Is it the same death, or one equivalent to ours?Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 7 vols., ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2023), 4:408–409.
Nor (2) did he undergo a bare dissolution of body and soul, in which alone our death consists, but that entire misery which was due to his people from sin, or that same evil which burdened his people due to sin, if not in the same in kind, or rather in number, at least the same in weight and value. For he neither received to himself each and every evil that could be imposed upon us on account of sin—for example, disease, blindness, and all those evils recounted in Deuteronomy 28:15ff.—nor could he receive, for example, the deprivation of the divine image and original righteousness, the eternity of death, and other things. Yet with respect to their kinds, he did undertake those same things which were incumbent upon us to endure, which were, at the least with respect to weight and value, equivalent to our miseries. So that in this death, there was not so much a solutio, a payment, according to its true and proper name, wherein, according to the jurists, the idem, the same thing, is rendered that is in the obligation, which payment cannot be refused by the creditor, but rather a satisfactio, a satisfaction, wherein the tantundem, the same value, is rendered, and which can be rejected by the creditor.30 With this one precaution carefully observed, a great number of difficulties in the business of satisfaction will disappear.
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30 For a prominent debate at the time regarding the idem versus the tantundem of Christ’s death, cf. Richard Baxter (1615–1691), Aphorismes of Justification … wherein also is opened the nature of the covenants, satisfaction, righteousness, faith, works, etc. (London: Francis Tyton, 1649), 44–56; and John Owen, Of the death of Christ, the price he paid, and the purchase he made … vindicated from the exceptions and objections of Mr. Baxter (London: Peter Cole, 1650); idem, Works, ed. William H. Goold (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1862), 10:437–48. Cf. Patrick Gillespie (1617–1675), The Ark of the Covenant Opened (London: for Thomas Parkhurst, 1677), 406, “Christ paid not the idem, but the tantundem; not the same that was due, but the value: for he suffered not the same pain, numero in number, but specie in kind.”
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