[MEDIATORIAL RELIGION.]
The Nature of the Atonement, and its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life. By John M'Leod Campbell. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1856.
This is a strange book. A Greek would have hated it. A Puritan would have found it savory, even where it was unsound. Rosenkranz, who has written on the Æsthetik des Hässlichen, would have been thankful for such a fund of illustration. Cumbrous, tiresome, monotonous, it has few attractions for the natural man, who may have a weakness in favor of pure English and nice grammar. It despises the graces of carnal literature, and treats all the color and music of language as the Roundheads treated a cathedral, silencing the "box of whistles" and smashing the "mighty big angels in glass." And yet, if you can get over its grating way of delivering itself, you will find it no barbaric product, but the utterance of a deep and practised thinker, charged with the richest experiences of the Christian life, and resolute to clear them from every tangle of fiction or pretence. Beneath the uncouth form there is not only severe truth, but great tenderness and beauty,—a fine apprehension of the real inner strife of tempted men, and an intense faith in an open way of escape from it, without compromise of any sanctity. The author, though not tuneful in his speech, has the gifts of a true prophet; and often enables one to fancy what Isaiah might have been if he had heard nothing but the bagpipe, and had set his "burdens" to its drone. Whether Mr. Campbell's style has been formed north of the Tweed, we know not. In any case, it is trained in the school of Calvinism; is untouched therefore by any feeling for art; and runs on with a sort of extemporaneous habit, insufficiently relieved by occasional flashes of grotesque and forcible expression. It is only in exterior aspect, however, that he presents the features of the rugged old Calvinism: and though the first-born of that system and its younger sons are distinguished like Isaac's children, "Esau is a hairy man, and Jacob is a smooth man," yet no true patriarch of the school can be so blind as not to see beneath our author's goat-skin dress, and know that he is other than the heir. In fact, the peculiarity of this work as a theological phenomenon is, that it is a destruction of Calvinism without any revolt from it,—an escape from it through its own interior. Its postulates are not denied. Its phraseology is not rejected. Its statement of the problem of redemption is in the main accepted. Its provision for the solution,—the Incarnation of the Son,—is sacredly preserved. Yet these elements are put into such play as to make it checkmate itself on its own area. Its definitions are shown to be suicidal; and its sharp-edged logic is used to cut through the ligaments that constrain and shape it.
We have spoken first of the style of this book, because it strikes the reader at the outset, and is not unlikely to repel him if he is not warned. Of one other feature, derived from the same school, we must say a word, to qualify the admiration and gratitude which we shall then ungrudgingly tender to the author. In common with all the great masters of the "Evangelical" school, he is too much at home with the Divine economy; knows too well how the same thing appears from the finite and the infinite point of view; can tell too surely how a mixed nature, both divine and human, would feel on looking from both ends at once; and altogether goes with too close a search to the "secret place of the Most High." Not that he speaks unworthily on these high themes; we have nothing truer to suggest, except more silence. But we must confess that when a teacher lays down the conditions of divine possibility, expatiates psychologically on the sentiments of the Father and the Son, and seems as though he had been allowed a peep into the autobiography of God, we shrink from the sharp outlines, and feel that we shall believe more if we are shown less. With so many soundings taken, and so many channels buoyed, the sense of the shoreless sea is gone, and we find only a port of traffic, with coast-lights instead of stars. The temptation to this theological map-making has always proved peculiarly strong among the disciples of Geneva: and the reason is to be found in the very nature of the problem they have attempted to resolve. Religion has two foci to determine,—the divine nature and the human. Athanasius and the Greek influence fixed the doctrine of the Godhead: Augustine and the Latin Church defined the spiritual state of man. The one, it has been said, produced a theology; the other, an anthropology. In the construction of the former, it is obvious that the appeal could be made only to positive authority, whether of Scripture or the Church. On the Nicene question no one could pretend to have personal insight or scientific data: it must be decided by arbitrary vote on impressions of testimony. But for establishing a doctrine of humanity, the living resources of consciousness and experience were present with perpetual witness; every proposition advanced could be confronted with its corresponding reality: the disciple could not help carrying the dogma inward to the test of his self-knowledge. The scheme of the Trinity partook of the nature of a Gnosis, which dwelt apart from the stir of phenomena, and, having once set and crystallized, could only be hung up for preservation. The dogmas of human depravity and helplessness partook of the nature of a Science, coming in contact with the facts of life and character at every point. Moral experience had something to say to them: and unless they could keep good terms with it, they could not hope to hold their ground. Hence the Augustinian divines have been constrained to seek a philosophy of religion, and to collate the text of their Scriptural system with the running paraphrase of actual life. No writers have contributed so much to lay bare the inmost springs of human action and emotion; have tracked with so much subtilty the windings of guilty self-deception, or so found the secret sorrow that lies at the core of every unconsecrated joy. If we must concede to the Roman Catholic casuists and the problems of the confessional the merit of creating an ethical Art embodied in systems of rules, we owe to the deeper Evangelical spirit, whether in its action or its reaction, the ground-lines of an ethical Philosophy;—or, if you deny that such a thing as yet exists, at least the true idea and undying quest of it. The disciples of Augustine, belonging to an anthropological school, have been naturally distinguished by a reflective and psychologic habit.
If it was the function of the Greek period to settle the doctrine of God, and of its Latin successor to define the nature of man, it was the aim of the Reformation, leaving these two extremes undisturbed, to find the way of mediation between them. So long as the great sacerdotal Church, living continuator of Christ's presence, was intrusted with the business, private Christians wanted no theory on the subject; all nice questions went into the ecclesiastical closet and disappeared. But as soon as ever the hierarchy fell out of this position, there was an immense void left to be filled. On the one hand, Infinite Holiness, quite alienated; on the other, Human Pravity, quite helpless: how was any approximation to be rendered conceivable? True, the great original Mediation on Calvary, which the papal priesthood pretended to prolong, remained; for it was fixed in history. But it lay a great way off, a fact in the old past; and its intervention was required to-day by Melancthon, and Carlstadt, and a whole generation quite remote from it. How was its power to be fetched into the present? how applied to men walking about in Wittenberg or Zürich? This was the problem which flew open by the cancelling of the Romish credentials: and the various answers to it constitute the body of Protestant theology. In one point they all agree, that, to replace the priestly media that are thrust out, Personal Faith is the element that must be brought in. In what way this subjective state of the individual mind draws or appropriates the efficacy of the Incarnation; in what order the redeeming process runs among the three given terms,—the alienated Father, the mediating Son, the believing disciple; whether any part of the process is moral and real, or all is legal and virtual;—these are questions which the Reformation has found it easier to open than to close. But answer them as you will, they entangle your thoughts in the mutual relations and sentiments of three persons; and cannot be discussed without establishing some principles of moral psychology, as the common grounds of intercommunion between minds finite and infinite, and dealing with hypothetical problems of divine as well as human casuistry. Hence the inevitable tendency of the doctrine of Mediation to venture on a natural history of the Divine Mind,—to construct a drama of Providence and Grace, with plot too artfully wrought for the free hand of Heaven, and traits too specific and minute for reverent contemplation.
It is deeply instructive to observe the pulsation of religious thought in men. Revealed religion is ever passing into natural, and natural returning to re-interpret the revealed. We can almost see the steps by which sacred history was converted into dogma; while dogma, assumed in turn as the starting-point, is ever producing new readings of the history. This world may be regarded as a human theatre, where the Wills of men perform the parts; or as the stage of Divine agency, using the visible actors as the executants of an invisible thought. Its vicissitudes, presented in the former aspect, yield only history; in the latter, give rise to doctrine. Noticed by Tacitus, the life of Christ is a provincial incident of Tiberius's reign, and his death a judicial act of Pontius Pilate's government. In the three first Gospels and the book of Acts, the crucifixion is still the act of wicked or misguided men, inflicted on an expostulating victim; not, however, without being foreseen as the appointed precursor of a resurrection. The event is thus in the main simply historical; but with a divine comment which gives it an incipient theological significance. It appears under another aspect in the Gospel of John; there, Christ not only foresaw, but determined his own death: his life "no man taketh it from him," but he "lays it down of himself"; he is not merely the submissive medium, but the spontaneous co-agent of a Divine intent. Finally, in St. Paul,—to whom the person and ministry of Christ were unfamiliar, who, as a disciple of his heavenly life, looked back upon them from a higher point,—the historical aspect almost wholly disappears in the ideal; and the cross becomes the Gospel, the wisdom of God and the power of God, the self-sacrifice of the Son the reconciling way to the Father, the very focus and symbol of all the mystery and mercy comprised in humanity. The movement of thought through these successive stages is obvious. An event is at first accepted as it arises. But in proportion as its concrete impression retires, the need becomes more urgent to find its function: instinctive search is made for all those elements, accessories, and effects of it, which promise to bring out its meaning and idea, until at last its doctrine absorbs itself, and enters the human mind as a permanent factor of positive religion. It is thus that the great antitheses, of Law and Gospel, of the Natural and the Spiritual man, of dead Works and living Faith, of self-seeking enmity and self-surrendering reconciliation with God, have settled upon the consciousness of Christendom, and grown into the very substance of its experience. They have become part of its natural religion. But in this character they may, conversely, be taken as the initiative of a new version of the history whence they sprung. They could not be born into unmixed and formed existence at once; but, like all new affections, must feel their way out of an early indeterminate state, into clear self-apprehension and settled purity. The testimony of the Christian conscience needs time to become articulate and collected. The shadow of human guilt may lie so dark upon the mind, the dawn of the divine holiness may so dazzle the inward vision, that blindness in part may linger for a while; and the eye, in very opening to Christ's healing touch, may fail to see. Once accustomed to the new light of life, men are no longer occupied with it alone, but find in it a medium for truer discernment of objects around. The special sentiments awakened by the Gospel test themselves afresh, like any other theory, by being fully lived out, and tried as experiments upon the soul. The type of character,—the edition of human nature,—in which they take embodiment, becomes a distinct object of critical appreciation; and while all its deep expressive traits speak for the inner truth whence they are moulded, every mixture of disharmony or defect calls for some revision of idea. In the thirsty spiritual state to which men were reduced on the eve of the Reformation, they drank up with intense eagerness the most turbid supplies of evangelical doctrine. With purer health and finer perception they become aware that not all was water of life; and that coarse notions of the nature of justice, the conditions of mercy, and the measurement of sin, were intermixed and must become mere sediment. Cleared of these, the theory is taken back to the facts of revelation, and so washed through them, that they may also emerge as from a sprinkling of regeneration. Through such re-baptism does our author, furnished with a purified conception of "atonement," pass the history of Christ.
In looking for the whereabouts of the atonement, we are guided, as in search for the pole-star, by two pointers whose indications we are to follow. Its function was double,—to cancel a guilty past, to make a holy future: and it must be of such a nature as to disappoint neither of these conditions. In determining its form, the great anxiety of theologians hitherto has been to fit it for its retrospective action, and disembarrass the problem of salvation of the burden of accumulated sin. It is Mr. Campbell's distinction that he lays the superior stress on its prospective action, and requires that it shall positively heal the sickness of our nature, and evolve thence a real and living righteousness. God's moral perfectness could be satisfied with nothing less. If, indeed, He looked on our guilt merely as an obstacle to our "salvation," and desired to remove it as a hinderance out of the way,—if He rather sought a pretext for making us happy than a provision for drawing us to goodness,—then the work of Christ might be so devised as simply to tear out the defiled page of the past, and register an infinite credit not our own, without inherent care for ulterior personal holiness. But were it so, the divine love would amount only to an unrighteous desire for our happiness, and the divine righteousness to an unloving repulsion from our sin. Such spurious analysis corresponds with no reality; and in the truth of things there can be no heavenly affection that is not holy, nor any holiness that is not affectionate.
"While in reference to the not uncommon way of regarding this subject which represents righteousness and holiness as opposed to the sinner's salvation, and mercy and love as on his side, I freely concede that all the Divine attributes were, in one view, against the sinner, in that they called for the due expression of God's wrath against sin in the history of redemption: I believe, on the other hand, that the justice, the righteousness, the holiness of God, have an aspect according to which they, as well as his mercy, appear as intercessors for man, and crave his salvation. Justice may be contemplated as according to sin its due; and there is in righteousness, as we are conscious to it, what testifies that sin should be miserable. But justice, looking at the sinner not simply as the fit subject of punishment, but as existing in a moral condition of unrighteousness, and so its own opposite, must desire that the sinner should cease to be in that condition; should cease to be unrighteous, should become righteous: righteousness in God craving for righteousness in man, with a craving which the realization of righteousness in man alone can satisfy. So also of holiness. In one view it repels the sinner, and would banish him to outer darkness, because of its repugnance to sin. In another, it is pained by the continued existence of sin and unholiness, and must desire that the sinner should cease to be sinful. So that the sinner, conceived of as awakening to the consciousness of his own evil state, and saying to himself, 'By sin I have destroyed myself. Is there yet hope for me in God?'—should hear an encouraging answer, not only from the love and mercy of God, but also from his very righteousness and holiness. We must not forget, in considering the response that is in conscience to the charge of sin and guilt, that, though the fears which accompany that response are partly the effect of a dawning of light, they also in part arise from remaining darkness. He who is able to interpret the voice of God within him truly, and with full spiritual intelligence will be found saying, not only, 'There is to me cause for fear in the righteousness and holiness of God,' but also, 'There is room for hope for me in the Divine righteousness and holiness.' And when gathering consolation from the meditation of the name of the Lord, that consolation will be not only, 'Surely the Divine mercy desires to see me happy rather than miserable,' but also, 'Surely the Divine righteousness desires to see me righteous,—the Divine holiness desires to see me holy,—my continuing unrighteous and unholy is as grieving to God's righteousness and holiness as my misery through sin is to his pity and love.' 'Good and righteous is the Lord, therefore will he teach sinners the way which they should choose.' 'A just God and a Saviour'; not as the harmony of a seeming opposition, but 'a Saviour, because a just God.'"—p. 29.
From this justly-conceived passage the characteristics of Mr. Campbell's theory may already be divined. He sets his faith on a concrete, living, indivisible God, whom you can never understand by laying out His abstract attributes one by one, with their separate requirements, and then putting them together again to compute the resultant. He insists on the absolute dominance of a moral and spiritual idea throughout the revealed economy: of this nature is the evil to be met,—sin and estrangement; of this nature is the good to be reached,—righteousness and reconciliation; and only of this nature can be the mediation which effects the change; related upward to the Father and downward to men, in a way accordant with the laws of conscience, and intelligible by its self-light. He craves, therefore, a natural juncture, a real causal nexus, between the several parts of the process, to the exclusion of all forensic fictions and arbitrary scene-shifting and sovereign tours-de-force. In short, he will have no tricks passed off, no quasi-transformations upon the conscience; he feels the moral world to be above the range of mere miracle; any change in it irreducible to its solemn laws would ipso facto fall out of it and become a mere dynamical surprise. Of physical miracle our author avails himself to the full amount; the incarnation of the Son of God being, with him, as with others, the central fact and essential medium of Christian redemption. But the august power thus supernaturally set up—the Person at once divine and human—works out his great problem naturally, without requiring the suspension of one rule of right, or holding any magical dealings with the character of God or man. His problem, therefore, is to show how the life and death of Christ—considered as God in humanity—were fitted, and alone fitted, to blot out the sins of the world before God, and to introduce among men a new state of real righteousness and eternal life.
The common Evangelical scheme of redemption so far affects to be deduced from certain general principles, and to render the way of redemption conceivable, that it is stigmatized as rationalistic by Catholics and Anglicans. It is so, however, only in the sense of hanging well together, and serving the purpose of a theological Mnemonic to those who want a religion ready more than deep. In the higher sense, of occupying any natural ground of reason, it does not earn its reproach. The propositions which it lays down, as to the inability of a holy nature to forgive unless circuitously and with compensation, and as to the commutability of either penal liabilities or moral attributes, are without any support from our primary sentiments of right and wrong, and could be carried out by no sane man in the conduct of life. The doctrine is taught in two principal forms;—the earlier and more exact scheme of "Satisfaction," elaborated by Anselm of Canterbury, and perfected by Owen and Edwards; and the modern theory of "Public Justice," maintained in the writings of Dr. Pye Smith and Dr. Payne, and prevailing wherever the first decadence from the old Calvinism is going on. The first of these prepares its ground by laying down these principles as fundamental;—that the connection between sin and suffering is inviolably secured on the veracity of God; that "when we have done all, we are unprofitable servants," and have only rendered our strict due; that, far from "doing all," we have done and can do nothing, except accumulate guilt, which, measure it as you will,—by the majesty of the authority defied, or the multitude of the offenders and their sins,—is practically of infinite amount. Here, then, is a case of utter despair: infinite debt; nothing to pay; remission impossible; punishment eternal; death unattainable. But we are brought into the labyrinth on one side, to emerge from it on the other. While men can only multiply demerit, there are natures conceivable to which merit is possible. A Divine Person, laying aside a blessedness inherently his, and assuming sorrow not his own, and doing this out of a pure love, fulfils the conditions; and when the Son takes on him our humanity, the act, carried out unto the end, has a merit in it which in amount is a full set-off against the guilt of men. Still, this only leaves us with two opposite funds—of infinite good desert and infinite ill desert—which sit apart and unrelated. In due course, the one ought to have a boundless reward, the other a boundless punishment. But to render his affluence available for our debt, the Son consummates his self-sacrifice, substitutes himself for us as the object of retribution, and dies once for all,—one infinite death for many finite hereafters of woe. The Father's justice is satisfied; the allotment of suffering to sin has been accurately observed; His desire to pardon is released from its restraint. Having dealt with the person of the Son as if it were mankind, He may deal with mankind as if they were the Son, and look upon them as clothed with a perfect obedience.