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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.[pg 732](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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 is1 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.
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 is1 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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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.”
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,mustbe 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 isnecessary, 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.
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.”
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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 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.
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 explainsJohn 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 inActs 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 ofHeb. 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 contradicts2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”—where the divine identification of Christ with the race of sinners antedates and explains his sufferings.John 1:29—“the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world”—does not refer to Jesus as a lamb for gentleness, but as a lamb for sacrifice. Maclaren:“How does Christ's death prove God's love? Only on one supposition, namely, that Christ is the incarnate Son of God, sent by the Father's love and being his express image”; and, we may add, suffering vicariously for us and removing the obstacle in God's mind to our pardon.
(e) The influence of Christ's example is neither declared in Scripture, nor found in Christian experience, to be the chief result secured by his death. Mere example is but a new preaching of the law, which repels and condemns. The cross has power to lead men to holiness, only as it first shows a satisfaction made for their sins. Accordingly, most of the passages which represent Christ as an example also contain references to his propitiatory work.
There is no virtue in simply setting an example. Christ did nothing, simply for the sake of example. Even his baptism was the symbol of his propitiatory death; see pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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.”
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 pages761,762. The apostle's exhortation is not“abstain from allappearanceof 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 byverse 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 ispar excellencethe 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.
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 ispar excellencethe 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.