, the strawman version of substitutionary sacrifice). It is a case of union.
Looking at it this way may also help see why not everyone's sins are automatically erased. For the union may need to be mutual. I need to die with Christ.
I too am attracted to the idea that our union with Christ plays an important role in explaining the penal substitution view. Most frequently in my experience, I have found that scholars give our union with Christ primarily a legal interpretation. We are united with Christ legally from God's perspective as judge. But I have always thought that there must be some further ground of this legal union. There must be something ontological or quasi-ontological going on here to make the notion of a legal union comprehensible.
Perhaps the doctrine of predestination has some relevance to the idea of our union with Christ and the deepness of this union. Perhaps God's predestining me to be in Christ has some importance when it comes to my legal union with Christ from God's perspective as judge.
There are other problems.
1) If the just punishment of our sins is eternal damnation, and Jesus is supposed to suffer the just punishment of our sins, then why is it that Jesus' suffering of it is entirely temporal? How can temporal punishment pay for eternal punishment?
2) The normal reason that a crime committed by the hand can result in a punishment of another part of the body is that it is understood that the hand is not the cause of the crime. If in fact someone's hand had a will of it's own and chose to commit crimes, arguably the only way to satisfy justice would be to punish the hand.
3) Why assume that retribution has intrinsic value? As Kvanvig pointed out in the comments on the last post, if justice requires retribution, and the demands of justice are perfect, then mercy doesn't appear to have any moral status. God would not need to be merciful, because his punishments would always hit the mark of justice perfectly.
It seems more reasonable to me to drop the assumption that God's punishment is fundamentally retributive rather than rehabilitative, and thus only instrumental towards justice rather than intrinsically just.
1. There are at least three answers possible here, not all compatible with each other, of which I like the first most and the third least:
a. Jesus's non-physical suffering might actually have been infinite. The virtuous person feels pain at seeing evil, roughly in proportion to the magnitude of the evil and her amount of virtue. But the sins of people involve infinite evil according to Anselm, being offenses against God. Thus, the perfectly virtuous person might suffer infinitely at seeing these evils vividly. On the other hand, a vicious person might suffer only finitely--and hence might need to suffer for eternity to get the right total amount of suffering.
b. The total amount of suffering in hell might be finite, even though the amount of time is infinite.
c. It could be that Christ only needs to bear the punishment of people's sins insofar as these sins are against neighbor (or maybe only those sins that are against neighbor that the neighbor has not forgiven). Sins against God can simply be forgiven by God, with no need for any further punishment. But the punishment due to people's sins insofar as these sins are against neighbor is finite--it is the sins against God that are infinite.
2. Note that justification and sanctification involve a union of will between Christ and the former sinner. This union of will might help with the concern.
3. On my view, justice does not require retribution nor reward. But there is good reason, in justice, to levy penalties for bad deeds and give rewards for good deeds. Punishment and reward are fitting, though not required. (I argued for this in the other thread. If reward were required, we'd have a society where altruism would be nigh impossible, since by benefiting someone, one would be placing an obligation on others.)
Punishment and reward have intrinsic value, I think. We reward those who have done good even if we know that our reward does not encourage them to any further goods. And if, per impossibile, someone's sins were so terrible that they became irredeemable, surely that would be all the more reason for punishment. Moreover, the person who repents of a terrible crime tends to think--indeed, this seems to be a necessary condition for us to take the repentance as genuine--that she deserves punishment.
1.(a)
If a sin against God is infinite, and Jesus were perfectly virtuous, and as you said "roughly in proportion to the magnitude of the evil and her amount of virtue" then wouldn't that imply that any sin at all would have caused Jesus infinite suffering? In that case, why the cross? Indeed, why death at all?
(b) Even if suffering in hell is in some sense infinite, it seems to me that suffering with no end is fundamentally different from suffering for a finite time followed by eternal bliss. So we might say, Jesus suffered infinitely, but our punishment was infinite *and eternal* suffering, so the punishments still do not match.
(c) This is an interesting possibility, but my objections really fall under point 3.
2. I see your point better than I did at first.
3. What is the proper response to someone who has wronged you, asks for forgiveness, but feels that they don't deserve to be your friend? If you would answer as I would that forgiveness is the right response, then perhaps we might say that guilt, and even dessert, have intrinsic value, but that even when punishment is deserved, punishment is not always "fitting."
(An aside: if we are admitting guilty persons' feelings that they deserve punishment as evidence, should we not also mention that virtuous persons tend to feel they deserve no reward for doing good?)
What distinguishes between cases where punishment is the fitting response and cases where it is not? One possibility is that punishment is appropriate in cases where 1) it serves to rehabilitate, or 2) it serves to protect others.
What is the value in inflicting harm on someone who is irredeemable? I'm not sure I'd agree there is any. I would agree that they deserve it, but not that it would be good to carry it out.
For example, one might punish a dog when it bites, but what would the value be in continuing to punish a dog who had become irredeemably feral? Wouldn't it be cruel to punish it once the punishment can do no good, though the dog's deeds if it continued to live might be said to deserve it?
I agree that Alex's first idea seems potentially fruitful for explaining why it is o.k. for Jesus to be punished for our sins. But, in order to see whether we can get a good explanation we have to cash out the metaphysics behind the metaphor of Jesus as the head of the body of Christ. I'll start out by discussing two "metaphysically serious" theories and my discussion of these theories will suggest a less metaphysically serious theory that I think is quite interesting and that might be the best way of saving the penal substitutionary view.
1) The most metaphysically serious view is that believers literally become one with Jesus; they are no longer two separate beings. If this were so, Mike's worry (I'll call it the Justice Worry) would no longer apply because Jesus's sufferings would literally be our sufferings. Now, I don't think anybody will accept this theory for several reasons: 1) we certainly don't seem to literally become Jesus in this life, and yet we are forgiven as a result of Jesus's passion in this life, 2) all traditional views of the afterlife regard us as distinct from God. Now, we could regard "unity with Christ" as something less than identity, but involving some sort of intimate causal interaction (sort of like how my hand is distinct from me but intimately causally integrated with me). But, any such view will seem subject to the Justice Worry, because as long as I am distinct from Jesus, even if he and I causally interact in intimate ways, it still seems unjust for a distinct being to be punished for what I do.
2) Even though my hand is distinct from me and from my head and my feet, it is quite plausible that my hand, feet and head are all parts of me (set aside Cartesian dualism for a moment). Perhaps then, and this is the second metaphysically serious theory, we should think of the unity between us - the Body of Christ - and Christ - the head of the body -analagously to the unity of my hand and my head and my feet. Christ and all believers are parts of one, literal, being. What would make it so that humans can become unified with Christ in this way? The indwelling of the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is the metaphysical glue, so to speak, holding Jesus and believers together. Now, if we still think of Jesus as dying for the sins of individuals - other members of the body - we still run into the Justice Worry. But, if we instead think of Jesus as dying for the sins of the whole Body, we don't seem to face the Justice Worry because it doesn't seem at all strange for a unified being to pay out its punishment by simply focusing punishment on one part of the being - in this case Jesus. This idea is quite similar to Gregory of Nyssa's view; as J.N.D. Kelly writes, "The whole of human nature, he claims, constitutes as it were a single living being, ... so that the experience of a part becomes the experience of the whole. In this way all of mankind is seen to share in what Christ achieves by his resurrection" (Early Christian Doctrines, p. 381).
Although interesting, the chief problem with this view is that it is hard to understand what kind of being would be formed by the unity of Christ with believers. Is it conscious? It has members that are conscious, but it itself doesn't seem to be conscious, just as a community has members but the community itself doesn't have its own consciousness. But, then how can it sin? Also, the view doesn't deal with the issue of how individual sins are dealt with; it only deals with sins of the body. But, the above analogy with a community suggests a less metaphysically serious picture that might be able to overcome these difficulties.
3) According to the third idea, we can think of humans as a community and as Jesus paying the punishment for the sins of the community. The reason he can be punished is that he himself, in virtue of being human, is a part of the guilty community. This idea escapes the Justice Worry because it doesn't seem contrary to justice for a part of a community to pay the price of the sins of the whole community (as long as the part undertakes the punishment voluntarily, but Jesus did undergo the crucifixion voluntarily). How do individual sins get forgiven? In virtue of being a part of a community whose sins have been forgiven. So, individual sins get forgiven as a result of communal sins having been payed for.
I realize that this view is still very rough, but on the face of it the theory seems able to hold on to some sort of penal substitution while avoiding the Justice Worry, which I think is the main problem for penal substitutionary views. The theory would no doubt have to be developed to deal with all sorts of other questions; here's one: in what sense did Jesus die for the sins of the world, according to this theory, if only the sins of the community of believers get forgiven? Also, Trent's worry in the other thread still holds for this theory - the sins of the community don't get forgiven, they get payed for.
I should add that this model fits pretty well with N.T. Wright's view that Jesus's vocation was to free Israel from exile; Jesus's primary mission was to save a community and individuals get saved in virtue of being members of that community. So, if you find Wright's view, or similar views, plausible, then you have at least some motivation to adopt this third view of the atonement.
A personal postscript: I'm not sure I fully believe this theory; I merely put it forward here as a fruitful theory to explore.
I haven't worked through the issue in detail and settled on a position yet, but I'm wondering what the group thinks about (substitutionary) recapitulation, where it is not punishment, but Jesus' unfailing obedience in our stead, that satisfies the Father. What advantages/disadvantages does this view have in relation to penal substitution.
Blessings,
Steve
Joshua:
Thanks for helping to improve on my inchoate ideas.
"in what sense did Jesus die for the sins of the world" -- That one seems easy, but it may be deceptively so: He died for the sins of the world in that his sacrifice is something everyone can avail herself of, simply by joining the Church.
Along with Steve, I am also just beginning to work through these issues, and I have an idea for the group to consider and comment on.
Could the Justice Worry be alleviated by suggesting that Jesus can take our place because he is in some sense responsible for our guilt.
This may be so even if we have libertarian freedom. For God knew prior to creating us that we would use our freedom to sin, but created us anyway. Does he not, in a sense, bear some responsiblity then for our sin? Maybe, maybe not?
If so, then perhaps it is just that he be a substitute for us.
Consider an analogy. I am keeping Josh T. locked up because he is somewhat unstable. One day I set him loose, KNOWING that he will freely (perhaps even in a libertarian sense) kill once released. Surely he is guilty. But, I bear some responsibility for his guilt, since I set him loose. It seems just that I could pay for his crime (though he may need to be locked up once again so he does not kill again :) ).
If the suggestion that God is in some sense responsible for our guilt (in the way suggested) is right, then is the justice worry alleviated?