I. The Prophetic Office of Christ
1. The nature of Christ’s prophetic work.
(a) Here we must avoid the narrow interpretation which would make the prophet a mere foreteller of future events. He was rather an inspired interpreter or revealer of the divine will, a medium of communication between God and men (προφήτης = not foreteller, but forteller, or forth-teller. Cf. Gen. 20:7,—of Abraham; Ps. 105:15,—of the patriarchs; Mat. 11:9,—of John the Baptist; 1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 2:20, and 3:5,—of N. T. expounders of Scripture).
Gen. 20:7—“restore the man’s wife; for he is a prophet”—spoken of Abraham; Ps. 105:15—“Touch not mine anointed ones, And do my prophets no harm”—spoken of the patriarchs; Mat. 11:9—“But wherefore went ye out? to see a prophet? Yea, I say into you, and much more than a prophet”—spoken of John the Baptist, from whom we have no recorded predictions, and whose pointing to Jesus as the “Lamb of God” (John 1:29) was apparently but an echo of Isaiah 53. 1 Cor. 12:28—“first apostles, secondly prophets”; Eph. 2:20—“built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets”; 3:5—“revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit”—all these latter texts speaking of New Testament expounders of Scripture.
Any organ of divine revelation, or medium of divine communication, is a prophet. “Hence,” says Philippi, “the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are called ‘prophetæ priores,’ or ‘the earlier prophets.’ Bernard’s Respice, Aspice, Prospice describes the work of the prophet: for the prophet might see and might disclose things in the past, things in the present, or things in the future. Daniel was a prophet, in telling Nebuchadnezzar what his dream had been, as well as in telling its interpretation (Dan. 2:28, 36). The woman of Samaria rightly called Christ a prophet, when he told her all things that ever she did (John 4:29).” On the work of the prophet, see Stanley, Jewish Church, 1:491.
(b) The prophet commonly united three methods of fulfilling his office,—those of teaching, predicting, and miracle-working. In all these respects, Jesus Christ did the work of a prophet (Deut 18:15; cf. Acts 3:22; Mat. 13:57; Luke 13:33; John 6:14). He taught (Mat. 5-7), he uttered predictions (Mat. 24 and 25), he wrought miracles (Mat. 8 and 9), while in his person, his life, his work, and his death, he revealed the Father (John 8:26; 14:9; 17:8).
Deut. 18:15—“Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet, from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him shall ye hearken”; cf. Acts 3:22—where this prophecy is said to be fulfilled in Christ. Jesus calls himself a prophet in Mat. 13:57—“A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house”; Luke 13:33—“Nevertheless I must go on my way to-day and to-morrow and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.” He was called a prophet: John 6:14—“When therefore the people saw the sign which he did, they said, This is of a truth the prophet that cometh into the world.” John 8:26—“the things which I heard from him [the Father], these speak I unto the world”; 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; 17:8—“the words which thou gavest me I have given unto them.”
Denovan: “Christ teaches us by his word, his Spirit, his example.” Christ’s miracles were mainly miracles of healing. “Only sickness is contagious with us. But Christ was an example of perfect health, and his health was contagious. By its overflow, he healed others. Only a ‘touch’ (Mat. 9:21) was necessary.”
Edwin P. Parker, on Horace Bushnell: “The two fundamental elements of prophecy are insight and expression. Christian prophecy implies insight or discernment of spiritual things by divine illumination, and expression of them, by inspiration, in terms of Christian truth or in the tones and cadences of Christian testimony. We may define it, then, as the publication, under the impulse of inspiration, and for edification, of truths perceived by divine illumination, apprehended by faith, and assimilated by experience.... It requires a natural basis and rational preparation in the human mind, a suitable stock of natural gifts on which to graft the spiritual gift for support and nourishment. These gifts have had devout culture. They have been crowned by illuminations and inspirations. Because insight gives foresight, the prophet will be a seer of things as they are unfolding and becoming; will discern far-signalings and intimations of Providence; will forerun men to prepare the way for them, and them for the way of God’s coming kingdom.”
2. The stages of Christ’s prophetic work
These are four, namely:
(a) The preparatory work of the Logos, in enlightening mankind before the time of Christ’s advent in the flesh.—All preliminary religious knowledge, whether within or without the bounds of the chosen people, is from Christ, the revealer of God.
Christ’s prophetic work began before he came in the flesh. John 1:9—“There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world”—all the natural light of conscience, science, philosophy, art, civilization, is the light of Christ. Tennyson: “Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.” Heb. 12:25, 26—“See that ye refuse not him that speaketh.... whose voice then [at Sinai] shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble not the earth only, but also the heaven”; Luke 11:49—“Therefore said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”; cf. Mat 23:34—“behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: some of them shall ye kill and crucify”—which shows that Jesus was referring to his own teachings, as well as to those of the earlier prophets.
(b) The earthly ministry of Christ incarnate.—In his earthly ministry, Christ showed himself the prophet par excellence. While he submitted, like the Old Testament prophets, to the direction of the Holy Spirit, unlike them, he found the sources of all knowledge and power within himself. The word of God did not come to him,—he was himself the Word.
Luke 6:19—“And all the multitude sought to touch him; for power came forth from him, and healed them all”; John 2:11—“This beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory”; 8:38, 58—“I speak the things which I have seen with my Father.... Before Abraham was born, I am”; cf. Jer. 2:1—“the word of Jehovah came to me”; John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word.” Mat. 26:53—“twelve legions of angels”; John 10:18—of his life: “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; 34—“Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came ... say ye of him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest, because I said, I am the Son of God?” Martensen, Dogmatics, 295-301, says of Jesus’ teaching that “its source was not inspiration, but incarnation.” Jesus was not inspired,—he was the Inspirer. Therefore he is the true “Master of those who know.” His disciples act in his name; he acts in his own name.
(c) The guidance and teaching of his church on earth, since his ascension.—Christ’s prophetic activity is continued through the preaching of his apostles and ministers, and by the enlightening influences of his Holy Spirit (John 16:12-14; Acts 1:1). The apostles unfolded the germs of doctrine put into their hands by Christ. The church is, in a derivative sense, a prophetic institution, established to teach the world by its preaching and its ordinances. But Christians are prophets, only as being proclaimers of Christ’s teaching (Num. 11:29; Joel 2:28).
John 16:12-14—“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth.... He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you”; Acts 1:1—“The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach”—Christ’s prophetic work was only begun, during his earthly ministry; it is continued since his ascension. The inspiration of the apostles, the illumination of all preachers and Christians to understand and to unfold the meaning of the word they wrote, the conviction of sinners, and the sanctification of believers,—all these are parts of Christ’s prophetic work, performed through the Holy Spirit.
By virtue of their union with Christ and participation in Christ’s Spirit, all Christians are made in a secondary sense prophets, as well as priests and kings. Num. 11:29—“Would that all Jehovah’s people were prophets, that Jehovah would put his Spirit upon them”; Joel 2:28—“I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” All modern prophecy that is true, however, is but the republication of Christ’s message—the proclamation and expounding of truth already revealed in Scripture. “All so-called new prophecy, from Montanus to Swedenborg, proves its own falsity by its lack of attesting miracles.”
A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 242—“Every human prophet presupposes an infinite eternal divine Prophet from whom his knowledge is received, just as every stream presupposes a fountain from which it flows.... As the telescope of highest power takes into its field the narrowest segment of the sky, so Christ the prophet sometimes gives the intensest insight into the glowing centre of the heavenly world to those whom this world regards as unlearned and foolish, and the church recognizes as only babes in Christ.”
(d) Christ’s final revelation of the Father to his saints in glory (John 16:25; 17:24, 26; cf. Is. 64:4; 1 Cor. 13:12).—Thus Christ’s prophetic work will be an endless one, as the Father whom he reveals is infinite.
John 16:25—“the hour cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in dark sayings, but shall tell you plainly of the Father”; 17:24—“I desire that where I am, they also may be with me; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me”; 26—“I made known unto them thy name, and will make it known.” The revelation of his own glory will be the revelation of the Father, in the Son. Is. 64:4—“For from of old men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”; 1 Cor. 13:12—“now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known.” Rev. 21:23—“And the city hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine upon it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the lamp thereof is the Lamb”—not light, but lamp. Light is something generally diffused; one sees by it, but one cannot see it. Lamp is the narrowing down, the concentrating, the focusing of light, so that the light becomes definite and visible. So in heaven Christ will be the visible God. We shall never see the Father separate from Christ. No man or angel has at any time seen God, “whom no man hath seen, nor can see.” “The only begotten Son ... he hath declared him,” and he will forever declare him (John 1:18; 1 Tim. 6:16).
The ministers of the gospel in modern times, so far as they are joined to Christ and possessed by his spirit, have a right to call themselves prophets. The prophet is one—1. sent by God and conscious of his mission; 2. with a message from God which he is under compulsion to deliver; 3. a message grounded in the truth of the past, setting it in new lights for the present, and making new applications of it for the future. The word of the Lord must come to him; it must be his gospel; there must be things new as well as old. All mathematics are in the simplest axiom; but it needs divine illumination to discover them. All truth was in Jesus’ words, nay, in the first prophecy uttered after the Fall, but only the apostles brought it out. The prophet’s message must be 4. a message for the place and time—primarily for contemporaries and present needs; 5. a message of eternal significance and worldwide influence. As the prophet’s word was for the whole world, so our word may be for other worlds, that _“__unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God__”__ (Eph. 3:10)_. It must be also 6. a message of the kingdom and triumph of Christ, which puts over against the distractions and calamities of the present time the glowing ideal and the perfect consummation to which God is leading his people: “Blessed be the glory of Jehovah from his place”; “Jehovah is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him” (Ez. 3:12; Hab. 2:20). On the whole subject of Christ’s prophetic office, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:24-27; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 320-330; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:366-370.
II. The Priestly Office of Christ
The priest was a person divinely appointed to transact with God on man’s behalf. He fulfilled his office, first by offering sacrifice, and secondly by making intercession. In both these respects Christ is priest.
Hebrews 7:24-28—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable. Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. For such a high priest became us, holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; who needeth not daily, like these high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people: for this he did once for all, when he offered up himself. For the law appointeth men high priests, having infirmity; but the word of the oath, which was after the law, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore.” The whole race was shut out from God by its sin. But God chose the Israelites as a priestly nation, Levi as a priestly tribe, Aaron as a priestly family, the high priest out of this family as type of the great high priest, Jesus Christ. J. S. Candlish, in Bib. World, Feb. 1897:87-97, cites the following facts with regard to our Lord’s sufferings as proofs of the doctrine of atonement: 1. Christ gave up his life by a perfectly free act; 2. out of regard to God his Father and obedience to his will; 3. the bitterest element of his suffering was that he endured it at the hand of God; 4. this divine appointment and infliction of suffering is inexplicable, except as Christ endured the divine judgment against the sin of the race.
1. Christ’s Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.
The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—
(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.
We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God’s love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man’s salvation.
(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.
We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God’s creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God’s ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God’s being.
(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God’s holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.
Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares in Rom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor’s Greek Testament, in loco: “When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son ‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul’s gospel; see Rom. 3:25 sq.” But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ; “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.
(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin’s penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.
My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God’s love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say: “Our loves in higher love endure.” No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed; “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work” (Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10; Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson: “There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.” This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.
(e) While Christ’s love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.
Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God “might himself be just” (Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God’s righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ’s suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn, “Love’s Redeeming Work is Done,” expressed the believer’s joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea of substitution the idea of sharing. Christ’s doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.
(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.
The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin; “in all our affliction he has been afflicted” (Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say: “Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation” (Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of the love that provided, man’s redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God’s suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.
(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings and Christ’s victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.
We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord “fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body’s sake, which is the church” (Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ’s sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner’s heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God’s righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God’s constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
A. Scripture Methods of Representing the Atonement
We may classify the Scripture representations according as they conform to moral, commercial, legal or sacrificial analogies.
(a) MORAL.—The atonement is described as
A provision originating in God’s love, and manifesting this love to the universe; but also as an example of disinterested love, to secure our deliverance from selfishness.—In these latter passages, Christ’s death is referred to as a source of moral stimulus to men.
A provision: John 3:16—“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”; Rom. 5:8—“God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”; 1 John 4:9—“Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him”; Heb. 2:9—“Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God he should taste of death for every man”—redemption originated in the love of the Father, as well as in that of the Son.—An example: Luke 9:22-24—“The Son of man must suffer ... and be killed.... If any man would come after me, let him ... take up his cross daily, and follow me ... whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it”; 2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves”; Gal. 1:4—“_gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us out of this present __ evil world_”; Eph. 5:25-27—“Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it; that he might sanctify it”; Col. 1:22—“reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy”; Titus 2:14—“gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify”; 1 Pet. 2:21-24—“Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did no sin ... who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 181—“A pious cottager, on hearing the text, ‘God so loved the world,’ exclaimed: ‘Ah, that was love! I could have given myself, but I could never have given my son.’ ” There was a wounding of the Father through the heart of the Son: “they shall look unto me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son” (Zech. 12:10).
(b) COMMERCIAL.—The atonement is described as
A ransom, paid to free us from the bondage of sin (note in these passages the use of ἀντί, the preposition of price, bargain, exchange).—In these passages, Christ’s death is represented as the price of our deliverance from sin and death.
Mat. 20:28, and Mark 10:45—“to give his life a ransom for many”—λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν. 1 Tim. 2:6—“who gave himself a ransom for all”—ἀντίλυτρον. Ἀντί (“for,” in the sense of “instead of”) is never confounded with ὑπέρ (“for,” in the sense of “in behalf of,” “for the benefit of”). Ἀντί is the preposition of price, bargain, exchange; and this signification is traceable in every passage where it occurs in the N. T. See Mat. 2:22—“Archelaus was reigning over Judea in the room of [ἀντί] his father Herod”; Luke 11:11—“shall his son ask ... a fish, and he for [ἀντί] a fish give him a serpent?” Heb. 12:2—“Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith, who for [ἀντί = as the price of] the joy that was set before him endured the cross”; 16—“Esau, who for [ἀντί = in exchange for] one mess of meat sold his own birthright.” See also Mat. 16:26—“what shall a man give in exchange for (ἀντάλλαγμα) his life” = how shall he buy it back, when once he has lost it? Ἀντίλυτρον = substitutionary ransom. The connection in 1 Tim. 2:6 requires that ὑπέρ should mean “instead of.” We should interpret this ὑπέρ by the ἀντί in Mat. 20:28. “Something befell Christ, and by reason of that, the same thing need not befall sinners” (E. Y. Mullins).
Meyer, on Mat. 20:28—“to give his life a ransom for many”—“The ψυχή is conceived of as λύτρον, a ransom, for, through the shedding of the blood, it becomes the τιμή (price) of redemption.” See also 1 Cor. 6:20; 7:23—“ye were bought with a price”; and 2 Pet. 2:1—“denying even the Master that bought them.” The word “redemption,” indeed, means simply “repurchase,” or “the state of being repurchased”—i. e., delivered by the payment of a price. Rev. 5:9—“thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto God with thy blood men of every tribe.” Winer, N. T. Grammar, 258—“In Greek, ἀντί is the preposition of price.” Buttmann, N. T. Grammar, 321—“In the signification of the preposition ἀντί (instead of, for), no deviation occurs from ordinary usage.” See Grimm’s Wilke, Lexicon Græco-Lat.: “ἀντί, in vicem, anstatt”; Thayer, Lexicon N. T.—“ἀντί, of that for which anything is given, received, endured; ... of the price of sale (or purchase) Mat. 20:28”; also Cremer, N. T. Lex., on ἀντάλλαγμα.
Pfleiderer, in New World, Sept. 1899, doubts whether Jesus ever really uttered the words “give his life a ransom for many” (Mat. 20:28). He regards them as essentially Pauline, and the result of later dogmatic reflection on the death of Jesus as a means of redemption. So Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 377-381. But these words occur not in Luke, the Pauline gospel, but in Matthew, which is much earlier. They represent at any rate the apostolic conception of Jesus’ teaching, a conception which Jesus himself promised should be formed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who should bring all things to the remembrance of his apostles and should guide them into all the truth (John 14:26; 16:13). As will be seen below, Pfleiderer declares the Pauline doctrine to be that of substitutionary suffering.
(c) LEGAL.—The atonement is described as
An act of obedience to the law which sinners had violated; a penalty, borne in order to rescue the guilty; and an exhibition of God’s righteousness, necessary to the vindication of his procedure in the pardon and restoration of sinners.—In these passages the death of Christ is represented as demanded by God’s law and government.
Obedience: Gal. 4:4, 5—“born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law”; Mat. 3:15—“thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness”—Christ’s baptism prefigured his death, and was a consecration to death; cf. Mark 10:38—“Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” Luke 12:50—“I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” Mat. 26:39—“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt”; 5:17—“Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil”; Phil. 2:8—“becoming obedient even unto death”; Rom. 5:19—“through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous”; 10:4—“Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to every one that believeth.”—Penalty: Rom. 4:25—“who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”; 8:3—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh”; 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”—here “sin”—a sinner, an accursed one (Meyer); Gal. 1:4—“gave himself for our sins”; 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree”; cf. Deut 21:23—“he that is hanged is accursed of God.” Heb. 9:28—“Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many”; cf. Lev. 5:17—“if any one sin ... yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”; Num. 14:34—“for every day a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years”; Lam. 5:7—“Our fathers sinned and are not; And we have borne their iniquities.”—Exhibition: Rom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”; cf. Heb. 9:15—“a death having taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant.”
On these passages, see an excellent section in Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, 38-53. Pfleiderer severely criticizes Ritschl’s evasion of their natural force and declares Paul’s teaching to be that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law by suffering as a substitute the death threatened by the law against sinners. So Orelli Cone, Paul, 261. On the other hand, L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 288-307, chapter on the New Christian Atonement, holds that Christ taught only reconciliation on condition of repentance. Paul added the idea of mediation drawn from the Platonic dualism of Philo. The Epistle to the Hebrews made Christ a sacrificial victim to propitiate God, so that the reconciliation became Godward instead of manward. But Professor Paine’s view that Paul taught an Arian Mediatorship is incorrect. “God was in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19) and God “manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16) are the keynote of Paul’s teaching, and this is identical with John’s doctrine of the Logos: “the Word was God,” and “the Word became flesh” (John 1:1, 14)
The Outlook, December 15, 1900, in criticizing Prof. Paine, states three postulates of the New Trinitarianism as: 1. The essential kinship of God and man,—in man there is an essential divineness, in God there is an essential humanness. 2. The divine immanence,—this universal presence gives nature its physical unity, and humanity its moral unity. This is not pantheism, any more than the presence of man’s spirit in all he thinks and does proves that man’s spirit is only the sum of his experiences. 3. God transcends all phenomena,—though in all, he is greater than all. He entered perfectly into one man, and through this indwelling in one man he is gradually entering into all men and filling all men with his fulness, so that Christ will be the first-born among many brethren. The defects of this view, which contains many elements of truth, are: 1. That it regards Christ as the product instead of the Producer, the divinely formed man instead of the humanly acting God, the head man among men instead of the Creator and Life of humanity; 2. That it therefore renders impossible any divine bearing of the sins of all men by Jesus Christ, and substitutes for it such a histrionic exhibition of God’s feeling and such a beauty of example as are possible within the limits of human nature,—in other words, there is no real Deity of Christ and no objective atonement.
(d) SACRIFICIAL.—The atonement is described as
A work of priestly mediation, which reconciles God to men,—notice here that the term “reconciliation” has its usual sense of removing enmity, not from the offending, but from the offended party;—a sin-offering, presented on behalf of transgressors;—a propitiation, which satisfies the demands of violated holiness;—and a substitution, of Christ’s obedience and sufferings for ours.—These passages, taken together, show that Christ’s death is demanded by God’s attribute of justice, or holiness, if sinners are to be saved.
Priestly mediation: Heb. 9:11, 12—“Christ having come a high priest, ... nor yet through the blood of goats and calves, but through his own blood, entered in once for all into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption”; Rom. 5:10—“while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son”; 2 Cor. 5:18, 19—“all things are of God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.... God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses”; Eph. 2:16—“might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby”; cf. 12, 13, 19—“strangers from the covenants of the promise.... far off.... no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God”; Col. 1:20—“through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross.”
On all these passages, see Meyer, who shows the meaning of the apostle to be, that “we were ‘enemies,’ not actively, as hostile to God, but passively, as those with whom God was angry.” The epistle to the Romans begins with the revelation of wrath against Gentile and Jew alike (Rom. 1:18). “While we were enemies” (Rom. 5:10)—“when God was hostile to us.” “Reconciliation” is therefore the removal of God’s wrath toward man. Meyer, on this last passage, says that Christ’s death does not remove man’s wrath toward God [this is not the work of Christ, but of the Holy Spirit]. The offender reconciles the person offended, not himself. See Denney, Com. on Rom. 5:9-11, in Expositor’s Gk. Test.
Cf. Num. 25:13, where Phinehas, by slaying Zimri, is said to have “made atonement for the children of Israel.” Surely, the “atonement” here cannot be a reconciliation of Israel. The action terminates, not on the subject, but on the object—God. So, 1 Sam. 29:4—“wherewith should this fellow reconcile himself unto his lord? should it not be with the heads of these men?” Mat. 5:23, 24—“If therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother [i. e., remove his enmity, not thine own], and then come and offer thy gift.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:387-398.
Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, 42—“Ἐχθροὶ ὄντες (Rom. 5:10) = not the active disposition of enmity to God on our part, but our passive condition under the enmity or wrath of God.” Paul was not the author of this doctrine,—he claims that he received it from Christ himself (Gal. 1:12). Simon, Reconciliation, 167—“The idea that only man needs to be reconciled arises from a false conception of the unchangeableness of God. But God would be unjust, if his relation to man were the same after his sin as it was before.” The old hymn expressed the truth: “My God is reconciled; His pardoning voice I hear; He owns me for his child; I can no longer fear; With filial trust I now draw nigh, And ‘Father, Abba, Father’ cry.”
A sin-offering: John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world”—here αἴρων means to take away by taking or bearing; to take, and so take away. It is an allusion to the sin-offering of Isaiah 53:6-12—“when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin ... as a lamb that is led to the slaughter ... Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Mat. 26:28—“this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many unto remission of sins”; cf. Ps. 50:5—“made a covenant with me by sacrifice.” 1 John 1:7—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin”—not sanctification, but justification; 1 Cor. 5:7—“our passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ”; cf. Deut. 16:2-6—“thou shalt sacrifice the passover unto Jehovah thy God.” Eph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor of a sweet smell” (see Com. of Salmond, in Expositor’s Greek Testament); Heb. 9:14—“the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; 22, 26—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission.... now once in the end of the ages hath he been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself”; 1 Pet. 1:18, 19—“redeemed ... with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ.” See Expos. Gk. Test., on Eph. 1:7.
Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 35, points out that John 6:52-59—“eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood”—is Christ’s reference to his death in terms of sacrifice. So, as we shall see below, it is a propitiation (1 John 2:2). We therefore strongly object to the statement of Wilson, Gospel of Atonement, 64—“Christ’s death is a sacrifice, if sacrifice means the crowning instance of that suffering of the innocent for the guilty which springs from the solidarity of mankind; but there is no thought of substitution or expiation.” Wilson forgets that this necessity of suffering arises from God’s righteousness; that without this suffering man cannot be saved; that Christ endures what we, on account of the insensibility of sin, cannot feel or endure; that this suffering takes the place of ours, so that we are saved thereby. Wilson holds that the Incarnation constituted the Atonement, and that all thought of expiation may be eliminated. Henry B. Smith far better summed up the gospel in the words: “Incarnation in order to Atonement.” We regard as still better the words: “Incarnation in order to reveal the Atonement.”
A propitiation: Rom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, ... in his blood ... that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.” A full and critical exposition of this passage will be found under the Ethical Theory of the Atonement, pages 750-760. Here it is sufficient to say that it shows: (1) that Christ’s death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement is his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God’s justifying the believer.
Compare Luke 18:13, marg.—“God, be thou merciful unto me the sinner”; lit.: “God be propitiated toward me the sinner”—by the sacrifice, whose smoke was ascending before the publican, even while he prayed. Heb. 2:17—“a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people”; 1 John 2:2—“and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world”; 4:10—“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins”; cf. Gen. 32:20, LXX.—“I will appease [ἐξιλάσομαι, “propitiate”] him with the present that goeth before me”; Prov. 16:14, LXX.—“The wrath of a king is as messengers of death; but a wise man will pacify it” [ἐξιλάσεται, “propitiate it”].
On propitiation, see Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 216—“Something was thereby done which rendered God inclined to pardon the sinner. God is made inclined to forgive sinners by the sacrifice, because his righteousness was exhibited by the infliction of the penalty of sin; but not because he needed to be inclined in heart to love the sinner or to exercise his mercy. In fact, it was he himself who ‘set forth’ Jesus as ‘a propitiation’ (Rom. 3:25, 26).” Paul never merges the objective atonement in its subjective effects, although no writer of the New Testament has more fully recognized these subjective effects. With him Christ for us upon the Cross is the necessary preparation for Christ in us by his Spirit. Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 74, 75, 89, 172, unwarrantably contrasts Paul’s representation of Christ as priest with what he calls the representation of Christ as prophet in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “The priest says: Man’s return to God is not enough,—there must be an expiation of man’s sin. This is Paul’s doctrine. The prophet says: There never was a divine provision for sacrifice. Man’s return to God is the thing wanted. But this return must be completed. Jesus is the perfect prophet who gives us an example of restored obedience, and who comes in to perfect man’s imperfect work. This is the doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews.” This recognition of expiation in Paul’s teaching, together with denial of its validity and interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews as prophetic rather than priestly, is a curiosity of modern exegesis.
Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 107-127, goes still further and affirms: “In the N. T. God is never said to be propitiated, nor is it ever said that Jesus Christ propitiates God or satisfies God’s wrath.” Yet Dr. Abbott adds that in the N. T. God is represented as self-propitiated: “Christianity is distinguished from paganism by representing God as appeasing his own wrath and satisfying his own justice by the forth-putting of his own love.” This self-propitiation however must not be thought of as a bearing of penalty: “Nowhere in the O. T. is the idea of a sacrifice coupled with the idea of penalty,—it is always coupled with purification—‘with his stripes we are healed’ (Is. 53:5). And in the N. T., ‘the Lamb of God ... taketh away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29); ‘the blood of Jesus ... cleanseth’ (1 John 1:7).... What humanity needs is not the removal of the penalty, but removal of the sin.” This seems to us a distinct contradiction of both Paul and John, with whom propitiation is an essential of Christian doctrine (see Rom. 3:25; 1 John 2:2), while we grant that the propitiation is made, not by sinful man, but by God himself in the person of his Son. See George B. Gow, on The Place of Expiation in Human Redemption, Am. Jour. Theol., 1900:734-756.
A substitution: Luke 22:37—“he was reckoned with transgressors”; cf. Lev. 16:21, 22—“and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel ... he shall put them upon the head of the goat ... and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a solitary land”; Is. 53:5, 6—“he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” John 10:11—“the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep”; Rom. 5:6-8—“while we were yet weak, in due season Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: for peradventure for the good man some one would even dare to die. But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”; 1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.”
To these texts we must add all those mentioned under (b) above, in which Christ’s death is described as a ransom. Besides Meyer’s comment, there quoted, on Mat. 20:28—“to give his life a ransom for many,” λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν—Meyer also says: “ἀντί denotes substitution. That which is given as a ransom takes the place of, is given instead of, those who are to be set free in consideration thereof. Ἀντί can only be understood in the sense of substitution in the act of which the ransom is presented as an equivalent, to secure the deliverance of those on whose behalf the ransom is paid,—a view which is only confirmed by the fact that, in other parts of the N. T., this ransom is usually spoken of as an expiatory sacrifice. That which they [those for whom the ransom is paid] are redeemed from, is the eternal ἀπώλεια in which, as having the wrath of God abiding upon them, they would remain imprisoned, as in a state of hopeless bondage, unless the guilt of their sins were expiated.”
Cremer, N. T. Lex., says that “in both the N. T. texts, Mat. 16:26 and Mark 8:37, the word ἀντάλλαγμα, like λύτρον, is akin to the conception of atonement: cf. Is. 43:3, 4; 51:11; Amos 5:12. This is a confirmation of the fact that satisfaction and substitution essentially belong to the idea of atonement.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:515 (Syst. Doct., 3:414)—“Mat. 20:28 contains the thought of a substitution. While the whole world is not of equal worth with the soul, and could not purchase it, Christ’s death and work are so valuable, that they can serve as a ransom.”
The sufferings of the righteous were recognized in Rabbinical Judaism as having a substitutionary significance for the sins of others; see Weber, Altsynagog. Palestin. Theologie, 314; Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, 2:466 (translation, div. II, vol. 2:186). But Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:225-262, says this idea of vicarious satisfaction was an addition of Paul to the teaching of Jesus. Wendt grants that both Paul and John taught substitution, but he denies that Jesus did. He claims that ἀντί in Mat. 20:28 means simply that Jesus gave his life as a means whereby he obtains the deliverance of many. But this interpretation is a non-natural one, and violates linguistic usage. It holds that Paul and John misunderstood or misrepresented the words of our Lord. We prefer the frank acknowledgment by Pfleiderer that Jesus, as well as Paul and John, taught substitution, but that neither one of them was correct. Colestock, on Substitution as a Stage in Theological Thought, similarly holds that the idea of substitution must be abandoned. We grant that the idea of substitution needs to be supplemented by the idea of sharing, and so relieved of its external and mechanical implications, but that to abandon the conception itself is to abandon faith in the evangelists and in Jesus himself.
Dr. W. N. Clarke, in his Christian Theology, rejects the doctrine of retribution for sin, and denies the possibility of penal suffering for another. A proper view of penalty, and of Christ’s vital connection with humanity, would make these rejected ideas not only credible but inevitable. Dr. Alvah Hovey reviews Dr. Clarke’s Theology, Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:205—“If we do not import into the endurance of penalty some degree of sinful feeling or volition, there is no ground for denying that a holy being may bear it in place of a sinner. For nothing but wrong-doing, or approval of wrong-doing, is impossible to a holy being. Indeed, for one to bear for another the just penalty of his sin, provided that other may thereby be saved from it and made a friend of God, is perhaps the highest conceivable function of love or good-will.” Denney, Studies, 126, 127, shows that “substitution means simply that man is dependent for his acceptance with God upon something which Christ has done for him, and which he could never have done and never needs to do for himself.... The forfeiting of his free life has freed our forfeited lives. This substitution can be preached, and it binds men to Christ by making them forever dependent on him. The condemnation of our sins in Christ upon his cross is the barb on the hook,—without it your bait will be taken, but you will not catch men; you will not annihilate pride, and make Christ the Alpha and Omega in man’s redemption.” On the Scripture proofs, see Crawford, Atonement, 1:1-193; Dale, Atonement, 65-256; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, iv. 2:243-342; Smeaton, Our Lord’s and the Apostles’ Doctrine of Atonement.
An examination of the passages referred to shows that, while the forms in which the atoning work of Christ is described are in part derived from moral, commercial, and legal relations, the prevailing language is that of sacrifice. A correct view of the atonement must therefore be grounded upon a proper interpretation of the institution of sacrifice, especially as found in the Mosaic system.
The question is sometimes asked: Why is there so little in Jesus’ own words about atonement? Dr. R. W. Dale replies: Because Christ did not come to preach the gospel,—he came that there might be a gospel to preach. The Cross had to be endured, before it could be explained. Jesus came to be the sacrifice, not to speak about it. But his reticence is just what he told us we should find in his words. He proclaimed their incompleteness, and referred us to a subsequent Teacher—the Holy Spirit. The testimony of the Holy Spirit we have in the words of the apostles. We must remember that the gospels were supplementary to the epistles, not the epistles to the gospels. The gospels merely fill out our knowledge of Christ. It is not for the Redeemer to magnify the cost of salvation, but for the redeemed. “None of the ransomed ever knew.” The doer of a great deed has the least to say about it.
Harnack: “There is an inner law which compels the sinner to look upon God as a wrathful Judge.... Yet no other feeling is possible.” We regard this confession as a demonstration of the psychological correctness of Paul’s doctrine of a vicarious atonement. Human nature has been so constituted by God that it reflects the demand of his holiness. That conscience needs to be appeased is proof that God needs to be appeased. When Whiton declares that propitiation is offered only to our conscience, which is the wrath of that which is of God within us, and that Christ bore our sins, not in substitution for us, but in fellowship with us, to rouse our consciences to hatred of them, he forgets that God is not only immanent in the conscience but also transcendent, and that the verdicts of conscience are only indications of the higher verdicts of God: 1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 57—“A people half emancipated from the paganism that imagines that God must be placated by sacrifice before he can forgive sins gave to the sacrificial system that Israel had borrowed from paganism the same divine authority which they gave to those revolutionary elements in the system which were destined eventually to sweep it entirely out of existence.” So Bowne, Atonement, 74—“The essential moral fact is that, if God is to forgive unrighteous men, some way must be found of making them righteous. The difficulty is not forensic, but moral.” Both Abbott and Bowne regard righteousness as a mere form of benevolence, and the atonement as only a means to a utilitarian end, namely, the restoration and happiness of the creature. A more correct view of God’s righteousness as the fundamental attribute of his being, as inwrought into the constitution of the universe, and as infallibly connecting suffering with sin, would have led these writers to see a divine wisdom and inspiration in the institution of sacrifice, and a divine necessity that God should suffer if man is to go free.
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.
(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.
For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr’s view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171. Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God’s symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God’s sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).” Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo: “God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.” Compare with this the ghosts in Homer’s Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr’s view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.” Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.” Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon: “Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.” “The old dispensation was God’s great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics? The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.” On Eph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,” as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor’s Greek Testament.
(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.
Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338 sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”
Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.” In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus: “Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.” And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.
Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer’s Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is “no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.” But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.” We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.
Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith’s explanation that sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The “bursting forth of the blood” satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith on Isaiah 53 (2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God’s intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”
Satisfaction means simply that there is a principle in God’s being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.” But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God’s satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted: “For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me” (Rom. 15:3; cf. Ps. 69:9).
(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God’s method of salvation.
Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” 10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.” Christ’s death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.
Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command: “An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings” (Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says: “new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you” (Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simply heartless sacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple. Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?” This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when “the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah” (Micah 4:1, 2). Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,” is interpreted by what follows, “and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.” Compare Prov. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel’s words: “to obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God’s theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.” Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.
(d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim’s head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.
Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”; 4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so 31 and 35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so 5:10, 16; 6:7. Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”
The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses: Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee [Eliphaz] ... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”; cf. 33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”; 1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said, “It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”; Gen. 8:20—Noah “offered burnt-offerings on the altar”; 21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake.”
That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain from Lev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also from Gen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”; Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says: “Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” See also Deut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says: “Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.” In Is. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.
Wallace, Representative Responsibility: “The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice were one symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground. ‘In the blood is the life.’ The life is reserved by God. It is given for man, but not to him. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, for our life.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ’s death.”
This following is a tentative scheme of the JEWISH SACRIFICES. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed in Lev. 17:11 (quoted above). I. For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation): Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission: Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness: Lev. 1:3 (the offering of Mary, Luke 2:24). II. For the family: The Passover: Ex. 12:27. III. For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice: Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement: Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.
Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby: ‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’ (John 6:51, 57).”
Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement “the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,” i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”
On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle’s Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.
(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man’s expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man’s own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.
Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history. Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel’s faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon. Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”
It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated in Gen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.” Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God’s favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God’s will, Abel’s faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.” We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.
On Gen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God’s holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God’s appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God ‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’ (Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said, ‘if thou doest well (LXX.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly) shalt thou not be accepted?’ But Cain desired to get away from God and from God’s way, and to lose himself in the world. This is ‘the way of Cain’ (Jude 11).” Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel’s faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God’s acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve, ‘This is now bone of my bones....’ (Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.” Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of the original man was probably a prayer, the first action of fallen man a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler: “By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”
(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ’s work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God’s love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.
“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29).”
A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it became functum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”
For denial that Christ’s death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.” Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ’s sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual, e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith’s Bible Dictionary.
With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?
“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, death with Jesus, regeneration.
“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
C. Theories of the Atonement
1st. The Socinian, or Example Theory of the Atonement.
This theory holds that subjective sinfulness is the sole barrier between man and God. Not God, but only man, needs to be reconciled. The only method of reconciliation is to better man’s moral condition. This can be effected by man’s own will, through repentance and reformation. The death of Christ is but the death of a noble martyr. He redeems us, only as his human example of faithfulness to truth and duty has a powerful influence upon our moral improvement. This fact the apostles, either consciously or unconsciously, clothed in the language of the Greek and Jewish sacrifices. This theory was fully elaborated by Lælius Socinus and Faustus Socinus of Poland, in the 16th century. Its modern advocates are found in the Unitarian body.
The Socinian theory may be found stated, and advocated, in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 1:566-600; Martineau, Studies of Christianity, 83-176; J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, Its Truths and Errors, 235-265; Ellis, Unitarianism and Orthodoxy; Sheldon, Sin and Redemption, 146-210. The text which at first sight most seems to favor this view is 1 Pet 2:21—“Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps.” But see under (e) below. When Correggio saw Raphael’s picture of St. Cecilia, he exclaimed: “I too am a painter.” So Socinus held that Christ’s example roused our humanity to imitation. He regarded expiation as heathenish and impossible; every one must receive according to his deeds; God is ready to grant forgiveness on simple repentance.
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 277—“The theory first insists on the inviolability of moral sequences in the conduct of every moral agent; and then insists that, on a given condition, the consequences of transgression may be arrested by almighty fiat.... Unitarianism errs in giving a transforming power to that which works beneficently only after the transformation has been wrought.” In ascribing to human nature a power of self-reformation, it ignores man’s need of regeneration by the Holy Spirit. But even this renewing work of the Holy Spirit presupposes the atoning work of Christ. “Ye must be born anew” (John 3:7) necessitates “Even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14). It is only the Cross that satisfies man’s instinct of reparation. Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums, 99—“Those who regarded Christ’s death soon ceased to bring any other bloody offering to God. This is true both in Judaism and in heathenism. Christ’s death put an end to all bloody offerings in religious history. The impulse to sacrifice found its satisfaction in the Cross of Christ.” We regard this as proof that the Cross is essentially a satisfaction to the divine justice, and not a mere example of faithfulness to duty. The Socinian theory is the first of six theories of the Atonement, which roughly correspond with our six previously treated theories of sin, and this first theory includes most of the false doctrine which appears in mitigated forms in several of the theories following.
To this theory we make the following objections:
(a) It is based upon false philosophical principles,—as, for example, that will is merely the faculty of volitions; that the foundation of virtue is in utility; that law is an expression of arbitrary will; that penalty is a means of reforming the offender; that righteousness, in either God or man, is only a manifestation of benevolence.
If the will is simply the faculty of volitions, and not also the fundamental determination of the being to an ultimate end, then man can, by a single volition, effect his own reformation and reconciliation to God. If the foundation of virtue is in utility, then there is nothing in the divine being that prevents pardon, the good of the creature, and not the demands of God’s holiness, being the reason for Christ’s suffering. If law is an expression of arbitrary will, instead of being a transcript of the divine nature, it may at any time be dispensed with, and the sinner may be pardoned on mere repentance. If penalty is merely a means of reforming the offender, then sin does not involve objective guilt, or obligation to suffer, and sin may be forgiven, at any moment, to all who forsake it,—indeed, must be forgiven, since punishment is out of place when the sinner is reformed. If righteousness is only a form or manifestation of benevolence, then God can show his benevolence as easily through pardon as through penalty, and Christ’s death is only intended to attract us toward the good by the force of a noble example.
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:218-264, is essentially Socinian in his view of Jesus’ death. Yet he ascribes to Jesus the idea that suffering is necessary, even for one who stands in perfect love and blessed fellowship with God, since earthly blessedness is not the true blessedness, and since a true piety is impossible without renunciation and stooping to minister to others. The earthly life-sacrifice of the Messiah was his necessary and greatest act, and was the culminating point of his teaching. Suffering made him a perfect example, and so ensured the success of his work. But why God should have made it necessary that the holiest must suffer, Wendt does not explain. This constitution of things we can understand only as a revelation of the holiness of God, and of his punitive relation to human sin. Simon, Reconciliation, 357, shows well that example might have sufficed for a race that merely needed leadership. But what the race needed most was energizing, the fulfilment of the conditions of restoration to God on their behalf by one of themselves, by one whose very essence they shared, who created them, in whom they consisted, and whose work was therefore their work. Christ condemned with the divine condemnation the thoughts and impulses arising from his subconscious life. Before the sin, which for the moment seemed to be his, could become his, he condemned it. He sympathized with, nay, he revealed, the very justice and sorrow of God. Hebrews 2:16-18—“For verily not to angels doth he give help, but he giveth help to the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.”
(b) It is a natural outgrowth from the Pelagian view of sin, and logically necessitates a curtailment or surrender of every other characteristic doctrine of Christianity—inspiration, sin, the deity of Christ, justification, regeneration, and eternal retribution.
The Socinian theory requires a surrender of the doctrine of inspiration; for the idea of vicarious and expiatory sacrifice is woven into the very warp and woof of the Old and New Testaments. It requires an abandonment of the Scripture doctrine of sin; for in it all idea of sin as perversion of nature rendering the sinner unable to save himself, and as objective guilt demanding satisfaction to the divine holiness, is denied. It requires us to give up the deity of Christ; for if sin is a slight evil, and man can save himself from its penalty and power, then there is no longer need of either an infinite suffering or an infinite Savior, and a human Christ is as good as a divine. It requires us to give up the Scripture doctrine of justification, as God’s act of declaring the sinner just in the eye of the law, solely on account of the righteousness and death of Christ to whom he is united by faith; for the Socinian theory cannot permit the counting to a man of any other righteousness than his own. It requires a denial of the doctrine of regeneration; for this is no longer the work of God, but the work of the sinner; it is no longer a change of the affections below consciousness, but a self-reforming volition of the sinner himself. It requires a denial of eternal retribution; for this is no longer appropriate to finite transgression of arbitrary law, and to superficial sinning that does not involve nature.
(c) It contradicts the Scripture teachings, that sin involves objective guilt as well as subjective defilement; that the holiness of God must punish sin; that the atonement was a bearing of the punishment of sin for men; and that this vicarious bearing of punishment was necessary, on the part of God, to make possible the showing of favor to the guilty.
The Scriptures do not make the main object of the atonement to be man’s subjective moral improvement. It is to God that the sacrifice is offered, and the object of it is to satisfy the divine holiness, and to remove from the divine mind an obstacle to the showing of favor to the guilty. It was something external to man and his happiness or virtue, that required that Christ should suffer. What Emerson has said of the martyr is yet more true of Christ: “Though love repine, and reason chafe, There comes a voice without reply, ’Tis man’s perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.” The truth for which Christ died was truth internal to the nature of God; not simply truth externalized and published among men. What the truth of God required, that Christ rendered—full satisfaction to violated justice. “Jesus paid it all”; and no obedience or righteousness of ours can be added to his work, as a ground of our salvation.
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 276—“This theory fails of a due recognition of that deep-seated, universal and innate sense of ill-desert, which in all times and everywhere has prompted men to aim at some expiation of their guilt. For this sense of guilt and its requirements the moral influence theory makes no adequate provision, either in Christ or in those whom Christ saves. Supposing Christ’s redemptive work to consist merely in winning men to the practice of righteousness, it takes no account of penalty, either as the sanction of the law, as the reaction of the divine holiness against sin, or as the upbraiding of the individual conscience.... The Socinian theory overlooks the fact that there must be some objective manifestation of God’s wrath and displeasure against sin.”
(d) It furnishes no proper explanation of the sufferings and death of Christ. The unmartyrlike anguish cannot be accounted for, and the forsaking by the Father cannot be justified, upon the hypothesis that Christ died as a mere witness to truth. If Christ’s sufferings were not propitiatory, they neither furnish us with a perfect example, nor constitute a manifestation of the love of God.
Compare Jesus’ feeling, in view of death, with that of Paul: “having the desire to depart” (Phil 1:23). Jesus was filled with anguish: “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour” (John 12:27). If Christ was simply a martyr, then he is not a perfect example; for many a martyr has shown greater courage in prospect of death, and in the final agony has been able to say that the fire that consumed him was “a bed of roses.” Gethsemane, with its mental anguish, is apparently recorded in order to indicate that Christ’s sufferings even on the cross were not mainly physical sufferings. The Roman Catholic Church unduly emphasizes the physical side of our Lord’s passion, but loses sight of its spiritual element. The Christ of Rome indeed is either a babe or dead, and the crucifix presents to us not a risen and living Redeemer, but a mangled and lifeless body.
Stroud, in his Physical Cause of our Lord’s Death, has made it probable that Jesus died of a broken heart, and that this alone explains John 19:34—“one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and straightway there came out blood and water”—i. e., the heart had already been ruptured by grief. That grief was grief at the forsaking of the Father (Mat. 27:46—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), and the resulting death shows that that forsaking was no imaginary one. Did God make the holiest man of all to be the greatest sufferer of all the ages? This heart broken by the forsaking of the Father means more than martyrdom. If Christ’s death is not propitiatory, it fills me with terror and despair; for it presents me not only with a very imperfect example in Christ, but with a proof of measureless injustice on the part of God. Luke 23:28—“weep not for me, but weep for yourselves”—Jesus rejects all pity that forgets his suffering for others.
To the above view of Stroud, Westcott objects that blood does not readily flow from an ordinary corpse. The separation of the red corpuscles of the blood from the serum, or water, would be the beginning of decomposition, and would be inconsistent with the statement in Acts 2:31—“neither did his flesh see corruption.” But Dr. W. W. Keen of Philadelphia, in his article on The Bloody Sweat of our Lord (Bib. Sac., July, 1897:469-484) endorses Stroud’s view as to the physical cause of our Lord’s death. Christ’s being forsaken by the Father was only the culmination of that relative withdrawal which constituted the source of Christ’s loneliness through life. Through life he was a servant of the Spirit. On the cross the Spirit left him to the weakness of unassisted humanity, destitute of conscious divine resources. Compare the curious reading of Heb. 2:9—“that he apart from God (χωρὶς Θεοῦ) should taste death for every man.”
If Christ merely supposed himself to be deserted by God, “not only does Christ become an erring man, and, so far as the predicate deity is applicable to him, an erring God; but, if he cherished unfounded distrust of God, how can it be possible still to maintain that his will was in abiding, perfect agreement and identity with the will of God?” See Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl, by Stählin, 219. Charles C. Everett, Gospel of Paul, says Jesus was not crucified because he was accursed, but he was accursed because he was crucified, so that, in wreaking vengeance upon him, Jewish law abrogated itself. This interpretation however contradicts 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”—where the divine identification of Christ with the race of sinners antedates and explains his sufferings. John 1:29—“the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world”—does not refer to Jesus as a lamb for gentleness, but as a lamb for sacrifice. Maclaren: “How does Christ’s death prove God’s love? Only on one supposition, namely, that Christ is the incarnate Son of God, sent by the Father’s love and being his express image”; and, we may add, suffering vicariously for us and removing the obstacle in God’s mind to our pardon.
(e) The influence of Christ’s example is neither declared in Scripture, nor found in Christian experience, to be the chief result secured by his death. Mere example is but a new preaching of the law, which repels and condemns. The cross has power to lead men to holiness, only as it first shows a satisfaction made for their sins. Accordingly, most of the passages which represent Christ as an example also contain references to his propitiatory work.
There is no virtue in simply setting an example. Christ did nothing, simply for the sake of example. Even his baptism was the symbol of his propitiatory death; see pages 761, 762. The apostle’s exhortation is not “abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22, A. Vers.), but “abstain from every form of evil” (Rev. Vers.). Christ’s death is the payment of a real debt due to God; and the convicted sinner needs first to see the debt which he owes to the divine justice paid by Christ, before he can think hopefully of reforming his life. The hymns of the church: “I lay my sins on Jesus,” and “Not all the blood of beasts,” represent the view of Christ’s sufferings which Christians have derived from the Scriptures. When the sinner sees that the mortgage is cancelled, that the penalty has been borne, he can devote himself freely to the service of his Redeemer. Rev. 12:11—“they overcame him [Satan] because of the blood of the Lamb”—as Christ overcame Satan by his propitiatory sacrifice, so we overcome by appropriating to ourselves Christ’s atonement and his Spirit; cf. 1 John 5:4—“this is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith.” The very text upon which Socinians most rely, when it is taken in connection with the context, proves their theory to be a misrepresentation of Scripture, 1 Pet. 2:21—“Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”—is succeeded by verse 24—“who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed”—the latter words being a direct quotation from Isaiah’s description of the substitutionary sufferings of the Messiah (Is. 53:5).
When a deeply convicted sinner was told that God could cleanse his heart and make him over anew, he replied with righteous impatience: “That is not what I want,—I have a debt to pay first!” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 28, 89—“Nowhere in tabernacle or temple shall we ever find the laver placed before the altar. The altar is Calvary, and the laver is Pentecost,—one stands for the sacrificial blood, the other for the sanctifying Spirit.... So the oil which symbolised the sanctifying Spirit was always put ‘upon the blood of the trespass-offering’ (Lev. 14:17).” The extremity of Christ’s suffering on the Cross was coincident with the extremest manifestation of the guilt of the race. The greatness of this he theoretically knew from the beginning of his ministry. His baptism was not intended merely to set an example. It was a recognition that sin deserved death; that he was numbered with the transgressors; that he was sent to die for the sin of the world. He was not so much a teacher, as he was the subject of all teaching. In him the great suffering of the holy God on account of sin is exhibited to the universe. The pain of a few brief hours saves a world, only because it sets forth an eternal fact in God’s being and opens to us God’s very heart.
Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:1—“There is some soul of goodness in things evil. Would men observingly distil it out.” It is well to preach on Christ as an example. Lyman Abbott says that Jesus’ blood purchases our pardon and redeems us to God, just as a patriot’s blood redeems his country from servitude and purchases its liberty. But even Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 2, goes beyond this, when he says: “Those who advocate the example theory should remember that Jesus withdraws himself from imitation when he sets himself over against his disciples as the Author of forgiveness. And they perceive that pardon must first be appropriated, before it is possible for them to imitate his piety and moral achievement.” This is a partial recognition of the truth that the removal of objective guilt by Christ’s atonement must precede the removal of subjective defilement by Christ’s regenerating and sanctifying Spirit. Lidgett, Spir. Princ. of Atonement, 265-280, shows that there is a fatherly demand for satisfaction, which must be met by the filial response of the child. Thomas Chalmers at the beginning of his ministry urged on his people the reformation of their lives. But he confesses: “I never heard of any such reformations being effected amongst them.” Only when he preached the alienation of men from God, and forgiveness through the blood of Christ, did he hear of their betterment.
Gordon, Christ of To-day, 129—“The consciousness of sin is largely the creation of Christ.” Men like Paul, Luther, and Edwards show this impressively. Foster, Christian life and Theology, 198-201—“There is of course a sense in which the Christian must imitate Christ’s death, for he is to ‘take up his cross daily’ (Luke 9:23) and follow his Master; but in its highest meaning and fullest scope the death of Christ is no more an object set for our imitation than is the creation of the world.... Christ does for man in his sacrifice what man could not do for himself. We see in the Cross: 1. the magnitude of the guilt of sin; 2. our own self-condemnation; 3. the adequate remedy,—for the object of law is gained in the display of righteousness; 4. the objective ground of forgiveness.” Maclaren: “Christianity without a dying Christ is a dying Christianity.”
(f) This theory contradicts the whole tenor of the New Testament, in making the life, and not the death, of Christ the most significant and important feature of his work. The constant allusions to the death of Christ as the source of our salvation, as well as the symbolism of the ordinances, cannot be explained upon a theory which regards Christ as a mere example, and considers his sufferings as incidents, rather than essentials, of his work.
Dr. H. B. Hackett frequently called attention to the fact that the recording in the gospels of only three years of Jesus’ life, and the prominence given in the record to the closing scenes of that life, are evidence that not his life, but his death, was the great work of our Lord. Christ’s death, and not his life, is the central truth of Christianity. The cross is par excellence the Christian symbol. In both the ordinances—in Baptism as well as in the Lord’s Supper—it is the death of Christ that is primarily set forth. Neither Christ’s example, nor his teaching, reveals God as does his death. It is the death of Christ that links together all Christian doctrines. The mark of Christ’s blood is upon them all, as the scarlet thread running through every cord and rope of the British navy gives sign that it is the property of the crown.
Did Jesus’ death have no other relation to our salvation than Paul’s death had? Paul was a martyr, but his death is not even recorded. Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 92—“Paul does not dwell in any way upon the life or work of our Lord, except as they are involved in his death and resurrection.” What did Jesus’ words: “It is finished” (John 19:30) mean? What was finished on the Socinian theory? The Socinian salvation had not yet begun. Why did not Jesus make the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to be memorials of his birth, rather than of his death? Why was not the veil of the temple rent at his baptism, or at the Sermon on the Mount? It was because only his death opened the way to God. In talking with Nicodemus, Jesus brushed aside the complimentary: “we know that thou art a teacher come from God” (John 3:2). Recognizing Jesus as teacher is not enough. There must be a renewal by the Spirit of God, so that one recognizes also the lifting up of the Son of man as atoning Savior (John 3:14, 15). And to Peter, Jesus said: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me” (John 13:8). One cannot have part with Christ as Teacher, while one rejects him as Redeemer from sin. On the Socinian doctrine of the Atonement, see Crawford, Atonement, 279-296; Shedd, History of Doctrine, 2:376-386; Doctrines of the Early Socinians, in Princeton Essays, 1:194-211; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:156-180; Fock, Socinianismus.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.
This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ’s death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ’s atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man’s stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ’s sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.
Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell’s Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell’s later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ’s death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus “making cost to himself.” He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God’s punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell’s doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.
F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ’s sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice’s den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ’s sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson’s. Christ’s death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God’s self-sacrificing love,
Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ’s oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.
Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ’s personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that only Christ’s oneness with God has taught men that they can be one with God. Christ’s consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.
Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ’s person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson: “Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.” For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology, 231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.
To this theory we object as follows:
(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon men of the sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name “vicarious,” which belongs only to the latter. Suffering with the sinner is by no means suffering in his stead.
Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell’s view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers’ enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonement itself.
But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ’s sacrifice vicarious. The word “vicarious” (from vicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector’s place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president; “A. B., appointed consul, vice C. D., resigned,” implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a “vicarious sacrifice,” then he makes atonement to God in the place and stead of sinners. Christ’s suffering in and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part the medium through which Christ was enabled to endure God’s wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with the reason why God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner’s place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.
(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.
Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God’s self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell’s statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.
Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell’s principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner’s forgiveness is penitence, either Christ’s, or his own, or both together.
Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ’s incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”
(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ’s suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.
B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension: “God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”
While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ’s suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God’s holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement: “The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”
(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God’s love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ’s sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ’s sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.
That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears from Eph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”; Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.” Conscience, the reflection of God’s holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear: “An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mere appearance of an atonement has no moral influence.” Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”
Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well: “All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.” Walter Besant: “It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one’s self.” The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one’s self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one’s self, unless one has been first forgiven; 1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may ‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’ (Heb. 9:14).”
(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ’s death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.
We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ’s death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell’s acknowledgment that these “altar-forms” are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ’s work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.
In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by “making cost to himself.” He “works down his resentment, by suffering for us.” This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy is already forgiving love; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, a condition of the forgiveness.
To Campbell’s view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than “a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.” Not Phinehas’s zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—LXX.: ἐξιλάσατο, “made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between the priestly atonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and the judicial atonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mere confession suffice to take away sin. On Campbell’s view see further, on page 760.
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God’s righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that “Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.” This modification of Campbell’s view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ’s relation to the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God “might himself be just” (Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God’s righteousness, rather than in his love.
E. Y. Mullins: “If Christ’s union with humanity made it possible for him to be ‘the representative Penitent,’ and to be the Amen of humanity to God’s just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man’s dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God’s condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed. ‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’ ”
Bushnell regards Mat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ’s atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather: “His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.” His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had “become a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus’ death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.
(f) This theory confounds God’s method of saving men with men’s experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer’s union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.
Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says: “The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man’s heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words ‘eternal atonement’ denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that ‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’ Atonement on its ‘Godward side’ is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”
All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father’s heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are “forever irreconcilable”; they are “based on radically different conceptions of God.” The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God’s love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explain how this work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul ‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’ But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle’s Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as something to be explained from Paul’s controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens’ own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”
(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.
Hovey: “The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.” Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit’s work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he [God] is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.” Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,” but literally: “God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.
Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The “Light of the world” (John 8:12) has many “X rays,” beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but “the darkness apprehended it not” (John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ’s atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.
To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God’s love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is “a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God’s likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one’s life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father ‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’ (Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father’s wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.” And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!
It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said: “I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;” and, as he thought of it further, he cried: “Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!” Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord’s Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words: “This is my body, broken for you,” he added: “This is our foundation!” As he started to bless the cup, he cried: “Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!” Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt’s hymn: “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,” as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn: “O sacred head now wounded!” when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.
This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God’s government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.
Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say: “It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”
Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, is Is. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness’ sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.” Strangely enough, the explanation is added: “even when its demands are unfulfilled.” Park: “Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam’s sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam’s sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”
Grotius used the word acceptilatio, by which he meant God’s sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God’s nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God’s holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.
Notice the difference between holding to a substitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to an equivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius’s own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey: “Christ’s suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men’s own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.” This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.
Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”
To this theory we urge the following objections:
(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God’s government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.
In our discussion of Penalty (pages 655, 656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.
(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.
Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatio implies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”
(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.
No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4); “God be propitiated toward me the sinner” (literal translation of Luke 18:13),—propitiated through God’s own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.
In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God’s nature, but only in expediency or in God’s arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”
N. W. Taylor’s Theology was entitled: “Moral Government,” and C. G. Finney’s Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God’s holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.
(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.
To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin: “How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.” The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott: “If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.” William Ashmore: “A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”
The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother’s grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ’s atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God’s justice and all God’s love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of “mist, the common gloss of theologians.” Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ’s suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson: “Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.” Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.
(e) The intensity of Christ’s sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God’s regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.
Christ refused the “wine mingled with myrrh” (Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding of the countenance of God from him who was “made to be sin on our behalf” (2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others, finis coronat, and dying words are undying words. “The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they’re seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.” Versus Park, Discourses, 328-355.
A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry. Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”; Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.” So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not only shows anger, but he is angry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22; John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly ‘tasted death’ (Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”
We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him ‘My God’ (Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.” E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father’s face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.” These explanations make Christ’s sufferings and Christ’s words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.
(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God’s regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner’s stead.
Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God’s transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry: “Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.” C. J. Baldwin: “The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”
(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God’s righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”
John Bunyan’s story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the “Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Christ’s words to every conscious sinner are simply: “Come unto me” (Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer. 1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner’s direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.
When The Outlook says: “Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,” we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ’s demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes’s doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.
4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.
This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ’s new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.
Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351 sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264 sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.
Irving’s followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.” 2:14—Freer says: “So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world ‘the Holy Thing’.” 11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”
So, says an Irvingian tract, “Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.” Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving’s realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ’s participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”
We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving’s own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.” 123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.” 128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.” 152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.” Irving frequently quoted Heb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”
Irving’s followers deny Christ’s sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ’s human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.
Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent’s Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two. “If I had married Irving,” said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle, “there would have been no tongues.”
To this theory we offer the following objections:
(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.
Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of “redemption by sample.” It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving’s view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned in Eph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.” But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving’s apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.
(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving’s theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of the person to rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus’ sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take a sinful nature, unless sin is essential to human nature. In Irving’s view, the death of Christ’s body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.” Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.
Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man’s sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.
(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ’s freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.
“I shall maintain until death,” said Irving, “that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.” The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.
Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks ‘Why?’ well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness: ‘I glorified thee’ (John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation from Ps. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does, ‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’ for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”
(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.
In Irving’s theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old, “the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16; cf. 1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).
As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was “made to be sin on our behalf” (2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to “cleanse that red right hand” of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving’s view, when he claimed that “Christ took human nature as he found it.”
(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.
Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.
This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ’s death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.
The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ’s humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ’s deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.” Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.
These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.” Gregory Nazianzen (390) “retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”
But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm’s acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled “Cur Deus Homo” constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that “whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.” Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.” Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God. “If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.” The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must “give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.” Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.
The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger’s Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).
To this theory we make the following objections:
(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.
The theory has been called the “Criminal theory” of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the “Military theory.” It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm’schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.
Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”
Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.” William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty ‘retributive justice,’ and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a ‘delightful conviction,’ as of a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’ appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”
(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ’s passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.
Neither Christ’s active obedience alone, nor Christ’s obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm’s view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”
It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ’s death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach “the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,” and says: “We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.” Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ’s sufferings as penalty: “The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite, i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God’s justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.” The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ’s obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God’s justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.
Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes ‘ten thousand talents’ and has ‘not wherewith to pay’ (Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he ‘magnified the law and made it honorable’ (Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.” Cf. Edwards, Works, 1:406.
(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.
Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.” The main text relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory is Mat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.” Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ’s sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.” Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”
(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.
Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that “so precious is the shedding of Christ’s blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them” (Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903: “Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.” The Bishop says: “I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”
Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is ‘fitting’ that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”
(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ’s work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.
This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another’s pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.
Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ’s death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.” For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416 sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.