This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature which is propitiated by Christ's death; but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ's atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not of penalty in man's stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ's sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in [pg 734] America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.
Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell's later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ's death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus “making cost to himself.”He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God's punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell's doctrine is the only one which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.
F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ's sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice's den, and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ's sufferings as an illustration, given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson's. Christ's death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God's self-sacrificing love,
Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ's oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.
Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ's personality on men, so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that only Christ's oneness with God has taught men that they can be one with God. Christ's consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.
Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception of Christ's person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson: “Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.” For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology, [pg 735]231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement, 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.
To this theory we object as follows:
(a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon men of the sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name “vicarious,” which belongs only to the latter. Suffering with the sinner is by no means suffering in his stead.
Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell's view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers' enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonement itself.
But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ's sacrifice vicarious. The word “vicarious” (from vicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector's place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president; “A. B., appointed consul, vice C. D., resigned,”implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a “vicarious sacrifice,”then he makes atonement to God in the place and stead of sinners. Christ's suffering in and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part the medium through which Christ was enabled to endure God's wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with the reason why God lays this suffering upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner's place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God.