ABSTRACT
The previous chapter argued that the biblical conception of justice, and the conception of justice which ought to underlie accounts of atonement, is fundamentally restorative. Penal substitution, however, is a particularly popular account of Christ’s work that typically assumes a retributive, rather than restorative, rationale. This chapter explores the prospects of combining the central claims of penal substitution – i.e., excepting any commitment to fundamental retribution – with other, non-retributive, justifications of punishment. It begins by offering a taxonomy of what might count as a punishment followed by some competing justifications of punishment. Then we turn to considerations regarding the sort of coherence one is after when thinking of substituting one punishment for another with a non-retributive rationale – i.e., considerations inspired by Immanuel Kant. We then apply these reflections to a restorative account of penal substitution that, when augmented by a realist group ontology, offers a clearly coherent and plausible explanation of atonement that incorporates biblical motifs of substitution, representation, and participation.
