The Doctrine of the Atonement, as taught by the Apostles; or, the Sayings of the Apostles Energetically Expounded. With Historical Appendix. By Rev. George Smeaton, D.D. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
We cannot too highly commend the conception and general execution of this really great theological work. Professor Smeaton may claim the honour of having inaugurated, at any rate in Scotland, a novum organum of theology. In relation to passing phases of thought in Christendom, he opposes the severely theological character of his work to 'a sort of spiritual religious or mystic piety, whose watchword is spiritual life, divine love, and moral redemption, by a great teacher and ideal man, and absolute forgiveness, as contrasted with everything forensic.' In relation to ordinary Scottish methods of treating theological doctrines, he proposes to establish the doctrine of the Atonement by a severely inductive method. In his former volume he submitted to an exegetical examination the sayings of our Lord in relation thereto; in the present volume he submits to a similar examination the sayings of the apostles. In this he has had predecessors in Germany and Holland—as for example, in the works of Schmid and Van Oosterzee, of which translations have been recently published. But in British theology he has had no predecessor, so far as we remember, in such treatment of the doctrine of Atonement. In his great work on the 'Scripture Testimony to the Messiah,' Dr. Pye-Smith adopted it in relation to our Lord's Divinity. Obviously it is the only satisfactory method. A priori theories constructed for systems of theology can never satisfy independent inquirers concerning a doctrine which, while it appeals to the principles and intuitions of our moral nature, yet as to its facts is a matter of pure revelation. The exegetical method which Professor Smeaton adopts, as opposed to the systematic theology method usually adopted, is clearly the true one.
The question, therefore, is, how far has Professor Smeaton been successful in realizing his method, and what is his exegetical ability? First, we regret that, with all its disadvantages of repetitions and lack of order, he rejected the plan of 'discussing the passages as they lie in situ in the several books,' and adopted the plan of 'digesting them under a variety of topics.' Not only does a strictly inductive method demand the former plan, but very important meanings depend upon the development of a strict chronological order. Professor Smeaton even accepts the arrangement of the Epistles in the English Testament. Next, in our notice of Professor Smeaton's former volume, we were compelled to say that he brought to our Lord's sayings much preconceived theology—that he had not thrown off the heavy burden of the Assembly's 'Confession of Faith,'and that thus his method was seriously vitiated. From this the strictly chronological method would have helped to keep him. In this volume he has perhaps been more successful, but the indications, not to say the bias, of his school of theological thought, are everywhere cognizable, both in phrase and in exegesis—e.g., the term 'surety for others' as applied to our Lord; the statement, 'according to the will of Him that sent Him, He comprehended in himself a body, or a vast multitude;' with the corresponding interpretations of 1 John ii.2. The 'whole world,' according to Professor Smeaton, is 'believers out of every tribe and nation,' 'The redeemed of every period, place, and people.' This bias, too, prompts the interpretation of 1 John i.7 in an objective rather than a subjective sense. Altogether, the subjective conditions of the Atonement are unduly disparaged, although they are not only recognised in Scripture, but are the essential complement of the objective conditions. Throughout, the theological and scholastic predominate over the exegetical and inductive. Professor Smeaton is a very accomplished scholar, and, notwithstanding the qualifications we have mentioned, a vigorous and independent thinker. His work would have been better had its method been more rigidly adhered to, but it is a great and noble work—a credit to British Biblical scholarship, and a great service to doctrinal theology.
An Examination of Canon Liddon's Bampton Lectures in the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. By A Clergyman of the Church of England. Trübner and Co. 1871.
This writer is anxious to impale, not only Canon Liddon, but all who hold substantially the Catholic doctrine of the Person of our Lord Jesus, on one or other horn of the following dilemma:—Either Pure Rationalism is our adequate guide, or the Catholic Church is the true divine informant of man. 'Repudiate,' he virtually says, 'orthodox doctrine, or admit that the Church is the depository and organ of Divine revelation.' Protestant orthodoxy confessing Catholic exposition of Holy Scripture, is, to our author's mind, inconsistent in method and fundamentally insecure. He professes not to debate 'the truth or falsehood of a doctrine, but the security or insecurity of a foundation on which a minority of Christians have attempted to erect that doctrine.' In every variety of phrase our author charges upon Protestant interpreters of Holy Scripture, and on Mr. Liddon, as the principal illustration of the painful phenomenon, the prepossession and bias which blunt their exegetical tact; the traditionary and apparently invincible blindness which prevents their understanding the contents of the Bible; and the prejudice which so obfuscates their spiritual perceptions that they continually wrest the true significance of God's Word written, into irrational agreement with the creeds of the Church. Orthodox believers 'never read the other side.' The mastery of standard Unitarian books is no part of clerical preparation in the Church of England, and orthodox Nonconformist ministers are 'not genuinely and honestly acquainted with the adversary at all.' The moral results of Protestant orthodoxy are, in this writer's opinion, deplorable. Where anything has been effected by it, according to our anonymous author, it has not been 'in virtue of the dogma that God is three Persons rather than one Father, but in virtue of truths which are the property of Theism as much as of Ecclesiasticism.' We think he is just when he urges that 'no man or society of men, while abjuring the Church's authoritative, interpreting, and revealing functions, is legitimately empowered to bind on the conscience doctrines which have not reasonable evidence and do not admit of reasonable detailed exhibition.' He is extremely vigorous, if not bitter, in his denunciation of those Protestant divines who, according to him, already surcharged with Catholic or ecclesiastical traditions, pretend to find on Protestant principles the doctrines they know and love in the Holy Scriptures. Repeated examinations of the Bampton lecture of Dr. Liddon have convinced him that the lecturer's method is vicious and unsound, and that no 'unbiased individual judgment, rationally exercised, can deduce from the Bible the doctrines of Christ's co-equal deity.' The work which follows is a searching attempt to grapple with the Scriptural argument as presented by Mr. Liddon. There is great ingenuity in the method of attack. The author lays hold of the most consummate expression of Mr. Liddon's theology—one on which Trinitarians of different schools might join issue with him, and which can hardly be said to be the explicit doctrine of the Nicene or Athanasian Creed—viz., 'that our Lord's Godhead is exclusively the seat of His personality, and that His manhood is not of itself an individual being.' There are those who may say that in this statement Mr. Liddon somewhat verges on Monophysitism, and therefore on a special theory which is intended to explain what for ever must remain inexplicable, if the two halves of the great synthesis are both to be held with equal tenacity. We are not concerned here with this theory further than to show that the author continually supposes this fundamental principle involved by Mr. Liddon in every reference which Holy Scripture makes to the humanity of our Lord. The leading features of the Catholic doctrine in the matter seem to us to be a repudiation of any theory on the how of the hypostatic union, and a continuous assertion of the veritable humanity as well as the eternal godhead of the Christ. Our author refers to the various and abundant proofs contained in Holy Scripture of the humanity, as if they were, pro tanto, a denial of the vast induction of theology touching the Person of the Lord. He appears to imply that every investigator in this great field of theological inquiry must necessarily go through the entire induction for himself before he is at liberty to see in any particular passage of Scripture anything more than what a rigid grammatical praxis can make out of it. Let us take an analogous case: The doctrine of gravitation (together with the third law of motion) is established on a wide induction of facts, still the realization of the truth of it requires a careful elaboration of the facts in a generalized form, and a certain amount of imagination. The motion of the earth towards the falling rain-drops; or the circumstance that each fly on a window-pane drives the round earth backwards in its upward march, is absolutely inconceivable and incredible taken as a separate, isolated fact of observation; and when the observer goes to the special supposed phenomenon he must take with him pre-suppositions and broad generalizations, which countervail all the evidence of his senses. No one fact of attraction would be enough anywhere in the vast field to determine the law, or even suggest it; the majority of isolated facts taken alone would—nay, still do—suggest a counter theory; and yet, for all that, the theory of universal gravitation may be held dogmatically, and must be brought to interpret an apparently recalcitrant fact without violating any principle of induction. It does not follow, even if the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed be accepted as a true induction of the facts of the Scripture, and a broad and satisfying generalization of the revealed Essence of the Godhead and of the Person of Christ, that those who do so accept it are bound to believe the creed to be the result of supernatural guidance given to the Church; nor is it just or rational in their application of it to see all it involves in every text of Holy Scripture on which its elements are presumed to rest. Our anonymous clergyman is lavish in his terms of abuse, and, though careful to quote Mr. Liddon's own words, he does not hesitate to speak continually of his 'heedless rhetoric and readiness of assumption,' of his 'reckless verbiage and stilted exposition and neglected context,' of his 'rapacious deduction,' and 'unscrupulous eagerness, in the face of probability, to appropriate ambiguous language.' He sings a cuckoo-note of 'pre-supposition' and 'orthodox bias' blinding orthodox eyes, and all the rest of it. It would seem that those who take a diametrically opposite view of the Person of our Lord always 'calmly review the evidence,' and are never moved by any predisposition whatever. Now, nothing has seemed to us more obvious than that this clergyman of the Anglican Church has gone with a thorough Arian, if not Unitarian bias, to the New Testament, and he cannot see there what to the consciousness of millions of honest thinkers is as plain as the sun in the heavens. It would be just as easy for Mr. Liddon to turn round, and with text after text accuse his critic of foregone conclusions, of arrant scepticism, of ignorant sciolism, of colour-blindness.
We think that it is scarcely fair of this anonymous critic to promise to refute the Protestant method of Mr. Liddon in demonstrating the Deity of our Lord, and then to commence by undermining, not simply the authenticity of John's Gospel, but the trustworthiness of the synoptists. If the New Testament is to be blown upon as well as the Protestant principle, let us understand one another, and not waste time in writing our rational vindication of the orthodox doctrine of the Godhead.
It is impossible to go into the details of the criticism of Mr. Liddon in a short notice, we therefore confine ourselves to two more remarks on the principle of the volume. The author seems to think that nothing but Catholic, conciliar orthodoxy can be held to account for the perverse exegesis of Protestant theologians, and their unthinking trust in the revealed dogma of the Divine-humanity and Deity of our Lord. Surely the very fact may be in itself a vindication that, apart altogether from Church authority, and apart from the Bible also, in the history of religious thought and philosophical speculation there are predisposing causes and tendencies which lead up to this great induction. Apart from Christianity altogether, religious men have with surprising frequency believed either in Divine incarnation or in apotheosis, or in both. No wonder, when the religious instinct points so strongly in this direction, that the exegetical faculty may be assisted by it to see what mere grammar may sometimes fail to see.
The speculative view, the induction which this author would justify as the final dictum of Biblical theology, would, after all, go a long way in the direction of the truth. He admits the Christ of the New Testament to be more than man; he cannot deny He is the giver of all spiritual gifts to man, and possesses many other lofty sublime superhuman functions. The difficulty in this whole class of exegesis has been felt for ages, and appeared in the Nicene controversy; it leads to practical tritheism, to a rivalry on the throne of God. If the Biblical theory of the author be accepted, he who is less than God is, practically, the God of the Christian; but this, with the Bible in our hands, is impossible. It is the intense monotheism of the Bible, and of Christ himself, which has driven the Protestant Christian consciousness, as well as the Catholic Church, into the formulization of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. We cannot affect to regret that the arguments and method of Mr. Liddon should have received so searching a criticism. Our author's extra-bilious hatred of rhetoric has betrayed him into unnecessary severity of personal invective, but there is a manly and obvious desire to be fair and honourable in his treatment. It is a war to the knife over the most sacred theme in human thought, and, while we do not attempt to justify all Cannon Liddon's interpretations, or stand by all his philosophy, we believe that he is much nearer to the thought of St. John and St. Paul than his critic.
Select English Works of John Wyclif. Edited from original MSS., by Thomas Arnold, M.A. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. 1869. These volumes were undertaken by the delegates of the University Press, at the earnest instance of the late Canon Shirley, the accomplished editor of the 'Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico' of Thomas Netter, of Walden, one of the series of 'Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages,' issued by the Master of the Rolls. The learned Canon intended to have personally superintended their preparation, and to have prefixed to them an Introduction, in which he would have endeavoured to fix the exact theological position of the writer, in reference both to his own and to later times, besides probably settling, so far as the means at our disposal allow, the chronology and authenticity of the immense mass of writings ascribed to Wyclif—a task for which he was eminently qualified, having devoted the best part of ten years of his life—alas! too short—to the study of the works and age of the English Reformer. The lamented death of Dr. Shirley devolved the duty of preparing these select works for the press on Mr. Arnold, whom he had previously requested to act as his editorial assistant.
Some time before his death, Dr. Shirley had compiled, partly from previously-published catalogues of the writings of Wycliff, such as those of Bale, Leland, Tanner, Lewis, and the late editor of this Review, and partly from other sources, a carefully prepared catalogue of his own, which he issued from the press in 1865, adding to each article critical notices of the evidence on which it was assigned to the Reformer, and intimating in the preface that one of his objects in the publication was to solicit the aid of scholars generally, in making the catalogue complete. What success this intimation met with does not appear. There is but one writing of Wyclif's published in these volumes which is not included in Dr. Shirley's catalogue, the 'Lincolniensis,' vol. iii. 230. Mr. Arnold prints it from a manuscript in the Bodleian, in which it is inserted between two other tractates, both of which appear in this selection, and one of which had previously been published both by Dr. James and Dr. Vaughan, who, as well as Ball, Lewis, and Dr. Shirley, also ascribe the other to the Reformer. It would have been more satisfactory, therefore, if he had given his reasons for including it in his selection, as it is scarcely possible that it had been 'overlooked,' especially by Dr. Vaughan and Dr. Shirley, the inference from which would be that they regarded it as of much too doubtful authenticity to be even noticed; and all the more so, that although he had previously said (vol. i. 3), 'I have no doubt that this, like most of the remaining contents of the manuscript, was written by Wyclif,' in the note which he has prefixed to the tractate (vol. iii. 230), he confesses 'it cannot be denied that it contains nothing which might not equally well have been written by one of his followers, as Herford, or Repyndon, or Aston.'