Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions: “1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate. [pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”
Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that “2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.” If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.
We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.
In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature. “He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.” J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.” In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth: “In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (not in) a world-soul.”
G. B. Foster, on Mat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” “On this ‘must be’ the Scripture is based, not this ‘must be’ on the Scripture. The ‘must be’ was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’ As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”
Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son [pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.” The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.
Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 117—“Christ had taken upon him, as the living expression of himself, a nature which was weighed down, not merely by present incapacities, but by present incapacities as part of the judicial necessary result of accepted and inherent sinfulness. Human nature was not only disabled but guilty, and the disabilities were themselves a consequence and aspect of the guilt”; see review of Moberly by Rashdall, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 3:198-211. Lidgett, Spir. Princ. of Atonement, 166-168, criticizes Dr. Dale for neglecting the fatherly purpose of the Atonement to serve the moral training of the child—punishment marking ill-desert in order to bring this ill-desert to the consciousness of the offender,—and for neglecting also the positive assertion in the atonement that the law is holy and just and good—something more than the negative expression of sin's ill-desert. See especially Lidgett's chapter on the relation of our Lord to the human race, 351-378, in which he grounds the atonement in the solidarity of mankind, its organic union with the Son of God, and Christ's immanence in humanity.
Bowne, The Atonement, 101—“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections upon his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive of God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not love at all, but only a reflex of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing upon us out of his infinite fulness but at no real cost to himself, he sinks before the moral heroes of the race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burdenbearer and leader in all self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and love and moral heroism and condescension filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ himself, so far as it was an historical event, must be viewed, not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that Cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:90, 91—“Conceive of the ideal of moral perfection incarnate in a human personality, and at the same time one who loves us with a love so absolute that he identifies himself with us and makes our good and evil his own—bring together these elements in a living, conscious human spirit, and you have in it a capacity of shame and anguish, a possibility of bearing the burden of human guilt and wretchedness, which lost and guilty humanity can never bear for itself.”