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.” Versus Park, 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 only shows anger, but he is angry. 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.