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

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, Part 21.

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

We began last week to look at the most important objection to the doctrine of penal substitution.

The doctrine states that Christ died to pay the penalty for our sins.

And the objection is that this would be unjust and therefore immoral on God's part because Christ was an innocent

person.

And I attempted to formulate this argument sympathetically in terms of six premises.

Number one, God is perfectly just.

Number two, if God is perfectly just, he cannot punish an innocent person.

Three, therefore God cannot punish an innocent person. Four, but Christ was or is an innocent person.

Five, therefore God cannot punish Christ. Six, if God cannot punish Christ,

then penal substitution is false. And we saw last time that someone who holds the penal substitution,

but denies that God punished Christ Christ can avoid this argument very easily simply

by denying premise 6.

He would hold that God afflicted Christ with the suffering which would have been our punishment

had it been inflicted on us instead.

So he would maintain that the truth

of penal substitution does not require that God punish Christ and the argument is invalidated.

On the other hand, suppose we do hold that God did punish Christ, which is what most penal substitution theorists would say, then

we need to examine the first two premises, that God is perfectly just and that if God is

perfectly just, he cannot punish an innocent person. And I suggested that this will, this needs to be contextualized within

...