Murphy, Mark C. ‘Not Penal Substitution but Vicarious Punishment’. Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 3 (2009): 253–73. https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil200926314.

The argument of this article is that penal substitution is untenable “for conceptual reasons.” Instead, Mark Murphy offers an account of vicarious punishment, which he believes accounts for the mechanism of the atonement in a similar way to penal substitution, but does not fall foul of the same conceptual problems.

The conceptual critique of penal substitution

Specifically, Mark Murphy argues that the expressive nature of punishment means that it cannot be transferrable. Murphy defines punishment as so:

an authoritative imposition of hard treatment upon one for the failure to adhere to some binding standard

p. 255

But alongside, and perhaps more foundationally than these three features (authoritative imposition, of hard treatment, for failure), punishment must express condemnation of the person punished. Murphy defends the addition of the fourth condition by appeal to situations in which hard treatment is imposed for failure which are not punishment, for example liability to compensation for negligence in duties of care, or sanctions in a basketball game. These are not punishments, as they do not express condemnation of the rule-violator, as opposed to criminal cases.

If I cannot express condemnation of someone I believe to be innocent, I cannot punish them. Imposing hard treatment upon them, even in connection with a moral failure, simply is not punishment without this condemnatory intent. (Or, Murphy concedes, perhaps it is punishment, but a defective punishment).

Given that penal substitution involves transfer of punishment, it is therefore incoherent. Christ cannot bear our punishment, for being innocent he cannot be condemned as guilty, which is inherent to the definition of punishment.

Murphy backs this up by the opposite concept of “praise substitution”, using the (perhaps unfortunate) illustration of Lance Armstrong’s 2005 Tour de France victory. Armstrong won the race, and his prize honoured his victory. It would not be possible for Armstrong to delegate the praise he received to someone else unconnected with his victory; while they might be able to receive the accidents of winning (trophy, money, fame etc), these things would not constitute praise or honour for a substitute who did not win the race.

To reiterate, Murphy intends to offer something more than the standard moral critique of penal substitution (that transferring punishment is unjust). He is contending that penal substitution is conceptually impossible, for once an act of punishment is meted out on one acknowledged to be innocent, it is no longer defined as an act of punishment. And this is certainly what, for one, Oliver Crisp argues as well.

Problems with the critique

However, I am not sure if this is quite the case. For starters, Murphy does concede that it might be that this transferred punishment is a defective act of punishment rather than no punishment at all. I take this must mean conceptually rather than just morally defective, otherwise this would be simply the transferring-punishment-is-unjust objection.

It seems to me to be more accurate to call unjust punishment just that, as opposed to saying it is no punishment at all. If a person is sentenced to prison for a crime he did not commit, he is punished for it. If Lance Armstrong is awarded the prize for winning the Tour de France, he is praised, whether or not he is later discovered to have cheated.

A key issue here seems to be the knowledge and intent of the punishing (or praising) authority. Murphy would counter that in a case of a miscarriage of justice, the lack of knowledge of the innocence of the murderer is why the judge expresses condemnation in his sentencing (the key fourth quality that makes it count as punishment). If the judge knows the murderer is innocent, and nevertheless carries out the sentencing (for whatever reason), this is not punishment.

But questions remain. Take the Tour de France example. Suppose that the awarding committee were aware of Armstrong’s cheating, but for some procedural reason or technicality, had no choice but to award him the prize. It would seem in such a case that Armstrong has been praised or honoured for winning, even though the situation is unjust. Certainly the public perception of his victory might be quite different, but the very injustice of the situation stems from the fact that Armstrong has received the honour he is not due. If we were to say that obtaining the prize on a technicality does not constitute praise, and that the second-place rider in fact receives all the real praise by the surrounding commentary, the injustice is severely lessened. Similarly, if a person receives a prison sentence for a crime, even though the judge admits they did not commit it (again, being constrained by some technicality), they seem to be punished for it – though the injustice is great. That they may be lauded as innocent in the press, for example, does not seem to change this.

But perhaps such counter examples do not convince. Certainly, the case of divine punishment would not seem to fall into these categories, given God’s perfect knowledge and non-susceptibility to being caught by technicalities. So let us grant that punishment must involve the expressive function of condemnation. And let us further grant that an act of punishment must condemn the very one who is actually guilty of the crime. It seems to me that this still does not challenge penal substitution. For is it not the case that in penal substitutionary accounts of the atonement, the death of Christ on behalf of his people precisely does express their condemnation? The hard treatment is taken by Christ, but precisely because he is an innocent substitute for our sins, the expressive function of the cross as punishment is to condemn our sins. Consider Romans 8:

Romans 8:1 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. 3 For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh

We are free from condemnation now, because our sin has been conclusively condemned in the death of Christ.

Or, in John Newton’s hymn:

My conscience felt and owned the guilt,
And plunged me in despair:
I saw my sins His blood had spilt
And helped to nail Him there.

Murphy takes this strand of atonement thinking in a rather different direction, as we will see.

One can of course object that it does not effectively condemn wrongdoing for an innocent to bear the punishment in place of the guilty. But this is a different sort of objection. If the Scriptural portrayal of the atonement is as condemning our sins in a substitute, it meets the expressive function of punishment Murphy requires.

Vicarious punishment

While the critique of penal substitution is interesting and worthy of engagement, I don’t find the same to be true of Murphy’s proposed alternative, vicarious punishment.

In essence, this proposal argues that in the atonement we are punished by the death of Christ. His hard treatment is what punishes us:

A deserves to be punished; B undergoes hard treatment, which hard treatment constitutes A’s being punished; and so A no longer deserves to be punished.

p. 260

This is analogous to X who murders someone’s wife being punished by his own wife being put to death. X is punished by the death of his wife, his hard treatment is to watch the hard treatment of his wife.

I confess I find it very hard to see anything useful in this account at all.

In the first place, what is vicarious about it? The guilty party is still punished, only by a different form of hard treatment. The innocent wife suffers hard treatment, but not as a punishment of herself. She hasn’t really stepped into the place of X, she is just a tool being used to inflict a different kind of hard treatment on X. So there is no relaxation of the punishment of X, it is just inflicted by a different method.

Murphy is quite clear on this. In response to the objection that it seems completely unnecessary to involve the third party in this (why punish X through his wife, involving the suffering of an innocent, when you could just punish him directly?), his answer is that this might be a way to punish X more severely than anything that could be directly inflicted. The punishment is still entirely directed at X, only by means of inflicting suffering on his wife.

Apply this concept to the atonement and many problems ensue:

1. Is seeing the suffering of Christ, knowing that Christ died for my sins really an equivalent hard treatment to actually suffering eternal punishment for sin myself? Is does not seem to be presented so in the New Testament: or it would make no sense for Christ himself to urge people to avoid hell as the worse of two alternatives. There is no sense that following Christ actually will constitute just as bad a punishment.
   
2. Following on from this, is atonement really presented in Scripture as a way of punishing the people of Christ, or a way of removing their punishment?
   
3. Murphy does not really deal with the objection that if the guilty are going to suffer just as much, only via the punishment of an innocent, why bring the innocent into it? It seems arbitrary to state that this cannot be achieved any other way. How does Murphy know this, especially in the case of divine judgment? Moreover, if we grant that those not atoned for will be punished for their own sins in hell (which Murphy probably doesn’t, as he leans universalist in a footnote), then we know that there is in fact an equivalent punishment possible.
   
4. We must ask more questions about the hard treatment that having the Lord die for us is. Does this hard treatment consist of mental anguish? If so, does it have duration, or does it continue eternally? It is hard to see how one could ascribe duration to it. But the idea that the atonement causes us to continue to suffer while in glory (gazing on the slain lamb?) is harder still to accept. Presumably our state in glory will be of pure gratitude to Christ for the atonement, not mental anguish over it. Murphy’s view seems to be essentially that we are eternally punished in heaven by knowing that Christ died for us.

I don’t think Murphy successfully addresses any of these issues with this view.

Conclusion

This article is useful for articulating one version of a conceptual argument against penal substitution. I don’t find it convincing, but the argument in the critique section expresses some interesting facets of the nature of punishment. I do think it nicely reveals that without a clear answer to the question of what punishment is, there will always be potential for problems with penal substitutionary accounts (and indeed any other atonement doctrines).

I don’t, however, find Murphy’s concept of vicarious punishment has anywhere near the same value.