The New Theology

by R. J. Campbell

+Antiquity of the essential truth.+—From what has now been said it will, I hope, be clear that the roots of the Christian doctrine of Atonement lie far back in history, especially Semitic history mediated through the Old Testament, and that its fundamental truth is one with which the world can never dispense; it is both simple and sublime. Nothing worth doing in human history has ever been done apart from it or ever will be. It is no paradox to say that even a morally earnest agnostic believes in the Atonement; at any rate he believes in the all-essential truth without which there would never have been such a thing as a doctrine of Atonement.

+No consistent theory in the New Testament.+—But now we come to the consideration of this truth as it has passed over into Christianity. I do not propose to give an accurate and exhaustive analysis of the principal things that have been said about it, from the writings of St. Paul downwards; that would only be wearisome to my readers and lead to no particular result. But if I have succeeded in making clear the psychological necessity for the existence of the idea of Atonement, it will serve us as a guiding principle when we come to consider it in relation to the sacrifice of Jesus. Many exegetes have undertaken to show that the various New Testament writers held one and the same theory of the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of sins; never was a task more hopeless. The Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine theories, and that of the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, are not mutually consistent, and Paul is not always consistent with himself. The principal thing they have in common is their belief that the death of Jesus was of vital efficacy in the doing away of sin. The symbolism in which they set forth this truth is borrowed mainly from the Old Testament, and we have already seen what underlay that symbolism even in its earliest use. Old Testament language about sacrifice supplies the mental dialect of the New, and now that we have the key to it we need neither be puzzled nor misled by it. Beneath all that the New Testament writers have to say about the death of Jesus there is the same grand old spiritual truth of Atonement which makes religion possible. Before we resume our examination of the connection between the death of Jesus and the doing away of sin, let us look for a moment at what post-apostolic thought has had to say about it.

+The Fathers.+—From the beginning of the second century onwards the Fathers of the church and their theological successors attempted a variety of explanations of the way in which the death of Jesus achieved potentially the redemption of mankind. It is not easy to say just when one period of Christian thought closes and another begins; but, broadly speaking, we can for convenience classify them into the period of the Fathers, the mediaeval period, the Reformation and afterwards up to the eighteenth century, and the period of modern thought. The Fathers may be divided into two groups, the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene writers, and also into the Greek and Latin Fathers. But as I am not writing for theological students, I will not attempt any further analysis of the various patristic schools. Those who wrote previous to 325 A.D. belong to the ante-Nicene group; those who wrote after that date, to the post-Nicene group. The ante-Nicene writers, generally speaking, avoid giving any theory of the atonement at all; but two of their greatest thinkers, Origen and Irenaeus, held that mankind had fallen under the dominion of Satan, and that Jesus by His sufferings paid a ransom to Satan in order that we might be freed from his power. Post-Nicene Fathers for the most part adopted this view without attempting to justify it. Amongst their statements we find the ideas that the Atonement was a ransom to Satan and also a sacrifice to God, but they offer no explanation of the necessity of either. Later on Augustine anticipated subsequent Christian thought by maintaining that the atoning work of Jesus was part of an eternal purpose.

+Anselm and after.+—The scholasticism of the Middle Ages finds its first important expression in the illustrious Anselm, an acute thinker and a beautiful soul. Anselm rejected the idea of a ransom to Satan, declaring that Satan had no rights over humanity; in place of this notion he put forward the theory that Jesus made to God an infinite satisfaction for an infinite debt. According to this theory the majesty of God had suffered indignity because of human sin, and yet man was unable by himself to offer an adequate satisfaction for the offence. Hence the eternal Son of God became man in order that He might offer the only satisfaction that could be considered adequate. This theory did not go unchallenged. Abelard, for example, asked the very reasonable question how the guilt of mankind could be atoned for by the greater guilt of those who put Jesus to death. Abelard's famous opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, also repudiated Anselm's main contention and fell back upon the theory of a satisfaction to Satan.

+Reformation theories.+—At the time of the Reformation the question of the Atonement formed the subject of considerable controversy, and, on the whole, the Reformers were less reasonable than the Catholics, as is the case to some extent even to-day. The Roman Catholic doctrine of Atonement is much nearer to the truth than conventional Protestant statements about the "finished work" and so on. One considerable section of sixteenth-century Protestantism held and taught the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature, and insisted on the idea that Jesus bore the actual penal sufferings of sinners. Calvinists held that these sufferings had value for the elect only. Against these views Socinianism arose as a protest, but tended to reduce the Passion of Jesus to a sort of drama enacted by God in the presence of humanity in order to excite men's contrition and win their love.

+The modern lack of a theory.+—Modern evangelical thought has done very little with all these theories except to make them impossible; it has no consistent and reasonable explanation to put in their place. The popular kind of evangelical phraseology is that which continues to represent Jesus as having borne the punishment due to human sin; salvation is spoken of as though it meant deliverance from the post-mortem consequences of misdoing.

+More about sin.+—In all these theories it is evident that the death of Jesus is closely connected with the forgiveness of sin and that the forgiveness of sin is the vital element in the Atonement. In order to understand the truth about this let us return to what has already been said on the subject of sin and pursue it a little farther. I have already pointed out that sin is selfishness pure and simple, and that that definition will cover all its manifestations. There is no sin that is not selfishness, there is no selfishness that is not sin. All possible activities of the soul are between selfishness on the one hand and love on the other. If people would only accept this simple explanation of a great subject, it would get rid of most of the confusion of thought that exists in regard to it. The life of love is the life lived for impersonal ends; the sinful life is the life lived for self alone. The life of love is the life which does the best with the self for the sake of the whole; the sinful life is the life which is lived for the self at the expense of the whole. The desire for gratification at some one else's cost, or at the cost of the common life, is the root principle of sin. Sin against God is simply an offence against the common life; it is attempting to draw away from instead of ministering to the common good. The sinful man thinks it will pay him to be selfish; his impulse is to suppose that he can gain more happiness, can drink more deeply of the cup of life, by doing it at the expense of other people. We all do it more or less, and yet the world might have learned by this time that selfishness does not pay; the thoroughly selfish man is an unhappy man, for he has not drawn upon the source of abiding joy. Like love, selfishness is a guest for life, but whereas love obtains more abundant life by freely giving itself, sin loses hold on life by trying to grab and keep it. Every man is seeking life and seeking it in one or other of these opposite ways; he is either fulfilling the self by serving the whole, or he is trying to feed the self by robbing the whole. But life is God, and there is no life which is not God. God is the life all-abundant, the life infinite and eternal, the life that never grows old, the life that is joy. Every man, consciously or subconsciously, wants that life; he is wanting it all the time. Why does the man of business spend so many hours in his office in the effort to make money? It is because money represents power, power that can purchase "more life and fuller." Probably he does not want it all for himself; he works for love of his family or love of the community, and his desire to serve them makes his work gladder, so that already he has more abundant life than he would otherwise possess. Analyse human action, no matter what, and it will be seen to point in one or other of these two directions, self-ward or all-ward. If the former, it will shrivel the soul, it makes for death; if the latter, it will expand the soul, it makes for life. This is a spiritual law which knows no exception; in the long run the loving deed brings larger life and joy, the selfish deed brings pain and darkness. "Be not deceived, God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap eternal life."

It is evident from the foregoing that even the sinful life is a quest for God, although it does not know itself to be such, for in seeking life saint and sinner alike are seeking God, the all-embracing life. And the sinner must learn that to seek life selfishly is to lose it; to seek it unselfishly is both to gain and to give it. The good man and the bad man are seeking the same thing in opposite ways.

During the recent New Theology controversy the editor of the British Weekly, in the course of an attack upon my teaching, printed a number of extracts from my sermons in order to convince his readers that that teaching was objectionable and false. In every case the extract was carefully removed from its context and therefore conveyed quite a misleading impression to the mind of the reader. One of these extracts was from a sermon on "More Abundant Life," preached in the City Temple on Sunday morning, March 18, 1906. As this extract has been widely circulated, perhaps I may be pardoned for giving it here along with the context. All that the editor chose to print was a part of the paragraph in which sin was described as a quest for God, and yet he must have known perfectly well that to take that paragraph out of its setting was to do an injustice both to the preacher and to the subject.

Observe the sharp antithesis between the "thief or the robber" on the one hand, and the "Good Shepherd" on the other. These two stand for two opposing tendencies that have run through all nature and all human life. All nature through, all history through, two conflicting tendencies have been discernible. These are ever at war, and they ever will be until the whole world has been subdued to Christ, and is filled with the fulness of the life of God. These two tendencies we may describe as the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The words are not very satisfactory because the deathward tendency masquerades as the lifeward tendency, and the lifeward tendency, before fruition, looks like the deathward one. In nature, as Romans viii. tells us, "We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the expense of other organisms. Yet at a certain stage in evolution this principle of the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest gives way to a counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as possible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the shepherd tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle to survive to the struggle for the life of others. I do not pause at the moment to account for these two antithetic tendencies, there they are; all through the history of this sad old world of ours these two tendencies have been in sharp conflict. Both are cosmic, both probably resolvable in that higher unity which is too mysterious for us to penetrate, but to our minds they are in flagrant opposition to each other. The thief cometh to steal and to kill and to destroy; mother-love, Christ-love, that it may give life, and that more abundantly.