Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today, the Doctrine of Christ, part 23.

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

We've been thinking about how the substitutionary punishment of Christ serves to satisfy the demands of God's

retributive justice. And last time we saw that penal substitution actually takes

place within the Anglo-American justice system.

Particularly we saw in civil law that substitutes are allowed to pay the penalties that

are sometimes exacted by the court and that even in criminal, there are cases of vicarious liability, where the

guilt of an employee is imputed to his employer, and the employer may be punished on behalf

of both of them.

And thus, in the American justice system, the satisfactoriness of penal substitution is in some

cases recognized.

And you'll remember the philosopher David Lewis said, as I quoted him last week, that this indicates that both sides agree that

penal substitution sometimes makes sense, even if none can say how it makes sense.

Well, Protestant theologians, likeis Touritaine that we have looked

at in the past offered an account to make sense of penal substitution in the case of Christ.

Turretin maintains that Christ is not only our substitute but also our representative before God.

Now this requires us to say a word about the nature of substitution and representation.

Though these are similar, they are not the same thing.

In a case of simple substitution, someone takes the place of another person, but he doesn't represent that person. A great example of this

would be a pinch hitter in baseball. The pinch hitter enters the lineup to bat in place of another player. And he in no sense represents that other player.

He is a substitute for the other player, but he doesn't represent him. And that's why the player

who is replaced is not affected by the performance of the pinch hitter.

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