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L. Dabney\par Table of Contents:\par \b0\fs22\par * 1. The Rationalistic Objections to Penal Substitute\par * 2. Definitions and Statement of the Issue\tab\par * 3. Objections Examine\par * 4. The Utilitarian Theory of Punishments\par * 5. Retribution not Revenge\par * 6. The Witness of Human Consciousness and Experience\par * 7. Our Opponents' Self Contradiction\par * 8. The Ethical Objections Considered\par * 9. What Scripture says of Substitution\par * 10. The Testimony of Christendom\par * 11. Conclusion\par \par \lang1033 Reformatted for e-Sword by David Cox (c) 2007\par dcox@davidcox.com.mx\par \lang2058 Stored on \cf0{\field{\*\fldinst{HYPERLINK "http://www.davidcox.com.mx/"}}{\fldrslt{\ul\cf2 http://www.davidcox.com.mx/}}}\cf1\f0\fs22\par \par \par } D  f / e j  11. Conclusioni\IF." 10. The Testimony of ChristendomPKWIFRF 09. What Scripture says of SubstitutionNIF`T 08. The Ethical Objections ConsideredBIF\P07. Our Opponents' Self Contradictionz\<IF\P06. Witness of Human Consciousness & Experience,9IFpd05. Retribution not Revenge/IFH<04. The Utilitarian Theory of Punishments*F*IFdX03. Objections ExamineIF>202. Definitions and Statement of the Issue4gIFfZ01. Rationalistic Objections to Penal Substitute8.IFrf00 Dabney - Christ our Penal Substituten@`TLVALIF{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;\red0\green128\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\cf1\lang2058\b\f0\fs32 The Rationalistic Objections to Penal Substitute\par \b0\fs22\par The student of religious discussion finds these objections as varied and pertinacious as though the blessed conception of righteous pardon, grounded in full satisfaction to law, were irritating and insulting to the objectors, instead of being attractive, as it should be, to all of us sinners. This cardinal conception is rejected by the multitudes of rationalizing nominal Christians through every party, from Socinians upward. They say that they must reject it as essentially unjust, as thus obnoxious to necessary moral intuitions, and so impossible to be ascribed to a righteous God. They say they must infer this from the Bible facts, that God strictly prohibits such substitution to civil magistrates judging in his name (see \cf2\ul Deu_24:16\cf1\ulnone ), and that he disclaims the usage for himself, as in the famous text, \cf2\ul Eze_18:20\cf1\ulnone .\par \par 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 antipspchoi 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.\par \par They argue that, since "God is love," we must not represent his penalties as meaning vengeance on transgressors, or simple retribution for supposed outrage upon his authority and personal honor; to indict misery upon the transgressor for this purpose would not be holy justice, but malicious revenge; and that this notion has descended from the pagan conceptions of their vindictive gods, who weLVALre apprehended rather as fearful demons than as a heavenly Father. Hence their only conception of divine justice is the remedial one. Penalties are but modified expressions of divine benevolence, just like the chastisements and bitter medicines administered by loving parents to erring or diseased children, solely for their good, and as deterrents from future transgressions for them and their brothers and sisters. Hence the objectors infer, with loud triumph, that there can be no imputed guilt and vicarious punishment, because the sick child must swallow his own physic in order to get any cure. The taking of it by a healthy comrade can do him no good. They charge that the orthodox doctrine of the necessity of a vicarious satisfaction in order to pardon is directly contradicted by the duty of Christian forgiveness, so strongly enjoined upon us in Scripture. To forgive those who trespass upon us, without waiting for compensation for the injuries done us, is the loveliest Christian virtue. The Lord's prayer makes such forgiveness the absolute condition of our receiving forgiveness from him. The apostle commands Christians to forgive their enemies "even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven them." But surely our Christian virtue should consist in our being like God. His perfections, therefore, do not prompt him to exact penal satisfaction in order to pardon. But the orthodox doctrine misrepresents God in an odious light, as a vindictive being who refuses to relinquish his own pique, no matter how penitent the transgressor against him, until his vengeance is satiated; yea, so blindly vindictive, that he can be satisfied only by hurting somebody, though that person be the innocent one.\par \par The more thoughtful objectors also argue analytically, that there can be no penal substitution in God's government, because penalty loses its whole propriety and moral significance when transferred away from the person of the transgressor. They ask, What is it that deserves penalty? Everybody's common sense answers,LVAL It is the sin. But sin is not a substantial thing when abstracted from the sinner. In strictness of speech, sin is the sinner acting. The sinfulness and bad desert are nothing more than the attributes of the sinning person. Hence they infer that the penalty must be as inalienable as the personal ill-desert.\par \par Therefore, imputation can be but a legal fiction, and that an immoral one. Passing from abstractions to concrete cases, they cry passionately, "How could any right mind view the punishment of an innocent person in place of the guilty except with righteous and burning indignation? " If you, Mr. Calvinist, were the victim of such a legal fiction, we surmise that all the dogmatism of the orthodox would fail to satisfy you under your unjust sufferings! Therefore, the ground upon which God permitted a holy Christ to suffer and die must be otherwise explained. The places in the Scripture which seem to teach his penal substitution must be so expounded as to expunge that doctrine out of them.\par \par So far as I know myself, I have above given the points and the arguments of the objectors with complete fairness and sufficient fullness. I have set them in the strongest light which their assertor's could throw around them. I do not believe that the impartial reader can find any treatise advocating Socinianism, or the new theology, which makes as plausible a showing as I have now made for them. Does the array appear formidable? Yet if the reader will follow me faithfully, he will convince himself that these seeming bulwarks are built not of stone, but of fog. They owe their seeming strength to half truths, false analogies, and defective analyses of elements.\par \par Now, reader, audi alteram partem, "A man seemeth right in his own cause until his neighbor cometh and searcheth him."\par \par \par } LVALIF{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;\red0\green128\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\cf1\lang2058\b\f0\fs32 Definitions and Statement of the Issue\b0\par \fs22\par The standard which distinguishes between righteousness and sin is the preceptive will of a holy God. This legislative prerogative belongs to him by right of his moral perfections, omniscience and righteous ownership of us as our Maker, Preserver, and Redeemer. Our righteousness is our intelligent and hearty compliance with that will. Our sin is our conscious and spontaneous discrepancy there from. (\cf2\ul 1Jo_3:4\cf1\ulnone The badness or evilness expressed in any sin (and usually increased by it) is the attribute or subjective quality of the sinning agent. "Potential guilt" is the ill-desert, or merit of punishment, attaching to the transgressor by reason of his sin. This concept is not identical with that judgment and sentiment of disapprobation which sin awakens in the conscience, though it springs immediately out of it. Where we judge that an agent has sinned, we also judge that he has made himself worthy of penalty; that his sin deserves suffering, and this is a necessary and universal part of the moral intuition whose rise he occasions in us. Such is potential guilt. Actual guilt (reatus) is obligatio ad poenam ex peccafo, the debt of penalty to law arising out of transgression. It is the penal enactment of the lawgiver which ascertains and fixes this guilt. Hence, under a lawgiver who was less than omniscient and all perfect, there might be sin, evil attribute and potential guilt, while yet the actual guilt was absent, because the penal statute defining it did not exist. It thus appears that while evilness or sinfulness is an attribute, actual guilt (reatus) is not an attribute but a relation. It is a personal relation between a sinning agent and the sovereign will which legislates the penal statute. Now, when the Scriptures and theolLVALogy speak of penal imputation or substitution, it is this relation only which is transferred or counted over from the sinning person to his substitute. We do not dream of a similar transfer of personal acts, or of the personal attributes expressed in such acts.\par \par Now let none exclaim that these are the mere subtleties of abstraction. They are the most practical distinctions. They are recognized, and must be recognized, in the civil and criminal laws of men as much as in the government of God. Readers must observe that in sacred Scripture the word "sin" is often used by metonymy where the concept intended is that of actual guilt. Thus a prophet exclaims (\cf2\ul Jer_50:20\cf1\ulnone ): "In those days, and in that time, saith the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none." The exact meaning of the word "iniquity" here must be actual guilt, else we should make the prophet contradict himself utterly by first charging on Israel very great sins, and then declaring that no sins of theirs existed, which is, moreover, a statement impossible to be true of any of Adam's race. In a multitude of places, God's mercy is said to "remit sins." But actual guilt is what is meant. For God's act of forgiveness only removes our actual guilt from us; not sinfulness, as is proved by our own subsequent, most hearty confessions of unworthiness and sinfulness whenever God really forgives us. Or let us add another instance, since this distinction is so vital and so much overlooked. A thief steals a horse of a neighboring benefactor, sells him beyond recovery, and loses the money at the gaming table. These acts of the thief give expression to much meanness or vileness of character. The market price of the horse was one hundred dollars. These acts have infected upon the good neighbor a pecuniary loss (damnum) of that amount. They have also laid the thief under the penal obligation of five years or more in the penitentiary, as fixed by statute law. The good man, learning that the thief and hLVALis family are still suffering destitution, exclaims: "Oh! I freely forgive the fellow." What he means is that he, at the prompting of charity, remits to the thief his damnum, his lost hundred dollars, and suppresses the anger at first naturally and properly felt. The good man dreams of no such folly as that he can remove from the thief his attribute of vileness or release him from his legal debt of penal servitude; he knows he has neither the power nor the right. The distinction between potential and actual guilt is found, perfectly real and solid, in numerous secular cases; as where the cunning manipulators of business corporations so juggle with the property of creditors and fellow-stockholders as to inflict on them what is mere theft in the sight of God. But the sapient American legislatures, while recklessly creating such corporations, have forgotten to enact any statutes fixing the legal penalties for these juggleries. Hence these men go unwhipped of justice, although the judges of the courts may be thoroughly alert and righteous. Abundant potential guilt is there, but for want of statute law the debt of actual guilt does not exist.\par \par 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 securityLVAL, 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. And the whole question between us and the objectors is this: May the sovereign Judge righteously provide for such a substitution, when the free consent of the substitute is given, and all the other conditions are provided by God for good results? This issue is cardinal. As the church of all ages has understood the Scriptures, the whole plan of gospel redemption rests upon this substitution of Christ as its corner-stone. He who overthrows the corner-stone overthrows the building. The system which he rears without this foundation may be named Christianity by him, but it will be another building, his own handiwork, not that of God--- another gospel. This is proved by the history of doctrinal discussions. There is scarcely a leading head of divinity which is not changed or perverted as a logical consequence of this denial of penal substitution consistently carried out. It must change the description of God's attributes, excluding his distributive justice from the catalogue of his essential perfections, and putting in place of it the morals of expediency. It must vitiate our view of God's immutability. It must change and lower our conception of sin as an infinite evil, because it assails the impartial justice, holiness and unchangeableness of an infinite God. He who pronounces the imputation of guilt to Christ morally impossible for God, has, of course, rejected the doctrine of original sin; for that contains, as Paul teaches in Romans v., a parallel imputation. Next, the church doctrine of justification must be corrupted, for that is founded upon the counterpartLVAL imputation of Christ's righteousness to believers personally unworthy, which is just as bad as the other, if the objectors are right. The true office of faith must next be perverted; for the imputed ground of justification having been denied, there is nothing else to thrust into its place except the believer's faith. The doctrine of adoption must be changed; there is nothing left to purchase it except the believer's personal obedience after the merit of Christ's preceptive righteousness is discarded. The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints becomes an excrescence and an absurdity in this creed; for the title and status of the Christian as a child of grace cannot be more stable than its foundation, and the only foundation left is the believer's own obedience, which is incomplete and mutable. The whole doctrine of Satan and, his angels, with their fall and eternal condemnation, must be rejected, since the theory asserts that the only penalties which the God of love can inflict must be remedial, whereas everlasting torments are not a remedy, but a destruction. Of course, this creed should reject eternal punishments of reprobate men, and teach universalism for the same reason. A proper belief in God's providence becomes impossible, because, if there was a special providence in Christ's sufferings and death, we should have God punishing Christ for other men's sins. How much now remains of the church theology? Did the limits of this treatise permit, the teachings of one or another of the objectors could be quoted, asserting each of these heretical inferences, and that logically from their denial of penal substitution. All of these errors are not charged upon all our opponents, for many of them are preserved from a part by a fortunate logical inconsistency. These objections against imputation are mostly of Socinian origin; and consistently followed they will lead back to Socinianism.\par \par The doctrine of substitution is taught by the Scriptures so expressly in both Testaments, by types and didacLVALtic propositions, and with such iteration, that it cannot be eliminated from the Bible system without a license of exegesis destructive of all faith in the inspiration of the Scriptures. Infidelity lies as the next remove from these disingenuous misconstructions. Let these three propositions be set side by side: Jesus was perfectly innocent; guilt cannot be imputed from a sinner to his substitute on any condition whatsoever; Jesus suffered the bitterest sorrows and death. Then there is but one way to reconcile them with each other; it must be asserted that God's providence does not direct what befalls even the best men, and that the evils of this life and the death of the body are not penal evils, but mere natural consequences, like the fading of the flower and the fall of the leaf. Such is theological result. Obviously, it assails God's word with the most express and insolent contradiction possible. It gives us practical atheism, that, namely, of the Greek Epicureans, for the god who exercises no providence over us in our most urgent circumstances is practically no god to us. And after an utter rejection of Scripture, it blots out every premise by which natural theology proves that there is a moral government over mankind. Is there any deeper abyss of infidelity? Yet not only is the Socinian literature, but the pretended "Advanced Christian thought" of our day, loaded with denials of the moral possibility of penal substitution, confidently uttered by men who do not foresee whither they are traveling. A generation ago Jenkyn, Beaman, and Barnes excluded this vital truth from their treatises on the atonement. So the New Haven theology had done, and its parent, Dr. Samuel Taylor, of Yale; so does Dr. Joseph Parker, the great light of the English Independents; so does Dr. Burney, lately the theological teacher of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, in a recent world, which, as we hear, his General assembly fail to disclaim; so teach multitudes of pulpit leaders in nearly all the Protestant denominations.(LVAL8 The customary tone of secular literature is marked by a fiery and disdainful rejection of the whole concept. And these writers think that nobody can believe it except stupid old fogies besotted in their bigotry. If Presbyterian pastors will probe the opinions of their own people they will find numbers of communicants who regard themselves as more cultivated and intellectual, discarding penal imputation as an insult to their moral intuitions. These facts show that an exhaustive and triumphant refutation of objections and a anal establishment of this vital doctrine are among the urgent needs of the day. If the innovators would but study the masterly demonstrations of the church theologians, of an Anselm, a Calvin, a Turretin, a Witsius, a Hill, a Hodge, a Shedd, they would not need further discussion. But the flippant and superficial spirit of our age disdains a thorough study of these masters; they are filliped aside by the words "antiquated," "Calvinistic."\par \par \par } LVALIF{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;\red0\green128\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\cf1\lang2058\b\f0\fs32 Objections Examine\b0\par \fs22\par It is objected that the unrighteousness of penal substitution is strongly shown by the fact that God expressly prohibited it to human magistrates (\cf2\ul Deu_24:16\cf1\ulnone ), and that in \cf2\ul Eze_18:4\cf1\ulnone , he disclaims it as a principle of his own moral government, declaring that "the soul that sinneth, it shall die." The first assertion is correct; the second misconceives the text. But the sophism of the first is contained in the false assumption that because a given moral prerogative is improper for men, it must, therefore, be improper for God. I shall not take the harsh position that because God is sovereign and omnipotent, therefore his will is not regulated by, or responsible to, those fundamental principles of morality which he has enjoined on his creatures. I shall never argue that God's "might makes his right," as our opponents charge strict Calvinists with arguing. But it is a very different thing, and a perfectly plain and reasonable thing, to say that the infinite sovereignty, wisdom, and holiness of God may condition, and may limit his moral rights in a manner very different from what is proper for us men. 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 LVALhis servants they must not do a certain thing, therefore it is immoral for him to do it.\par \par 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. 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. One bankrupt cannot release the obligations of another bankrupt by becoming surety for him. The surety must personally be innocent, righteous, and owing nothing for himself to penal law. This principle governed in the establishment of the representative relation between both Adam and Christ and their two federal bodies. Adam was personally innocent when thus chosen, and must have continued so in order to benefit his federal body; and Christ was and continued absolutely innocent, and was thus able to justify his federal body by his imputed merit. Here, then, is one insuperable obstacle to any human ruler's punishing through a substitute. Not to dwell upon this difficulty, that a good man would rarely be found willing to die under human law for a wicked neighbor, we meet another still more fatal. No subject of human government has that ownership or autocracy of his own faculties and being which are strictly necessary for a penal substitution; these belong to his maker; they are but a loan to the creature. Now, no citLVAL izen, however generous, can pay his neighbor's debt with propriety, nor his own, by robbing another in order to get the wherewithal. Besides this, every man in society owes moral obligations to other fellow-creatures who have a rightful interest in his being and faculties. Let us suppose that a good Damon were found generous enough to propose dying for a bad Pythias; Damon's wife would very certainly protest, saying, may it please the court, I "have a legal right to object utterly to that arrangement; for our matrimonial contract has invested me with a previous right in Damon's life and faculties, for the protection and subsistence of me and my children. If the judge knew anything of law, he would be obliged to reply, that the wife was right; that Damon, however generous, had no right to dispose of his life in this substitution, and that the court could not accept his proposal, being clothed with only a limited and delegated power, and strictly forbidden by the sovereign to accept such an arrangement. Another obstacle would arise; the civil magistrate has no power to convert Pythias from the evil of his way. And as he is equally unable to raise Damon from death, the practical results of the substitution would only be to deprive society of a good citizen in order to preserve for it one who had been wicked and mischievous, and who would, probably, continue so. When we add to this that the human judge might wickedly pervert the power of substitution to wreak his malice upon some innocent person, or to gratify a general rage for slaughter, we have the true reason which prompted God to prohibit the power summarily to the magistrate. But how worthless is the inference that he will never exercise it himself under conditions which he knows to be wise, just, and beneficial?\par \par Now, we find every condition which was la