Part 6 — Chapter I. Christology, Or The Redemption Wrought By Christ. (continued 4)

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: [pg 726] 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 [pg 727]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 [pg 728]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 [pg 729] 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 [pg 730]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 [pg 731]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.

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(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 appearanceof 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 [pg 733]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 [pg 734] 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, [pg 735]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 [pg 736]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.”

[pg 737]

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 [pg 738]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 [pg 739]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 [pg 740]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 [pg 741]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)—“Acceptilatioimplies 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.

[pg 742]

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 [pg 743]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 [pg 744]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 [pg 745]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.