Mark Murphy's View of the Atonement

This post appeared yesterday on Luke's CommonSenseAtheism blog.

Mark Murphy is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in 1993. He has written a very interesting article on the atonement utilizing the methodology of philosophical theology. The article is entitled, "Not Penal Substitution but Vicarious Punishment," in Faith and Philosophy, 26:3 [2009]: 253-73).

Murphy begins by showing that the Penal Substitutionary Theory (PST) of the atonement is "incoherent." In other words, it does not meet the criterion that is required for genuine punishment. He writes:

The objections to the doctrine of penal substitution are familiar. On one hand, the objection is pressed that it is wrong to subject someone to hard treatment for the wrongs done by another. On the other hand, the objection is pressed that even if it were not morally abhorrent to punish someone for another’s wrongs, it would nevertheless constitute a failure with respect to punishment’s retributive aims if someone other than the evildoer were punished for the wrongful deed. Retribution, a legitimate and desirable aim of punishment, is unrealized if the wrongdoer is not him- or herself subjected to suffering on account of the wrongful deed; and a sinner’s ill-desert remains if he or she does not bear the punishment for his or her sin (p. 254).

He continues:

[P]unishment expresses condemnation of the person punished. And if that is right, then punishment will be non-transferrable: one cannot express condemnation via hard treatment of someone who one does not take to be worthy of condemnation. Or, perhaps, one can, but then the punishing act will be defective—and it will not do for the penal substitution account to hold not merely that the penal substitution was unusual, or nonstandard (we all knew that already), but that it was a defective case of punishing (p. 256).

So, according to Murphy, affliction of hard treatment upon an innocent person cannot properly be called "punishment," instead he terms it, "defective punishment." This is one of the points that I have stressed over and over again. Punishment only makes sense if it is the guilty person who is punished, otherwise it is illogical (see Penal Substitution is an Oxymoron). He says that this problem cannot be resolved by trying to separate the guilt from the sin and have Christ bear the former but not the latter. He states:

[W]e have no experience of guilt as such, cut off from its sources; one is always guilty for something done or undone, or some state of affairs realized or unrealized. We can use the words ‘the guilt itself is transferred,’ but again this will shed no light (p. 259).

Again, as I have stated repeatedly, guilt cannot be detached from the sin that causes the guilt in any coherent manner. Guilt only makes sense if there is something for which to be guilty.

Having established the incoherence of the PST, Murphy now offers an alternative theory which he calls "vicarious punishment." He explains the difference:

[I]n cases of penal substitution ... A deserves to be punished; but B is punished in A’s place; and so A no longer deserves to be punished. A’s ill-desert is removed by B’s penally substituting for A. This, however, is incoherent. Consider, by contrast, vicarious punishment. A deserves to be punished; B undergoes hard treatment, which hard treatment constitutes A’s being punished; and so A no longer deserves to be punished (p. 260).

In other words, a person whom the criminal loves suffers hard treatment in place of the criminal and the hard treatment of his loved one is actually a punishment of the criminal. The criminal is punished vicariously. His punishment is watching his loved one suffer hard treatment. Murphy illustrates his theory:

Suppose that under a legal system one who murders someone who is married is to be punished, if possible, by having one’s own spouse killed. The idea is not that the spouse is being punished in one’s place, a la penal substitution. Rather, the idea is that the criminal is punished by having his or her spouse killed (p. 260).

This is a clever theory but I think it is also very problematic. What are the problems with vicarious punishment?

1. It is still unjust.

There is a biblical example of vicarious punishment. David is punished for his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba by having the child born to them die (2 Sam. 12:14-15). But is this justice? Is it fair to the child who must die for something it did not do?

Murphy anticipates this objection. He writes:

My answer to the charge that vicarious punishment is unjust is a simple one. It is possible for there to be a scheme of vicarious punishment to which all of the potential suffering innocents freely and informedly consent. A practice by which one party subjects another to some deprivation may no doubt be morally objectionable even if the parties involved freely and informedly consent, but the species of wrongness will not be that of injustice; volenti non fit iniuria. If the state, or whatever form of legal authority is in place, has instituted and is employing vicarious punishment for some crimes, the consent of all potential suffering innocents is sufficient to preclude the charge that if someone is made to suffer in order to punish a wrongdoer, then he or she is being treated unjustly (p. 261).

I think Murphy is confusing legality with justice. Yes, if the law stated that one would be punished for a crime by having a loved one suffer hard treatment, then it would not be illegal to do so but it would still be unjust. But what if the loved one consented to suffering so as to punish the guilty party? It seems to me that it is still an act of injustice.  My consenting to an unjust act does not transform the act into a just act. It is still unjust; I have merely consented to it. It does not change the fact that to inflict hard treatment intentionally on one for another's crime is unjust. The only way it can be just is if the suffering  person bears some culpability for the crime. 

Punishment or infliction of harm or hard treatment or whatever one wishes to call it, is only justified if the person receiving the hard treatment deserves it. That is the essence of the retributive theory of justice and I cannot make myself deserve it by simply volunteering to receive it.  As C. S. Lewis said: "the concept of desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice" (God in the Dock, p. 288).

2. It inflicts harm on other undeserving parties.

For example, in the illustration provided by Murphy of the spouse being put to death for what her husband did, the parents of the spouse would suffer hard treatment unnecessarily and undeservedly.  They are made to suffer the loss of their daughter for something that their son-in-law did.

3. It treats persons as things.

Murphy's theory might work if we were not talking about persons. In other words, a child might be punished for wrong-doing by destroying his favorite model airplane or some other beloved possession. However, to inflict suffering on a person for what someone else did is to treat that person as a thing and not a person. It is to treat that person as a means to an end. It considers only the importance of the criminal and not the worth and value of the loved one who is suffering harm.

4. It is not biblical.

Murphy admits: I cannot deny, of course, that there are texts that suggest that Christ was literally punished: that he was chastised, or made sin, or cursed (p. 266). The Bible nowhere presents the atonement as the sinner being punished by the fact that Jesus died. The simple truth is that few people will experience any kind of punishment by thinking that Jesus suffered in their place. Many don't even know of Jesus, and for many others, he is just a person in a book. It is hard to see how any real punishment is inflicted on people by being told that Jesus suffered because of them.

So, Murphy's theory of the atonement suffers from fatal flaws not the same ones as the PST but fatal nonetheless.

Oliver Crisp's Attempt to Defend Penal Substitution

Oliver Crisp is a Professor of Theology at the Univeristy of Bristol. He is a prolific young author who has written extensively on Philosophical Theology (Philosophical theology is the disciplined employment of philosophical methods in developing or analyzing theological concepts). This approach to Theology attempts to "make sense" of Christian doctrines. In other words, it attempts to provide a rational understanding and philosophical explanation of how the doctrines cohere. Alvin Plantinga defines Philosophical Theology as a matter of thinking about central doctrines of the Christian faith from a philosophical perspective; it is a matter of employing the resources of philosophy to deepen our grasp and understanding of them ("Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century," in James F. Sennett, ed. The Analytic Theist, An Alvin Plantinga Reader [1998], p. 340).

There have been a few attempts by contemporary philosophical theologians to explain how the Penal Substitutionary Theory (PST) of the atonement works: John Hare, Steven Porter (see here, here, and here), and Oliver Crisp. I have dealt with Hare's explanation in a previous post and I have a paper on Steven Porter's theory which I have submitted for publication in an academic journal. In this post I would like to examine Oliver Crisp's attempt to defend the PST.

In Chapter 19 of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (eds. Thomas Flint and Michael Rea [2009], pp. 430-51), Crisp has an article entitled: "Original Sin and Atonement."

He begins the article by admitting that to this point, no one has really been able to explain how the atonement of Christ works:

The atonement is one of the central and defining doctrines of Christian theology. Yet the nature of the atonement--how it is that Christ's life and death on the cross actually atone for human sin--remains a theological conundrum (p. 430).

He continues:

In the theological literature, the relation between Christ's penal substitution for the sinner and the sinner's sin and/or guilt is usually (though not always) made sense according to what I shall call a "forensic fiction." God treats Christ as if he is guilty of the sin of fallen human beings, and "punishes" him accordingly . . . on this forensic fiction account of penal substitution, the innocent Christ really is treated as if he were the guilty sinner, though he is not. And God really does punish the innocent in the place of the guilty (p. 436).

He admits that this appears to be unjust. He states:

[W]e find no examples of legislation allowing substitution when the crime is a serious felony, such as murder. In such cases, the one guilty must meet the penal consequences of that crime, and we would consider it a terrible miscarriage of justice were a substitute punished in place of the perpetrator (p. 436).

What the defender of the theological application of penal substitution needs is some reason for thinking that it is just for God to punish Christ in place of the sinner. . . For, whatever else the defender of penal substitution says, unlike pecuniary penal substitution, it certainly looks unjust that Christ, an innocent individual, should be punished in place of me, a sinful individual (p. 437)

This injustice Crisp attempts to solve through what he terms: Realist Penal Substitution. He draws the term from the Realist theory of the imputation of sin which goes back to Augustine. Augustine taught that in a real sense every human being was present in Adam when he sinned.  He phrased it this way: In the first man, therefore, there existed the whole human nature, which was to be transmitted by the woman to posterity, when that conjugal union received the divine sentence of its own condemnation; and what man was made, not when created, but when he sinned and was punished, this he propagated, so far as the origin of sin and death are concerned(City of God, 13:3). According to Augustine, we were all present seminally in Adam. Building on this, Crisp states:

We begin with the idea that Adam and his progeny are (somehow) one metaphysical entity such that God may justly pass on the moral consequences of Adam's sin to his heirs because they are all member of one persisting entity, or object, that we might call "Fallen Humanity" (p. 438).

Now applying this realism doctrine to the atonement, Crisp writes:

Consider the possibility that Christ and the elect together compose one metaphysical entity that persists through time, just as, on the Augustinian realist way of thinking, Adam and his progeny do. This object we shall dub "Redeemed Humanity". Christ is in some sense the first member of this entity, and the elect are subsequent members (p. 440).

Because Christ is part of this "metaphysical entity," which Crisp calls "Redeemed Humanity," he shares the guilt (or penal consequences) of the elect's sin (even though he himself is sinless) and thus can justly die for that guilt. Crisp explains:

Although he is not the one who has sinned, or the part of the mass of Redeemed Humanity that has sinned, because he is a member of this larger entity, he may pay the consequences of the sin of other members of the same entity, by which I mean the derivatively elect, like you and me (p. 441).

He maintains that this solution does not involve imputation and thus escapes the charge of being a "legal fiction."

Notice that there is no "imputation" involved in this process, no forensic fiction, whereby God treats Christ as if he were the sinner for the purpose of bringing about atonement, as with many traditional accounts of penal substitution. The transference of the punishment for sin from fallen humanity to Christ, and the union of those self-same humans with Christ are two aspects of Christ's atoning work that involve a real union between Christ and the human beings concerned (pp. 441-42).

He believes that his proposed Realist Penal Substitution Theory avoids

the moral problems besetting other, standard arguments for penal substitution that require only that Christ acts on behalf of sinful humans as their representative ... [which] requires a forensic fiction in order to make good on the act of atonement. It is this that has generated so much of the difficulties facing apologists for penal substitution. This problem is not so much overcome as circumvented by the realist accounts of penal substitution offered here, because Christ's act of atonement is not merely representationalist; he really takes upon himself the penal consequences for human sin. (p. 443)

What are some of the problems with Crisp's Realist Penal Subsitution Theory?

1. Whereas one can imagine how that every human being could be seminally in Adam (assuming he was literally the first man) and thereby have an organic (and genetic) connection with him, the same does not hold true for the "metaphysical entity" which Crisp calls, "Redeemed Humanity." There is no real connection between the parts. At best it is some type of mystical unity which defies any meaningful description.

2. If there were some real connection between the parts in Crisp's metaphysical Redeemed Humanity entity, then it seems that Jesus would share not only in the guilt (and penal consequences) of the other members but in the actual corruption and demerit of the sins of the other members. How can he share in one but not in the other? Moreover, guilt and its penal consequences only have meaning when attached to the sin itself. In other words, a person is only guilty and subject to punishment for a particular sin that he commits. You cannot decouple sin and guilt.

3. It seems at best what Crisp's "solution" does is to make Jesus guilty by association. In other words, since Jesus is the head of the metaphysical entity and since other members of the entity are sinners and subject to the penal consequences of that sin, then Jesus is also guilty and subject to the same consequences by means of his association with them. This "guilt by association" is generally recognized as a fallacy. In reality, what Crisp is arguing for is what I have previously termed "collective culpability." While the concept of collective culpability was prevalent in ancient times, it is generally rejected today (e.g., a major philosophical discussion took place after WW II in which the question was raised: "Are the German people as a whole culpable for what the Nazi's did?" The consensus of scholars was "No." See Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, eds. Larry May and Stacey Hoffman [1992]).

Allow me to offer an illustration. A new CEO takes over for BP. He has no personal responsibility for the oil spill in the gulf as he was not associated with the company at the time of the spill. However, now as the CEO, he is the head of the corporation which is culpable for the spill. Thus, if the whole corporation is punished, he will be punished as well (even though he personally is innocent). That makes sense because he voluntarily attached himself to the corporation knowing that it was going to be subject to punishment (another example would be a football coach who takes over a program that is about to enter NCAA probation). However, to single out the CEO and make him pay personally in place of the corporation would make no sense. It seems that in the PST, this is what is happening when Jesus bears the punishment that the whole entity deserves.