Forgiveness and law

Front matter

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Introduction

In what way led to this revision, Page 10. The moral view of atonement asserted even more completely, 12. Novelty excused, 14. How all doctrines have to pass a change of form when they come into the human molds of thought, 16. Reasons why this doctrine of Christ requires revision, 21. Brief notice of Dr. Campbell's

treatise, 28.

Page.

I

Forgiveness by GTod and by men coincide in the New Testament, one set forth by the other, 35. Negative forgivenesses, 36. Difficulties that are real, 37. How forgivenesses fail, 39. Two tilings necessary, sympathy with and cost made for the subject, 40-41. Examples for illustration, 42, 45, 46. "We require in forgiveness to be ourselves propitiated, 48. In this we have the tragic element of our virtue, 49.

II

The analogy of our own propitiations, 50. Applied to God, 52. Not that Christ dies for the reaction of it, 53. God loves his adversary already, 54. God's holiness not too inflexible, 55. God's, office in government no objection, 56. Our analogies only show that we propitiate ourselves, 51. No implication dishonorable to God, 59. God's propitiation above time, 60.

III

Scripture statement of propitiation, 63. Usus loquendi of the altar word, 64. Old Testament sacrifices, 66. Statute concerning blood, 68. How these old forms are related to Christ's sacrifice, 11. The Propitiation thus set forth, 72.

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IV

Objection to all propitiations however conceived, 73. Propitiations

from eternity, 74. Another solution, 76. Not supposed that God

has reluctances here to overcome, 77. An ideal of God that must

have great value, 78.

V. — (without expiation.) "What now to be thought of expiation, 81. Classic word not in the Scriptures, 82. Worst and best examples, 82. Suffering, right or wrong, the main thing in expiation, 83. Demoralizing effect of expiation, 85. It is evil paid, for evil due, 86. No instance in Scripture, 87. And no indications for it, 87. No interest of character in expiation, 90.

CHAPTER II. — Law and commandment 93

The satisfaction of law, 94=. Theologic devices for this purposes, 95.

I.

Christ and his commandments, 97. Who is he to assume such a right, 98. General statement, 99. Two words, Law and Commandment, 100. What Law is, 101. What Commandment, 103. Commandment in a sense unlegal, 104. Liberty in these, 105. Christ's own exposition of them, 106. Offices and uses, 107. Law first stage of discussion, 108. No perfect institute in itself, 109. Mostly negative, 109. Has no inspirations for duty, 110. Commandment includes more and better, 111, 112. Leave the tabulated rule and embrace the divine person for law, 113. Commandment offered to faith, 114. How the two are related, 115. One a factor in nature, the other in the supernatural, 117. Law never to be taken away by redemption, 118.

II.

Great Analogies also to be noted, 120. Mother and child, 121. The school, 123. Labor and the curse, 124. The army discipline, 125. The civil state, 127. The two factor method in all these analogies, 130. No compensations here in deliverance from the law, 131. It never works destructively, 132.

III.

The gospel a twofold way of discipline in like manner, 133. General Proposition to include all, 134. The penally coercive discipline, 134. No judicial penalty here, 136. The two factors work together, not one against the other, 137. No justice comes till after the discipline is through, 139. But we are kept in due impression of its future,

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CONTENTS. Vll

Page. 140. Apprehended loss of justice, 141. No thought of saying justice by penal compensations, 143. Public and Retributive justice, 145. Christ incarnated into the discipline, 147. His incarnation is the necessity of suffering accepted, 149. More to him than to us, for ■we do not much realize our own, 151. See no law of desert and therefore make light of it, 152. Make no sufficient account of the suffering of the good, 153. Christ's suffering great because of his purity, 154. Also by his great amount of mind, 155. Suffers in a failing cause, 157. The temptation, 158. Weeping over the city and the agony, 159. No justice in the suffering of the cross, 161. IY.

Some of the texts supposed to show God's dealing with Christ on the score of justice, 162. How we make proof texts, 163. No literal language for religious ideas, 163. Gratitude exaggerates always, 164. Christ made a curse, 166. Bare our sins, 167. Gives himself a ransom, 168. The scape-goat forms, 168. Forms of fifty-third of Isaiah, 169. How the commandment keeps the law, gives it back its honor, and works conjunctively with it, 173-6.

CHAPTER III. — Justification by faith 177

Rom. iii, 25-6, How understood, 177. Two sets of words in English to represent one in the Greek, 178. Probably no relief, and can only take our disadvantage as it is, 181. Legal justification impossible, 183. Legal justification implies justification before faith, 184. The fiction supposed, 185. Also another fiction, 186. Legal satisfaction an ignoble gift for character, 187. Highest of all words for character is right or righteousness. 190.

I.

Plato and Socrates in quest of its secret power, 192. Psychological non-discovery, 193. -Abraham in advance of Socrates, 194. God early declared to be source of all righteousness in men, 196. Christ puts us to the seeking after righteousness — even that of God, 197. How Christ advances the scope o'f the idea, 199. Legal justification cold and insufficient, 201. True justification the normal state of all created mind, 202. Faith how related to justification, 204. What the true faith is, 205. Luther's great discovery true, 206. Only his head mistook the meaning of his heart, 207. Justification and sanctification not confounded, 210.

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Page II.

How related to imputation, 212. We are also to have our righteousness putatively in God.

CHAPTER IV. — Threefold doctrine of Christ concerning himself 218

How often has it been wished that Christ had given us a doctrine concerning himself, 218. He has done it, 218-19. His three Articles, 219. Our English word Comforter a great mistake, 220. Dispenses comfort, of course, much as Christ himself does, 222. We have missed the meaning here by not observing that the Spirit is to work in and by Christ's work, 224.

ARTICLE I.

Of sin because they believe not on me, 225. New sensibility of sin expected, 225. Defect of the old methods, 221. They did not produce the sense of sin as a state, 228. Christ reproves of sin by the sense of what is not done, 229.

ARTICLE II.

Of righteousness, because I go to the Father and ye see me no more, 230. Great and upright characters commonly not valued till they die, 231. Christ expects a great revision to occur after he is gone, 233. By what he calls righteousness he means justification, 234. And there is no legal justification possible to bethought of here, 235.

ARTICLE III.

Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged, 236. Conceives evil to be a great organizer, 237. But the bad kingdom will be shaken by the trial scene at hand, 239. Judas, Peter, Annas, Caiaphas, all shaken, 240. Pilate himself is judged, 241. So dispossessed that he makes court to Herod, 244. All the multitude dispossessed by what they have seen, 247. All this by no display of force but only by goodness, 247.

The uses proposed to be made of this doctrine of Christ, 249. Not to be a rival doctrine, 250. To be a duplicate view that will take us away from so many literalities, 252. In the three articles we have the full scope of a gospel, 253. They give conviction not by the law, 253. The justification is simple and clear without the word, 255.

INTRODUCTION.

It seems to be required of me, by the unexpected arrival of fresh light, that I should make a large revision of my former treatise, entitled The Vicarious Sacrifice, and especially of the Parts III. and IY. of the same. Having undertaken to find the truth on this great subject at whatever cost, I am not willing to be excused from farther obligation because the truth appears to, be outgrowing my published expositions. My former discussion has been as favorably received as I had any right to expect, and there is no reason, personal to myself, why I should be fastened to my own small measures, when larger measures are given me. Besides, how shall a man ever get rid of his old sins, when he can not let go his little outgrown opinions ? Wishing no change, I have yet not ceased to consider and reconsider the whole question, as carefully as if I had not written, watching for all inward monitions and outward suggestions, whereby I might be corrected and guided farther in, to apprehend the matter of it more worthily, and in closer accord with the truth.

Since it so often helps the interest and also the under standing of the reader to know in what manner the writer came into the arguments and opinions he is trying to set forth, I feel constrained to indulge a little harmless egotism.

10 INTKODUCTION.

Thus it lias happened to me twice over, when writing on two simply practical subjects, to be overtaken by surprise in suggestions setting me back on the last half of my book, and requiring amendments in it that amounted to a virtual substitution of it by new matter. I do not pretend to say that I have these amendments by any private revelation, I only know that I have them as being found by them, and not as having found them myself. Perhaps our new seeing in such matters is, at times, but our mood ; and yet perhaps our mood may be our gift of seeing.

Thus, I was writing a discourse on the inquiry, How shall a man be able to entirely and perfectly forgive his enemy, so as to forever sweeten the bitterness of his wounded feeling and leave no sense of personal revulsion ? I can not give the whole argument here, but it must suffice to say, that I was brought squarely down upon the discovery, that nothing will ever accomplish the proposed real and true forgiveness, but to make cost in the endeavor, such cost as new tempers and liquefies the reluctant nature. And this making cost will be his propitiation of himself. Why not say this of all moral natures, why not of the Great Propitiation itself? Here opens my Chapter I., entitled Forgiveness and Propitiation.

Before the complete writing out of this, I was overtaken again by corrective suggestion at another point. Falling on the injunction by which Christ lays it onus to "keep his commandments," the prosy dullness in which we commonly embalm his words, when we draw them out as tests and lessons of practice, was forever exploded by the question occurrent, Why his commandments ? Where is the law ? Does he undertake to overtop Sinai, and be a new standard of character ? Thus I had the Greek words nomos and entole, before me, and they began to freshen each other in the individualities of .their uses and meanings. One thought opened into another, and I began to sketch a series of articles for the press that should give a practically fresh exposition of the Saviour's word. Suffice it to say that I shortly came upon the discovery that the law-state has everywhere a commandment-state going with it, to be its consummation or crown ; its fulfillment, and so, in a very important and true sense, its satisfaction al substitute. Here then begins another, partly very simple, partly very subtle range of inquiry, treated of in Chapter II., called Law and Commandment. In this certain terms of our atonement language get a qualified permission, but nothing that offends the principles of right.

These two chapters, I. and II., cover the general ground of my revision, as they also do the general field of what has been called in orthodox circles the atonement. My chapter IV. occupies a ground by itself. How it came it will not be difficult to see, only it may be difficult to find why it did not come sooner, and to some, at least, of the great interpreters. It has to me the nature rather of an occurrence than of a discovery ; for how can that be called a discovery which the Master's words have been plainly teaching for eighteen hundred years, and which we, his disciples, have, by some unaccountable dullness, missed, even down to a particular day of accident within the last six months ? An oversight all the more humiliating that the doctrine we. have missed has been the doctrine of Christ by Christ himself; an operative doctrine indeed, and not a formulating, giving the outfit of the Spirit and the implemental forces by which lie is to work. And again, let it be the more valuable to us that it comes in after the formulating history is done, to be a gospel by Christ's own authority, not inwoven with any of the old textures of the schools, but set in by an intercalation, to have its own footing, and its regulative sway in the respectful deference of the ages to come.

It will be observed in these preliminaries that the corrections I am proposing to make do not include a return to any of the standard theologic formulas I have heretofore rejected. I recant no one of my denials. I only undertake to fill the vacant spaces made by them with better material. Thus, if any one should imagine that in now asserting the positive fact of a propitiation of God, I return to the common orthodox position, that will depend entirely upon the manner in which the propitiation is believed to be made, whether as by a legal satisfaction for sin, or wholly one side of law by a transaction in and of the divine feeling itself. I asserted a propitiation before, but accounted for the word as one by which the disciple objectivizes his own feelings, conceiving that God himself is representatively mitigated or become propitious, because he is himself inwardly reconciled to God. Instead of this, I now assert a real propitiation of God, finding it in evidence from the propitiation we instinctively make ourselves, when we heartily forgive. So if it should be imagined that I now give in to the legal-substitution, legal-satisfaction theory, it will only be true that I assert a scheme of discipline for man, which is contrived to work its own settlement, in being; fulfilled and consummated by an obedience in the higher plane of liberty itself.

I still assert the " moral view " of the atonement as before, and even more completely than before ; inasmuch as I propose to interpret all that is prepared and suffered in the propitiation of God and the justification of men, by a reference to the moral pronouncements of human nature and society ; assuming that nothing can be true of God, or of Christ, which is not true in some sense more humano, and is not made intelligible by human analogies. We can not interpret God, as any one may see, except by what we find in our own personal instincts and ideas. And just here is the sin of all our theologic endeavor in the past ages, especially as regards this particular subject, that we invent so many ingredients that are verbals only, having no reality and no assignable meaning. We contrive a justice in God, which accepts the pains of innocence in place of the pains of wrong, and which is, in fact, the very essence of injustice. We contrive a forgiveness on the score of compensation, which to our human conceptions mocks the idea. We imagine that Christ has a virtue more transcendent than any of mortal kind, because it is optional ; whereas nothing is a virtue save as it is done for the right, and as being under moral obligation. We conceive that Christ is even overgood in this way, better than he need be, and that the surplus he gains is a meritum prepared for us; asserting how often that we are saved by the merits of Christ, when we can not so much as conceive the idea. We contrive how law may be satisfied for transgressors without their punishment, and then we teach that God may justly punish after satisfaction. Our precise difficulty is, in all such impossibles of thought, that we are trying to construct the ways of God, or of his Son, without any light from our own moral instincts and ideas ; to make him intelligible in the matter of a gospel, without intelligiblcs anywhere given to be his interpreters. We put the bits of glass and crockery into our kaleidescope, and tnrninsj it round and round we make theologic figures

that we call truths, and which having no ideas in them, we think must surely stand, because they look so regular and are milled in the scientific way of the scientific instrument. Thus we go on from age to age, trying vainly to fasten theologic notions that represent God by nothing in ourselves. Is it not time now, after so many centuries gone by, to have it discovered, that there is no truth concerning God which is not somehow explicated by truths of our own moral consciousness ?

If now these prefatory specifications signify less, taken by themselves, than might be desired, they will at least have a certain value in suggesting beforehand what I myself conceive to be the significance or intended amount of the reconstructions offered — that I do not undertake to be orthodox, but to be more sufficiently and scripturally true.

It will be understood, I presume, that I suppose the two revised statements, or solutions of doctrine I am now going to propound, to be really new. I frankly allow that I do, and also as frankly confess that in this simple fact my courage and confidence are most weakened by misgivings. For who can expect a great subject like this, which has engaged so many of the most gigantic minds of so many past ages, to be now, in these last times, more sufficiently apprehended and better expounded by an ordinary teacher, at his common level of standing. It is difficult, I allow, not to be greatly appalled when confronted by this objection. But it must not be forgotten that now and then some person will be stronger in his accidents, than other and greater men have been in their powers; also that God himself sometimes makes accidents for mind by his own private touch, when he will unfold some needed lesson; also that God has a way of preparing times for the uncovering of truth, and that as lie would not have his Son appear till the fullness of time should come, so he will not expect his Son's gospel to be duly conceived till the times are ready and all the suggestive conditions ripe that may set us in upon it. No greatest man or champion is going to conquer a truth before its time, and no least competent man, we may also dare to say, need miss of a truth when its time has come, and the flags of right suggestion are all out before him. How easy a thing it is, in fact, to think what the times have got ready to be thought, and are even whispering to us from behind all curtains of discovery, and out of all most secret nooks and chambers of experience. That now the clock has finally struck, and the day has fully come for some new and different thinking of this great subject, I most verily believe. And, to make this evident, I propose to occupy the few remaining pages of this preliminary chapter in showing by what signs the two staple matters of what has heretofore been called the Christian Atonement, viz., Propitiation and Legal Substitution, appear to be asking, or rather expectantly waiting, for some more satisfactory, better grounded exposition.

In the original word of Scripture the truths revealed are either visibly or verbally presented from that other side of heavenly announcement whence they come. There is no sympathy as yet, no twofold thinking in the forms, for they represent one party only. But the supposition is, that being given to intelligence, intelligence will fall at work upon them, and that human thought, laboring in the outward images of things, will generate modes of speech and laws of experience that compose a kind of second language on the base-level of nature. And so it will, by and by, begin to be the problem how to get the simple indicative matter of revelation into the forms of thought prepared in the thought-language of the mere understanding. The problem is, to accomplish a marriage of the two parties, and get the declarative work grafted in upon the natural analogies, when it will be so much closer to the common life of men, and settle its hold just so much more firmly on their convictions. We must not be so jealous of naturalism as to be alarmed by this process. It is not the supernatural submitting itself to nature to be buried and lost, but going down to hook itself in upon nature by seizing on the analogies of thought and law ; so to become fast locked in all the terms of experience and opinion which thought has generated. The bent w r e are thus receiving more and more distinctly towards nature and science is not wholly mischievous, as many appear to assume in their nervous dread of naturalism, but is our instinctive endeavor to obtain a new anchorage ground for christian truths and ideas, where they will hold us more firmly, and yield us a more settled confidence. To change the figure, we digest the declarative matter supernaturally given, and turn it into chyle for the absorbent action of our intelligence, in the plane of life where we grow our common thought and frame our common judgments.

Thus our fathers, down to a few generations back, made up their account of human depravity under what they called " the covenant of works ; " and only could not be sure, whether the propagation of it was " by the federal headship established in that covenant," or <( by Adam sinning for us," or "by our own sinning in Adam," or by "God putting over Adam's sin upon us by an act of imputation." All which is substituted now, with how great advantage, by simply conceiving that every sinning man is retributively damaged in his person by the effect of his sin, which damage is propagated of necessity in his posterity, by well known laws of physiology.

In the same way all the expectances of christian nurture were set forth, and conceived to have their pledge in " the covenant of Abraham," and laborious argumentations were drawn out to show that the sacrament of baptism followed the sacrament of circumcision, connecting us back, as it were across the sea, with that far off, dimly beheld dispensation of promise. Whereas now we behold a promise always at hand in the laws of physiology, rinding how, in their dispensation, every good element and gracious longing works reproductively in the child, to fashion, as by a law, the lineaments of a divine life established in its parent. And then, furthermore, after the child is born, we do not see it to be a wholly separate creature at first, but regard it for a long time still as being in the matrix of a parental culture, where it is wax to every temper, feeling, sentiment, all that bathes it in expression, all that is done for it and round it. And then to finish out our conception, instead of going back to Abraham, to imagine some blessing coming out of Abraham's faith, we say, without scruple, that we mean to have our child " grow up " in the faith.

We get a similar advantage when we put ourselves to the question of Christ's divinity. Piling on scripture citations ought to sufficiently prove it. And yet after it is proved in this manner, it will scarcely seem to be true. There is, in fact, no way to make out his divinity, so effective and true as to put him down into humanity, under the laws of humanity, and sec, from his childhood onward, whether he stays there. Starting him above the level of humanity, there to

simply continue ' and be, embalmed in texts, makes him a

2* kind of riddle in his story — we can no way master it, and are sure of nothing concerning it — but when we find that we can not keep him under manhood after we have put him there, he will have proved his divinity by experiment. The Unitarians have been of great service to us here ; for when we start with them, at their point of born humanity, we find him shooting proudly up out of human range and level, in all the wonders of his great life and character, and by no fit name can we call him but Immanuel. The closer we bring him down to manhood the more evidently, visibly, indisputably superhuman, or divine he appears.

In the same way again we have found our advantage in a less ghostly way of conceiving the supernatural. We tried a long time, and some are trying still, to think it as a phantasmagoric affair that is super as regards nature, and comes out apparition-wise in prodigies and flitting visitations, supernaturally disturbing our mortal affairs. Therefore believing, it may be, in supernaturals that occurred a long time ago, or clear back in the beginnings of revelation, we took up the impression that such . things were credible when they were far enough off; but that anything so irregular may be occurring now, we assumed to be wholly incredible. What then is nature, we have lately begun to ask, as related to the supernatural ? and what is the supernatural as related to nature? And one, we learn to say, is the world under causes, the other the world above causes. One is matter and force, the other is mind in the self-arbitrament of will. Whereupon it is discovered, strange to say, that we act supernaturally ourselves, and are in fact supernatural beings. All minds, in all orders and worlds, created and uncreated, make up thus a realm supernatural, under whose action nature is every where flexible as a hand for its uses. And the supernatural is only just as much more real than nature as it is more sovereign, and more nearly universal. We get a place for it thus, where it shows itself as a factor in our common life, and as such is the subject of our consciousness. "We no longer perambulate the sky and climb over the moon to find it, but we have it as a fact familiar to our knowledge.

Again, we get a solid footing in the same manner for the great gospel fact of vicarious sacrifice, by showing its correspondence and symbolic natural agreement with facts and demonstrations occurring all the while in our human relations. All love, as we perceive, reveals the vicarious instinct, either natural or religious. The sad story of a child in the street, the moan of a wounded stranger by the roadside, engages it. The malefactor dying for his crime will none the less burden some good man's heart, but possibly the more, that he suffers only what he deserves. And so the mother, the friend, the patriot, are all specially charged with their own special burden of concern or sorrow. Half the wants that gird our industry, and half the cost we undergo in our feeling, are instigated by our vicarious relations and offices. And Christ is with us under like instigations, only immeasurably above us in the scope of his sympathies and the generally perfect fullness of his aims and dispositions. Nothing is easier to believe than that he, in this most humanly natural and worthy sense, bows himself to suffering in a mission of vicarious sacrifice. But if, taking hold of certain highly figurative phraseologies, we conceive them prosily enough to convert the matter of the vicarious suffering into penal endurances under the justice of God, we recoil from believing a story of supernatural goodness so doubtfully good. Even if we say that we believe, our faith is choked by a jealousy of mistake, and we are scarce able to hold ourselves to any but a very thin, misgiving sort of confidence.

Edwards drew what I look upon as the finest paragraph in all his works, setting forth Christ in the sentiment of Lis vicarious relation to men as their Redeemer aud Saviour. And yet he could not imagine that it amounted to very much more than a pleasant commendation of him to oiir human feeling. That it showed the very essence of the substitution — how " he bore our sins in his own body on the tree," how " God laid on him the iniquity of us all," and how " the chastisement of our peace was upon him " — he did not so much as imagine : that was something more literal, and not to be explained by any such mere human analogies. " Christ's great love," he says, " and pity to the elect was one source of his suffering — [one source only]. A strongexercise of pity excites a lively idea of the misery under which he pities them, * * his love and pity fixed the idea of them in his mind as if he had really been they, and fixed their calamity in his mind as though it had been really his. A very strong and lively love and pity towards the miserable, tends to make their case ours ; as in other respects so in this, in particular, as it doth in our idea place us in their stead, under their misery, with a most lively feeling sense of that misery, as it were feeling it for them, actually suffering it in their stead by strong sympathy."* And yet he could not see the atonement here ; that was transacted on the nails and the wood ! As if the mere suffering of his human body were any thing in comparison with the great moral woe of his heart, or as if it were intended to be any thing but an outward sign of that. We see from his words that he had the key in his hand, but he did not dare to use * Miscellaneous observations.