First, God must pay himself back. [David Bentley Hart]
summarizes the problem with this. According to PSA, the fee of sin was a price paid
to the Father. The price was paid by Jesus. Jesus is this like a coin of a
circular transaction: God buys off God in order to spare his own displeasure.
Think about it in terms of a bank. A bank has issued credit to itself to pay
off a debt it owes to itself by employing a currency it has created for this
occasion and it certifies the value of this currency on the basis of the credit
it is paying off to itself. John Calvin would even agree with a bank-like
analogy for the death of Christ as he called it a “wondrous exchange” between
man and God. But this analogy is clearly absurd. A bank has issued credit to
itself to pay itself back in any way that actually creates value in the
transaction. This is to say that there is no value created by God paying off
the credit he wrote to himself.
Second, substitution should be allowed for punishment.
According to PSA, Jesus has put himself as the substitute to receive the punishment
of the Father that should be doled out on humanity for their sins. The problem
here is that the notion of substitutional punishment or sacrifice is absolutely
nonsensical. If I were a Father and I wanted to punish my son for stealing a
cookie from the cookie jar, but then my other son came out of nowhere and volunteered
the punishment to be enacted on him, I would not be a good Father if I were to
punish my son who did nothing wrong. But humans have done much more than steal
from cookie jar, the Calvinist whines. Indeed, suppose then that my son is
tried for murder and the state is about to sentence him to death row. Suddenly,
his brother, my other son, who is sitting in the back of the courtroom, leaps
to his feet and shouts, “Send me to death instead!” There is not a single judge
in the entire world who would shrug their shoulders and allow this substitution
to occur in a situation ceteris paribus or all else being equal. (There are
some truly comical attempts at responding to analogies like this by pointing out
states of exemption in judicial law; for instance, suppose the defendant has a
life-altering disability. There are, according to such arguments, certain areas
of the industrialized world where judicial laws, specially property laws, are
lenient enough such that an able-bodied volunteer could receive the punishment,
say, a fine, instead of the disabled defendant. I hope I don’t need to explain
the ad hoc and disanalogous nature of this argument. I’ll leave that for
the reader to ruminate on.)
Returning back to the point at hand then, since God is
the most good Father, he would not punished the Son for something the Son did
not do wrong. And even the Highest Judge, then, would be woefully inept at
their judicial practice if they were to allow such a substitution to occur; as
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, one can only assume while fancifully laughing, God
the creditor played the scapegoat for this debtor, “Out of love (can you
believe?)” Yes, somehow, there are (allegedly) cognitively healthy people who
do believe this. How that may be is almost as much of a mystery as the
Incarnation itself.
Third, God the Father can only punish God the Son in his
humanity but not his Godliness. The presumption here is that the Father can
subject the Son to an action that only affects his human nature but not his
divine nature. The philosophical problem with this is that every action an individual
does or is done to them is done by their person or done to their person, not
their nature. Suppose there is a person who has a human nature. Suppose the
person is driving to work, and a car hits them from behind on the interstate. The
person who was hit in their car, is just that, a person. They are human, so
they possess a human nature, but their human nature is not who was hit
in their car. Following this logic, the substitutionary action must be done by
the Person of Jesus (the Person of Jesus must die), not his human nature. This must
mean, then, that the Godman himself died. And he did. This can be accepted by
someone who does not affirm PSA< but it is harder for a proponent of PSA to
avoid the logical incoherence that arises from mixing up “person” and “nature.”
An incoherence that, due to its gravity, was dogmatically condemned at the
Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451).
Fourth, the Incarnation was Plan B. Since the Incarnation
was done to save the world from its sins, which required a substitution of the
Son to bear the wrath of the Father, the PSA proponent must argue that the Incarnation
was not eternally planned but rather was a decision made by the Father because of
what was occurring in creation. God, then, becomes a like a road service worker
who visits the scene of a car crash. To put this argument in a cartoonish way,
it is as if God the Father were to say, “Dang humans, you guys have caused a
lot of sin in the world. There is so much sin that no one human cane take on
the brunt of my punishment (which I must delve out because I am the Highest
Judge or something). Eureka! I shall send my Son, and (somehow) this will solve
the problem!” There are two further problems with this presumption. Since PSA
posits the Incarnation as Plan B, it contradicts the narrative in Acts 2 and 4
as well as Ephesians 3:11, the latter of which explicitly identifies the plan
of the Incarnation as “before all worlds” employing the polysemic adjective aiōnion
. . . And it is worth mentioning that the idea that the Incarnation was Plan B
was generally rebuked both in the East and West until at least the late Scholastic
period when it gained prominence. Whether the Fall did or did not happen is of
no matter because the Incarnation would happen regardless. The Incarnation was
not in the slightest predicated on the entrance of sin into the world. (Hunter
Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation [Eugene,
Oreg.: Resource Publications, 2024], 51-53)
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