they won’t be breaking legs, they will be coming to finish you. Desperate to avoid a thrashing by Nitti-and-company, you quickly hang up on Eddy and phone your brother, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, who happens to be a close-confidante of the Capone family. After telling your brother what you’ve done and that you don’t have the money, he arranges a meeting with you and Capone to make a deal. To your great surprise and relief, in the meeting, your brother promises to pony-up the hundred-grand to pay your debt to Capone. The problem, however, is that having brokered the deal and bought your debt to Capone, your brother Guzik is now out a hundred-grand (provided he pays-up of course). What is interesting is that by discharging you of your debt to Capone, and assuming it himself, Guzik is now in a position to either forgive your debt to him outright and absorb the financial loss or exact the same sort of retribution from you, as would have Capone and company. Buying up your debt gives him that right. In this way, Guzik can either pay your debt or your debt of punishment.
Now, if we stop here we could cash out this analogy in terms of either a payment of a debt of punishment or payment of a debt. To owe Capone a debt—in this case, a debt of honor—means that he may neither lose money nor his honor and thus remains both vigilant and patient until these things are restored to him. To owe him a debt of punishment means that getting back the money means less to Capone than killing you, perhaps in order to show that he is not one to be trifled with and that he will inevitably and eventually settle all accounts of those offences against him.63
It is the Capone-like exaction of a debt of punishment that is precisely the problem that the death of Christ solves on the penal substitution model. God’s punitive action for offences against him is the actualization of his retributive justice. And according to exponents of penal substitution, it is the retributive demands of divine justice that Christ takes upon himself to meet for humanity’s sake. Divine retributive justice is that which God visits upon the unrighteous for sins against him.
For Edwards’ part, Christ is somehow depicted as paying both a debt simpliciter and a debt of punishment. For Christ to perform both of these works is a problem on several levels. But before we show how this is a potential problem—because it is so intimately bound up with the direction of sins offence—let us consider a second aspect of a debt of punishment.
II.3.2. Retribution and the Direction of Sins Offence
The second aspect of a debt of punishment that demands our attention here is the underlying assumption that sins offense is directed against God himself, and not, say, against his moral law. According to Edwards,
Sin is of such a nature that it wishes ill, and aims at ill, to God and men, but to God especially. It strikes at God; it would, if it could, procure his misery and death. It is but suitable that with what measure it meets, it should be measured to it again. ‘Tis but suitable that men should reap what they sow, and that the reward of every man’s hands should be given him.64
In this way, exponents of penal substitution make much of the fact that divine retribution for offenses against God are private legal affairs—that is, they are offenses against God himself by individual, morally responsible creatures, in contrast to say, a public offense, which is an offense against a society. Consider that if someone commits a crime against another, that person is liable for the offense and punishment will likely befall the offending party. The individual, who sins against God, so they argue, is thus justly liable to the punitive measures of God’s retributive justice as an individual. Such exponents also make much of the fact that private or individual offenses require individual reconciliation. This is, so they claim, what Christ does in making atonement, namely, effect personal, individual, and legal reconciliation between persons and God. That sins offense is against God and that it is something with individual implications is evident from the previous quotations. However, Edwards says elsewhere that,
‘tis requisite that sin should be punished, as punishment is deserved and just, therefore the justice of God obliges him to punish sin: for it belongs to God as the supreme Rector of the universality of things, to maintain order and decorum in his kingdom, and to see to it that decency and right takes place at all times, and in all cases. That perfection of his nature whereby he is disposed to this, is his justice; and therefore, his justice naturally disposes him to punish sin as it deserves. The holiness of God, which is the infinite opposition of his nature to sin, naturally and necessarily disposes him to punish sin.65
He then goes on to argue that,
God is to be considered in this affair not merely as the governor of the world of creatures, to order things between one creature and another, but as the supreme regulator or Rector of the universality of things, the orderer of things relating to the whole compass of existence, including himself, to maintain the rights of the whole, and decorum through the whole, and to maintain his own rights, and the due honor of his own perfections, as well as to keep justice among creatures. ‘Tis fit that there should be one that has this office, and the office properly belongs to the supreme being. And if he should fail of doing justice to him[self] in a needed vindication of his own majesty and glory, it would be an immensely greater failure of his rectoral justice than if he should deprive the creatures, that are beings of infinitely less consequence, of their rights.66
A close reading of these two statements alongside the one in the previous section reveals that these statements are actually incongruent. The problem here is that if penal offences are both criminal and punishable, they are not, strictly speaking, private or individual, so much as public or societal affairs that are punishable by the authority of a system of laws, not an individual lawmaker. In other words, a coherent picture of penal substitution seems to require that sins offence be levelled against the moral law and not God himself, and that this is a problem facing all persons collectively, not as individuals, as it is so often thought to be the case. For Edwards’ part, he seems to conflate the two.
It might be helpful to think of the difference between the offences that are tried in a United States district or civil court versus those tried in a United States criminal court. In a United States district court, someone might be sued, for example, for a breach of contract. Strictly speaking, this is not a criminal offense. This is a personal, (and therefore private) offense—one person versus another (even another individual group, as in a class action suit)—that is resolved by the offending party’s restoring or making reparation for the offended party. United States Criminal courts, by contrast, try criminal offenders. If someone is on trial for murder, say, that person’s offense is, again, strictly speaking, not against the one they killed (though I am sure we would all agree that murder is, if not the most, among the most egregious personal offenses that human persons can perpetrate against one another). Rather, their offense is against the laws of the society to which both parties have presumably assented and which demand that murderers pay a debt of punishment to society upon the commitment of such a crime. And in the United States judicial system, this debt is paid by incarceration or sometimes, in some states, death. In this way, murder, or any such criminal offense, is a public matter between the murderer and the society at large, not, strictly speaking, the murderer and the one that was murdered.67 To put it differently, there’s a difference between offenses against Capone himself and those levelled against the rules of his club.
Now, carrying this line of thinking over to the more recent suggestions of Edwards subscription to penal substitution, if Christ is said to pay a debt of punishment on behalf of others, then, the debt is actually not a private offense against God—like in a district court—requiring that something be restored (via reparation) to God, despite those claims of his being the privately offended party.68 To put it rather bluntly, nothing is restored to God on the penal substitution model. Instead, and quite to the contrary of the apparent demands of God’s retributive justice, penal substitution seems only to make provision for God to restore righteousness to humanity, leaving God dishonored and his Son, crushed (as the prophet Isaiah says) for this dishonor, and what is more, all of this being of no apparent benefit to himself. And this is in contrast to Edwards’ apparent thinking that the work Christ does in making atonement
