Vicarious redemption: the moral objection

Guilt is not transferable. An innocent's suffering cannot discharge another person's culpability, and LDS theology cannot appeal to God's authority over the law to make it so.

What the Church claims

Christ's suffering justly discharges the guilt of those who repent. Far from being an injustice, it is the supreme act of love, because he offered himself freely and because justice had to be satisfied before mercy could be extended.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. The justice half of the claim does not survive its own terms. Church materials teach a debt paid by a third party, and moving a penalty onto someone innocent is the thing justice ordinarily forbids. The usual rescue, that God may set the terms, is closed here because LDS scripture puts law above God. The love half is untouched, which is what keeps the claim from failing completely.

The record

  • The target is the model the Church's own materials teach. Its topical page says "to atone is to suffer the penalty for sins"; Preach My Gospel says "Christ paid the penalty for our sins"; D&C 19:16-17 says the repentant need not suffer because God suffered for all, and the unrepentant "must suffer even as I"; Boyd K. Packer's parable has a mediator pay a creditor who demands justice.
  • Christopher Hitchens put the objection in its best-known form, treating vicarious redemption as scapegoating and as a father showing love by subjecting a son to death by torture: "I can pay your debt, my love, if you have been imprudent," but of assuming another's moral responsibility, "It would be immoral of me to offer, and immoral of you to accept".
  • Kant had already drawn the distinction Hitchens uses. A debt of sins is "the most personal of all debts" and unlike a financial one, where "the creditor doesn't care" who pays; it "can't be taken on by an innocent person even if he is magnanimous enough to be willing to take it upon himself for the sake of the sinner".
  • This is the leading objection in the philosophical literature, not a polemical flourish. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the charge that penal substitution is immoral "perhaps the most influential" objection: serious punishment "cannot be justly leveled upon an innocent, even willing, third party," and "We do not have the hint of an intuition that it would be just, say, for an innocent mother to willingly take on the death penalty due her son for murder".
  • The version that targets guilt rather than suffering is the imputation objection: for Christ to be justly punished he would have to bear human guilt, and there is no area of morality in which guilt can be imputed from one person to another.
  • David Lewis isolated why the debt metaphor misleads. "The condition of owing a debt and the condition of deserving to be punished are not alike": a creditor must not lose money and it does not matter who pays, whereas with punishment "what is required is that the debtor shall suffer a loss; there is no creditor". He concluded that penal substitution as an account of the atonement is nonsense.
  • The standard rescue is unavailable to Latter-day Saints. William Lane Craig's reply is that God, as the ultimate lawgiver, has sole authority to impute sins. LDS scripture puts the law above God: a law "irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world", and a justice whose destruction would mean "God would cease to be God". A law nobody authored cannot be said to have authorized the transfer.
  • The Book of Mormon states the moral principle the model violates. Amulek denies that "any man" can "sacrifice his own blood which will atone for the sins of another" in the same speech that demands an infinite sacrifice; Jacob Morgan, writing in Dialogue, presses the same point against penal substitution because "justice, by definition, cannot demand injustice", and Eugene England rejected the satisfaction model as feudal legalism.
  • The objection has a real limit, and the limit is LDS. Blake Ostler's compassion theory holds that Christ "is not punished for our sins, nor does he bear our shameful guilt or moral culpability"; nothing in this argument touches it. Ostler also reports that "most Mormons accept a form of penal substitution theory of atonement".

The moving target

  • 1830-03: God suffered for all so that the repentant need not; those who will not repent must suffer as he did.
  • 1830: An infinite sacrifice appeases the demands of justice, though no man's blood can atone for another's sins; if justice were destroyed, God would cease to be God.
  • 1977-04: Justice is a creditor who cannot be refused; the atonement is payment of a debt by a mediator.
  • 2026-09: To atone is to suffer the penalty for sins; Christ paid the penalty and the debt, having no debt to justice of his own.

The exchange

Standard Christian and LDS reply; D&C 19:19; Jada Twedt Strabbing (2016), as cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia

Christ volunteered. Nobody was coerced, and a free gift of self-sacrifice for others is the highest good, not an injustice; in the case of a sinless God incarnate the conditions for accepting a substitute are met.

The answer: Consent answers coercion, which is not the objection. Kant's point is precisely that a debt of sins "can't be taken on by an innocent person even if he is magnanimous enough to be willing to take it upon himself", and the philosophical statement of the objection builds the willingness in: an innocent, even willing, third party cannot justly bear the penalty, as the case of the volunteering mother shows. Nor is the LDS account free of compulsion in the text itself: the revelation has Christ wish the bitter cup away before partaking.

What they get right: It disposes of the crudest version of the charge. No one in the story is dragged to the altar, so language about divine child abuse misdescribes what Latter-day Saints believe happened.

Mainstream LDS reading of Alma 42:15; William Lane Craig, as cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia

God is not paying a third party. He is satisfying his own justice, which is an aspect of his character, so no outside creditor is being bought off and no law is being imposed on him from outside. As the ultimate lawgiver he may accept what he chooses in satisfaction of justice.

The answer: This reply forces a choice that LDS theology cannot make comfortably. If justice is God's own character, he could forgive directly, and Eleonore Stump argues that unconditional love entails exactly that; the suffering then buys nothing. If justice is the eternal law of D&C 130 and Alma 42, which God must satisfy or "cease to be God", then Craig's appeal to divine legislative authority is not available, because nobody legislated that law. The mediator parable makes the second reading explicit by casting justice as a creditor with standing to refuse.

What they get right: Craig is right that law recognizes vicarious liability and legal fictions, so imputation is not wholly foreign to moral practice. Those devices transfer cost and liability, not culpability, which is the thing at issue.

Blake T. Ostler (compassion theory); Eleonore Stump (2018), as cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia

The model is not transfer of guilt at all. Christ enters into our condition and we are joined to him; what he bears is the pain of relationship with sinners, not our culpability, and what saves is union and moral transformation rather than a punishment reassigned.

The answer: This is the strongest reply, and against it the objection fails. Ostler's model says outright that Christ "is not punished for our sins, nor does he bear our shameful guilt or moral culpability", so nothing here counts against it. Two things keep it from settling the matter. It is not what the Church teaches: the official page and the missionary manual speak of a penalty suffered and a debt paid, and Ostler himself says most members hold a penal view. And the non-penal models still owe an account of why an innocent had to suffer at all, which Ostler concedes no theory has yet supplied.

What they get right: This is the honest limit of the argument. A Latter-day Saint who holds a participation or compassion model is untouched by it, and should be told so.

David Lewis's tu quoque (1997); a common apologetic move

Moral intuitions are poor evidence about metaphysics, and the intuitions here are not even consistent. We do let a friend pay someone's fine. So the objection rests on a feeling that we ourselves do not apply evenly.

The answer: Lewis is conceded in full, and he is the one who drew the line that survives. He grants that all of us "are of two minds about penal substitution" and that the tu quoque is not intellectually weightless, while insisting that a serious punishment has "no creditor" and so is not a debt anyone else can pay, and that the theological application of the debt metaphor is nonsense. Our claim is not that an intuition refutes a metaphysics. It is that a church which teaches this model teaches that God does what its own scripture forbids a man to do.

What they get right: Lewis is right that the objector's own practice is untidy, and a critic who presents the intuition as self-evident is overreaching.

Common apologetic response; the same point is granted on this site's page on justice and mercy

The objection proves too much. It applies to Christianity as such, and to Judaism's sacrificial system before it, so it is not a reason to doubt the restored gospel in particular.

The answer: Largely granted, and it is why this page is not rated higher. The LDS difference is narrow but real. A classical theist can say God authored the law he satisfies, which is Craig's reply; LDS scripture makes law and justice prior to God, so the appeal to divine authority is closed. LDS teaching also attaches conditions to a debt said to be paid in full - ordinances and covenant-keeping to the end of life - which is a strange shape for a discharged liability.

What they get right: A critic who treats this as evidence that the Church specifically is false is overreaching. It is a reason to doubt penal atonement wherever it is taught.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Moral responsibility does not move between persons. Another person can pay my fine, serve out a debt, or take a beating meant for me, and none of it makes me less the one who did the thing. Kant stated the reason plainly: a debt of sins is "the most personal of all debts" and "can't be taken on by an innocent person even if he is magnanimous enough to be willing to take it upon himself for the sake of the sinner". Lewis explained why the accounting metaphor fools us: with money there is a creditor who must not lose out and it does not matter who pays, while with punishment "there is no creditor" and the point is that this person suffers. Hitchens drew the practical conclusion - one may pay another's debt, but taking over another's responsibility is something "immoral of me to offer, and immoral of you to accept". This is the leading objection in the professional literature, not an internet talking point. The Church teaches the model the objection is aimed at. Its own page defines atoning as suffering "the penalty for sins", the missionary manual says Christ "paid the penalty for our sins", the revelation says the repentant need not suffer because God suffered instead, and the parable used to teach children casts justice as a creditor demanding payment and Christ as the friend who pays. Ostler, who rejects that model, reports that most members hold it. The LDS version is worse off than the classical one in a specific way. Where an orthodox theist can say God is the author of the law and may therefore accept a substitute - Craig's reply - LDS scripture makes law and justice prior to God: a law "irrevocably decreed" before the world, a justice that would unmake God if it were robbed. So the question of who accepted an innocent's torture as payment has no answer: not God, who is bound, and not the law, which is nobody's decision. Then add the strangest detail. The same book that demands an infinite sacrifice says no man can "sacrifice his own blood which will atone for the sins of another", and the payment is followed by conditions - ordinances and lifelong obedience - which is not how a discharged debt behaves.

The apologetic case

The best reply refuses the frame. On Ostler's compassion theory and Stump's participation account, no guilt is transferred and nobody is punished in another's place: Christ enters our condition, and what heals us is union with him and the transformation it makes possible. On that reading the objection is aimed at a caricature that the LDS canon does not require, since the Church has never adopted penal substitution as doctrine and the scriptures use many images. The defender can add that he gave himself freely, which changes the moral character of the act as it does in every case of self-sacrifice, and that our intuitions here are demonstrably inconsistent, since we let a friend pay a fine while calling substitution monstrous - Lewis's point, made by an atheist. A moral objection cannot show that a claim is false; it can only show that we do not like what it describes.

What would change this

This is a moral argument, so no document or discovery can settle it. What would defeat it is a coherent account of how moral culpability transfers between persons, or the Church adopting a model in which nothing transfers - a participation or compassion account of the kind Ostler proposes - as its official teaching in place of the penalty-and-debt language now used in its manuals.

Closely related

Sources

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