vicariously substituting himself for particular individuals, as in the case of penal substitution. Christ thus satisfies the legal demands of the moral law for everyone, not as a means of releasing them from their individual and particular debts to divine retribution. Rather, Christ dies to satisfy the unmet demands of the moral law, which in turn restores dignity or honor to God—the lawmaker.
This atonement narrative has seemingly reached a point of argumentative entropy in the literature, what with evidence that has more recently been held out that recommends President Edwards’ subscription to a version of the penal substitution theory of atonement. On this theory, Christ willingly assumes the legal responsibility for the sin(s) of human beings and by his substitutionary death pays their debt of punishment in order to satisfy God’s retributive rather than his rectoral justice.31 The recent suggestion that the so-called Northampton Sage may in fact have articulated such a doctrine has in part motivated a set of serious inquests into his successor’s doctrinal formulations, the most serious of which have been put forward in two articles by Oliver Crisp.32 In the first, Crisp directs his attention to Bellamy’s doctrine of atonement and convincingly recasts the “decline-and-fall narrative” as a story of doctrinal development—a move that has motivated much of the ensuing analysis. In the second article, Crisp offers up a thoroughgoing and rigorously systematic analysis of Edwards Jr’s doctrine of atonement. Crisp’s analysis of Edwards Jr ultimately distances him from the possibility—if his father did hold to some version of the penal substitution theory—that he carried on this aspect of the Reformed theological tradition.
So in order to distinguish, better still, isolate Edwards Jr’s thinking about the moral government theory from his fellow Edwardsians, let us consider a sort of “core sample” of features of the New England version of the moral government theory.33 By core sample we mean a sort of collation of ideas about the atonement that developed during the first, second, and third generations of Edwards’ intellectual tradition. Such a survey will bring us close to the heart of our understanding what it means for New England theologians to have been harangued with a decline and fall narrative until recently. For the sake of brevity and clarity, we set out this core sample in the following series of numbered theses, interspersed with both primary source evidence and some explanatory comments. For a more detailed discussion of these some of these features, we direct our readers elsewhere.34 We begin with:
1) God is the moral governor of the universe.35
That is, God is the supreme authority over all creation, including his morally responsible creatures. God’s government is his power, according to which his infinite wisdom and unfathomable divine will are exercised over his creatures to direct them to their various appointed ends. God’s moral government describes his specific interaction with rational creatures. President Edwards himself had a robust doctrine of God’s moral government, commenting,
Hereby it becomes manifest, that God’s moral government over mankind, his treating them as moral agents, making them the objects of his commands, counsels, calls, warnings, expostulations, promises, threatenings, rewards and punishments, is not inconsistent with a determining disposal of all events, of every kind, throughout the universe, in his providence; either by positive efficiency or permission.36
This brings us to our second thesis:
2) God governs his rational creatures by instituting the moral law.37
For Edwards and his successors alike, the moral law is the means by which God displays the righteousness of his self-love, makes his moral perfection and holiness comprehensible to the creature, and threatens those who despise his general benevolence toward and authority over his rational creatures.38 Again, consider Edwards, who writes:
The chief and most fundamental of all the commands of the moral law requires us “to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls, with all our strength, and all our mind”: that is plainly, with all that is within us, or to the utmost capacity of our nature: all that belongs to, or is comprehended within the utmost extent or capacity of our heart and soul, and mind and strength, is required. God is in himself worthy of infinitely greater love, than any creature can exercise towards him: he is worthy of love equal to his perfections, which are infinite: God loves himself with no greater love than he is worthy of when he loves himself infinitely: but we can give God no more than we have.39
By including references to President Edwards amongst these number theses we are intentionally trying to draw attention to the fact that are indeed doctrinal continuities regarding the moral government of God that are rightly labelled “Edwardsian.” Given this, the following thesis is a fairly critical distinction that Edwards’ successor made with some frequency is arguably the principal point of theological departure of the Edwardsians from their mentor.
3) God’s moral government is revoked by sin, which, strictly speaking, is an offence against the moral law, not God.
By making the moral law the measure of sin’s offence and thus ensuring that the problem that the atonement solves is a punitive one—an offence that requires the satisfaction of God’s retributive justice—they end up supplanting the idea that Christ’s work is in any way a substitutionary act.40 Edwards Amasa Park explains:
Our Lord suffered pains, which were substituted for the penalty of the law, and may be called punishment in the more general sense of the word, but were not strictly and literally the penalty which the law had threatened. . . . The humiliation, pains, and death of our redeemer were equivalent in meaning to the punishment threatened in the moral law, and thus they satisfied Him who is determined to maintain the honor of this law, but they did not satisfy the demands of the law itself for our punishment. . . . The active obedience [of Christ], viewed as the holiness of Christ was honorable to the law, but was not a work of supererogation, performed by our Substitute, and then transferred and imputed to us, so as to satisfy the requisitions of the law for our own active obedience.41
This brings us to our fourth thesis:
4) Sin requires atonement in order to satisfy the penal consequences of retributive justice, which rectoral justice demands by the moral law.42
This too is quite an important point of distinction. For where penal substitution demands that the offender suffer a penalty, rectoral justice has clear penal implications and Christ must suffer these implications in order to restore the honor that is due God’s moral law; the difference here being that Christ suffers this penal as an example, not as a substitute for any individual. And this leads us to our final thesis:
5) Christ makes atonement, not as a penal substitute but as a penal example, making it possible for God to forgive sin.43
In other words, Christ’s death for sinners was never intended to absolve them from their individual debts of punishment to God. Rather, Christ’s death publicly satisfied sins impunities against the moral law, making the forgiveness of the sins of individuals possible.44
Now,
