Greg and Amy argue that justice cannot exist without retribution. Forgiveness without justice contradicts moral intuition and diminishes the righteousness of God. Christianity, however, provides a unique framework for both justice and grace.
Transcript
Question: What do you say to a Muslim who asks why God’s justice requires him to punish sin, and why can’t he just forgive without punishment? I can argue for the atonement from the Bible, but how do I reason outside of the Bible for someone who doesn’t believe in its authority?
Greg: Well, first of all, I guess they don’t have, in Islam, anything parallel with atonement. It’s completely the will of Allah to release or not to. Here is where it may be helpful to employ what I call the Inside Out tactic, and that is an appeal to people’s common sense moral intuitions about things. Now, I think those common sense moral intuitions are actually part of being made in the image of God. There are things on the inside of a person, in virtue of their being made in the image of God, that end up expressing themselves on the outside in their language or their behavior. So, when we suggest a world in which there is just a loving government—the legal system is just loving, and they just forgive, there is no requirement for retribution—all this offends people’s moral sensibilities, particularly the sensibility of justice because—and this is the way people put it—that guy got away with murder. He just got away with it, and that’s not right, is what they’re thinking.
This way of looking at things says that God will just let everyone, in a certain sense, get away with murder. And that, of course, isn’t the view of grace. There has been a payment made to satisfy the requirements of justice, but it’s been made by a substitute. That’s Jesus, who redeemed, and that gives the redeemer—the rescuer—the right to open the seals and to judge mankind.
I think that one way to approach this is to appeal to our moral intuitions that seem to be legitimate. We wouldn’t consider a government to be a legitimate, just, and proper government if they did not punish any crime. Look at the situation in California, for example. A theft under $1,000—say $950—is a misdemeanor and not a felony. The California District Attorney has chastised Target for calling the police to arrest people who steal less than $1,000 from their store because it’s not a felony. Of course, all this means is that people can go into one Target, steal $900 worth of stuff, and just walk out, go into another, do the same thing, come back to the same Target the next day, and do the same thing. So, the law is not enforced, and this is, I think by common consent, not right. The government should not shrug its shoulders at people committing crimes like this and destroying entire business establishments. That’s what’s happening in California. This isn’t right. The rule of law is not enforced, which means that justice is not being done. And when justice is not being done, evil increases. Again, I don’t need the Bible to know that. I don’t need to be a Christian to know that.
This is a human awareness built into all of us. It’s not perfect, but in many cases, it’s adequate to make the particular point we need to make. That’s how the Inside Out tactic works. You don’t have to trade on a biblical verse. You can say, “You know this. Do you think this is okay? Do you guys think this is right?”
By the way, it’s interesting: In Islam, apostates get punished, and Muslims are free to do the punishing, to take vengeance out on behalf of God—that’s probably how they think about it—and punish the apostates or those who do something offensive to Islam. So, how does that comport with this concern?
Amy: And it’s not just even a pragmatic thing—because you were saying that evil increases. We just know it’s wrong, even if evil didn’t increase. So, even if, at the end of all things, God forgives everyone, and it has nothing to do with increasing evil, we’d still think it was wrong if God never punished sin. And all you have to do is wait for something in the news to pop up, and everybody reveals that they agree with this. There was this case—it was probably a decade ago. There was a kid—he was a college student—and he raped one of his fellow students. Then, because he was wealthy and had connections, the judge just let him off. The outcry against that judge was so great because everyone realized that is wrong. That is wrong. He has to pay the penalty.
It’s not surprising that someone would ask this question because this is a real problem for religions. Every other religion other than Christianity has to make sense of justice. So, either, at the end, justice is all there is, and you have to meet that justice—and you have to do well enough, and so there’s hopelessness. There’s no way you can make it.
Greg: Everyone’s condemned.
Amy: Or God sweeps all the justice under the rug. He says, “I don’t really care about evil.” And now, not only is he letting people off the hook, and that’s wrong, but now we’re saying something about God. Now God doesn’t care about the evil. Now it’s not important to him that it be punished. He’s not righteous. He’s not good, even. So, that way people get to be with God, but now, what kind of God is that? He’s not a good judge. Everyone should hate him like they hated that other judge. But only Christianity has the cross, which upholds justice perfectly and is the means by which God offers grace.
Greg: God can be the just and the justifier.
Amy: Which is exactly what Paul says in Romans 3. That’s actually my favorite passage in the Bible, Romans 3:21–26, because this is such an incredible, brilliant way that God handled this whole situation, and it’s the only way that we can have grace without God being a bad God.
So, why can’t he just forgive without punishment? Because he’s good, and he’s righteous, and we all know that requires him to punish.
Greg: Incidentally, kind of another facet to this is that none of this applies to those who do not believe in penal substitution. In other words, if they don’t think that Jesus was the substitute who took the punishment from the Father on our behalf, then justice still is not satisfied. In fact, I wrote a piece a couple of months ago—a Solid Ground titled “Why the Blood?”—very controversial with a lot of Christians. I wrote it in response to pushback I’d gotten regarding things I wrote in The Story of Reality, and then, when Solid Ground came out with my full-throated justification of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus satisfying the wrath of the Father, we still got a whole bunch more complaints. But If this isn’t what took place, then how is God’s justice satisfied? Jesus paid for sins. He died for sins, not just died because people sinned. His death was in some sense a payment for it. It “atoned” for the sin—that would be the New Testament word—and therefore it appeased God’s wrath, which is propitiation. If Jesus didn’t pay for sins, if none of those things happened on the cross—though those are biblical words used frequently in the text, especially the Epistles talking about this—then there is no justice done.
God has just forgiven some. In virtue of what? In virtue of them believing in Jesus. So, if God decides not to be retributive merely based on someone’s belief, what happened to justice? There is no justice in that. It is certainly unmerited mercy. It’s grace, but the demands of the Law have not been satisfied. In penal substitution, God’s wrath is satisfied through the payment that he himself makes through the incarnate Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, so that now God is satisfied. And that’s what propitiation means: satisfaction. It’s done. It’s resolved. So, God has no basis to be angry at us anymore. We are under that satisfaction. And that’s the first couple verses of Romans 5: “Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, who’s given us this introduction into the grace in which we stand, and we rejoice.” Notice, that’s not the peace of God. That’s real, but that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s saying “peace with God”—God’s not angry at us anymore. None of that could be the case if substitutionary atonement is not a fact.