Debts and Punishments

Socinus argues that in redemption, God is the offended party, the creditor whose debt isn’t repaid by sinful man. As a creditor, he is free to forgive without satisfaction being made. In fact, the idea of debt-forgiveness assumes that no satisfaction is made.

Grotius sees this as a category confusion. The relation of God to sinful men is not one of creditor and debtor, but one of ruler and ruled. He recognizes some similarities between the two sorts of relations: “The similarity lies in this, that as the giver has a right in the thing, so the ruler in the punishment.” He recognizes that both creditors and rulers may act with mercy ( Defensio Fidei Catholoicae: De Satisfactione Christi Adversus Faustum Socinum Senensem , 2.22)

Despite the similarities, they have “not the same right, or an equally free right.” Owners have rights that they exercise “for the sake of the owner,” but the right of punishment inflicted by a ruler is “for the sake of the common good.” The ruler is not free to dispense with the public good in the way an owner can forgo his own good in an act of mercy. Grotius admits that “in a certain sense punishment can even be said to be due to someone; not properly, because here no one is truly a creditor, but on account of similarity.” It is a “misuse of language” to say that we “owe punishment either to the ruler or to God, or to the accuser as to the devil” since “no injury is done to the devil if punishment is not inflicted on the man, nor is it consistent with the justice of God that he should remit any punishment forever” (2.23).

This strict distinction between ruler’s and their responsibilities, and creditors and debtors, makes sense. But questions remain: What of the biblical language of sins as “debts” and forgiveness as debt cancellation? Grotius has answers to these passages, but some seem strained (though there is strain in the other direction when Anselm, for instance, speaks of owing God a death). Has Grotius imposed a seventeenth-century model of rule on theology? Would medieval rulers have thought of the distinction of debt and punishment in the way he does? Would David or Solomon?