extension of the divine character where God must act in such a way as to satisfy the highest law—the goodness of the eternal law.50
The questions that most concern us here is the necessity and nature of divine justice and, more than that, the divine motivation as they relate to the moral law and human transformation. These important distinctions are fundamental to both New England theology and contemporary models of justice and the atonement. For, the apparent de-coupling the rectoral and retributive justice in the thought Edwards Jr is a crucial aspect for our understanding the Edwardsian doctrine of atonement. However, we understand Gelston and the Edwardsian tradition to affirm a penal substitution of a modified sort. What we mean by this is not that rectoral justice is fundamental, in a non-voluntarist or voluntarist sense, but that retributive justice is fundamental to God’s moral governing of the world (within God’s providence). So, Christ as a penal substitute becomes central in God’s governance of human beings. Another question we raise, is whether rectoral justice or retributive justice are fundamentally a payment made to the moral law or is it a payment made to God himself? By differentiating within New England dogmatics, the atonement options are expanded for contemporary discussions. Rather provocatively, we think that within these discussions the atonement theories are a more complex, with several new vignettes than may have been thought to this point. For it seems that there are at least three models of the atonement at work in the Edwardsian tradition that have relevance to contemporary atonement. Let us move on to Crisp’s next point.
C—Sin and Its Penal Consequences
The third component of the moral government model or penal non-substitution concerns the nature of sin and its penal consequences. Both penal substitution and penal non-substitution affirm that there is some debt of punishment required for re-establishing the sin-fractured relationship between God and humanity. Both Grotian and Edwardsian variants of the moral government model involve maintain that sin requires a penalty—“non-transferable” penalty. This is because guilt is not transferable either between humans or between divine-human and other humans. Penal substitution on the other hand, says that the penal consequence of a guilty sinner is transferable. Herein lies the mechanism of the atonement—the consequences from human sin are transferred to Christ and Christ pays the debt of punishment for those sinners (of the world or the elect). Distinctively, what is required is not a debt of punishment on penal non-substitutionary atonement, but a penal equivalent to satisfy the demands of the moral law. Atonement, then, is construed more communally in virtue of God’s means of governing the world. An actual, individual payment to God for sins committed is thus not required. Instead, a “suitable equivalent” must pay the penalty for the disorder in God’s moral order where humans have failed to honor God’s means of governance. There is an imbalance in the force or the moral order hindering the means by which God has chosen to providentially orchestrate the world toward its proper end. Christ, then, brings about balance by paying the penalty as a “suitable equivalent.”51
Several important questions emerge from this discussion that concern the relation between Christ and the moral law, and, for that matter, the relation the moral law has to the divine nature or the eternal law. We are led to think, contra Crisp, that Edwards Jr affirmed a variant of penal substitution where Christ’s act of atonement brought about balance in God’s moral order by transferring the penal consequences of human sin to himself on the cross. Below we signal some important data from Gelston that might be suggestive in this direction. The contemporary questions deserving attention that follow from this such a discussion include some of the following: Does Christ make a payment to the moral law, to God himself or to both in some sense? Is a non-transferable payment made sufficient for human atonement for sin? In what sense is Christ’s payment truly penal in nature? Are there other options available like the possibility that Christ pay a penal payment to the law that somehow multiply repeatable rather than a discrete penal payment made individually?
D—The Solutio Tantidem
In the fourth part of Crisp’s account of Dr. Edwards’ penal non-substitution model, he offers some explanation of the concept of the so-called “suitable equivalence” of Christ’s sacrifice. It is in this part where we can see what is perhaps the most significant difference between the Northampton Sage and his son. Suitable equivalence has to do with several tightly woven together concepts. Crisp fixes on two concepts in particular. First, whether the death of Christ is of a sufficient weight, as it were, to tip the scales on the penal demands of the moral law. Or put differently, whether Christ’s death can be treated “as if it were the moral equivalent to the sin of humanity.”52 Second, whether or not the problems of (and therefore the solutions to) the retributive and rectoral demands of divine justice can be individuated one from the other. Upon reviewing the several explicit comments about the suitable equivalence of Christ’s made by some of those later New England theologians, Crisp argues that on penal non-substitution, “Christ’s suffering on the cross was not a species of penal substitution.”53 This, as the comments clearly show, is because while Christ was thought to have suffered a penalty of some sort, he suffered it specifically to meet the demands of the moral law, not as a substitute for individual persons. Crisp is careful to note, against several recent accounts of penal non-substitution, that for Dr. Edwards, Christ’s work remained an objective, though not supererogatory act.
E—Suitable Equivalent and Acceptation
In a related point, Crisp thoughtfully goes on to show how Edwards Jr considers that Christ could in fact have suffered less than he actually did suffer and still have offset the penal demands for human transgressions against the moral law has some interesting links to the medieval doctrine of “acceptation.” Here, Crisp distinguishes between what he aptly refers to as a “thin” versus a “thick” doctrine of Christ’s equivalent suffering for sin. “Thin,” because the accumulated penal consequence(s) of human suffering may in fact not have required a corresponding infinite equivalent to offset their demands; something he says is likely not the case for Edwards Jr. “Thick” because, alternatively, it may be the case (and likely is for Edwards Jr) that because sins against a being of infinite value require an infinite punishment, that the only suitable equivalent for such offenses much be of corresponding infinite value, and thus offered up by an infinite person, namely Christ. Following his assignment of this latter account to Edwards Jr, Crisp further discriminates between what he calls a “thicker” and a “plain thick” version of the “thick” view of the equivalence of Christ’s suffering. According to “thicker” version, Crisp describes Edwards Jr’s assertion that “any amount of suffering endured by Christ is of a qualitatively different nature to any suffering that might be endured by someone who is merely human”; something he says of Edwards Jr is “counterintuitive.”54 The “plain thick” view, to the contrary, Crisp claims avoids the fallout that seems to be entailed by the “thicker” view, which says that Christ’s hitting his thumb with a hammer, as it were, is an infinite suffering like his death on the cross appears to be. Crisp shows that Edwards Jr’s consideration of supposed thickness of Christ’s equivalent suffering is not discordant with his earlier assertions regarding Edwards Jr’s thinking about the necessity of the atonement.
Crisp is altogether correct to claim that the son of the Northampton Sage contributed a great deal more to the development of the New England theological tradition than he is often credited with.55 The preceding should no doubt make this point clearly. His account of Edwards Jr’s doctrine of penal non-substitution is thoroughgoing and convincing. It is, however, not without its own vulnerability. For there is evidence that suggests that Crisp’s account of Edwards Jr’s thinking about atonement is itself “thicker” than we have been lead to believe. Upon this suggestion we transition to consider several important comments that Edwards Jr makes about the atonement that
