Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, Part 19.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time we considered an objection to the coherence of the doctrine of penal substitution.

The basic idea of this objection is that punishment inherently involves an attitude

of condemnation or censure.

But since Christ was sinless, God could not have had an attitude of condemnation or censure

toward Christ, and therefore it's impossible that God could have punished Christ.

Any harsh treatment that God might have afflicted Christ with would not count as punishment and therefore

the doctrine of penal substitution is incoherent.

Now Jan suggested to me after the lesson last Sunday that it would perhaps help people's

understanding of this objection if I could encapsulate it in a very simple,

clear form. And so that's what I've done here on the whiteboard. It seems to me that this

argument consists of basically three premises. Number one is, if Christ was sinless, God could

not have condemned Christ.

Two, but if God could not have condemned Christ, God could not have punished Christ.

Three, if God could not have punished Christ, penal substitution is false. And so by means of this argument, it shows that if Christ

was sinless, then penal substitution is false. And since, of course, Orthodox Christianity

holds that Christ was sinless, it follows that penal substitution is false. So this seems to be the

argument in a nutshell. How might we respond to this objection to penal substitution? Well, it seems to me

that all three of the premises are vulnerable. All three of them are

eminently challengeable. To begin with, what about this last premise, number three, that

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