Some people believe that God made it a condition for His forgiveness even of repentant sinners that Jesus died a sacrificial death at human hands. Often, in the New Testament, this doctrine of Objective Atonement seems to be implied, as when Jesus spoke of his blood as ‘shed for many for the remission of sins’ (Matth. 26:28), or when St Paul said that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures’ (1 Cor. 3:15). And for many centuries the doctrine was indeed accepted by most if not all Christian theologians. It seems in fact to be an essential part of Christianity, which adherents of that religion cannot reject without undermining the authority both of their scriptures and of a very long tradition. It looks then as if objections to the doctrine are objections to the Christian scheme itself. Here is one of them. As the Gospels present it Jesus was murdered, by one or more of Pilate, the Sanhedrin and the Jewish mob. Given Objective Atonement, God ordained the sacrificial death of Jesus, and so, as it seems, this murder. Murder requires freedom on the killer's part. And many have doubted that an action can be both free and ordained by God. Leave that aside. A good God would in any case not make it a condition for our forgiveness that someone acquired the guilt of murder.

There is this reply. God did not ordain just one particular mode of death for Jesus, but only that Jesus should die in one or other of a certain range of ways. If God had ordained just one mode of death for Jesus, then He must have ordained the particular mode of death that Jesus suffered. And this, as it seems, was murder. But on the ‘one way or another’ hypothesis about God's plan, that Jesus was murdered was just one of the possibilities that God envisaged. In the interests of human freedom He determined not to prevent such a murder, and, in the event, He did not prevent it. But His plan allowed also for the possibility that the murderers would exercise their freedom in a different way, and not kill Jesus. In that event and in the event that no other purely human murderer had come forward, and that no other purely human being had freely done Jesus to death in good faith, God would have ensured that Jesus died in some other way at human hands. There is a parallel in the story of Joseph and his brothers. By wickedly selling Joseph to the Midianites for twenty pieces of silver, the brothers set something in train which eventually caused the entire family to go to Egypt, thus fulfilling the prediction which God made to Abraham that his posterity ‘would be strangers in another land’ (Gen.15). In the interests of human freedom, God did not prevent the wicked action of the brothers, but neither did He choose to fulfil the prediction made to Abraham in just that particular way in which it was in fact fulfilled. He chose only that it should be fulfilled in one or other of a range of ways. If the brothers had exercised their freedom differently, then God would have achieved His end in some other way, either with the help of some other free human action, which, if wicked, He would again tolerate in the interests of human freedom, or, as a last resort, by His own miraculous intervention. And it is easy to imagine how, if Joseph's brothers had not sold him to the Midianites, and no other free human action had got the posterity of Abraham to another land, then God might have achieved this outcome by a harmless miraculous intervention. He might for example just have told Joseph to go to Egypt and told the family to follow him. We could say that, wanting to preserve human freedom, God formed a conditional intention to achieve his purpose by a miraculous intervention: he would miraculously intervene if his purpose were not going to be achieved by free human action.

The reply seems plausible until we ask just how, if Jesus had not been murdered, or otherwise done to death by a free and purely human action, God could have brought about his sacrificial death at human hands. How can a person die at human hands? The hands that kill him may be his or those of someone else. The victim's act of will may move the hands, or they may be moved by someone else's will. Suppose the victim dies at alien hands. Murder is one possibility: an alien agent acts with malice and deliberation; it is the alien killer's act of will that moves his hands. And then there are cases where the alien killer acts in good faith, or kills by accident, or kills without there being an act of will that moves his hands. Cases are also possible in which it is just the victim's act of will that moves the alien killer's hands. Suppose the victim dies at his own hands. He may deliberately kill himself, or he may die by accident. Or the victim's own hands are, murderously or otherwise, moved only by an alien act of will. On the ‘one or other way’ hypothesis God is supposed to have ordained for Jesus not one in particular of these modes of death, but only that that he should die in one or other of at least some of these possible modes of death at human hands. And, more particularly, God is to have had the conditional intention Himself to bring about this death, if Jesus was not going to be killed by free and purely human agency. How, though, short of ordaining a free and purely human action, could God Himself bring about the sacrificial death of Jesus at human hands?

The defender of Objective Atonement may at this point invoke the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. If Jesus was the incarnation of the pre-existent Son or second Person of the Trinity then God the Son could have killed the body of Jesus that He had himself assumed, and could have done so either by using the hands of Jesus or by willing the fatal movements of an unfree purely human killer. Would either be a fitting form of sacrificial death? Both seem too close to suicide. The seeming alternative is for some other Person of the Trinity to kill the body that the Son has assumed, by willing the movements of the hands of Jesus or by willing the movements of an unfree purely human killer. That, however, looks too close to murder. It seems then any conditional intention that God form about how to bring about the death of Jesus if this does not happen through free and purely human agency will be a conditional intention to do something which, if not wrong, would at least prevent the death from being a fitting sacrifice. The ‘one way or another’ version of God's plan for the sacrificial death of Jesus would not have the perfection which is easily attributable to the ‘one way or another’ version of God's plan to fulfil his prediction to Abraham.

The alternative to the ‘one way or another’ theory, is the theory that God ordained just one particular mode of death for Jesus, this being his actual mode of death. The initial objection to Objective Atonement was that Jesus was murdered, that on Objective Atonement God would have ordained this murder as a condition for our forgiveness, and that such a plan is incompatible with God's goodness. Could it be argued that actually Jesus was not murdered, because his killers, though acting freely, acted in good faith, and believed that they were judicially executing a blasphemer or dangerous revolutionary? If that was what happened, God could have ordained for the sake of our forgiveness just one particular mode of death for Jesus without ordaining a murder and without our forgiveness conditional on someone's acquiring a murderer's guilt.

One difficulty with this suggestion is it seems to conflict with what Christians are apt to believe about the purposes of the Incarnation. Jesus taught that evil is not to be returned for evil, and, so Christians sometimes say, died partly to offer the supreme example of not returning evil even for the evil of being tortured to death upon the cross. But if Jesus had been killed in good faith there had been no evil in his death on the cross of the kind to which evil is not to be returned. Christians also often hold that Jesus died partly to express God's solidarity with the sufferings of humanity. Conspicuous among human sufferings is physical cruelty freely and maliciously inflicted by other human beings. Jesus would not have borne that kind of suffering if the sufferings of his death and passion had been self-inflicted. But to vindicate the good faith hypothesis would in any case be very uphill work. We must suppose that the Sanhedrin really believed that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy, explain away the report that Pilate could find no fault in him, and of course explain away such passages as the one in Acts 2.23, in which Peter is reported as saying that it is by ‘wicked hands’ that the Jews have taken and crucified Jesus, albeit by the ‘determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God’? And what of Mark 14:21 and Matth. 26:24, in which Jesus is reported as saying that it would have been good for Judas, the betrayer, if he had never been born? If God had ordained the particular way in which Jesus died then even if he would not then have ordained a murder he would still have ordained a betrayal. It is as hard to see how a good God could have made the forgiveness even of repentant sinners depend on someone's acquiring the guilt of betrayal as it is to see how a good God could have made it depend on someone's acquiring the guilt of murder.