A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

A fundamental conception of God lay at the basis of the whole Scotist theology. God, it maintained, could best be defined as Dominium Absolutum; man as set over against God they described as an individual free will. If God be conceived as simply Dominium Absolutum, we can never affirm that God must act in any given way; we may not even say that He is bound to act according to moral considerations. He is high above all considerations of any kind. He does not will to act in any way because it is right; and action is right because God wills to act in that way. There can be neither metaphysical nor moral necessity in any of God’s actions or purposes. This Scotist idea, that God is the absolutely arbitrary one, is expressed in the strongest language in the Racovian Catechism. “It belongs to the nature of God that He has the right and supreme power to decree whatsoever He wills concerning all things and concerning us, even in those matters with which no other power has to do; for example, He can give laws, and appoint rewards and penalties according to His own judgment, to our thoughts, hidden as these may be in the innermost recesses of our hearts.”

If this thought, that God is simply Dominium Absolutum, be applied to explain the nature and meaning of the work of Christ, of the Atonement, it follows at once that there can be no real necessity for that work; for all necessity, metaphysical or moral, is derogatory to the Dominium Absolutum, which is God. If the Atonement has merit in it, that is only because God has announced that He means to accept the work of Christ as meritorious, and that He will therefore free men from the burden of sin on account of what Christ, the Saviour, has done. It is the announced acceptation of God which makes the work of Christ meritorious. A meritorious work has nothing in its nature which makes it so. To be meritorious simply means that the work so described will be followed by God’s doing something in return for its being done, and this only because God has made this announcement. God could have freed men from the guilt and punishment due for sin without the work of Christ; He could have appointed a human mediator if He had so willed it; He might have pardoned and accepted man as righteous in His sight without any mediator at all. He could have simply pardoned man without anything coming between His act of pardon and man’s sin. This being the case, the Scotist theologians argued that it might seem that the work of Christ, called the Atonement, was entirely superfluous; it is, indeed, superfluous as far as reason is concerned; it can never be justified on rational grounds. But, according to the dogmatic tradition of the Church, confirmed by the circle of the Sacraments, God has selected this mode of getting rid of the sin and guilt of man. He has announced that He will accept this work of Christ, Atonement, and therefore the Scotist theologians declared the Atonement must be believed in and seen to be the divinely appointed way of salvation. Erasmus satirised the long arguments and hypotheses of the Scotist theologians when he enumerated among the questions which were highly interesting to them: “Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? How could a gourd have preached, done miracles, hung on the Cross?”[640]

It is manifest that this idea of Dominium Absolutum is simply the conception of the extremest individualism applied to God instead of being used to describe man. If we treat it anthropomorphically, it comes to this, that the relation of God to man is that of an infinite Individual Will set over against a number of finite individual wills. If this view be taken of the relations between God and man, then God can never be thought of as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth, but only as a private individual face to face with other individuals; and the relations between God and man must be discussed from the standpoint of private and not of public law. When wrong-doing is regarded under the scheme of public law, the ruler can never treat it as an injury done to himself, and which he can forgive because he is of a kindly nature; he must consider it an offence against the whole community of which he is the public guardian. On the other hand, when offences are considered under a scheme of private law, they are simply wrongs done to a private person who, as an individual, may forgive what is merely a debt due to himself. In such a case the wrong-doer may be forgiven without infringing any general moral principle.

The Socinians, following the mediæval Scotist theologians, invariably applied the principles of private law to the relations between God and man. God, the Dominium Absolutum, the Supreme Arbitrary Will, was never regarded as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth where subjects and rulers are constrained by the same moral laws. Sins are simply private debts due by the individual finite wills to the One Infinite Will. From such premises the Scotists deduced the conclusion that the Atonement was unnecessary; there they stopped; they could not say that there was no such thing as Atonement, for the dogmatic tradition of the Church prevented them. The Socinians had thrown overboard the thought of a dogmatic tradition which had to be respected even when it appeared to be irrational. If the Atonement was not necessary, that meant to them that it did not exist; they simply carried out the theological premises of the Scotist-Pelagian mediæval theologians to their legitimate consequences.

In these three important conceptions—faith, Scripture, the nature of God, involving the character of His relations to man—the Socinians belong to a mediæval school of thought, and have no sympathy whatever with the general principles which inspired Reformation theological thinking.

But the Socinians were not exclusively mediæval; they owed much to the Renaissance. This appears in a very marked manner in the way in which they conceived the very important religious conception of the Church. It is a characteristic of Socinian theology, that the individual believer is considered without much, if any, reference to the Church or community of the saved. This separates the Socinians not only from mediæval Christians, but from all who belonged to the great Protestant Evangelical movement.

The mediæval Church always regarded itself, and taught men to look to it, as a religious community which came logically and really before the individual believer. It presented itself to men as a great society founded on a dogmatic tradition, possessing the Sacraments, and governed by an officially holy caste. The pious layman of the Middle Ages found himself within it as he might have done within one of its great cathedrals. The dogmatic tradition did not trouble him much, nor did the worldliness and insincerity often manifested by its official guardians. What they required of him was implicit faith, which really meant a decorous external obedience. That once rendered, he was comparatively free to worship within what was for him a great house of prayer. The hymns, the prayers, many of the sermons of the mediæval Church, make us feel that the Institution was for the mediæval Christian the visible symbol of a wide purpose of God, which embraced his individual life and guaranteed a repose which he could use in resting on the promises of God. The records of mediæval piety continually show us that the Church was etherealised into an assured and historical fellowship of believers into which the individual entered, and within which he found the assuring sense of fellowship. He left all else to the professional guardians of this ecclesiastical edifice. Probably such are the unspoken thoughts of thousands of devout men and women in the Roman and Greek communions to-day. They value the Church because it represents to them in a visible and historical way a fellowship with Christ and His saints which is the result of His redeeming work.

This thought is as deeply rooted in Reformation as in mediæval piety. The Reformers felt compelled to protest against the political form which the mediæval Church had assumed. They conceived that to be a degradation from its ideal. They saw the manifold abuses which the degradation had given rise to. But they always regarded visible Christendom as a religious community called into being by the work of Christ. They had always before them the thought of the Church of Christ as the fellowship which logically and really comes before the individual believer, the society into which the believer is brought; and this conception stood with them in close and reciprocal connection with the thought that Jesus, by His work of Atonement, had reconciled men with God, had founded the Church on that work of His, and, within it had opened for sinners the way to God. They protested against the political form which the Church had assumed; they never ceased to cling to the thought of the Catholic Church Visible which is founded on the redeeming work of Christ, and within which man finds the way of salvation. They described this Church in all their creeds and testimonies; they gave the marks which characterised it and manifested its divine origin; the thought was an essential part of their theology.

The Socinians never felt the need of any such conception. Jesus was for them only the teacher of a superior kind of morality detailed in the commands and promises of God; they looked to Him for that guidance and impulse towards a moral self-culture which each man can appropriate for himself without first coming into a society which is the fellowship of the redeemed. Had they ever felt the burden of sin as the Reformers felt it, had they ever yearned for such a fellowship with Christ as whole-hearted personal trust gives, or even for such as comes in the sense of bodily contact in the Sacrament, had they ever felt the craving to get in touch with their Lord somehow or anyhow, they would never have been able to do without this conception of a Church Catholic of some kind or other. They never seemed to feel the need of it. The Racovian Catechism was compelled to make some reference to the kingly and priestly offices of Christ. It owed so much to the New Testament. Its perfunctory sentences show that our Lord was for the Socinians simply a Prophet sent from God to proclaim a superior kind of morality. His highest function was to communicate knowledge to men, and perhaps to teach them by example how to make use of it. They had no conception that Jesus came to do something for His people, and that what He did was much more valuable than what He said, however precious that might be. They were content to become His scholars, the scholars of a teacher sent from God, and to become members of His school, where His opinions were known and could be learned. They had no idea that they needed to be saved in the deeper sense of that word. They have no need, therefore, for the conception of the Church; what they did need and what they have is the thought of a school of opinions to which they could belong.[641]