4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity

This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering, until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and reunited it to God.This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ’s new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward Irving, of London (1792–1834), and it has been held, in substance, by Menken and Dippel in Germany.

Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9–398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279–404; 6:351 sq.; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264 sq., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496–498.

Irving’s followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers.… The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.” 2:14—Freer says: “So that, despite it was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world ‘the Holy Thing’.” 11–15, 282–305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”

So, says an Irvingian tract, “Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part 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 quotation from Irving’s own words will show: works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.” 123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.” 128—“His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.” 152—“These sufferings came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.” Irving frequently quoted Heb. 2:10—“make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”

Irving’s followers deny Christ’s sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in other words, that not native depravity, but only actual trangression, 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, in 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 in Eph. 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, Errinerungen 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 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 the person to 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 a sinful nature, unless sin is essential to 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 from Ps. 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”).

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.

5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement

This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ’s death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.

The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ’s humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ’s deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Reedemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.” Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.

These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325–373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.” Gregory Nazianzen (390) “retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”

But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm’s acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled “Cur Deus Homo” constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that “whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.… He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.… It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.” Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.” Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.” If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.” The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must “give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.” Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.

The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger’s Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470–540).

To this theory we make the following objections:

(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.

The theory has been called the “Criminal theory” of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the “Military theory.” It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen lœsœ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm’schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.

Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.” William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty ‘retributive justice,’ and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a ‘delightful conviction,’ as of a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’ appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”

(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ’s passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.

Neither Christ’s active obedience alone, nor Christ’s obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm’s view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.” … II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.” … II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this interession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”

It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ’s death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach “the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,” and says: “We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva; he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.” Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ’s sufferings as penalty: “The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite, i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God’s justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.” The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ’s obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God’s justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.

Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues, No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.… Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes ‘ten thousand talents’ and has ‘not wherewith to pay’ (Mat. 18:24, 25). But Christ did both, and therefore he ‘magnified the law and made it honorable’ (Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.” Cf. Edwards, Works, 1:406.

(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.

Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209–212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.” The main text relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory is Mat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.” Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediveval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ’s sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.” Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”

(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.

Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that “so precious is the shedding of Christ’s blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them” (Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903: “Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.” The Bishop says: “I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is ‘fitting’ that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.… Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”

(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ’s work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.

This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another’s pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.

Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 132–189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ’s death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.” For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172–193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230–241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416 sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273–286; Dale, Atonement, 279–292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196–199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176–178.

6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement

In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ’s death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ’s relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.

Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ’s sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God’s wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ’s endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.

Adolphe Monod said well: “Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.” Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ’s satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.” And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.” See John 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.” Christ was “lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as “the serpent lifted up in the wilderness” (John 3:14), and we overcoming “because of the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 12:11).

First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God

The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God’s image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others’ wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God’s nature that penalty follow sin.

The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.” Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes: “First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.” Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ’s dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.” Richard II, 4:1—“The world’s Ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.” Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from his Father’s wrathful curse.” Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.” Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.” Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!” All’s Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.” See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God’s holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100–124.

Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God’s being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ’s penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.

John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419–1489): “Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit” = “Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].” Quarles’s Emblems: “O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”

Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God’s name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question: ‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’.… The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”

This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.

Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is ‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is ‘full of truth’ also, and so ‘the only-begotten from the Father’ (John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.” Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows: “On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.

“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.… Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.… Consequently for the good of man he bore all that which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.… This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”

Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.

The great classical passage with reference to the atonement is Rom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.” Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offences in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”

Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the “righteousness of God” (= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in 1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in 1:18–3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer’s comments upon this passage.

“Verse 25. ‘God has set forth Christ as an affectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’ i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἕνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ, ‘for the display of his [judicial and punitive] righteousness,’ which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited. ‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’ i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment. ‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’ expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ’s sacrifice, God’s administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God’s answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.

“Verse 26. εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὃν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God’s being just, and secondly, his appearing just in consequence of this. Justus et justificans, instead of justus et candemnans, this is the summum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”

We repeat what was said on pages 719, 720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ’s death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God’s justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God may appear righteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ’s suffering is that God may be righteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. See Heb. 2:10—it “became” God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer; cf. Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country” = the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.

Charnock: “He who once ‘quenched the violence of fire’ for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God’s anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.” The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 93—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf. Ps. 85:10—“Mercy, and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.’, “Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia, Peripatetica, 88.

Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord’s endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.… God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it. ‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’ (2 Cor. 9:15).” Simon, in Expositor, 6:321–334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us; as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”

See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272–324, Philosophy of History, 65–69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401–463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 253; Edwards’s Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214–334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500–512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27–114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319–363; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267–318, and 1847:7–70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115–214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114–138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605–637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332–339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263–286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641–662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107–124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.