Did God punish Jesus on the cross? William Lane Craig vs Greg Boyd on Penal Substitution Atonement

[Music] well hello and welcome back i'm justin briley this is unbelievable the show that brings you conversations that matter and you can get weekly dialogues and debates via our podcast too sign up to our newsletter you won't miss a thing plus you'll get a free ebook that will send your way there are links to the show and the newsletter in the description so do like and subscribe this video if you enjoy it really glad to say that on the show today i'm joined by greg boyd and william lane craig as we ask is penal substitution central to christ's atoning death on the cross well many of us know the popular hymn in christ alone it includes that line but on the cross as jesus died the wrath of god was satisfied not all christians are comfortable singing that line and today we're discussing that doctrine of penal substitution as defended by christian philosopher william lane craig in his new book atonement and the death of christ opposite bill on the show today is theologian greg boyd teaching pastor at woodland hills church in minnesota and greg is a critic of penal substitutionary atonement he says christ's death on the cross is best understood in a christus victor model that christ overcame the powers of darkness in an act of sacrificial love that subverts the violent images of a wrathful god well we'll be debating atonement theory today and why it matters so welcome along to the show both bill and greg great to have you both with me today thank you good to be here thanks for the invitation well um i'm so glad to get you both together um i've been influenced by both of your work and i've read both of you on these subjects around atonement perhaps we'll just start with a couple of introductions to you both bill um you've been very fruitful during this lockdown period we've obviously spoken nearer to the beginning of the lockdown but not only have you had this book published atonement and the death of christ you've been busy working on other things as well haven't you yes i just finished a book on the historical atom which is now in press and i've begun now my final major work i anticipate which is writing a systematic philosophical theology and i anticipate that this will be a five to ten year project that i've embarked on during this sequestration and so the big blocks of time it's afforded may have been very very helpful fantastic magnum opus yes i i look forward to it how many years do you think that'll be in the making though bill at least five at least five i would be thrilled if i could get it done in five right um greg welcome back to the show it's been a while since we we last had you on um you of course are in full-time ministry as well as all the writing and other speaking and and so on that you do how has life been for you in in with this present coronavirus and lockdown in the last few months well it's too it's 20 20 and it's it's been the second year do you honestly i gotta the church has been going very well i i feel like we've we've been hit on all pistons we didn't skip a beat yeah on this uh and there's even some kind of advantages to doing uh you know zoom ministries it's expanded our reach quite a bit so uh things are overall going pretty good uh but uh it's been a invisible year it's been a very challenging one that's for sure in in all kinds of france yeah well look um coronavirus aside we're going to be discussing something that obviously is is fundamental to christian belief the death of christ on the cross and how that pays for our sins um bill maybe you could tell us what was the inspiration for this particular work and the the body of study and research you did that brought us this book atonement and the death of christ tell us a bit about that one of the interesting phenomena of our age is the renaissance of christian philosophy that's been going on over the last 50 years or so and one of the most noteworthy features of this renaissance is the entry by christian philosophers into areas normally reserved for the systematic theologian in areas like the trinity and the incarnation some of the most important and creative and insightful work in recent decades has been done not by christian theologians but by christian philosophers one of the areas however that has remained under developed is atonement theory and for years i have longed for my christian philosophical colleagues to address this issue and to take up a robust defense of the classic reformation doctrine of the atonement and to my frustration nobody has done so and so i finally decided as preparatory to writing this systematic philosophical theology that i spoke of a moment ago that i was just going to have to tackle the issue myself and so i began to plunge into the study of the doctrine of the atonement biblically historically and philosophically and i have to tell you justin i never anticipated the richness of the insights that that study would bring to me of this central doctrine of the christian faith i thought i understood the doctrine of the atonement i've taught on it but this study has revealed to me new areas of insight that i never had before and so it's been a wonderful experience i'm glad to hear that bill um greg um tell us a little bit about your overall reaction to the book um obviously it's coming from a different place from you and you might want to sketch out how your thinking on the atonement has developed yourself over the years sure sure sure well first let me say uh congratulations bill i it was a good book i i want to say that it's uh especially your the survey of all the different varieties uh i was unaware of most of that um and uh the the diversity of views that also kind of presents a little bit of a challenge because it makes for a moving target i mean there's some folks in there that uh don't even believe they only hold that god punish jesus who you classify as penal substitution um and so i mean at the very start i i want to narrow it down a little bit to say that the only problem i have is with the idea that god needs to be appeased to forgive i all the other varieties i'm you know okay with but on the whole i want to say that um um the historical stuff was really insightful and i you know i wasn't to be honest with you i wasn't excited about reading another book on the atonement because after a while it feels like same old same old you know i don't care but but this is not same old uh you you really do carve new ground your stuff on grodius was uh i got i did you know the way you bust stereotypes he's a moral government guy and i didn't know that there was a penal substitution laying behind that so i want to thank you i really do appreciate i i love it when you read a book and you learn some things that's really really good um i feel like the in terms of just a general okay that was the positive now here's the kind of critical part it was a little bit of an odd experience to be honest because as i'm reading your book i'm i'm agreeing with so much of it uh and i think we put the pieces together kind of pretty much the same way to have the same kind of portrait and yet when i step back we've got very different views and and the analogy i would use is like have you ever had like a painting or a portrait or something which when you frame it one way you're like oh i really like that you put a different frame on it and it's like a different picture and i i think we frame things just differently um the most fundamental difference i i would say is that for you it seems like everything's framed in a legal context uh you're you're very big on the you know that it's like a court of law analogy god's the judge you're you're very uh insistent that the forgiveness is like morally you see it like a pardon from a from a king uh rather than a personal kind of forgiveness thing and so that it's a it's a legal framework and and you talk about all the presence of of the judicial metaphors and the judicial language um you know throughout the scripture um but i i i everyone agrees that there's there's both you know judicial and cultic uh metaphors and language about uh sin and punishment in scripture but there's there's one category of well so far as i can see bill uh i find myself being persuaded by those scholars who argue that um the dominant way of speaking about sin and punishment in scripture uh is not judicial but organic and and it where sin the punishment for sin is built into this sense itself um and you've got you know all these different kind of sayings about uh you know if you dig a hole for your enemy you yourself will fall in it uh violence will come back on your head the violence that you have done will come back on you and horrify you and and so this intrinsic sort of judgment it seems to me i'm thinking about like you know stefan davis and uh uh jose craft and terence freightheim those scholars craig why do we what why don't we just um put a pause on that and just just because what i think we should do before we come to some of those specifics and and i think i'd love to to dig into that is it's perhaps just for bill to sketch out very simply what where he does land with the the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement because obviously there may be some people watching or listening bill who who who aren't even sure exactly what that that phrase means so why don't we start right at the beginning in that sense before we get into the the technicalities and and just have you sort of lay out um the groundwork here bill what um what what what do we mean by this view this is the central view that you defend it's not the only view you explain in the book this penal substitution you're right and that's that's that's critical to my position it seems to me that any adequate theory of the atonement needs to be a multifaceted theory that will include a variety of these new testament motifs like justification penal substitution ransom theory moral influence and so forth and so any theory of the atonement that attempts to reduce the atonement to just one facet or motif is going to be incomplete and inadequate and so i believe that penal substitution is one of the essential facets of a full orbed and biblically adequate theory of the atonement uh and in in that of course you do though say in the book that you believe that penal substitution is in a sense the the core motif if you will um yes um gemologists call the central facet of a jewel the table and i do think that the table of uh your atonement theory that central facet that anchors the others is penal substitution because it makes sense of so many of the other facets now obviously you've written a whole book that deals with this in great depth but but in a nutshell is there a way that you would sum up what what penal substitutionary atonement means what what what that doctrine is yes i think that penal substitution is the doctrine that jesus christ bore the suffering for sin which would have been our punishment had we born it instead and thereby he freed us from liability to punishment and in that sense that uh is an essential part of what it is to be forgiven uh to when we accept that that sacrifice made by christ on the cross this connects with what greg was talking about a moment ago people would be surprised to know that there's a whole philosophical literature on forgiveness and the nature of forgiveness and one of the insights of this literature is that there is a distinction between forgiveness and legal pardon these are not the same thing and i think that divine forgiveness of sins is much more akin to a legal pardon than it is to the kind of personal forgiveness that we extend to one another in personal relationships personal forgiveness does not absolve guilt or make a person into a new creature legal pardon absolves the condemned criminal from guilt and constitutes him a new man he is as innocent in the eyes of the law as if he had never committed the crime and that's what divine forgiveness does for us it's not simply a removal of god's wrath or emotional anger with us far more it is a divine pardon that absolves our guilt and reconstitutes us as new creatures or persons in god's sight so before we come back to greg to to sort of give us sort of his response to penal substitution what um i mean many people characterize it as and the problem that many people have with it is the idea that god punishes an innocent party in place of us who did deserve the punishment as it were and they see that as somehow morally wrong that that how can how can that constitute justice um in that sense so well is that the view that you take of what it represents god punishing jesus in our place well notice the way i've framed or formulated the doctrine of penal substitution um some penal substitution theorist notably john stott has said we should never say that god punished his beloved son rather penal substitution means that jesus bore the suffering that would have been my punishment if it had been inflicted on me instead it would have been my just desert and by bearing that that suffering he thereby frees me from liability to punishment so in fact it is not an essential element of a penal substitutionary atonement theory that god punished christ for our sins that's open to the penal substitutionary theorist uh that's one possibility but it's not required uh you you can say instead that christ bore the suffering that would have been my punishment um thereby freeing me from the liability to punishment i i can see that yes there is a a difference there potentially between those two is is that where you end up landing bill would you say is i mean you're obviously keen to to give a an overview of all no i i myself take the stronger view i think that uh christ did in fact bear the punishment for sin that we deserved but i don't want to rule out people like john stott from being penal substitutionary theorists and so the way the doctrine is formulated is an inclusive formulation that will allow you to affirm that christ either was punished in our place or that he bore the suffering that would have been our punishment had it been inflicted on us greg you've you've written this um you you've said that um penal substitution makes it look as though god had to vent his wrath on jesus in order to forgive us um so so for you you do feel that this doesn't paint god the right way this this way of looking at substitution you know it's interesting let me first say that i i also agree that the talmud's multifaceted uh and i appreciate the table i had never heard that before that core thing there and that's what i would put chris is victor i i think that is what makes sense of the whole and informs the parts and that's probably where we disagree the you know the thing is what bill just said on penal substitution and this was kind of a strange part when i'm reading this book is that i could be i would be classified a penal substitution the theorist because while i frame it differently i believe that jesus stood in our place and bore the death consequences of sin that we deserve uh and yeah that's how we're reconciled with god the only part of it i've ever really had a problem with is the idea that god that retributive justice is an essential attribute of god that all sin must be punished and this goes to the legal framework again uh i when i talk about uh us or jesus bearing the death consequences of sin that is that that is what i think is the punishment of god the judgment of god it's the wrath of god that paul talks about in romans 1. uh he says the wrath of god's been revealed from heaven and then it says three times says that uh god delivered them over to their reprobate hearts and all that and i so i see god in his mercy as is hanging with us saying don't go down this road because it naturally leads to death this way of going god is life and so sin is is rejecting god so sin is death you're going down a death road and god's mercy tries to hang on to us saying don't go down that road but there comes a point where if he sees his mercy is just enabling us uh then god says i have to turn you over and and uh suffer the consequences of this and that is i i think the essence of the judgment of god um so i i i frame it all more in organic terms rather than legal terms but if if the appeasing god's wrath is not part of it then we can still discuss the different meanings of this but uh we're not as far apart as i thought we were going to be well well that that's very interesting to hear but maybe it would help to tease out some of these terms greg is using here appeasing god's wrath firstly what do you take to be the meaning of god's wrath um i did mention that that well-known line from in christ alone um on the cross as jesus died the wrath of god was satisfied um what does that mean to you bill yeah well i do think that god is incensed with sin um if god were not angry with evil he would be indifferent to the plight of all the victims of sin and injustice and so i think that it's quite proper that a righteous god would be angry when evil is done and people are victimized and he's not a callous unfeeling impassable god i think but at the root of god's wrath i think lies this notion of retributive justice it's not just that he's angry rather it is that his holiness and justice cry out for the just desert of sin which is i think death death is both the consequence of sin as greg explained but in the old testament it's also a punishment for sin all the way back into the story of the garden of adam and eve you have this legal terminology that indicates that sin is a capital crime that deserves death so sin is both or rather death is both a consequence of sin in this organic sense but it's also a punishment for sin in the legal sense and we mustn't attenuate our theology by eliminating these multiple facets they're all part of the big picture and we neglect any one of them to our detriment um great quick response before we go to a break i'll try um see it seems to me i i i would agree with that i think it is consequence of sin i think it's the punishment of sin i agree that it's expressed sometimes in judicial categories but i think it's more fundamentally expressed in organic categories but the organic seems to me to be the more fundamental for example if if you're speeding and you break the law well then you get a fine okay it's imposed on you that's a judicial punishment the legal punishment but if you're speeding going down a hill that has got a sharp curve at the bottom and you because you're speeding don't make that curve and end up getting in a crash and getting injured maybe killed well see there that's an organic punishment uh an intrinsic punishment because there's no connection between the fine and speeding but there is a definite connection between going down the sails feeding and getting in a crash it seems to me that the reason you have the law is is to warn people about the organic reality um the law is not the more fundamental thing i don't think the it's it's in service to this reality do this and it ends up in depth um and so i i just don't weight the the legal terminology the way uh bill does i think it's just indisputable that paul's theology is suffused with legal terminology and the imagery of the courtroom uh this is also prominent in the old testament old testament judaism was a religion of law law and ancient judaism are virtually synonymous so these legal categories and legal motifs suffuse judaism and they pervade the book of romans uh in paul's doctrine of both justification and sin and so we can't downplay these legal categories that we have sinned deserve to be punished for our sins and that through the intervention of jesus christ he has satisfied the demands of divine justice thereby freeing us from our condemnation and liability to punishment we'll go to a quick break and we'll we'll be back in just a moment here are unbelievable we're talking about atonement theory today specifically penal substitutionary atonement which is very much what's defended the core of which is defended in the new book by william lane craig atonement and the death of christ in conversation with bill today is minnesota pastor and theologian greg boyd and we'll be back in just a moment time what i want to invite roger to comment on is why couldn't the mental realm include an infinite consciousness it's too much like us it's it's like putting like yes like the greek views of the gods in some sense were too much like that they were finite and contingent here we're talking about a metaphysically necessary source i admire this noble aspiration to find the highest possible ideal it's almost as if you're proposing a new religion to meet this new challenge it's not a new religion what it is is something that sits in the same place it addresses some of the same needs but it is not founded on the same principle if the new testament says that jesus did x y and z did he do it or not i don't think it's a story that's made by committee am i going to have a later literary genius who comes up with a great story like this or am i going to say no jesus is the genius and somehow that story has basically been preserved welcome back to today's show we're having a theological discussion between two christian guests on the show today william lane craig and greg boyd are both well-known uh theologians uh teachers but they've got different views on penal substitutionary atonement what exactly happened on the cross how did christ's death pay for our sins and bill craig has written atonement and the death of christ an exegetical historical and philosophical exploration um and there's a surprising amount of agreement in some ways between uh greg and bill today more than i was expecting gentlemen if i'm honest um but before we get back into sort of this this categories you've described here of the legal versus organic way in which uh sin is a punishment um i i mean you have spoken very strongly against penal substitution return i was listening to a sermon of yours the other day greg um where you got very passionate about the way that you see that this myth the redemptive violence you called it this idea that you can make things right by by killing someone by by creating that kind of blood sacrifice and so on um and um and as i say you've had this phrase frequently in writings that this idea that god had to vent his wrath on jesus in order to forgive us is just a completely wrong way of viewing god and the atonement so so what what what are the forms of penal substitutionary atonement that you really have in mind if as you say in terms of what bill's representing you're just framing it slightly differently and you could even call yourself a penal substitutionary uh atonement sort of theorist if if it was framed under some descriptions that uh the variety that uh bill lays out and i was also surprised at how broad that was uh but okay so bill said just before the break uh that that uh jesus died to i don't do exactly phrases but to appease or to satisfy the father's wrath and he uses that throughout the book and that that's the part it alters your picture of god it generates a number of uh difficult questions bill does a good job as they can be done and trying to answer these questions like how is jesus innocent and yet legally guilty and how are we guilty yet legally innocent and how does this uh legal fiction or this pronouncement uh allow god to forgive us um and all those are created because of that idea that retributive justice is an intrinsic attribute of god it seems to me that that is and i like to ask all this because i i i it's several points you've called it a caricature um the way you presented the character struck me as the form of penal substitution that i was taught and that most of the people that i see is taught like that like the students i teach and stuff um it's all about here's analogy that i was given all right when i was first a christian uh god's wrath you know we were sinners and god was about to condemn us send us to eternal hell because justice must be satisfied uh but jesus and as a preacher actually did this i'm not kidding had a hammer and was going to smash this glass uh and like the wrath of god was going to come down and crush us but jesus says no i'll take the brunt instead and so he pulls out from behind the pulpit a cookie sheet and a cookie sheet catches the hammer and vibrates and that's how we now can go free since since the justice was satisfied by punishing jesus it doesn't need to be satisfied by punishing us for eternity though i will say i've never quite understood how his 30 or 36 hours on the cross or being dead is the just payment for eternal yelling if that how does that satisfy god's justice if justice demand that we would be damned eternally um the whole we have multiplied but that's a different issue so is that a caricature a complete character bill or does that and the idea that jesus absorbs the wrath that we that was destined for us i would agree with you greg that god the father does not vent his wrath upon jesus rather what he expresses is the just punishment for our sins and here's why these legal motifs are so important it's not that god is just emotionally angry it's rather that we are guilty of capital offenses we are like uh criminals who have committed capital crimes and whose just desert is death but god out of his tremendous love for us says i will become incarnate and bear the death penalty for sin that you deserve so that you can go free and be cleansed and forgiven so the incarnation and atonement of christ is the supreme act of self-giving sacrifice on the part of god it shows god's tremendous love for us as well as his holiness and righteousness which demands uh punishment for sin justly deserved can you get you can get involved with that greg um it's that odd experience i had read this book verbally i can but i frame it differently it's like in james uh when it says that each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire enticed then after desire has conceived it gives birth to sin and sin when it's fully grown it gives birth to death okay so that's kind of organ the relationship between punishment and sin is a relationship between conception and birth if that being the case what do you add to it by saying oh now god also has to punish it it's there there's nothing more for god to do is there well i i think that what you add is a more adequate biblical view as i said these legal motifs suffuse judaism and they feature front and center in the book of romans i'm not even sure that in the book of james that james is not talking about penal death there as a penalty for sin rather than a consequence i think it's both it's both a consequence and a penalty and we shouldn't try to make this an either or it's it's a both and i would say good well do you have room do you have room in your atonement theory for the idea that christ bore the suffering that would have been our punishment had it been inflicted on us thereby releasing us from liability to punishment yes yeah good complaint but the difference for me in this in this debate is is who's doing the punishing in a sense because i get the sense from you you greg that this is an organic form of punishment you say it's not god doing the punishment it's it is its own punishment but it's but divine punishment and that god created this moral order right but but but but bill do you do you see god as having a sort of direct role in punishing either people or jesus uh i think that the fact that god's justice in the new testament is in large measure what is called retributive justice according to which the guilty deserve punishment uh the fact that god's justice is retributive i think is so clear in that it's eschatological that is to say people are punished in the afterlife uh they experience eternal separation from god or if you will annihilation depending on your view but in any case at that point it's too late for punishment to serve purposes of rehabilitation or deterrence or other goods that are visualized by a consequentialist theory of justice eschatological justice can only be it seems to me retributive in nature and so this shows that the demands of god's retributive justice um are satisfied i think by christ's bearing the punishment for sin that we deserved what's your take on retributive justice then greg um what like if god is love and that's the essence of god and i think bill agrees with that i'm wondering how retributive justice can be like it seems to me that god is love everything god does is an expression of god's love and uh i i just have never understood why you it comes on why is sin sin and it seems i would argue sin is sin and god hates sin i agree with what bill said about god's hatred towards sin but he hates it because it kills us it it's and he loves us um and yeah so so it's the law isn't it it's not something in and of itself it's uh uh is there in service to something more fundamental and that's why i think friending it see we frame everything in a legal way it almost seems like you turn a love story into a legal story and you do talk about the love of god and you even get excited about gotta do it with you but but uh then there's all these these legal you know the whole books on these legal terminology and i i was amazed at how you dug into these court cases going back to the 18th century you know it's showing analogies about how you know an innocent person could be guilty whatever you've got way more patience in time than i do because i i could not wait through that stuff um but see that all comes because it's framed primarily as a legal problem the atonement's like a legal problem and and for me it's you know the whole thing comes down to a the bridegroom uh his his betrothed bride has gotten kidnapped and by this and seduced by this uh evil person who's intent on killing her and so god does everything that could possibly be done uh going to the full extent across whatever to then free her from that that uh seducer and to woo her back and win her back and restore her that's the core love story that i see going on with the atonement uh it's got legal dimensions to it but uh if you make it if that becomes the center then it seems to me you've turned it it's this is where uh i i disagree with you bill that that uh we should see the uh forgiveness that comes about as a result of the cross as primarily a pardon a legal pardon uh from a king um you know it's it's it's so my my friend paul eddie pointed this out turned me on to some articles that that had shown that some of the most ferocious judicial link which is used as yahweh is confronting his unfaithful bride i think in ezekiel 16 here you find it in hosea and so you have got the the uh judicial language being used and yet it's put in the context of this marriage it's an intimate marriage thing and so that is a personal thing um and it it it seems to me that that the the bridegroom metaphor which is run throughout scripture and jesus comes and he's now yahweh the bridegroom for a bride to be truth uh that is as intimate as it gets it's as personal as it gets and so i guess i'm not i know the distance between pardon and forgiveness but as it pertains to the atonement i i'm just not seeing uh how that applies excuse me well this is the wonderful thing about the atonement of as i've tried to explicate it is that it enables us to unite these two motifs of christus victor the rescue operation of the beloved and so forth with the absolution of guilt and the expiation of sin and the one without the other is incomplete and unsatisfactory if you have simply the personal redemptive christus victor motif what you don't get there is absolution of guilt you we we need to have something that does away with our guilt and constitutes us innocent and new creations before god so it's very interesting greg the great 19th century uh german theologian albert ritchell wrote a massive book on atonement and justification and to my shock oh really okay he he doesn't begin he doesn't begin the book with the church fathers he begins with anselm and the reason he says is that in the church fathers because of their adherence so much to the christus victor motif there's virtually nothing about reconciliation it does not explain how sinful guilty people are reconciled to the holy god we have to wait until anselm for that so what rituals example shows is it focusing on just one facet to the neglect of the others is going to leave us with an incomplete uh atonement theory and therefore an inadequate atonement theory we want to have both the ransom and rescue redemption motif along with the satisfaction of divine justice motif i i'm just questioning why you need the satisfaction of divine justice motif why you know it's and maybe this is part of the character but you know i was taught that all holy god simply cannot accept sinners uh as they are um and that's why he has to satisfy his justice by he's got funny somebody and so jesus becomes the way that that that uh get gets uh taken care of um but jesus hangs out with sinners all the time and he's got incarnate it doesn't seem like he's got a problem with that um and you find god forgiving people all the time in the bible uh without needing to have a sacrifice or punish somebody um why why why does that and commands us to forgive without expecting payment um and yet god doesn't it it's like uh god in the end yes he pardons us but he never can forgive freely he he he has to collect on the debt and i just don't see why that is the case why can't the husband whose wife has betrayed him why why can't forgiveness be the cleansing in itself that does some does he have to vent his anger what she did on somebody else it seems that love itself is redemptive love itself is reconciling love itself cleanses us and there's more going on than like we haven't talked about our power placed in christ and then christ share you know how we participate in christ uh i grant there's more that needs to be said about it but i just don't get that the that the his justice has to be satisfied with the punishment and that's the most grievous part to me because that's what places the myth of redemptive violence at center stage in uh christian atonement theory and you know anthony bartlett wrote this book called cross purposes where he i think makes a fairly compelling case that it's not a coincidence that when anselm's theory became dominant um that uh it's shortly after that with that we begin to see christian violence beginning to escalate uh whether that's we accept that or not i think it's especially in this climate where everyone's got paranoia about religious violence anyways and justifiably to have violence as the way that god solves the ultimate problem of the universe is is i think unfortunate whereas in the christians victor view the enemy is always the powers uh and and in the early church that is precisely what allows us to not make enemies out of other human beings and so yeah that's a major concern i have with female substitution go ahead bill yeah well the theme runs all the way through the old testament with respect to the levitical animal sacrifices that the death needs to occur but the animals are sacrificed instead of people animals bear the fate that the sacrificer deserves uh and so you have this substitutionary death of the animal uh and these sacrifices were offered in the tabernacle and the temple for centuries in judaism but it's a conviction of the new testament authors that the blood of bulls and goats can't really take away sins to do that you needed the divine son of god who would uh die in our place as the ultimate lamb of god and in jesus last supper he prefigures his death precisely in these sacrificial terms and quotes from isaiah 53 as well which is i think the central place in the old testament where you have a penal substitutionary suffering of the righteous servant for the people and jesus sees himself as the righteous servant of the lord of isaiah 53 who gives his life as a sacrifice for sinners so to get absolution of guilt we need a pardon we need more than just personal forgiveness that can amend um [Music] our feelings toward one another but it doesn't deal with retributive justice and our guilt before god which needs to be expiated that was the purpose of these sacrifices was to symbolically expiate people's guilt and so constitute them righteous before god and christ is the ultimate lamb of god who expiates our sins and therefore gives us absolution yeah well we have uh different takes on the animal sacrifices uh but that could really lead us into a i'll just say this that that uh i read those more in terms of a covenant context and just as god i think retooling a practice they were already doing uh he accommodates it he says in leviticus 17 don't go sacrificing the goat demons anymore you're going to sacrifice sacrifice to me and and uh but every tools that i think to teach covenantal lessons primarily about that um breaking covenant leads to death i think that's the main list of the whole thing right and a covenant is a legal notion sure and so that that cultic language is used throughout i grabbed that and i'm totally on board with substitution see i see the substitution more like um you know if if i see a bus coming down the road and you're distracted in the middle of the road playing with marbles or with your child or something and i go and jump and push you out of the way and i get hit instead i died as your substitute that that's what would have been befalling you i see jesus doing that uh to he absorbs the full death consequences of no all of you have to add gray and jesus jumps in the way instead uh see that that's why what does the legal add to it i i just don't why is god bound by a law like that he's god you know it's it's i i must punish sin i i bill i think you did as good a job as can be done uh in trying to make sense of uh these legal fiction what happens on the cross but at the end of the day i'm still left puzzled as to how god can consider jesus guilty even though he knows he's innocent and consider us innocent even though he knows we're guilty and that that somehow satisfies his justice which allows him to forgive uh i'm wondering what is the reality there i like we're not really righteous but he considers us that uh how does that work okay go ahead bill now in the philosophical portion of the book i deal extensively with these very questions these questions that greg raises are not biblical or theological they're philosophical and i suggest two mechanisms that are prominent in the anglo-american justice system that would account for this one as greg just indicated is the use of legal fictions and i give some wonderful examples in the book of how in british courts uh the justices have adopted legal fictions in order to deal with real world problems and so one way to think of this would be that god adopts for the purposes of this action the legal fiction that jesus actually committed these sins now he didn't but as in a court of law you can adopt a legal fiction for the purpose of an action god could adopt that legal fiction and as a result then jesus would be declared guilty uh for our sins and thereby justly bear the punishment for our sins um and his being punished for our sins in that case is real the satisfaction is real the only thing that would be fictitious there would be that jesus actually did the sins and we all would say that christ cannot sin and so that part is fictitious but then the other element i appeal to greg does not appeal to legal fictions this appeals to something in the law called vicarious liability and it's based upon an old legal principle called respondiat superior which is roughly translated the master is answerable and in british and american law wrongs committed by a servant can be imputed to the master so that the master is responsible for wrongs done by his servant in his role as a servant and on the modern scene this has led to a principle of vicarious liability between employers and employees whereby the wrongs committed by an employee and the discharge of his duties can be imputed to his employer even though the employer is absolutely blameless for those uh wrongs and this shows us that the notion of imputed wrongdoing is not at all something that is foreign to our anglo-american justice system both in civil law and in criminal law and so i think that one way to understand the penal substitution of jesus would be that god holds jesus vicariously liable for our wrongdoing in virtue of his relationship to us and thereby can be punished justly in our place when i was reading through that your very detailed historical assessment stuff when it came to like this vicarious thing it always seems to me that the uh the law there is in service to something more fundamental for example why would an employer be fined for the wrongs of an employee uh isn't it at the bottom at rock bottom is it because the employer should vet their employees better keep a better mind there's always something bold there it's not just made up or decreed or just asserted is it in the court of law no you're quite right that it does serve broader societal ends i i it serves to protect society from wrongs that can be done but in in these cases it's very important to understand that the employer is utterly blameless in the matter he's not guilty of negligence or complicity or failure to supervise uh that's very clear so um what the illustrations show is that the idea of imputation of wrongdoing to an innocent third party is a non-controversial and widely applied principle in anglo-american justice but but it sounds to me greg like your problem with this is is that you don't think that you can simply map legal fictions and that what happens as we kind of make specific laws uh in this instance onto the atonement you feel that's too much of a stretch well more fundamentally i i think it's that there's anyone who just hold a employer responsible for what their employees i grant that he may be blameless uh personally with stuff but there's always a wrong there's a reason for it like in general employers should have better uh supervision of their employees there's something there it's not just a decree and so i'm wondering what is the what is the rationale that that explains this kind of vicarious something that that jesus did if you're talking in legal terms because i it seems to me billy it's just a decree god just says i will i just decree you to be a righteous i decree you to be guilty and it doesn't have unlike court of laws in real life it doesn't have any reality that explains it it's just sort of a decree it feels arbitrary i i'm just going to consider you righteous and then that sacrifices justice it's like how does that sound by justice it seems i i'm not seeing the judgment of what yeah i can speak justice in a court of law because of the other the the rationale for it i don't see it in the penal substitution theory well if jesus is held to be vicariously liable for our sins then even though he is personally virtuous he's declared legally guilty and therefore liable to punishment so that god's uh punishing jesus for our sins is something that's perfectly compatible with the justice of god and the motive for it is god's love for us he wants to find a way to rescue us from sin that does not compromise the demands of his own justice and holiness so that just as god's love is essential to his nature so his justice and holiness are essential to his nature and the the trick is to figure out how both can be fully expressed without compromising one or the other and that's where i think the theory of the atonement is so beautiful in that it shows us how the justice and love of god are both fully expressed without compromise yeah see we it it becomes down to i think in justin raises earlier like like you know who's doing the punishing or i guess i would say who demands a pound of flesh for every sin i'm thinking of you know chronicles of narnia uh and it's the witch who says that edmund must suffer because uh because she says for every treasonous act i get a pound of flesh or i get my my justice and i think that's how you know when jesus dies on the cross in my view uh that is the perfect revelation of god that the he goes to the uncertain extreme of even becoming our sin and becoming our curse uh experience the separation from god uh that's why it cries out my god my god why are you forsaking me so god actually enters into his own antithesis which is as far as god could have possibly gone and that expression a revelation of god's love and that it's like a bomb set off in the in the kingdom of darkness uh the power and wisdom of the cross is what uh causes the king of darkness to self-implode and so in colossians two in colossians two uh paul says that the the death of when jesus died everything that was written against us was nailed to the cross abolished and doing that he disarmed the powers and made an open mockery of them it excuse me that's showing that it's the pop you know the accuser is the one who's saying you must pay for your sins uh the inspector chaver of the cosmic realm as it were god i think is he's not that's why he can say hey uh god's not holding in with sin against them second corinthians 5 19. anyone um because uh all that was written against us the enemy had on us because it's our sin that puts them in in bondage to this uh it's been obliterated the love of god has triumphed over judgment the source of justice is not satan it's god himself god's holiness and perfect righteousness are the source of divine justice that demands punishment for sin rightly deserved and so we what we need to find is a way for god's essential justice and love to both be fully expressed without compromise yeah i i agree that that god is the source of all true justice the question is who's the one that demands uh the pound of flesh uh i think god can just forgive i i think satan is the one who says you must pay can i respond to that quickly remember as i explained in the book that there are penal substitution theorists uh who hold that god's choosing to satisfy divine justice by christ's substitutionary punishment is contingent that hugo grodius is a perfect example of this god could have just chosen to forgive but he has chosen substitutionary punishment because of the great benefits to be won by that self-giving sacrifice such as exhibiting in the clearest way his hatred of sin and in the deepest way his tremendous love for mankind so grodius would agree that god didn't have to do it this way but he would simply say that god had good reasons for choosing to do it this way it's been a fascinating discussion gentlemen i'm sorry that our time is drawn to a close we've covered such a lot of interesting ground here um just as we close out why is it important to get this right i mean i can imagine a lot of people um perhaps some of the non-christians especially who listen to my show folks i'm thinking isn't this angels dancing on pinheads you know what why does this matter um but greg maybe you want to start on that and we'll finish with bill yeah for me and it's important i think to always reiterate that uh bill and i agree on the basic same scenario that got out of his love became a human being gave it all he could give in order to die in our place as a representative in order to for us to be reconciled to god and free from satan and all the rest so we agree on the basic narrative but it's about how to understand sort of the mechanism of it if you will and uh um and so my main concern is number one i i think the most important fact in anyone's life is what is your mental conception of god what really do you conceive of with god because we your passion for god will never outrun the beauty of your mental conception of god and and i don't doubt that bill has a way of putting it together where it doesn't see it seems like it magnifies god's beauty it didn't have that effect on me or many of the people that i know who wants to tell that view because it it i can't it seems like there's this father there that has got to punish and and gee i mean this is why luther like really loved jesus but was kind of terrified of the father right um because his father could if it wasn't for jesus he would send us to hell for all eternity and so i worry about people's the beauty of their conception of god being compromised and then as i said earlier i am very concerned with the the myth of redemptive violence an act of violence solves the biggest problem in the universe because if that's good enough for god it's good enough for us and uh we don't need more encouragement in that area what why do you believe it's so important to get this theology of atonement right bill because this is the central doctrine of christianity it is right at the heart of what the christian gospel is christ died for our sins that's our central affirmation and so i think it's vital that we uh understand that doctrine and then also justin be able to defend it against those who would object to it ultimately i do often feel like we we can go so far but ultimately aren't we dealing in some sense bill with something that is a huge mystery how much can we within you know 300 pages or whatever get to get you know really understand what the the fullness of the atonement i think what we can do is we can offer a coherent and plausible theory of the atonement that survives the objections brought against it so it can remain mysterious but at least what we can do is say here is a plausible theory that is philosophically coherent and biblically consistent and if you've been able to do that i think then you've succeeded greg and bill thank you so much it's been it's been a very very good natured as i expected it to be anyway um discussion i i really appreciate it let me say again that uh whether you're penal substitution this or not bill's book is well worth reading uh uh that just the way you blow apart stereotypes and misconceptions we have of certain people that's worth the price of the book right there and uh bill make sure that when you send me my commission check you send it to my personal address and not to my church because they'll think it's an offering all right okay well that's very good um i know you've got a new book out as well greg uh on the bible uh which i'd love to bring you back on for us imperfection yeah in inspiring perfection well we'll get you on that that'll be great maybe maybe it's it's it's uh it's on the issue of we'll we'll inaudib make that another one but um for the moment um that's the book we've been talking about today atonement and the death of christ an exegetical historical and philosophical exploration by william lane craig it's available now i'll make sure there are links from today's show plus links to both my guests where you can find out more but for the moment bill and greg thank you for joining me thank you until next time for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter

Channel: Unbelievable?

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Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, william lane craig, greg boyd, atonement, penal substitution, christus victor, cross, sin, forgiveness, wrath

Id: OfrbsA-YNiI

Length: 61min 36sec (3696 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020