(e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ's death; and which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.
We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ's death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell's acknowledgment that these “altar-forms”are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ's work, and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.
In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by “making cost to himself.” He “works down his resentment, by suffering for us.” This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy is already forgiving love; so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, a condition of the forgiveness.
To Campbell's view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more therefore in the sufferings of Christ than “a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.” Not Phinehas's zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement (Ps. 106:30—“executed judgment”—lxx.: ἐξιλάσατο, “made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between the priestly atonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and the judicial atonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mere confession suffice to take away sin. On Campbell's view see further, on page [760].
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God's righteousness he has failed to indicate. He tells us that “Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.” This modification of Campbell's view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ's relation to [pg 738]the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God “might himself be just” (Rom. 3:26), and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love.
E. Y. Mullins: “If Christ's union with humanity made it possible for him to be ‘the representative Penitent,’ and to be the Amen of humanity to God's just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.”Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103—“The serious element in sin is not man's dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature, but rather God's condemnation of man. This Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed. ‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’ ”
Bushnell regards Mat. 8:17—“Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”—as indicating the nature of Christ's atoning work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather: “His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.” His sighing when he cured the deaf man (Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he too had “become a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus' death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.
(f) This theory confounds God's method of saving men with men's experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer's union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.
Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says: “The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon man's heart to induce him to accept forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity.... To me the words ‘eternal atonement’ denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its sympathy—that ‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’ Atonement on its ‘Godward side’is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”
All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father's heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are “forever irreconcilable”; they are “based on radically different conceptions of God.” The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God's love for men; these are truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explain how this work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul ‘the theory of a substitutionary expiation.’ But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle's Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard as [pg 739]something to be explained from Paul's controversial position, or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr. Stevens' own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.”