A thought on retributive justice and the Atonement

The other day I was listening to a podcast of Christian philosopher William Lane Craig defending a version of the “penal substitutionary” account of the Atonement (“PSA” as it’s often referred to). One thing Craig emphasized was that Jesus must take our punishment in order to “satisfy God’s retributive justice.”

It occurred to me, however, that there is considerable tension between this account of the Atonement and the standard accounts of retributive justice.

To take one example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that the concept of retributive justice is best understood as committed to three principles:

1. that those who commit certain kinds of wrongful acts, paradigmatically serious crimes, morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment;
2. that it is intrinsically morally good—good without reference to any other goods that might arise—if some legitimate punisher gives them the punishment they deserve; and
3. that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers.

From the perspective of retributive justice, then, it seems that punishing an innocent person be worse than not punishing anyone at all. (Because it would violate both principles 1 and 2, at least.)

Under retributive justice, punishment is specifically supposed to be meted out to those who deserve it. It’s not like there’s just a free-floating quantity of punishment that has to land on someone. Retributive justice is intrinsically tied to the idea of desert.

Of course, a defender of PSA could say that God, being God, can relax the strict requirements of retributive justice, allowing an innocent person (Christ) to take the due punishment in humanity’s stead. But the obvious counter to this is that if God can relax strict retributive justice in this way, why can’t God relax it so as not to require anyone to be punished? Other things being equal, a state of affairs where no one is punished seems preferable to one where only the innocent are punished.

None if this is to say that there aren’t ways PSA defenders can respond to this. Maybe the most promising approach would be to develop the idea of Christ as a kind of “corporate person” who, because he collectively represents humanity, can be said to deserve this punishment in some extended sense. But I think it’s worth teasing out because it’s often assumed that this account of the Atonement is very closely connected to a retributive model of justice, and indeed that retributive justice requires something like PSA.*

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*Of course, many theologians and philosophers have disputed whether a retributive concept of justice is the most appropriate way of thinking about God’s justice. And they have developed Atonement models that don’t rely on retributive logic at all.