Atonement and the Death of Christ by William Lane Craig

Author:William Lane Craig [Craig, William Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Theology, Philosophy, Christianity
ISBN: 9781481312066
Publisher: Baylor University Press
Published: 2020-06-30T21:00:00+00:00

Condemnation of Christ without Personal Sin and Guilt

But suppose one adopts an expressivist theory of punishment that does require that condemnation be directed toward the person punished. Would such a theory rule out penal substitution? Not necessarily, for one might espouse a theory of penal substitution that includes the imputation of sin, such as the Reformers articulated and Turretin defended. On such a theory, Christ, though personally without moral fault, is legally guilty and so condemned by God for our sins. Hence, (1) is denied. Murphy admits that given the doctrine of the imputation of sins, his charge of incoherence fails.

Unsurprisingly, however, critics of penal substitution are unlikely to be sympathetic to the doctrine of imputation. But reservations about that doctrine are even more rarely unfolded than the standard moral objection to penal substitution. Murphy cursorily dismisses the doctrine of imputation with the observation that we have no experience of the transfer either of moral responsibility for actions or of guilt in isolation from actions from one person to another.35 We shall take up that issue in the next chapter when we discuss the justification of penal substitution. For now we note merely in passing that given the doctrine of the imputation of our sin to Christ, the objection to the coherence of penal substitution is a self-confessed failure.

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