Justice, mercy and who is being paid

Alma 42 personifies a Justice that God must satisfy; LDS thinkers disagree about what that means, and none of the models explains why an innocent's suffering discharges anyone's guilt.

What the Church claims

Christ's atonement was necessary because justice demanded it, and it could be accomplished in no other way.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. Rated on the claim, not on how useful the objection is against Mormonism, which is how this page read before. The necessity clause, that it could be accomplished in no other way, has no support in the Church's own materials; no defined mechanism explains how one person's suffering discharges another's guilt; and LDS thinkers give incompatible accounts of what the justice of Alma 42 even is. That the same problem afflicts other atonement-centered Christianity does not repair the claim. It only means the failure is not distinctively Latter-day Saint.

The record

  • Alma 42:15: God himself atones 'to appease the demands of justice, that God might be a perfect, just God, and a merciful God also'; v. 25: 'justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own'.
  • Alma 42:13, 22, 25 state that if justice were destroyed or robbed 'God would cease to be God'.
  • Skousen taught that the 'demands of justice' are the demands of the uncreated intelligences who would withdraw their honor from an unjust God; Ostler objects that this makes God's status precarious and makes the Father complicit in an unjust demand.
  • Ostler surveys the LDS atonement theories and proposes in their place a 'compassion theory' centered on Gethsemane rather than penal substitution.

The moving target

  • 1830: Mercy cannot rob justice; God would cease to be God.

The exchange

mainstream LDS reading

Alma's language is personification. Justice is an aspect of God's own character, and the atonement lets him be both just and merciful (v. 15).

The answer: If justice is simply God's own character, then the obstacle to forgiveness is internal to God, and the question becomes why a loving being cannot forgive without someone being tortured - a question penal substitution has never answered well in any tradition. If justice is an external law (as D&C 130 and the 'cease to be God' language suggest), we are back to a law above God whose strange content - guilt transferable to an innocent volunteer - is unexplained.

Blake T. Ostler

Penal substitution is the wrong model. The atonement is Christ's entering into our pain so that a healing relationship becomes possible (compassion theory).

The answer: Ostler's model is more morally attractive, but it is a minority philosophical proposal that does not match the forensic language of Alma 34 and 42 or general conference preaching, and it still needs to explain why Gethsemane and the cross were necessary for God to empathise or forgive.

What they get right: That the most sophisticated LDS philosopher rejects both Skousen and penal substitution shows the tradition can self-criticize.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The Book of Mormon's atonement theology is early-nineteenth-century Protestant satisfaction/penal theory in Nephite dress: law, punishment affixed, demands of justice, a substitute. LDS metaphysics then makes the usual problem worse. In classical Christianity God is at least the author of the justice he satisfies. In LDS thought justice is either an eternal law over God - in which case nobody can say why that law accepts vicarious suffering - or the opinion of the intelligences (Skousen), which LDS philosophers themselves reject as unworthy. The Church has no official theory, which is defensible, but it regularly asserts that there was 'no other way' without being able to say why.

The apologetic case

No Christian tradition has a settled mechanics of atonement; the New Testament uses several metaphors and so does the Book of Mormon. The scriptures assert that the atonement works and invite trust; theories are human scaffolding. LDS theology's emphasis on Gethsemane, empathy (Alma 7) and healing gives it resources beyond penal substitution.

What would change this

A coherent account of why vicarious suffering satisfies an eternal, impersonal law.

Closely related

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.