Governmental theory of atonement

The governmental theory of the atonement (also called the moral government theory) holds that Christ’s death does not pay the specific penalty owed by particular sinners. Instead, God, acting as moral governor of the universe rather than as an offended creditor, publicly displayed his displeasure against sin by letting his own Son suffer, so that he could forgive repentant sinners without undermining the authority of his moral law. First proposed by Hugo Grotius against the Socinians, the theory keeps much of the church’s traditional vocabulary of satisfaction and propitiation while relocating what that vocabulary means.¹

Historical Origin

Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist and theologian, introduced the theory in the seventeenth century in Defensio Fidei Catholicae de Satisfactione Christi (1636), written against the Socinians, who denied that Christ’s death was any kind of payment to divine justice at all. Charles Hodge judges that the book’s occasion and vocabulary give it “an aspect of orthodoxy”: Grotius speaks throughout of satisfaction, propitiation, and Christ’s bearing “the guilt of our sins.” But different principles underlay the traditional terms, so that, in Hodge’s assessment, “there was, after all, no real satisfaction of justice, no real substitution, and no real enduring of the penalty of the law.” Grotius’s own Socinian opponents recognized this and concluded that in writing the book “he had given up all the main principles in dispute.”²

The Synod of Dort met two years after Grotius’s book was published, and Grotius himself joined the Dutch Remonstrants who protested its decisions. The Remonstrants as a body, however, did not adopt Grotius’s particular doctrine. Rather than treat Christ’s death as a governmental transaction, they described it as a sacrifice and ransom that God simply chose to accept, by sheer ordinance, as the condition of forgiveness, without holding that it satisfied justice in any strict sense.³

Core Tenets

Hodge summarizes the main elements of Grotius’s own theory:

In forgiving sin, God should be regarded neither as a creditor (who may remit a debt at will) nor as a master (who may punish or not as he pleases), but as a rector, a ruler who must act with a view to the best interests of those under his authority.²
The purpose of punishment is the prevention of crime and the preservation of good order, not the payment of a debt owed to justice for its own sake.
Because a good governor cannot let sin go unpunished without undermining public order, God could not forgive sin without some adequate exhibition of his displeasure and his resolve to punish it. This was the design of Christ’s sufferings and death: God punished sin in Christ as a public example, made more impressive by the dignity of Christ’s own person.
Grotius defines “punishment” broadly, as suffering inflicted on account of sin, without requiring either the sufferer’s own personal demerit or a strict satisfaction of justice. Christ’s sufferings, caused by human sin and designed to make its remission consistent with the interests of God’s moral government, qualify as punishment on this definition, even though Christ bore no one else’s specific guilt.
The essence of the atonement, on this view, is that Christ’s death was an exhibition of God’s displeasure against sin, teaching that sin deserves punishment and that the impenitent cannot escape it. Hodge summarizes the resulting picture: “the work of Christ was purely didactic…the cross was but a symbol.”⁴

Variants

The theory did not stay fixed in Grotius’s own juridical form. In Germany, the Supernaturalists (C. F. Stäudlin, C. C. Flatt, and G. C. Storr) revived Grotius’s central idea in their effort to preserve something of traditional doctrine against Rationalism, teaching that Christ’s death functioned as an “example and symbol” of God’s displeasure rather than a strict satisfaction of justice, without Grotius’s own juridical framework of God as rector.⁵

Hodge reports that the theory also arose independently in America, “as the necessary consequence of the principle that all virtue consists in benevolence.” If all of God’s moral attributes reduce to benevolence, his justice can only mean a disposition to promote happiness, so Christ’s death could only be designed to make forgiveness consistent with the best interests of divine government. The younger Jonathan Edwards elaborated this American version, Nathan S. S. Beman presented it fully in his own work on the atonement, and Edwards Amasa Park of Andover Seminary gathered and surveyed its leading American exponents.⁶

Confessional Contrast

The Reformed confessions state Christ’s death as a payment of the specific penalty his people’s sin incurred, not merely a public demonstration of God’s attitude toward sin in general. The Second London Baptist Confession states that Christ, in his mediatorial office, “underwent the punishment due to us, which we should have borne and suffered, being made sin and a curse for us,”⁷ and that by his obedience and sacrifice he “hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him.”⁸ Charles Hodge reports that the Lutheran and Reformed confessions of the sixteenth century, though drafted independently of one another, converge on exactly this point against a governmental or exemplarist alternative.⁹

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the governmental theory rest on a mistaken idea of what punishment is for? Hodge’s first objection is that the theory assumes punishment exists only for the good of others, so that if the same benefit could be secured without it, no punishment ought to be inflicted at all. But suffering imposed purely for someone else’s benefit is not, on that ground alone, punishment: “the sufferings of martyrs, although intended to redound to the good of the Church and of the world,” are not penal, and neither, on the theory’s own premises, would Christ’s sufferings be. Hodge quotes an 1866 reviewer making the same point about human justice: “The whole moral effect of punishment lies in its being just. The man who suffers for the benefit of others is a martyr and not a convict.”¹⁰

Doesn’t ordinary moral experience actually support the theory, since punishment does deter crime? Hodge’s second objection is that the theory contradicts the intuitive judgment of conscience. A person who has sinned does not experience guilt as calling for punishment because punishing him would benefit society; conscience testifies that he deserves punishment for his own wrongdoing. “If not guilty he cannot justly be punished; and if guilty he cannot justly be pardoned without satisfaction to justice.” Hodge treats this as the universal verdict of human conscience toward the sins of others as much as one’s own: when a serious crime is committed, “the instinctive judgment of men is that the perpetrators ought to be punished,” not merely that society would benefit from punishing them.¹¹

Isn’t reframing the atonement around God’s general moral government, rather than a specific legal debt, still a way of taking sin seriously? Hodge’s third objection is that the theory depends on collapsing all of God’s moral attributes, including justice, into benevolence, so that God’s righteousness becomes nothing more than a disposition to promote happiness. He judges this account of the divine attributes already refuted on independent grounds, so that a theory of the atonement built on it cannot stand either.¹¹

Can the theory be squared with how Scripture actually describes Christ’s death? Hodge’s fourth objection is that it cannot. Scripture “constantly represents Christ as a priest, as a sacrifice, as a propitiation, as an expiation, as the substitute and representative of sinners,” bearing the law’s curse in his people’s place. Civil government, the domain from which the governmental theory draws its whole vocabulary of moral rule and public example, “know[s] nothing of priests, sacrifices, and vicarious punishments,” so these biblical categories have no real place within the theory and must be explained away rather than accounted for.¹²

Doesn’t Christ’s death still exert a powerful moral effect on sinners and onlookers, the way the theory says? Hodge’s fifth objection grants the moral effect but denies that it is the atonement’s primary design. Christ’s death does impress on sinners and “the intelligent universe” the seriousness of sin, but only because it was first a real satisfaction of divine justice; the moral impression is downstream of that satisfaction; it is not, on its own, the atonement’s essence. Herman Bavinck frames the governmental theory as one of a family of “modern atonement theories” that “replace the juridical doctrine of satisfaction…with an emphasis on Christ acting in a personal ethical manner so as to effect a moral change in us,” and that in doing so share “a rejection of all notions of penal substitution.”¹³

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 571. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 571-572. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 573-574. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 571-573. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 574-576. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 577. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 8.4. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 8.5. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VII. Satisfaction of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 478. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 577-578. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 578. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 578-579. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩