Precisely here again we enter the interesting territory where new and old in Presbyterian theology contrast so deeply. It is just at such points, where the strong tide of high Calvinism meets the freshening flood of New Theology ideas, that one cannot but be arrested. The surge and swell of contending thought are there so marked. One whom we have before quoted from, Prof. Orr, has some discernment of the true bearing of much that is now put forth; and on such reasoning regarding the atonement as has been instanced he has remarked, “Distinction is often made between fact and theory in the doctrine of atonement; but it is evident that an element of what is called theory, i.e. of doctrinal significance, attaches to even the simplest statements of scripture on this subject. It is not every conception of the cross that suits the full and varied representations given of it in scripture. The New Testament will not allow us to believe that everything remains vague and undetermined in the meaning we are to attach to Christ's doing and dying for our salvation.” And another, not a Presbyterian, has spoken out thus: “It is sometimes said, There are several theories of the atonement, but we have to do with the fact, and not with our understanding of it! This frame of mind is the root of all that is most feeble and ominous in the teaching in our churches to-day.” Then against the derision of such discarded ideas as the Calvinistic one of “Christ having rendered by His blood satisfaction to divine justice in the sense of quantative payment of a ransom,” compare a remark of the same, “We cannot in any theology which is duly ethicized dispense with the word satisfaction. It was no satisfaction of a 'jus talionis ' yet the sinner could only be saved by something that thus damned the sin.” And still another, “There is room to-day for a truly forensic doctrine of the atonement. Christ has redeemed us not by a facile amnesty; but by making our sin His own in vicarious love, and bearing it in the face of the universe.”
A “facile amnesty” it is to be feared is the too common conception of what has resulted from the death of Christ for us, with but little concern for the solemn fact that ere sins could at all be forgiven there were questions, long-outstanding questions, between God and our souls to be settled, as regards the heinousness of them in His sight, and the guilt of them lying upon us, and that for the necessary removal of both, a real true work of atonement, propitiatory and expiatory, had to be accomplished by the vicarious suffering and death of the “Lamb of God.” A most remarkable confession was made by a young minister recently. “I have been urged,” he wrote, “to make the cross of Christ the heart of my teaching, but I have the vaguest possible conception of what is meant by this and similar phrases. I can understand the cross as the transcendent symbol of the Christian life; as symbolizing the death of the Christian to sin, but I fail to see the relation between the actual crucifixion on Calvary and the forgiveness of sins.” Consider how momentous that confession is from an accredited preacher of the gospel. And is there not serious reflection awakened as to the theological system of which such as this is the product. Here is one who has just undergone a modern theological training, and is regarded as qualified to preach and teach the truth of God. And what is the attitude assumed towards this great, vital, central doctrine of atonement. The cross, unless symbolizing the death of the Christian to sin (which is not atonement, but at best a sequel to it), has no such supreme importance attaching to it as to make it in any sense central to his teaching. No relation perceived between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of sin! A most strange confession! On what then is such forgiveness to be based? Or is it that there is no need for such a basis? Are we to imagine forgiveness of sins by God to be so light a matter as to need no such ground for its exercise as Scripture shows the death and blood of Christ to have provided. Really, if the state of mind disclosed does not indicate just such a conception as has been spoken of, of salvation as a sort of “facile amnesty” from sin, to be prevalent theology to-day, what else does it?
The real fact is, as Prof. Orr has pointed out, there is an ingrained aversion to the whole doctrine of an expiatory atonement in modern ideas. The principal cause, according to him, is that such presuppositions of the need and purpose of the atonement as, on the one hand, a sense of the character and holiness of God, and on the other of the gravity and guilt of sin, are totally lacking in present-day thought. A wrested mutilated doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, and the influence of a perverted evolutionary theory of man's origin, are respectively to be held accountable for much of this departure from Biblical teaching on what God is, how holy, how righteous, how abhorrent of sin; on the fact also that sin is sin—no element of the world process, or necessity of human development, but a thing in itself horrible, displeasing to God, laying the transgressor under God's just condemnation.
The inability to perceive any relation between the fact of Christ's death on the cross, and the forgiveness of sins instanced above, is, alas, if all were as frank in confessing it, only too prevalent to-day. That, ere forgiveness of sins could be, the holy sinless Son of God had to become our Sin-Bearer, and under the whole burden of the cross endure the wrath and judgment of God “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree"; that by His blood and death the requirements of God's holiness should be met, and the whole question of sin as it affects Him be so perfectly settled that it can be said, “Once in the end of the age hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself,” and “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world"; that henceforth in the gospel there is the divine tender of a relief from the penal consequences of sin absolute, universal, and final, as also “justification by His blood,” and by God's grace “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness not only for the passing over of the sins that are past, through his forbearance, but also that now at this time he might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” —all this is fast becoming quite meaningless to, or entirely misapprehended by, those who have drifted away from the truth as to the expiatory and propitiatory atonement of our Redeemer.
The expression given to it in the Westminster Confession, or the Shorter Catechism, may, as theological expressions, neither of them quite reach to adequacy— “The Lord Jesus, by His perfect obedience, and sacrifice of Himself, which He through the Eternal Spirit once offered up unto God hath fully satisfied the justice of His Father, and purchased reconciliation, etc.,” or, “Christ executeth the office of a Priest in His once offering up of Himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and reconcile us to God” —but they are surely preferable by far to the hazy, colorless, presentation of it given by the expositor of the Creed. This negation of all theories of the atonement, with professed adherence to the large and general truth of Christ's death as the means, in an unspecified way, of our salvation is not reassuring in itself. When, joined to it there is ridicule, as well as repudiation, of the very expression used in the Presbyterian Confession! what can one say? No wonder it is so far back, or as far down as to the Apostles' Creed such desire to go as the norm of faith necessary to Christianity. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried,” is quite comprehensive enough for them.
It may certainly be the case, that all attempts in the past to interpret the doctrine, or to construe it theologically, have failed in adequacy, or erred essentially, and being found incapable of responding to broadening and deepening thought on the subject, have had to be left behind. Otherwise put, theological definitions have consistently failed to fill out the complete doctrine as Scripture gives it, however true it be that a certain side of truth was emphasized in each case. There were, for instance, the so-called Ransom Theory, which has long since been superseded, at least, in the form in which it was originally held; the Socinian view of atonement in keeping with their system, which to believers now is just as erroneous as it ever was; the Governmental Theory prevalent in pre-Reformation times, with no more permanency. And again from the Reformation onwards what is called the Substitutionary Theory has held the field, until recently, when, as we are having instanced now, it also is being repudiated.
A word on the nature of that repudiation and what is to replace the rejected scheme. It is only quite recently that this latter was called in question, but it is in quite a wholesale fashion that it is being surrendered now. Readers of the theological works of last century must be familiar with the great and long-drawn-out controversy on “the extent of the atonement” waged so earnestly by adherents of Calvinistic theology, Presbyterians (as Candlish and Cunningham) among the number. The whole basis of reasoning on both sides was, and could not be other than, this same Substitutionary theory of atonement. Whether the results of the atonement were universal, or limited to the elect, could not, it is evident, be a question, apart from the idea of Christ having assumed in that work the place of a Substitute to render satisfaction to divine justice for sinners. It is most remarkable, yet no more than a fact, that it is almost impossible to imagine that controversy in the same quarter to-day. The Substitutionary theory, as a theory, is being dropped as completely as the others. And what is now emerging as a successor to it? Something more satisfactory, more scriptural, something giving fuller value to those aspects of the sacrifice of which admittedly the theory was deficient? The tendency now rather is away from any thought of a sacrificial and expiatory interpretation of the death of Christ at all. Complaint is made of atonement being turned into a non-moral and superstitious transaction by the theory of Christ as our Substitute taking the place and judgment due to sinners, and the trend of theology now is to develop the doctrine on what is called its ethical side. That is to say, it is not the sufferings and death of the Lord Jesus that are regarded as in themselves, or intrinsically efficacious for the covering of sin; but rather the moral qualities displayed by Christ Jesus in the descent to death, the obedience to the will of God He rendered even unto death. “The sacrifice required by God,” it is said, “was not that of so much pain, or even death itself, but a moral reparation in the offering of a great and perfect obedience.”
The “transactional” theory of atonement, as it is called, with its insistence upon “satisfaction” in the old penal sense, is considered obsolete now. It is caricatured as some monstrous growth of fanatical puritan times, with a hard legal conception of God with His outraged righteousness, like some glorified Shylock, insisting upon and obtaining its pound of flesh. That from the suffering Savior on the cross is wrung out a full measure of torment precisely equivalent to the desert of our sins, and that thus offended justice can now retire satiated and appeased by the blood of the victim! All this is derided as superstitious, and partaking too much of the nature of a material and non-moral transaction, to commend itself to Christian thought. It is a reversion, we are told, to the crude, semi-pagan ideas embodied in the Jewish ritual, and expressed in the sacrificial language of the Old Testament. Whereas, underlying the New Testament doctrine of atonement there is an altogether different conception of sacrifice. The express point of distinction, it is maintained, between the latter and the Old Testament ritual of sacrifice lies in this entire absence of a moral element in the sacrifices offered under the law. In regard to the sacrifice of Christ on the other hand, all the stress is laid upon the moral quality inherent in it. The thought of a purely objective expiation and external transaction is transcended, and the value and efficacy of His offering seen to lie in the holy obedience and submission to the will of God of which this was the crown and culmination. This, it is repeated, is the great truth which emerges in the New Testament as to atonement. Deeper than any mere expiation resulting or expiatory merit attaching, that in which the essence of Christ's sacrifice consists is “not in His suffering, not even His death in itself, but obedience completed in the surrender of His life to the will of God.” It is explained that now, in the New Testament, if we revert to Old Testament terms at all, we must think of the sprinkling of the blood on the altar, signifying the presentation of the life to God, as the important matter, not the shedding of blood, signifying the death of the victim! It is not vicarious suffering, but representative submission ' that is the essential element in sacrifice!
For scripture evidence we are referred to the tenth of Hebrews. “It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins. Wherefore, when he cometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me. In burnt-offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first that he may establish the second.”
Here, it is said, in this passage, we have the whole matter epitomized. This verse sets the atonement of Christ in opposition to the sacrifices of the law, and treats it as superseding them. There is the distinct repudiation of the entire conception of sacrifice as expressed in Jewish ritual. The notion therein associated with the blood shedding of the victim as something in itself of atoning virtue is absent from the New Testament conception, and the principle of vicariousness attaching to a sacrificial death emphatically ruled out. The performing of the will of God on Christ's part and His submission to it His obedience is shown to be that in which true atonement lies.
The way in which the death of Christ under this theory (to complete our survey of it) becomes efficacious for us is not in the sense that it avails for us atoningly before God, as having borne our sins or as made propitiation for them. That is unnecessary, it is implied, for as Christ has revealed God's attitude, there is neither hint of, nor room for, the thought of Him needing to be propitiated, or His wrath appeased. It is on our side mainly, not on His, that the influence of Christ's death requires to be exerted. And on us accordingly all the moral influence of His perfect obedience and sinless penitence is brought to bear. By the sight of the loving Savior in the tenderness of His compassion taking on Himself the burden of His children's [?] misdoing, and bearing on the cross the shame and misery of it in the face of the universe, we are broken down and drawn back from the far country of our sins to our un-estranged Father's [?] ready welcome! Then as to the only aspect Godward they can understand it to possess, there is in that same perfect obedience and submission to death on the part of such a one as Christ Jesus, such a potency as to constitute it a complete and adequate moral reparation to God for all the sins humanity has been guilty, or is capable, of! “The impulse of divine holy love found its own level, its counterpart, its other self, in the perfect, sinless sacrifice of Jesus. That moral perfection, that moral equivalent to His perfect righteousness, which God craved and required in the creature, was realized in the Man Christ Jesus. In Jesus humanity was raised to the moral level of God. The total moral demand of God upon man was satisfied in man.” From all this it may be seen what the “ethical” theory of the atonement amounts to.
[J. T.]
(Continued from page 175)
(To be continued)