Craig on Potential Redemption & Redemption Accomplished & Applied
In Atonement and the Death of Christ there’s a lot which Craig says on the scope of the atonement which a Reformed person would take issue with. Here I’m going to focus on a narrow point about language.
On pages 211–214 Craig attempts to answer Eleonore Stump’s (and the Reformed) objection to endorsing penal substitution + unlimited atonement. (The objection being that universal salvation seems inescapable.) Craig’s response to the argument is the familiar Arminian distinction between Christ’s life, death, and resurrection only potentially securing redemption vs. actually securing redemption.[1] What I’m interested in here is his claim that this is the same distinction that reformed theology draws between redemption accomplished and applied.
“. . . payment of our debt needs to be freely received by faith in order to achieve our actual redemption.
In fact, Reformed thinkers themselves recognize this truth in distinguishing between redemption as accomplished and as applied.”
— p. 213
Though none as clear as the quote above, there are earlier remarks in the book that Craig makes which suggest that his distinction of potentiality vs. actuality is the same one that reformed theology makes.
This, especially as a synonym for his more frequent language of potential, is misleading because the reformed concept inhabits a theological context in which there is no tension between God’s having accepted the work of Christ and God’s eternal damnation of the reprobate. That context is missing in Craig’s theological landscape. Craig’s understanding of redemption accomplished and applied is, thus, not quite the same and isn’t doing the same work as it is the reformed understanding.
After all, reformed folk (in my experience) usually balk at language of potentiality in regards to the work of Christ. Why? The term fits awkwardly with the reformed concept. Imagine that I’ve just thrown a rock at a window with sufficient force to break the window and the rock is now mid-flight, on course to hit its target. To use language of the window as potentially broken seems ill-suited to capture the state of affairs. Had I not thrown the rock, the window would still be potentially broken! The reformed language is intended to account for the sufficient conditions having been met. Another example might be how we could have said that victory in the war against Japan had been accomplished as the second bomb fell towards the ground of Nagasaki.
To capture the concept Craig is talking about, we would need an entirely different analogy. Perhaps we could imagine a man, Smith, with incredible foresight and who knows, at t1, that his friends Jones will take out a loan from the bank next year, t2. Smith decides to write a check to the bank at t1. When it comes time to repay the debt, the bank will ask Jones whether he wants to make use of Smith’s check. If he does, then the bank will consider Jones’s debt settled, but he is free to reject Smith’s offer and pay it himself.
In The Mortification of Sin, John Owen makes a distinction (in addressing an entirely different issue) that is relevant. Owen notes that “Conditionals… may denote two things: — (1) The uncertainty of the event or thing promised . . . (2) The certainty of the coherence and connection that is between the things spoken of . . .” (The Works of John Own, vol. 6, p. 6).
Craig’s potentiality language is of type 1. The reformed idea of redemption accomplished and applied is of type 2 and meant to acknowledge the distinction while maintaining the certainty of the coherence and connection. Thus, the reformed idea of redemption accomplished and applied doesn’t provide a solution for Craig, it actually highlights the problem!
In the Jones/Smith scenario, we might say that Jones’s debt is potentially paid at t1. But clearly to say that the paying of his debt has been accomplished at t1 is misleading. The idea of potentiality here clearly doesn’t solve the problem with ideas about the bank accepting Smith’s offer or Smith having paid the debt at t1. It’s such language, and its theological grounding, that creates the problem Stump is pointing to.
Granted, this observation doesn’t indicate that Craig’s idea of potentiality can’t solve the problem. My interest here is simply to clarify that Craig’s way of trying to solve this problem is not to merely make the same distinction between redemption accomplished and applied that reformed theology makes.
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[1] Though see his interesting remark on a Molinist account of limited atonement on p. 212 fn. 40, which seems implicitly to acknowledge some traction with the reformed logic on limited atonement and means-end rationality.
