‘tis requisite that sin should be punished, as punishment is deserved and just, therefore the justice of God obliges him to punish sin: for it belongs to God as the supreme Rector of the universality of things, to maintain order and decorum in his kingdom, and to see to it that decency and right takes place at all times, and in all cases. That perfection of his nature whereby he is disposed to this, is his justice; and therefore, his justice naturally disposes him to punish sin as it deserves. The holiness of God, which is the infinite opposition of his nature to sin, naturally and necessarily disposes him to punish sin.65
He then goes on to argue that,
God is to be considered in this affair not merely as the governor of the world of creatures, to order things between one creature and another, but as the supreme regulator or Rector of the universality of things, the orderer of things relating to the whole compass of existence, including himself, to maintain the rights of the whole, and decorum through the whole, and to maintain his own rights, and the due honor of his own perfections, as well as to keep justice among creatures. ‘Tis fit that there should be one that has this office, and the office properly belongs to the supreme being. And if he should fail of doing justice to him[self] in a needed vindication of his own majesty and glory, it would be an immensely greater failure of his rectoral justice than if he should deprive the creatures, that are beings of infinitely less consequence, of their rights.66
A close reading of these two statements alongside the one in the previous section reveals that these statements are actually incongruent. The problem here is that if penal offences are both criminal and punishable, they are not, strictly speaking, private or individual, so much as public or societal affairs that are punishable by the authority of a system of laws, not an individual lawmaker. In other words, a coherent picture of penal substitution seems to require that sins offence be levelled against the moral law and not God himself, and that this is a problem facing all persons collectively, not as individuals, as it is so often thought to be the case. For Edwards’ part, he seems to conflate the two.
It might be helpful to think of the difference between the offences that are tried in a United States district or civil court versus those tried in a United States criminal court. In a United States district court, someone might be sued, for example, for a breach of contract. Strictly speaking, this is not a criminal offense. This is a personal, (and therefore private) offense—one person versus another (even another individual group, as in a class action suit)—that is resolved by the offending party’s restoring or making reparation for the offended party. United States Criminal courts, by contrast, try criminal offenders. If someone is on trial for murder, say, that person’s offense is, again, strictly speaking, not against the one they killed (though I am sure we would all agree that murder is, if not the most, among the most egregious personal offenses that human persons can perpetrate against one another). Rather, their offense is against the laws of the society to which both parties have presumably assented and which demand that murderers pay a debt of punishment to society upon the commitment of such a crime. And in the United States judicial system, this debt is paid by incarceration or sometimes, in some states, death. In this way, murder, or any such criminal offense, is a public matter between the murderer and the society at large, not, strictly speaking, the murderer and the one that was murdered.67 To put it differently, there’s a difference between offenses against Capone himself and those levelled against the rules of his club.
Now, carrying this line of thinking over to the more recent suggestions of Edwards subscription to penal substitution, if Christ is said to pay a debt of punishment on behalf of others, then, the debt is actually not a private offense against God—like in a district court—requiring that something be restored (via reparation) to God, despite those claims of his being the privately offended party.68 To put it rather bluntly, nothing is restored to God on the penal substitution model. Instead, and quite to the contrary of the apparent demands of God’s retributive justice, penal substitution seems only to make provision for God to restore righteousness to humanity, leaving God dishonored and his Son, crushed (as the prophet Isaiah says) for this dishonor, and what is more, all of this being of no apparent benefit to himself. And this is in contrast to Edwards’ apparent thinking that the work Christ does in making atonement restores honor to God—something that belongs to owing and paying a debt of honor. The problem, as we have suggested before, is that Christ cannot perform both works. He cannot suffer as a penal substitute and a non-penal substitute. So, the question for us then is whether Edwards’ commitments to the rectoral demands of divine justice are at odds with his commitment to the role of retributive justice issued by penal substitution. Our answer is yes, they are at odds, and they are in no less than two important ways.
First, because Edwards construes sin as both a private offense against God for which humanity is liable to pay a debt of honor and as a private offense against God for which humanity is liable to pay a debt of punishment (which as we have seen previously is itself something of a contradiction, that is, if we understand a debt of punishment to be a public or societal offense)—both acts of which cannot be done simultaneously by a penal and non-penal substitute. In other words, Christ cannot absorb divine wrath for sin as a penal substitute, when he is at the same time (collectively) deferring or delaying that wrath until the consummation by making reparations on behalf of all humanity. The second way they are at odds, is because Edwards construes the nature of Christ’s substitutionary work in what we might call “personal” and then “meritorious” terms. By personal substitution, we mean the substitutionary work he performs by “standing in,” as it were, for individual persons upon whom are the retributive demands of God justice. By meritorious substitution, we mean the substitutionary work he performs by accumulating the reparative merit of honor that offsets the infinite demerit of sin. For, because God is infinitely holy, sins against God accrue an infinite demerit, as it were, that requires some infinite merit to offset.69 It seems to that, at least with respect to the mechanism of the atonement, these are not complimentary accounts of substitution so much as competing ones. For, no honor is restored to God by his meeting out retribution against the Son—paying a debt of punishment does not necessarily pay a debt of honor. In these two ways at least, there is a tension in Edwards’ account of Christ’s atoning work. Against this detailed backdrop, let us consider some Edwards Jr’s thinking on the matter.
Of the variety of theological writings that offer some additionally detailed insight into the development of his father’s legacy regarding the atonement, there are two works in particular that shed some light on Edwards Jr’s thoughts about the work of Christ. The first is his “Thoughts on the Atonement,”echoes of which appear in the second piece called “Remarks on the Improvements Made in Theology by His Father, President Edwards.” In both cases, the younger Edwards makes a number curious statements that point in the direction of his ascent to something along the lines a penal substitution model atonement. What is interesting—what makes this evidence so curious—is that Edwards Jr has never been attributed with articulating anything but a so-called penal non-substitution model of atonement, where (roughly) the work Christ accomplishes is claimed to be that of a penal example—repairing the dishonor done to the moral law by humanity’s transgression(s) against it. The following two statements, each one represent a sort of core sample of ideas in which are resident both Dr. Edwards’ clear out-working of the penal non-substitution model and the presence of substitutionary language in keeping with his father. Dr Edwards writes,
By atonement, I mean something done or suffered, which, to the purpose of supporting the honor and dignity of the divine law and government, shall be equivalent to the punishment of the sinner according to law. Therefore, the atonement made by Christ implies his substitution in the stead of the sinner, who is to be saved by him; or that he suffered that in the sinner’s stead, which as effectually tended to discourage, or prevent transgression, and excite to obedience, as the punishment of the transgressor himself, according to the letter of the law would have done.70
In another place he maintains,
The atonement is the substitute for the punishment