Restitution, Retribution, and Atonement

Consider this silly thought experiment. You are out for a morning walk with your dog. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the air is crisp, it’s a great way to start the day. You come to your favorite part of your route, a trail that goes through some woods. Shortly after entering the woods, a knife wielding maniac suddenly jumps out of the bushes and gouges out one of your eyes. Then he runs off, out of your (now one-eyed) sight. But before you spend too much time suffering your wounds, a genie appears out of the same bush that your attacker did. The genie says, “I will grant you one of two wishes.”

1) You can have retribution without restitution. “Eye for an eye” justice will be done, and your attacker will suffer the loss of an eye just as you have suffered it. But your wound will remain and you will still see the world in 2-D for the rest of your life.

2) Or, you can have restitution without retribution. You will get your eye back, and it will actually be a better eye than what you had before you were attacked. Your vision will overall significantly improve over what you had before you were attacked. But your attacker will go totally free and unpunished.

I have put this illustration to many people, penal substitution advocates included, and everyone has chosen 2: restitution without retribution.

The value of the thought experiment is that it makes us consider the two main priorities of justice in the Bible, restitution for the innocent and retribution for the guilty. Restitution is the reparation or restoration of damages suffered by offended parties, most often with a surplus, that is, compensation greater than the damages done (for example, in Exodus 22:1 if someone kills your sheep, they have to pay you back four sheep; restitution is restoration and surplus). Retribution is the return of the sinner’s own sin upon the sinner’s own head. As Paul summarizes in 2 Thessalonians 1:6, “it is just (justice) for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you (retribution) and to give relief to you who are afflicted (restitution).” From the survey results, it seems that restitution is preferable to retribution.

The Bible indicates that restitution is the preference of God Himself, for He asks rhetorically in Ezekiel 18:23, “Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked, rather than that he should turn from his ways and live?” and answers in verse 32, “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies, therefore, repent and live.” God indicates that He would rather have the restoration of the broken sinner than his ultimate retribution.

It is important to understand these two priorities of justice when we consider the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection, because one of the central questions about the cross of Christ is “How can a perfectly just God pardon guilty sinners?” This question seeks to understand the relationship of atonement and justice, that is, the means by which God forgives sinners in a way that is consistent with his perfect justice.

Penal substitution has emphatically built its sequence of atonement logic on a particular conception of retribution: humanity has sinned against God, a being of infinite worth, so justice demands retribution upon humanity commensurate with this offense i.e. infinite punishment in hell. God desires to save sinners from this fate, but He cannot compromise His justice, so the question becomes: how can a just God save humanity from the punishment they deserve? Answer: God becomes a human in the person of Jesus and goes to the cross to suffer God’s retribution in place of humanity, thus freeing humanity from having to suffer infinite punishment in hell. Salvation is from the wrath of God, accomplished because Jesus has satisfied God’s wrath on the cross, in our place, as our substitute. God satisfies His own wrath by providing Himself with a substitute sacrifice in Jesus Christ. That is the retribution-based logic of penal substitution.

But if restitution is the first priority of justice, not just for human beings but for God Himself, then it follows that we should build our sequence of atonement logic on the principle of restitution rather than retribution. Doing so gives us this summary:

Due to God’s gracious covenant, justice requires restoration for damage suffered by innocent parties. Humans have totally and severely damaged themselves by their own sin (God is not damaged by our sin. In the case of sin against God, sin is an offense that damages the offender). God desires to enact restoration for this destruction, but humans are not innocent, they are guilty. There is none righteous, not one. So the question is: How can a just God, a covenant God, enact restoration for guilty humanity’s self-destruction? Answer: God becomes a human in the person of Jesus Christ, lives completely innocently (righteously) and therefore merits the covenantal blessings by which humanity’s destruction will be restored. Jesus then voluntarily endures all of humanity’s sinful destruction against himself by suffering crucifixion at the hands of all humans on the cross. He therefore merits restoration for all of humanity’s sinful destruction, for he alone has suffered sin’s destruction as an innocent party. This restoration manifests in His resurrection, when “God raised our Great Shepherd up from the dead through the blood of the eternal covenant (Heb 13:20).” So the correct response to the question “Why did Jesus die?” is: in order for all suffering and death to be repaired by God in accordance with his justice, all suffering and death had to be endured by a perfectly innocent and righteous person (for only innocent persons have the right of restoration for wrongs suffered) and only Jesus qualifies as that perfectly righteous person.

Divine justice is therefore satisfied in the resurrection as the reversal and reparation of all the sin that Jesus unjustly suffered on the cross. Jesus dies under the unjust judgment of humans, and is raised by the just judgment of God. Jesus’ reward, or inheritance, of the covenantal blessings applies to the rest of humanity if by the power of the Holy Spirit we participate in His death (through remorse) and participate in His resurrection (through repentance). So the gospel is not that “God substituted Himself to satisfy His own wrath,” which is not Biblical terminology. Again, the gospel is exactly what Paul says it is: “the good news that God has fulfilled His promises to our children in that He raised Jesus up from the dead” (Acts 13:32). And again, the gospel is that God’s covenantal promises to restore the world from Adam’s curse (the subject of the Old Testament) are fulfilled in Jesus’ resurrection (the subject of the New Testament).

But how exactly do the merits of Jesus’ death and resurrection apply to us? We participate in Jesus’ death and resurrection through remorse and repentance for our sin. An offender feels remorse when he puts himself in his victim’s shoes and, through empathy, mentally and emotionally suffers his own offense against himself as his victim suffered it. This type of remorse is required for an offender to apologize to his victim. Notice also that this remorse is a fulfillment of the priority of retribution, that is, a suffering of one’s own sin against oneself, but internally in the soul rather than merely externally enduring physical punishment. Remorse is what the cross should cause in us. When we look to the cross, we the offenders should put ourselves in the shoes of our victim, Jesus, and suffer (in an internal sense) our crucifixion of him as crucifixion of our sinful selves. We are then “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20) and have “died with Christ” (Rom 6:8) and our sin is “condemned in the flesh” (Rom 8:3). When we die in Christ in this way, we are also able to rise to new life in Christ, for His unjust death has merited for us the reversal of death in His resurrection.

This restoration based logic emphasizes important things penal substitution overlooks or de-emphasizes, such as the self-destructive nature of sin, the death of Jesus at the hands of sinners, the fulfillment of God’s covenantal promises in Jesus’ resurrection, and the necessity of our participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection by undergoing a death and resurrection ourselves.