The Necessity Problem
Penal

Calvin · Institutes of the Christian Religion

definitive edition, 1559

The Reformed doctrine of satisfaction

The problem it faces

How can a just and holy God forgive sinners without treating sin as though it didn't matter? Anselm had framed the answer around God's honor; the Reformers recast it around justice and God's wrath against sin.

The move it makes

Christ, standing in our place, bears the curse and the wrath our sin deserved — a real, objective, substitutionary satisfaction of divine justice — so that God can be at once just and the justifier of those who believe. This is the fountainhead of the penal-substitution stream.

The new problem it opens

It hands the critics their opening: if Christ fully bears the penalty in our place, is that forgiveness or merely payment — and can guilt be justly transferred to an innocent? Exactly the blades Socinus will press.

My notes

Calvin changes the deontic currency (deontic currency is a currency of metaphysical "stuff" like debt, honor, sin and forgiveness, but not of whole persons). Debt and honor are out. Sin and righteousness are in. Why?

This is because Anselm's view was based on the feudal system of his time. For Anselm, sin disturbed the universe by withholding honor due to God. Satisfaction restores the order by repaying the debt. The category of honor, however, is negotiable, leading to the charge that God could simply waive the debt entirely and forgive anyways. Christ's death on the cross earns infinite merit because Jesus was fully innocent and didn't deserve to die, and his death restores the order that was lost by sin. Mankind, for his end, is not imputed any of this honor. The debt of man goes to zero because it's been paid by a third party (Jesus), but man has no righteousness in himself.

This was problematic for Calvin. He viewed it as necessary that we have righteousness as well, because we will not enter the kingdom of God unless our righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees.

Debt/honor gets a settled account, but sin/righteousness enables a swapped verdict, and Calvin, to be consistent with Luther, needed the latter, emphasizing substitution over the satisfaction.

Where this sits

Upstream

Downstream