R. L. Dabney's Attempt to Justify Penal Substitution--Part Two and Evangelicals Attempt to Defend Slavery--Part Five

In this post, I continue my discussion of R. L. Dabney's attempt to justify the Penal Substitutionary Theory (PST) of the Atonement. Towards the end of the post, Dabney's defense of slavery will illustrate how one's surrender of moral intuitions, which has to be done to defend the PST, can lead to heinous conduct.

Dabney uses the the analogy of someone who hires another to commit a murder as an analogy showing the justice of the PST.

They [rationalists] may exclaim, "Yes, it is an ethical intuition that one man cannot justly be made responsible for another man's righteousness or sin;" yet the slightest close analysis will show that they are making a very shallow confusion of their pet proposition with another which is different. There is an intuition, universally held by thinking and just men, for which they mistake their opinion. The true predication is this: The consequences of righteousness or sin may not be transferred to another, unless he is in some way reasonably responsible therefor (emphasis original). Now, in order to identify this proposition (which everybody accepts} with theirs, they must assert that there is no way in which a moral agent can become reasonably responsible except solely by personally doing himself the moral or immoral actions in question. Is that self-evidently true? Is it at all true? Manifestly not. They have heedlessly begged the whole question. Every good jurist, yea, every man of common sense, knows that there are other ways in which moral responsibility may attach besides the personal doing of the responsible acts, as by the voluntary assumption of the responsibility for the sake of some valuable consideration. Here is another class of instances. The law justly holds "accessories before the fact" to a murder guilty of death. Here the law claims two victims for one murder, the life of the assassin and the life of the man who bribed him. Yea, if twelve men combine to hire him, there would be thirteen, each guilty of death for one and the same murder, while only one single hand perpetrated it. How comes this to be just? Because the twelve voluntarily associated themselves in the responsibility of an immoral act, which neither of them personally executed. Again, does the just law punish the accessory for the sin of suborning a murderer, or for murder itself? The correct answer is, for both: for his sin of subornation, because it was his own personal act and was evil, and for the murder, because he voluntarily associated himself in the responsibility of it (pp. 77-78).

I believe Dabney is wrong here. My understanding is that in the scenario described above the person who hires the murderer is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder but not murder itself. The penalty may very well be the same but technically the crime is different. Charles Manson, for example, received the death penalty (which was later commuted to life in prison) for the crime of "conspiracy to commit murder." He didn't actually commit the murders but he was instrumental in them. No one would say that Manson is innocent and that the guilt of his followers murders were imputed to him, as would be the case with Jesus under the PST. The reason the conspirators are prosecuted is because they are guilty of wrongdoing.

Next, Dabney refers to a father who refuses to give his daughter's hand in marriage to a man because the prospective bridegroom's own father is in the penitentiary. Dabney says in this case, even though the bridegroom is not personally guilty of a crime, his father's guilt is imputed to him tarnishing his reputation. He writes:

There are, for example, two citizens of high moral and social rank, each of whom has a marriageable daughter who is refined and beloved. One is sought in marriage by a John Doe, the other by a Richard Roe. Both these young men are personally reputable, industrious, and intelligent. The one parent says to John Doe, you cannot have my daughter; because a man whose father is now serving his long term in the penitentiary for a bad felony cannot be a son in my family, and husband to my pure daughter. The other parent gives the same refusal, and justifies it by reminding Richard Roe that he is "filius nullius." The young men sorrowfully protest, and urge that these misfortunes were not their own faults; but each parent persists in declaring: I have nothing against you personally, but you cannot marry my daughter, become a son to her mother and a brother to my other children. But society fully justifies their decision, and there is not one of our opponents who would not concur. Here, then, is the partial transfer of penal responsibility (emphasis added) where the consent of the second party is not even asked, yet the judgment may be just(pp. 79-80).

These unfortunate men in Dabney's example do not receive a "partial transfer of penal responsibility" as he claims. They have their reputation's tarnished because of what their fathers have done but they are not being legally punished. This example does not reflect what transpires under the PST.

Dabney maintains that those who object to the justice of the PST commit a logical fallacy. He says:

Then their common sense tells them, as it tells everybody else, that essential attributes, being subjective personal qualities, are not transferable from the person whom they really qualify to another person. And so they jump to the non-sequitur that therefore guilt is equally untransferable, and its imputation an immoral legal fiction. . . . In syllogistic form the process of thought would be this enthymeme: personal subjective qualities are untransferable therefore a personal relation conditioned on actions which these qualities have determined, must be equally untransferable. Manifestly the suppressed premise must be the universal proposition: that all such relations are as inalienable, or as incapable of being substituted as such subjective qualities. But who is absurd enough to believe that (p. 83)?

Dabney wants us to believe that even though "personal subjective qualities," such as sinfulness cannot be transferred, the "personal relation conditioned on actions [sins] which these qualities have determined," namely guilt can be. As pointed out above, personal guilt only results from personal sin. To take sin out of the equation is to take guilt out as well.

He argues that retribution, which is what God's nature requires for sin, can be fulfilled by a substitute.

Let us take the true theory, that the just punishment of guilt is dictated primarily by God's essential attribute of distributive justice, not by expediency; that the remedial and deterrent effects of punishments among human sinners who are still under a dispensation of hope are secondary and subordinate in God's purpose; and that in his punishment of reprobate men and angels, these have no place at all, but God's whole purpose is moral equalization in his government by the due requital of sin (just as by the due requital of righteousness) to the glory of his own holiness and honor. Then there remains no reason why this purpose of retribution, pure and simple, may not be as completely gained from a substitute as from the sinner, provided a voluntary substitute be found who is able to fulfill the other proper conditions. Such a substitute is our Messiah (p. 85).

This fails to understand the most basic principle of retribution which is that the the one who commits the crime is the one who must face retribution. Retribution, which means to "pay back" or to "recompense," only makes sense when it is the one who committed the wrong that is "paid back" (The word "back" or the prefix "re" in retribution loses its meaning otherwise). As C. S. Lewis said: the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice (God in the Dock, p. 288).

Next Dabney gives the same argument William Shedd gave concerning the idea that no one has grounds to complain with regard to the PST.

The reasonableness and righteousness of this plan of vicarious redemption may be very shortly proved by pressing this plain question: Whom does it injure? God, the lawgiver, is not injured, for the plan is his own, and he gains in this way a nobler satisfaction to the penal claims of law and to his own holiness, truth, and justice, than he would gain by the punishment of the puny creatures themselves. The Messiah is not injured, because he gave his own free consent, and because the plan will result in the infinite enhancement of his own glory. Certainly, ransomed sinners are not injured, because they gain infinite blessedness, and the plan works moral influences upon them incomparably more noble and blessed. The unsaved are not injured, for in bearing their due punishment personally they receive exactly what they deserve and precisely what they obstinately preferred to redemption in Christ. None of the innocent subjects of God's moral judgment on earth or in all the heavens are injured, because this vicarious redemption of believing men originated a grand system of moral influences far sweeter, more noble, more pure, and more efficacious than those which they would have felt without it. But how can there be injustice when nobody is injured' (pp. 85-86)?

As I responded with regard to Shedd, this argument misses the point. The point to be proven is that the punishment of an innocent can be just not that no one was harmed by it. If the God of the Bible is righteous and just by nature, then whatever he does must also be righteous and just.

Dabney concludes by arguing that only God's word is infallible and if man's moral intutitions are contradicted by God's Word, then God's Word must be believed and man's intuitions disregarded. He writes:

Philosophy and moral intuitions are not infallible but God's Word is. Much of our argument has been run into the field of rational discussion, because our opponents are rationalists, and they, by their attacks on God's truth, have made it necessary to follow them to their own ground. But the reader must not infer from this that we think that human philosophy is the superior, and Scripture the inferior source of evidence. Our comparative view of the sources of authority -- a view taught by a long acquaintance with the contradictions, mutations, and vagaries of the most boastful human philosophies -- may be truly expressed in the apostle's words: "Let God be true, but every man a liar." What saith the Scripture? When that is carefully and honestly ascertained, it should be the end of controversy. Therefore, the main thing which we have to allege in support of our thesis is this: that the doctrine of Christ's substitution under our penal obligations, and the imputation of his satisfaction for guilt to be the ground of our justification, is, either implicitly or expressly, taught throughout the Scriptures. It is so intertwined as an essential part of the whole warp and woof of the fabric that it can only be gotten out of it by tearing it into shreds (pp. 87-88).

This kind of thinking allowed Dabney to defend slavery in the Old South. He wrote an entire book in defense of the institution, A Defense of Virginia and the South.

In the aforementioned book, Dabney argues that the Bible has authority over man's conscience. He writes:

[T]he cause of our defence is the cause of Gods' Word, and of its supreme authority over the human conscience. For, as we shall evince, that Word is on our side, and the teachings of Abolitionism are clearly of rationalistic origin, of infidel tendency, and only sustained by reckless and licentious perversions of the meaning of the Sacred text. It will in the end become apparent to the world, not only that the conviction of the wickedness of slaveholding was drawn wholly from sources foreign to the Bible, but that it is a legitimate corollary from that fantastic, atheistic and radical theory of human rights, which made the Reign of terror in France, which has threatened that country, and which now threatens the Untited States, with the horrors of Red-Republicanism. Because we believe that God intends to vindicate His Divine Word, and to make all nations honour it; because we confidently rely on the force of truth to explode all dangerous error; therefore we confidently expect that the world will yet do justice to Southern slaveholders. The anti-scriptural, infidel, and radical grounds upon which our assailants have placed themselves, make our cause practically the cause of truth and order (pp. 21-22).

When one believes that one has divine sanction, one is capable of acts that would normally violate one's conscience. To hold another human being as property and force that human being to be a slave is a violation of human dignity. One would never want that for one's self or one's family. However, if one believes that God condones it and even ordained it, then the pangs of conscience can be silenced.

Dabney believed that the black people were actually under a divine curse. Commenting on Genesis 9:20-27, he states:

[I]t gives us the origin of domestic slavery. And we find that it was appointed by God as the punishment of, and remedy for (nearly all God's providential chastisements are also remedial) the peculiar moral degradation of a part of the race. God here ordains that this depravity shall find its necessary restraints, and the welfare of the more virtuous its safeguard against the depraved, by the bondage of the latter. He introduces that feature of political society, for the justice of which we shall have occasion to contend; that although men have all this trait of natural equality that they are children of a common father, and sharers of a common humanity, and subjects of the same law of love; yet, in practice, they shall be subject to social inequalities determined by their own characters, and their fitness or unfitness to use privileges for their own and their neighbours' good. But second: this narrative gives us more than a prediction. The words of Noah are not a mere prophecy; they are a verdict, a moral sentence pronounced upon conduct, by competent authority; that verdict sanctioned by God. Now if the verdict is righteous, and the execution blessed by God, it can hardly be, that the executioners of it are guilty for putting it in effect (p. 103).

Dabney believes the black race to be inferior to the white race mentally and morally. He writes:

[W]hen once abolition by federal aggression came, these other sure results would follow: that the same greedy lust of power which had meddled between masters and slaves, would assuredly, and for the stronger reason, desire to use the political weight of the late slaves against their late masters: that having enforced a violent emancipation, they would enforce, of course negro suffrage, negro eligibility to office, and a full negro equality: that negro equality thus theoretically established would be practical negro superiority: the tyrant section, as it gave to its victims, the white men of the South, more and more causes of just resentment, would find more and more violent inducements to bribe the negroes, with additional privileges and gifts, to assist them in their domination: that this miserable career must result in one of two things, either a war of races, in which the whites or the blacks would be, one or the other, exterminated; or amalgamation. But while we believe that "God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens," we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral (emphasis added), almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus . Hence the offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race, stamped with all the feebleness of the hybrid. and incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble before the righteous resistance of Virginia freemen; but will have a race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political subjugation, which they desire to fix on the South (pp. 352-53).

So, ultimately Dabney believes in the PST because he believes that is what the Bible teaches. Even if it runs counter to man's moral sensibilities, one is to surrender his conscience in favor of the divine Word. I maintain that this approach is dangerous and can lead to unbelieveably inhumane practices such as slavery.

R. L. Dabney's Attempt to Justify Penal Substitution--Part One

Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) was an American Christian theologian, a Southern Presbyterian pastor, and Confederate Army chaplain. He was also chief of staff and biographer to Stonewall Jackson. His biography of Jackson remains in print today (Life and Campaigns of Stonewall Jackson). Dabney was Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, VA for nearly 30 years. He was a staunch Calvinist and a vocal proponent of the Penal Substitutionary Theory (PST) of the Atonement. In October of 1897, a few months before his death he delivered the Davidson College Divinity Lectures which were later published in a volume entitled, Christ Our Penal Substitute. Dabney also wrote a Systematic Theology in which he discusses the PST in chapter 35.

In the lectures, Dabney defends the PST against what he calls "rationalizing nominal Christians" (p. 5). These rationalists, according to Dabney,

say that they must reject it [PST] as essentially unjust, as thus obnoxious to necessary moral intuitions, and so impossible to be ascribed to a righteous God. . . . They claim that, while ancient or pagan peoples, taught by barbarism and debasing forms of religious belief, made constant use of the cruel principle of substitution in their "antipsychoi" and hostages, civilization, Christianity, and correct ethics, have banished these usages from modern christendom. And this, they say, is but the testimony of a more enlightened, a better age, against the cruelty and injustice of substituting the innocent in place of the guilty under punishment (pp. 5-6).

Throughout the lectures, Dabney employs a number of analogies which he believes illustrates that the PST is just. For example, he talks about the function of a bail bondsman. He writes:

The distinction between sinfulness as an attribute and as a penal obligation often receives more practical concrete application. Here is a treasurer who has given an official bond upon which a friend goes security. The treasurer commits the felony of embezzlement, and by flight escapes the clutches of the law. Thereupon the Commonwealth forces the security to pay the official bond; that is to say, it exacts from him the legal obligation which is made his by imputation. And this exaction is, to the good man, a heavy penalty, a mulct, inflicting, perhaps, much suffering on him and his family. Does anybody dream that a shadow of the embezzler's meanness or sinfulness is transferred to, or infused into this generous friend, who suffers for another's crime? Not at all. All honor the unfortunate man for the generous friendly help which prompted him to go security, and for the honesty with which he makes good society's loss. Yet the Commonwealth acts with perfect justice in exacting the money from him. Here is the clearest distinction between actual guilt and sinfulness; nobody is so stupid as to pretend not to see it. Let the vital proposition be repeated, that, in the penal substitution of Christ, it is the actual guilt of sinners as above defined, and nothing else, which is transferred from them to him (pp. 13-14).

Does this really illustrate what happens under the PST? I don't think so. First, in the case of a bail bondsman, the guilt of the embezzler's crime is never imputed to him. He pays the bond because there has been a legal arrangement constructed in which the bondsman guarantees that the defendant will show up in court. The bondsman's responsibility is to make certain that the criminal appears in court; if he fails in that responsibility, then he has to pay the bond. His "sin" is that he didn't produce the defendant in court. He is not held responsible for the actual crime committed by the embezzler. Second, once the bondsman pays the bond to the court, the embezzler's guilt is not removed. If he can be found (and the bondsman will do his best to find him), he will still stand trial for his crime. So, this analogy is not even close to representing the PST of the atonement.

Next, Dabney argues that while it might be wrong for a human magistrate to accept a substitute's payment of the penalty, it is not so for God. He argues that the same rules that apply to human jurisprudence do not apply to divine jurisprudence. The main distinction is that human government has delegated authority whereas God's authority is inherent or intrinsic to him. He states:

The principles of righteousness for the two rulers, God and a human magistrate, are the same; the details of prerogative for the two may differ greatly, while directed by the same holy principles. How simple is this! How ready and facile the instances! Thus, a father entrusts his boy to a distant teacher, and tells him to consider himself as in loco parentis to the child. Does this authorize the pedagogue to inflict any kind of punishment for the boy's faults which would be righteous for the father, as, for instance, disinheritance? By no means. This plain view makes the inference of our opponents worthless, that because God has told his servants they must not do a certain thing, therefore it is immoral for him to do it....

And the reasons limiting the two cases differently are plain and strong. The first is: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." The prerogative of retribution is God's alone; magistrates only possess a small fraction of it by delegation from him. Hence, they are properly bound by such restrictions as he chooses to impose upon their judicial functions (pp. 20-21).

Dabney is saying that God in his delegation of authority to human government has not allowed man to use penal substitution. But the question is why hasn't he? Dabney goes on to answer this question:

Next, men lack the wisdom and infinite serenity of moral judgment which are requisite for these exalted and far-reaching acts of retribution. Third, they cannot possibly find subjects suitable for holy penal substitution. One of the conditions necessary for righteous substitution is the free consent of the substitute, that is, where he himself is innocent. No human being is thus innocent before God, but each is guilty for himself. Now, a guilty life forfeited to the law cannot possibly buy off another guilty life also forfeited to law (pp. 21-22).

So, according to Dabney, God doesn't allow human government to utilize penal substitution because (1) man lacks the wisdom and serenity to make that judgment and (2) because there is no truly innocent person to substitute. I don't find (1) convincing. If man has the wisdom to make any kind of judicial decisions, it seems that he would be able to make this one too. God could have explained in detail how the judge would go about finding a just substitute. His (2) also misses the mark in my opinion because a human substitute, lets say for the embezzler mentioned above, would not have to be sinless in every aspect of his life in order to not deserve punishment for the embezzlement; he would just have to be innocent of any involvement with the particular crime of embezzlement under consideration.

Next, Dabney argues that the justice of the PST can be seen in the "Law of Reprisal." He writes:

Still another instance of penal imputation is found in the law of reprisal; and this is still asserted by all Christian nations. One commonwealth commits sin by breaking its treaty-obligations to another. Thereupon the injured commonwealth seeks retribution by issuing letters of marque and reprisal against the property of any citizen of the sinning commonwealth found upon the high seas. Let the aggressive commonwealth have a representative government; let the citizen whose goods are seized upon the sea for reprisal plead that he voted against the aggressive actions of his own commonwealth, and, therefore, is not morally and personally responsible therefor; there is not an admiralty court in Christendom which would yield to this plea. This merchant must bear his part of the retribution due to his sinning commonwealth, because he is a member of it (pp. 34-35).

Here Dabney is arguing that a citizen of a country is justly held responsible for what his country does. The justice of the law of reprisal, seizing the property of a citizen of an outlaw country on the high seas, was debated in this country in the 19th century. An article published in the New York Times on June 4, 1858, read:

Reprisals, though authorized by the "law of nations," are but one of the hundred barbarities which find full sanction in the same code. . . . The right which is still retained to plunder private property on sea, is unquestionably a relic of barbarism [the law of reprisal did not permit the plundering of private property on land but only in international waters] . . . . Nothing is more needed than a general and absolute recognition, by all the Christian Powers, of the sacredness of private property under all circumstance, unless in case of the owner's malfeasance. . . . To plunder him who plunders, and kill him who kills, is a rough sort of justice, which satisfies men's instincts tolerably fairly; but to plunder one member of a community because some other member of it has committed an outrage, is the acme of clumsy justice. . . . It may possibly be useless to seek satisfaction at the hands of their national authorities for injuries our citizens may sustain; but this is no reason for sending the navy of the United States to plunder private individuals, and bring the booty into our ports to be disposed of by the United States District Courts. The unfortunate inhabitants of those wretched countries suffer sufficiently from the insecurity, anxiety and violence caused by chronic internal convulsions and disorders, without our stepping in to visit upon individuals the consequences of offences in which they may never have participated, and of which they very probably never heard.

As the author of the Times article points out, the law of reprisal is at best "clumsy justice," and in reality is a relic of "barbaric justice," which is really injustice. It was practiced because of the frustration of nations who had been wronged by another nation and they were unable to exact reparation in any other way. To use this law as a means of illustrating the justice of the PST actually backfires because the law of reprisal is thought by many to be unjust.

Then Dabney offers the following example:

The military laws of every civilized nation provide for cases of penal imputation, and of none is this more true, both in theory and practice, than of those of the United States. Let an officer who has surrendered in battle or by capitulation be slain by the enemy while an unresisting prisoner of war, then a captive officer of equal rank among the enemies will be condemned and shot, although, personally, he had never broken any rule of civilized warfare, or, perhaps, had never yet drawn his weapon against any adversary (p. 35).

I am quite confident that the execution of a prisoner of war would not be condoned by the US military code of justice and it is prohibited by the Geneva Code. If Dabney thinks it is just to execute a prisoner of war in the fashion described, then it is no surprise that he thinks the PST is just. Both are patently unjust.

Dabney goes on to argue that only the PST is just and that the moral exemplar theory and the governmental theory are not. He writes:

If Providence did ordain the sufferings of Jesus, while he bore no guilt, then the case which we have is this: That God punished, or intentionally permitted the punishment of the one man of purest and sublimest virtue who ever appeared on earth with miseries more dire than he ever visited upon a Cain or a Judas. What lesson of patience or fortitude under suffering does this contain for us? It would be only a lesson of hatred against the government we live under, and of horror and despair. And last: the gratuitous sufferings of Jesus would remain a dramatic exhibition of God's hatred of innocence and virtue rather than of vice (p. 66).

What Dabney fails to acknowledge, however, is that under the PST, Jesus does not have the actual sin of mankind imputed to him but merely the guilt. As I argued against Charles Hodge, one cannot have personal guilt without personal sin. To say that the guilt of Adam's race is imputed but not the actual sin is to separate the effect from the cause. Guilt is caused by sin. One is only guilty if one has sinned. So, Dabney's theory fares no better than the moral exemplar or governmental theory that he disdains. All three have an innocent man suffering the wrath of God.

Dabney devotes chapter 8 to what he calls the "philosophic" objection to the PST. He writes:

The grand and cardinal objection against Christ's substitution is the philosophic one. It has, therefore, been reserved for separate and special discussion. As already stated, its claim, as a moral intuition, that a just government, human or divine, cannot transfer one man's guilt to another who is innocent, under any possible conditions, because punishment loses its moral significance, and becomes cruelty and wickedness as soon as it is transferred from the sinning person to another (p. 71).

Dabney argues that since the Bible, the Word of God, clearly teaches the PST, then one must accept its justice and reject any moral intutitions to the contrary. He states:

The reader must understand what our opponent's position is, that whatever be the Bible's testimony for Christ's penal substitution, it cannot be true, because they know it to be false by an immediate, self-evident, necessary intuition, which is to say that they set their philosophy above all the authority claimed for God's word. To those who know the history of philosophy and the picture it presents of the uncertainty of human metaphysics, this towering self-confidence would appear ludicrous were not the results so tragical. If the philosophy, which they worship, has settled anything, it has agreed that these should be the traits of an intuitive judgment; it should be primary (resting upon no prior premises), self-evident, necessary, and universal. Should it not have given some pause to their philosophic dogmatism to remember that most Christians for several thousand years sincerely believed what these dogmatists pronounce self-evidently false? How was it that not only the most devout Christians, but the greatest thinkers and philosophers of all ages -- a Lactantius, an Augustine, an Anselm, an Aquinas, a Luther, a Calvin, a Pascal, a Claude, a Turretin, a Butler, a Newton, a Chalmers, an Edwards, a Wesley, an Alexander, a Thornwell -- saw no difficulty in this proposition which our Socinianizers find so unspeakably absurd? There is modesty with a vengeance! One would think, to hear them, that intuitions had only been invented, like the telegraph and telephone, in the nineteenth century (pp. 72-73).

Dabney maintains that since Christians throughout history have taught the PST without finding any moral contradictions, then there must not be any real moral contradictions in the theory. Could it be, though, that these Christians accepted the doctrine for the same primary reason that Dabney does--they believed it to be the teaching of the divine Word of God and thus they could not question it? The fact is that punishing a person for a crime he did not commit is self-evidently unjust. It is a basic moral intuitition as even Dabney recognizes above. He says that under the moral and governmental theories an innocent person is punished and that the theories are false for that reason. He believes that the PST escapes this problem by the imputation of guilt, but as also shown above one cannot have guilt apart from sin. He believes that Jesus inherited guilt but not sin.

The discussion of Dabney's defense of the PST will be continued in the next post.