3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”To this theory we urge the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.
This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God's government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law, but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.
Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”
Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions; escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:“It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”
Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, isIs. 42:21—“It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.”Strangely enough, the explanation is added:“even when its demands are unfulfilled.”Park:“Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam's sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam's sin,—that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”
Grotius used the wordacceptilatio, by which he meant God's sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God's nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God's holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon[pg 741]man; so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.
Notice the difference between holding to asubstitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to anequivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius's own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey:“Christ's suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men's own feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God was concerned.”This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.
Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”
To this theory we urge the following objections:
(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God's government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.
In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.
In our discussion of Penalty (pages655,656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.
(b) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.
Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”
Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“Acceptilatioimplies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”
(c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.
No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.[pg 742]In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.
No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays:“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”(Ps. 51:4);“God be propitiated toward me the sinner”(literal translation ofLuke 18:13),—propitiated through God's own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.
In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution, but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God's nature, but only in expediency or in God's arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”
N. W. Taylor's Theology was entitled:“Moral Government,”and C. G. Finney's Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. But because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God's holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it.
(d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.
To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.
To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin:“How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.”The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott:“If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.”William Ashmore:“A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a stage-trick for the same effect.”
The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother's grief a reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ's atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it is a reality. All God's justice and all God's love are focused in the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of“mist, the common gloss of theologians.”Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ's suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson:“Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.”Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed, and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.
(e) The intensity of Christ's sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God's regard for his government, and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.
Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.
Christ refused the“wine mingled with myrrh”(Mark 15:23), that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Mat. 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding[pg 743]of the countenance of God from him who was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others,finis coronat, and dying words are undying words.“The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they're seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”VersusPark, Discourses, 328-355.
A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry.Ps. 97:10—“O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”;Eph. 4:26—“Be ye angry, and sin not.”So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not onlyshowsanger, but heisangry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink (Mat. 20:22;John 18:11), and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196—“Jesus alone of all men truly‘tasted death’(Heb. 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”
We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him‘My God’(Mat. 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.”E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father's face.... He felt that it was so; but it was not so.”These explanations make Christ's sufferings and Christ's words unreal, and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.
(f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God's regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner's stead.
Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”
Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us, but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God's transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry:“Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.”C. J. Baldwin:“The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”
(g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as being a revelation of God's righteousness; as being an execution of the penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer, on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins, instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it upon all who come to him.
John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.
John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”
John Bunyan's story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental[pg 744]theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the“Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”(John 1:29). Christ's words to every conscious sinner are simply:“Come unto me”(Mat. 11:28). Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer.1 John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner's direct access to Christ, and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.
When The Outlook says:“Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,”we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ's demands and promises, for he demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes's doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.
4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”To this theory we offer the following objections:(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.
This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ's new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.
Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”
Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.
Irving's followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.”2:14—Freer says:“So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world‘the Holy Thing’.”11-15, 282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”
So, says an Irvingian tract,“Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part[pg 745]of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.”Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving's realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ's participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”
We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving's own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.”123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.”128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.”152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.”Irving frequently quotedHeb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”
Irving's followers deny Christ's sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.
Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent's Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and died at the age of forty-two.“If I had married Irving,”said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle,“there would have been no tongues.”
To this theory we offer the following objections:
(a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which makes the subjective application possible.
Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.
Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of“redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned inEph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.”But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.
(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of[pg 746]punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of thepersonto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take asinfulnature, unless sin isessentialto human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.
Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.
(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.
“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”
“I shall maintain until death,”said Irving,“that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.
Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks‘Why?’well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness:‘I glorified thee’(John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation fromPs. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’(Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does,‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”
(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.
In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).[pg 747]As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”
In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old,“the power of God unto salvation”(Rom. 1:16;cf.1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).
As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was“made to be sin on our behalf”(2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to“cleanse that red right hand”of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that“Christ took human nature as he found it.”
(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.
Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.
Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.