Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)

by Augustus Hopkins Strong

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.