2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.To this theory we object as follows:(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.
This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in[pg 734]America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.
Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.
Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus“making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.
F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,
Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.
Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that onlyChrist'soneness with God has taught men thattheycan be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.
Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson:“Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.”For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology,[pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.
To this theory we object as follows:
(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon menofthe sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name“vicarious,”which belongs only to the latter. Sufferingwiththe sinner is by no means sufferingin his stead.
Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.
Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonementitself.
But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrificevicarious. The word“vicarious”(fromvicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;“A. B., appointed consul,viceC. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a“vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to Godin the place and steadof sinners. Christ's sufferingin and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part themediumthrough which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with thereasonwhy God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.
(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.
Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”
Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God, and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of God as subject to law imperils God's self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell's statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.
Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell's principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that, God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the sinner's forgiveness is penitence, either Christ's, or his own, or both together.
Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ's incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of[pg 736]pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.”
(c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ's suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.
B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”
B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension:“God in Christ reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature; that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”
While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ's suffering. That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God's holiness brings suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement:“The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of an objective agency to secure it.”
(d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement is necessary, not simply to reveal God's love, but to satisfy his justice; that Christ's sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ's sacrifice, before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.
That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”[pg 737]Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”
That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the sinner, appears fromEph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”;Heb. 9:14,—“offered himself without blemish unto God.”Conscience, the reflection of God's holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear:“An appeal to man, without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mereappearanceof an atonement has no moral influence.”Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”
Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd says well:“All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.”Walter Besant:“It is not enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one's self.”The converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive one's self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one's self, unless one has been first forgiven;1 John 3:20—“if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new dispensation, in order that he may‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’(Heb. 9:14).”
(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.
We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.
We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these“altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.
In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by“making cost to himself.”He“works down his resentment, by suffering for us.”This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy isalready forgivinglove; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, acondition of the forgiveness.
To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than“a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.”Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο,“made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between thepriestlyatonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and thejudicialatonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mereconfessionsuffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page760.
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that“Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.”This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to[pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.
E. Y. Mullins:“If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be‘the representative Penitent,’and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’”
Bushnell regardsMat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather:“His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.”His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had“become a curse for us”(Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.
(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.
Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”
Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says:“The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words‘eternal atonement’denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’Atonement on its‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”
All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are“forever irreconcilable”; they are“based on radically different conceptions of God.”The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explainhowthis work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as[pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”
(g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.
Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.
Hovey:“The manward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.”Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit's work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God (1 John 2:1—“we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins”). Hence1:9—“If we confess our sins, he[God]is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.”Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice (Luke 18:13,—“God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,”but literally:“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.
Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The“Light of the world”(John 8:12) has many“X rays,”beyond the visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but“the darkness apprehended it not”(John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.
To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God's love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is“a true reconciliation between God and man, making them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but to purify and perfect them in God's likeness by uniting them to God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life (1 Peter 3:18?)—but a laying down of one's life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’(Eph. 5:27).... We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it.... Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.”And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!
It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said:“I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great harm;”and, as he thought of it further, he cried:“Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed[pg 740]blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!”Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord's Supper. After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words:“This is my body, broken for you,”he added:“This is our foundation!”As he started to bless the cup, he cried:“Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!”Then he sank quietly back, and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt's hymn:“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,”as describing physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn:“O sacred head now wounded!”when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.