Let's conclude.
Finally, let me make a comment about the 'immoral' allegation. Morality includes love and forgiveness, which are essentially forbidden to the legal system. Courts can only indict, acquit, or refuse to hear the case. They can wiggle some on sentencing (but less so every day with 'sentence equalization' movements). But they simply cannot forgive sin. The love a judge might have for a defendant cannot in the least allow him to 'influence the outcomes' of the judicial process. Morality is a super-set of Law, and Penal Substitution is a wonderfully elegant endorsement of both the importance of the moral law, the urgency of divine love to forgive, and the zeal with which these were pursued by God. Consider the 'moral' outcomes of this (Dabney again, Christ our Penal Substitute, Part 8 and 11):
"The reasonableness and righteousness of this plan of vicarious redemption may be very shortly proved by pressing this plain question: Whom does it injure? God, the lawgiver, is not injured, for the plan is his own, and he gains in this way a nobler satisfaction to the penal claims of law and to his own holiness, truth, and justice, than he would gain by the punishment of the puny creatures themselves. The Messiah is not injured, because he gave his own free consent, and because the plan will result in the infinite enhancement of his own glory. Certainly, ransomed sinners are not injured, because they gain infinite blessedness, and the plan works moral influences upon them incomparably more noble and blessed. The unsaved are not injured, for in bearing their due punishment personally they receive exactly what they deserve and precisely what they obstinately preferred to redemption in Christ. None of the innocent subjects of God's moral judgment on earth or in all the heavens are injured, because this vicarious redemption of believing men originated a grand system of moral influences far sweeter, more noble, more pure, and more efficacious than those which they would have felt without it. But how can there be injustice when nobody is injured'?
"When we discard the ethics of expediency, place the disciplinary results of chastisement in their subordinate rank amidst God's purposes, and when we recognize the truth that his supreme end in punishing is the impartial satisfaction of eternal justice, all reasonable difficulties concerning the transfer of guilt and penalty, the proper conditions being present, vanish away. Towards guilty but pardoned men God does pursue in the infliction of pains a remedial and disciplinary purpose; but when he comes to deal in justice with men and angels who are finally reprobate, these ends are absent; the only one which remains is the retributive one. To secure this end, the punishment of a substitute may be as truly relevant as of the guilty principal, provided the adequate substitute be found, and his own free consent obviates all charge of injustice against him personally; for now law is satisfied, guilt is duly punished, though the guilty man be pardoned. The penal debt is paid, as truly and fairly paid as is the bond of the insolvent debtor when his independent surety brings to the creditor the full tale of money. But let us suppose that the wisdom and power of God the Father and the infinite majesty and love of the Son combine to effect a substitution by which impartial justice and law are more gloriously satisfied than by the condign punishment of the guilty themselves. Then is a result obtained unspeakably more honorable, not only to justice, but to the divine love and every other attribute. God is revealed full-orbed in his righteousness, no longer wrenched out of true moral symmetry by man's poor utilitarian ethics. Impartial justice appears even more adorable than in the punishment of the personally guilty. When God pours out his retributive justice upon the guilt of men and angels who have insulted him, caviling creatures, in their blindness and enmity, might charge that he was indulging, at least in part, a personal resentment inflamed by their outrages; but when they see him visit this justice upon his only begotten Son, infinitely holy in his eyes, notwithstanding his eternal and divine love, men and devils are obliged to admit that this is the action of nothing but pure, impersonal equity, as absolutely free from the taint of malice as it is majestic and awful. When we see that while, on the one hand, immutable righteousness restrains the Father from setting aside his penal law at the prompting of mere pity, infinite love makes him incapable of consenting to the deserved perdition of sinners, and makes him willing to sacrifice the object worthier and dearer in his eyes than all the worlds rather than endure the spectacle of this immense woe; we gain a revelation of God's love more glorious and tender than any other doctrine can teach. Our opponents charge that we obscure the delightful attribute of benevolence in God in order to exaggerate the awful attribute of vengeance. In truth we do just the opposite. It is our doctrine as taught by the gospel, which reveals depths and heights of the divine tenderness and love, which neither men nor angels could have otherwise imagined. The Socinian says that God's love is such an attribute as prompts him to forgive sin at the expense at once of the order of his great kingdom and of the glory of his own consistency. A very deep pity this! but a pity equally weak and unwise. The gospel teaches us that there is in God a pity infinitely deep, and equally wise and holy...Let us suppose a human brother most gracious and virtuous who should speak thus; "I cannot sacrifice principle and honor to save my erring younger brother; but I am willing to sacrifice myself. I cannot lie to save him, but I will die to save him." This declaration would excite in every just mind glowing admiration. Such an elder brother would be a feeble type, in his combined integrity and pitying love, of the God-man; and he answers us that in these exalted affections he represents exactly the attributes of the whole Trinity.
So, I think the LEGAL objection is either 'misplaced' or unrepresentative of the real situation, and that it certainly has a number of problems to overcome (with its First Premise and Middle Term) before it should be entertained again, in a revised form.
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The Metaphysical One is a horse of a different color...[But not TEAL, because forgiven-little-Glenn is the Teal--thanks to HIM--YES!!!]
This argument is a bit off-center for us, since it has a problem with equivocation, relative to Penal Substitution. In Penal Substitution, "guilt" is legal guilt--that is, liability to punishment. This is NOT the same as 'moral blameworthiness' (which is unrelated to statutes of law...there can be 'sin' without 'crime'--done in Laws of War all the time, as when the Law simply cannot change as fast as our sinful cleverness.
If we add the adjective 'legal' in front of the word 'guilt' in the objection, we get a manifest falsehood:
"[Legal] Guilt is an attribute attached permanently to a criminal agent, because of their indissoluble historical attachment with a specific criminal act. Such [legal] guilt cannot be detached from said agent, because the agent cannot be detached from the historicity of their criminal act. And, consequently, if the [legal] guilt cannot be detached, then it cannot be re-attached to someone else, who does not have a historical attachment with the criminal act which creates and sustains the 'legal' 'guilt' associated with the act."
Legal guilt is "liability" to legal punishment. So, from some online dictionary: "1. The criminality and consequent exposure to punishment resulting from willful disobedience of law, or from morally wrong action; the state of one who has broken a moral or political law; crime; criminality; offense against right. 2. Exposure to any legal penalty or forfeiture."
Legally, when the criminal has served their sentence, they are no longer 'liable to punishment' and hence are no longer guilty. So, Legal guilt is NOT "attached permanently" to a criminal agent. They still are a felon; they still have a criminal record; but they are no longer 'guilty' in the sense we use in "Penal Substitution" discussion. The objection misses the mark. Theologians readily admit that my 'unworthiness' continues on after forgiveness, that 'demerit' doesn't transfer per se (only the legal liability to punishment), and that the perp is forever 'indicted' (even after justice has been served). The objection is just a little too fuzzy and too thin to bear the weight it is trying to. In the case of 'legal' guilt, it is manifestly false. In the case of 'historical guilt' ("it is a permanent attribute of yours that you committed 14 first-degree grammatical atrocities over the past eight pages"), it is trivially true. In the case of 'morally blameworthy for having done such a thing', it is banally true (and accepted by all)--but legally irrelevant, once the punishment has been inflicted. Essentially, the objection 'needs work'...
Theologically, of course, our Points 2 and Points 3 above (in the little Glenn story) would be a suitable reply to this, anyway.
That being said, I would suggest that there are additional ways to defeat this objection, based on equally 'refined' metaphysics (smile), which perhaps I can develop some other time. For starters, I think I would zero in on the 'personal-moral continuity' level, and probe there first. For example, the original crime was so because of intent/motive (part of our standard definitions of crime) on the part of an agent. If, after 5 years of not being caught and suffering the pangs of conscience, the perp internally repudiates his actions, motives, intents, and begins to live a completely different/superlative moral life, is this person really the 'same person' that the guilt was originally attached to, at-point-of-crime? Of course, if the perp had stayed 'perp-ing', the moral continuity of the personality was 'unbroken' and so THAT modern 'instance' of the perp WAS STILL the same dude (e.g., in motive and intent). But I suspect that if one digs just under the surface of the metaphysics of a contrite, changed-life post-perp perp, one might find some points where the legal guilt 'stays in the past' with the past-self (and is not shared-by-personal-contact with all post-event 'similar selves'). This is a philosophically heavy point here, and I hope to develop it in a different context, but 'uncleanness' spread by 'contact' in the OT/Tanaach, so what happens if the Glenn-of-11:59pm no longer has any moral 'contact' (through radical repudiation, self-loathing, moral distancing, etc.) from the Glenn-of-11:58? Does the 'moral uncleanness' spread? (heavy stuff, but unnecessary for our point here...smile). Does not the theological "dying to self" mean some true/radical discontinuity between the guilty/old and the forgiven/free, centered around abject repudiation of the old self--especially if death really is 'separation'?
[This, btw, becomes a problem for our Lord, because unrequited sin (and this would be impossible to specifically requite--because that person no longer actually existed, due to the discontinuity, under my suggestion here) requires a sacrifice in itself...cf. Deut 21.1-9, where they never find the murderer, but a sacrifice is required anyway...I wonder, and tremble in thinking about this, how many unrequited crimes had their ONLY judicial consequences on the Person of our Lord on that Cross...]
There are other problems with the objection, concerning how attributes relate to one another. One of my attributes is that I am a "Southerner" (because of where I was born), but when I lived in California, I was also a 'Californian' (because of where I paid utility bills). At a 'flat level', there is a 'contradiction', but once you dive into the nature and causes of the attribution (birth, residence), the difficulty goes away.
In our case, I suspect one can make a case that I can be guilty and no-longer-guilty at the same time, because the grounding bases are different (moral-legal, personal-judicial, etc). Not sure I can be 'innocent' again (until I get my new name...yes!). And, there's the 'attachment point' issue: legal guilt 'attached' (as an attribute, in this objection) on a self, but this self had to have had the "intent" and "motive" to make the action a crime. If somewhere between 'crime' and 'punishment', I lose the 'intent' (e.g., through a radical reformation of character and values), where does the attribute 'attach' now? The me-with-intent is gone, and only exists in the past. With the intent attribute gone, I am no longer the "immoral person" who did the crime--not that that will stop the justice system (but it DOES tend to make the courts/judges more lenient in sentencing--perhaps an indication of this 'change'). The 'attribute' model seems too 'flat' or simplistic a framework to discuss this. [Theologians note that 'guilt' is a relationship between a law and a perp, so the objection might best be restated in terms of relationships, somehow--but I'll leave that to the objector...smile.]
Again, the metaphysical issue is not very 'forceful', and certainly too 'simplistic' (at least in the form I have stated it--I will look for a stronger form and deal with it later), and I think our theological and legal arguments are sufficient to send this objection "back to committee" for refinement and rework...
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I do want to quote one last time from Dabney, at the point where he is drawing from Penal Substitution an implication about the love of God:
"These are the essential points of our defense of God's providence: First, The restoration of Adam's apostate race was in no sense necessary to God's personal interest, glory, or selfish welfare. He is all-sufficient unto himself. He was infinitely blessed end happy in himself before Adam's race existed. When it fell, he could have vindicated his own glory, as he did in the case of Satan and his angels, by the condign punishment of all men. He could have created another world and another race, fairer than ours, to fill the chasm made by our fall. Second, The price which he paid in order to avoid this just result of sin in our fallen race was the death of the God-man. Since the co-equal Son was incarnate in him, he was a person dearer and greater in God's eyes than any world, or all the worlds together. Being infinite, God-Messiah bulks more largely in the dimensions of his being than all the creatures aggregated. He was more worthy and lovely in the Father's view than any holy creature, "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." This great fact may not open to us the deep secret of the permission of evil -- perhaps no finite mind could fully comprehend it were its revelation attempted -- but the glorious sacrifice of love does prove that no defect of divine benevolence can have had part in this secret. Had there been in God's heart the least lack of infinite mercy, had there been a single fibre of indifference to the misery of his creatures, Christ would never have been given to die for the guilt of men.
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Well, it's (another...smile) start...and a trail of wonderment and worship for me, unlike probably any Tank article before...I have wept more tears of gratitude and been swept away by more visions of "This Grand Love" in this article, than any other I can remember...perhaps that point made by someone about this view being the most 'effective' at stirring the heart to love, thankfulness, worship, and commitment to holiness is what I am feeling right now...
But I must stop now (it's 12.40am, and I still have to SPELLCHECK this sucker...sigh/smile)...the grammar, of course, is irreparable...but I'm the teal ...and a Little Drummer Boy tonight for the One who Came to Die...
Quiet at the foot of the Cross,
Glenn Miller (Jan 21/2005)
