This is the weekly Q & A blog post by our Research Professor in Philosophy, Dr. William Lane Craig.
Question
If I am guilty of a grave sin (I kill a mother's daughter while driving drunk, for example) but then repent and am saved by the blood of Christ, I die and go to heaven. If I am no longer guilty of sin having been justified, where is the justice for the mother whose daughter I killed or for the victim? How is the demand for justice for either party ever satisfied?
Don
United States
Dr. William Lane Craig's Response
The answer to your question, Don, is that Christ satisfies the demands of justice by bearing substitutionally the punishment for your sin. The whole point of a penal substitutionary view of the atonement is that God does not (or cannot) pardon sin unless the demands of divine justice are met. Your question would press hard upon those atonement theorists who think that God just mercifully pardons sin without satisfaction of divine justice. But on a penal substitutionary view the just desert of every sin is exacted—it’s just not exacted from the sinner who accepts Christ’s substitutionary payment but rather from Christ himself. The atonement thus displays both God’s mercy and justice.
William Lane Craig is a visiting scholar in philosophy at Talbot School of Theology. He lives in Atlanta, Ga., with his wife Jan and their two teenage children Charity and John. At age 16, while a junior in high school, he first heard the message of the Christian gospel and yielded his life to Christ. He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology; and God, Time and Eternity, as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology. In 2016, Craig was named by The Best Schools as one of the fifty most influential living philosophers.
Biola University
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