The Necessity Problem
Penal

Vindiciae Evangelicae

John Owen vs. John Biddle, 1655

It's not pecuniary, it's penal.

The problem it faces

Socinus, through the English Socinian Biddle, pressed two blades at once: full payment leaves no room for grace, and guilt cannot be justly transferred onto an innocent substitute.

The move it makes

He distinguishes penal from pecuniary satisfaction — penal payment doesn't auto-discharge, so release still waits on God's free act and grace survives — and grounds the transfer in Christ's voluntary suretyship and covenantal union with the elect.

The new problem it opens

The penal move rescues grace but kicks out the pecuniary logic the double-payment case for limited atonement depended on (Baxter's knife) — and the suretyship answer still owes an account of how Christ's work is actually reckoned to the believer.

My notes

So he moves to penal to preserve God's right to accept a substitute, and he says that it's that move that is essentially the grace of God—that God didn't have to accept a substitute but he does anyway.

It may also be worth noting that this move subtly re-imports restorative justice. Allowing a substitute for retributive justice provides restoration for another, and thus it's no longer retributive, but restorative, which tends toward's God's retribution being more of a display than anything else and we're moving in Grotius's direction towards Governmental theory.

The unstated motive of allowing the satisfaction to move via the volunteerism provided by this view is to restore the sinner. That means it quietly shifts from retributive to restorative justice. What's left then is a question of whether the shift maintains the judicial parity between how man pays and how Christ pays (is ECT equivalent to death on a cross?), and it opens the question of sourcing the penalty from the divinity or humanity of Christ.

The former split devolves into an argument about the infinite value of Christ and how that pays the debt. But the infinite value argument cuts both ways, and includes an infinite God paying himself, thus omitting mankind entirely in the transaction. Moreover, what does payment between infinite co-equals even mean? It's nonsense.

To say the debt is paid by Christ's humanity requires some kind of infusion of necessary value into a bankrupt mankind in order to provide a value to remit. The only source outside mankind capable of this is God himself, so mankind is merely inserted as a passthrough entity in a greater (probably nonsensical) transaction between God and God.

Even more than this, what would the suretyship look like amongst the Trinity? Wouldn't this mean that the Son agrees in advance of creation to pay back to the Father what the people owed? Isn't that again another imbalance? What does this mean for immutability?

Where this sits

Upstream

Downstream