Barnes * defines punishment or penalty as ‘‘evil in- | flicted by the lawgiver, or under his direction, to show his sense of the value of the law, or of the evil of violat- ing the law.” But he also insists that Christ did not suffer the penalty of the law; that sin was not truly punished nor punitive justice truly exercised in his death: “That the Atonement (p. 244)“ts something substituted in the place of the penalty of the law, which will answer the same ends that the punishment of the offender himself would.” But his own definition of the penalty is, pain inflicted with the design of showing the evil of violating the law; and now he says that the Atonement is pain inflicted with the same design; and yet in making the Atonement, Christ did not suffer the penalty. Thus God manifested his justice by refusing
* Atonement, p. 89.
IMMUTABILITY OF THE LAW. 61 to exercise it, and gave an example of punishment when there was no penalty; and proved his hatred of sin, and the certainty that under his government sin shall be punished, by not punishing it either in the person of the sinner or of his Substitute.
The advocates of the Governmental Theory of the Atonement maintain that Christ did not suffer the penalty of the law, but a substitute for the penalty : that his sufferings, in some way or other, avail to secure the same ends that the actual infliction of the penalty on the transgressors in person would have done. These parties agree in maintaining that it is essential to the penalty (a) that it should, in each case, consist in some precise, definite kind and degree of suffering; and (0) that it should be inflicted on the wrong-doer in person.
On the other hand, some orthodox divines——as, for instance, Owen, in his reply to Baxter’s strictures against parts of his work on Redemption—have maintained that Christ suffered the very same penalty legally due his people for whom he was substituted, and not merely a full equivalent for it; that is, an adem and not a tantundem. The motive for this apparently excessive precision of ex- pression was commendable. Those who make such difficulty in admitting that Christ really suffered the penalty of the law are no more ready to admit that what he suffered was a full equivalent, in any strictly legal sense, for the punishment of his people in person. They mean that he did not suffer the penalty in any sense, and their views as to the connection between his
death and our deliverance from condemnation are most vague and unsatisfactory.
The following points, however, appear to be sufficiently certain: (1.) Christ did not suffer the same degree or duration of pain that his people would have suffered in person, nor in all respects sufferings of the same kind.
CHAPTER, Vis
Sufferings of Christ not a
“* substi- tute for the penalty.”
62 THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT.
cuarren Theirs would have been eternal, his were temporary.
“Theirs would have involved ever-increasing depravity of Christ’s Soul and self-accusing remorse, while, on the contrary, sttitee his were consistent with (a) the divinity of his person, ht? (6) the perfection of his humanity, and (c) the fact that
monded he was always the well-beloved Son in whom the Father people in Was well pleased. (2.) On the other hand, it is no less vier. certain that the identity of the penalty does not consist
ing, but either in the precise kind, or degree, or duration of the identical : , : : : aspen. Suffering, nor in the personal identity of the sufferer with a the sinner; but in the relation of the suffering to the guilt of some particular sin or sins, and to the demands of divine justice in the case. Duty in any case is what- ever the moral law says ought to be done. Penalty, in any case of disobedience, is precisely that kind, degree, and duration of suffering, which the same law decides ought to be suffered. Of this obligation to suffering, in all cases whatsoever, the nature of God is the ground, and the reason of God is the judge. The execution of precisely the same sufferings, if it had been possible, in the person of the God-man, that would have been the proper penalty of the law if executed in the person of the transgressors themselves, would have been an out- rageous injustice. It would not, consequently, have been the penalty of the law, but an illegal violation of that absolute righteousness which is the principiwm essendi of the law. The substitution of a divine and all-perfect person in the stead of sinners necessarily involves, as a matter of justice, the substitution within the penalty of different kinds and degrees of suffering. Christ suffered precisely that kind, degree, and duration of suffering, that the infinitely wise justice or the absolutely just wisdom of God determined was a full equivalent for all that was demanded of elect sinners in person ;—eqguivalent, we mean, in respect to sin-expiating and justice-satisfying
IMMUTABILITY OF THE LAW. 63