Francis Turretin
Punitive justice is essential to God, not a free act of will. What is free is only its exercise — which is what lets a substitute stand in.
The problem it faces
Socinus had argued that punitive justice is merely a free act of God's will — so God could pardon by fiat and the cross was never necessary. If satisfaction isn't anchored in God's nature, the necessity of Christ's death collapses and the whole Reformed doctrine loses its footing.
The move it makes
He takes over Owen's thesis from the Dissertation on Divine Justice — that vindicatory justice is a natural, necessary attribute, so God cannot not punish sin — and adds the decisive move: a distinction between the habit and its act. The disposition to punish is necessary; its exercise is free. God must punish sin, yet is free as to when, whom, and by what mode — free, above all, to accept a substitute. Necessity grounds satisfaction; freedom of exercise preserves grace and licenses the transfer to Christ.
The new problem it opens
A disposition that is necessarily present but only contingently exercised smuggles a real potency into a God meant to be pure act — the habit/act split names the potentiality rather than dissolving it. And the more necessity is loaded into the attribute, the more grace must answer to a prior necessity in God — justice ruling mercy — while freedom over the mode lets the penalty fall on the innocent, loosening the guilt-to-penalty tie that made the justice retributive in the first place.
My notes
This shows more clearly the faultlines in PSA and why it's so difficult to discuss. There are two pieces that are necessary in PSA: the debt on man's side and the need for satisfaction on God's side. Most of Owen's work in this regards is related to finding a way to insert the satisfaction into the system. What Turretin posits here is a very similar retribution-relocation move that Owen makes in Dissertation. Not only this, but he also casts strict limits on how attributes can be exercised. It says God can choose when, whom, and how, but would likely say that God isn't free to decide how badly he's going to punish you, because that would essentially open the charge that God could simply slap our hands.
They're looking for a place for the retribution to hide, but it will always be found.
And this is why it's so hard to combat the theory. In an idea space, as theology is, there are plenty of places to try to hide another injected idea, and we see this happening throughout all versions of the theory. Philosophically, this is known as several things: An immunizing strategy or ad-hoc rescue, which adds ever more qualifications to an idea to hedge it against being disproven. The specific move here is called "monster-barring", which is the refinement of hypotheses to rule out nasty counterexamples. The PSA tree is full of monster-barring examples.
The trouble with PSA isn't that we're hiding retribution in the wrong place on God's side; it's that the goodness and infinity of God makes retribution nonsensical. We should abandon the idea that God is retributive and just admit that God is good and able. Maybe he's asking us to trust that anything we lost will be given to us in spades--just as he said. Maybe a God who can generate quite simply anything from thin air has better ways to set justice right.
Where this sits
Upstream
- A Dissertation on Divine Justice is related to