(b) It is a natural outgrowth from the Pelagian view of sin, and logically necessitates a curtailment or surrender of every other characteristic doctrine of Christianity—inspiration, sin, the deity of Christ, justification, regeneration, and eternal retribution.
The Socinian theory requires a surrender of the doctrine of inspiration; for the idea of vicarious and expiatory sacrifice is woven into the very warp and woof of the Old and New Testaments. It requires an abandonment of the Scripture doctrine of sin; for in it all idea of sin as perversion of nature rendering the sinner unable to save himself, and as objective guilt demanding satisfaction to the divine holiness, is denied. It requires us to give up the deity of Christ; for if sin is a slight evil, and man can save himself from its penalty and power, then there is no longer need of either an infinite suffering or an infinite Savior, and a human Christ is as good as a divine. It requires us to give up the Scripture doctrine of justification, as God's act of declaring the sinner just in the eye of the law, solely on account of the righteousness and death of Christ to whom he is united by faith; for the Socinian theory cannot permit the counting to a man of any other righteousness than his own. It requires a denial of the doctrine of regeneration; for this is no longer the work of God, but the work of the sinner; it is no longer a change of the affections below consciousness, but a self-reforming volition of the sinner himself. It requires a denial of eternal retribution; for this is no longer appropriate to finite transgression of arbitrary law, and to superficial sinning that does not involve nature.
(c) It contradicts the Scripture teachings, that sin involves objective guilt as well as subjective defilement; that the holiness of God must punish sin; that the atonement was a bearing of the punishment of sin for men; and that this vicarious bearing of punishment was necessary, on the part of God, to make possible the showing of favor to the guilty.
The Scriptures do not make the main object of the atonement to be man's subjective moral improvement. It is to God that the sacrifice is offered, and the object of it is to satisfy the divine holiness, and to remove from the divine mind an obstacle to the showing of favor to the guilty. It was something external to man and his happiness or virtue, that required that Christ should suffer. What Emerson has said of the martyr is yet more true of Christ: “Though love repine, and reason chafe, There comes a voice without reply, 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.”The truth for which Christ died was truth internal to the nature of God; not simply truth externalized and published among men. What the truth of God required, that Christ rendered—full satisfaction to violated justice. “Jesus paid it all”; and no obedience or righteousness of ours can be added to his work, as a ground of our salvation.
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 276—“This theory fails of a due recognition of that deep-seated, universal and innate sense of ill-desert, which in all times and everywhere has prompted men to aim at some expiation of their guilt. For this sense of [pg 731]guilt and its requirements the moral influence theory makes no adequate provision, either in Christ or in those whom Christ saves. Supposing Christ's redemptive work to consist merely in winning men to the practice of righteousness, it takes no account of penalty, either as the sanction of the law, as the reaction of the divine holiness against sin, or as the upbraiding of the individual conscience.... The Socinian theory overlooks the fact that there must be some objective manifestation of God's wrath and displeasure against sin.”
(d) It furnishes no proper explanation of the sufferings and death of Christ. The unmartyrlike anguish cannot be accounted for, and the forsaking by the Father cannot be justified, upon the hypothesis that Christ died as a mere witness to truth. If Christ's sufferings were not propitiatory, they neither furnish us with a perfect example, nor constitute a manifestation of the love of God.
Compare Jesus' feeling, in view of death, with that of Paul: “having the desire to depart”(Phil 1:23). Jesus was filled with anguish: “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour” (John 12:27). If Christ was simply a martyr, then he is not a perfect example; for many a martyr has shown greater courage in prospect of death, and in the final agony has been able to say that the fire that consumed him was “a bed of roses.” Gethsemane, with its mental anguish, is apparently recorded in order to indicate that Christ's sufferings even on the cross were not mainly physical sufferings. The Roman Catholic Church unduly emphasizes the physical side of our Lord's passion, but loses sight of its spiritual element. The Christ of Rome indeed is either a babe or dead, and the crucifix presents to us not a risen and living Redeemer, but a mangled and lifeless body.
Stroud, in his Physical Cause of our Lord's Death, has made it probable that Jesus died of a broken heart, and that this alone explains John 19:34—“one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and straightway there came out blood and water”—i. e., the heart had already been ruptured by grief. That grief was grief at the forsaking of the Father (Mat. 27:46—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), and the resulting death shows that that forsaking was no imaginary one. Did God make the holiest man of all to be the greatest sufferer of all the ages? This heart broken by the forsaking of the Father means more than martyrdom. If Christ's death is not propitiatory, it fills me with terror and despair; for it presents me not only with a very imperfect example in Christ, but with a proof of measureless injustice on the part of God. Luke 23:28—“weep not for me, but weep for yourselves”—Jesus rejects all pity that forgets his suffering for others.
To the above view of Stroud, Westcott objects that blood does not readily flow from an ordinary corpse. The separation of the red corpuscles of the blood from the serum, or water, would be the beginning of decomposition, and would be inconsistent with the statement in Acts 2:31—“neither did his flesh see corruption.” But Dr. W. W. Keen of Philadelphia, in his article on The Bloody Sweat of our Lord (Bib. Sac., July, 1897:469-484) endorses Stroud's view as to the physical cause of our Lord's death. Christ's being forsaken by the Father was only the culmination of that relative withdrawal which constituted the source of Christ's loneliness through life. Through life he was a servant of the Spirit. On the cross the Spirit left him to the weakness of unassisted humanity, destitute of conscious divine resources. Compare the curious reading of Heb. 2:9—“that he apart from God (χωρὶς Θεοῦ) should taste death for every man.”
If Christ merely supposed himself to be deserted by God, “not only does Christ become an erring man, and, so far as the predicate deity is applicable to him, an erring God; but, if he cherished unfounded distrust of God, how can it be possible still to maintain that his will was in abiding, perfect agreement and identity with the will of God?” See Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl, by Stählin, 219. Charles C. Everett, Gospel of Paul, says Jesus was not crucified because he was accursed, but he was accursed because he was crucified, so that, in wreaking vengeance upon him, Jewish law abrogated itself. This interpretation however contradicts 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf”—where the divine identification of Christ with the race of sinners antedates and explains his sufferings. John 1:29—“the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world”—does not refer to Jesus as a lamb for gentleness, but as a lamb for sacrifice. Maclaren: “How does Christ's death prove God's love? Only on one supposition, namely, that Christ is the incarnate Son of God, sent by the Father's love and being his express image”; and, we may add, suffering vicariously for us and removing the obstacle in God's mind to our pardon.