Owen and Vindicatory Justice
...argues that vindicatory justice is one part of the outworking of God's perfect nature, simply the external working of God's perfections in the manner demanded by the sinfulness of the creature. There is, in other words, no single internal attribute that corresponds to God's justice and upon which his vindicatory justice is based. As a consequence of this, God's vindicatory justice must be understood not as something that possesses existence of its own right but as something that exists only as part of the relationship between a perfect God and his creatures.
Carl Trueman, The Necessity of Atonement, Drawn into controversie: reformed theological diversity and debates within seventeenth-century British Puritanism (Göttingen ;Oakville, Conn. : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 211