ART. IV.-(1.) The Vicarious Sacrifice. By HORACE BUSHNELL, D.D. London: Alexander Strahan. 1866.

(2.) The Life and the Light of Men. By JOHN YOUNG, LL.D. London and New York: Alexander Strahan. 1866.

THE ancient limits between the great schools of theological thought seem temporarily effaced, and the dogmatic map of Christendom must be drawn anew. Before the commencement of the present century, nearly all who acknowledged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, maintained that the direct intention of His sufferings and death was to re-adjust the relations of the Divine government to the human race. Only those who affirmed the simple humanity of our Lord rejected altogether the catholic idea of the Atonement. Arianism itself constructed a theory in which the humiliation and dying agonies of the Son of God were represented as, in some sense, satisfying the exigencies of Divine justice and providing a reason for the remission of human sin.

But, during the last fifty or sixty years, there have risen up in Germany and France, in England and America, distinguished theologians who have dissolved what appeared to be the natural and necessary alliance between the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ, and the doctrine that by His death He made a true and proper atonement for the sins of mankind. They adore Him as God manifest in the flesh. If they shrink from accepting the intricate definitions of the Athanasian Creed, it is not because they are disposed to withhold from our Lord any of the prerogatives or glories of Divinity. They even insist that the modern church has degenerated from the faith of the fourth century; and they proclaim the fact of the Incarnation with all the energy and fervour of men who believe it to be their mission to re-assert a forgotten or neglected truth. But they repudiate the interpretation which, from the days of Polycarp to the days of Anselm, and from Anselm's days to our own, the vast majority of Christian theologians have attached to those passages of Holy Scripture which represent the death of Christ as a sacrifice, a ransom, a propitiation, for the sins of men. Their Gospel begins and ends with the song which the angels sang to the shepherds of Bethlehem. They contract their creed within the first fourteen verses of St. John's Gospel.

We propose to discuss in this article the principal objections of this new theological school,-of which Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Young may be taken as among the fairest and ablest representatives, to the orthodox conception of the Atonement; and, in

The "Moral View" an Innovation.

411 doing this, we shall be able both to illustrate and to sustain our own position. If in the course of this discussion Dr. Young's name occurs less frequently than Dr. Bushnell's, it is not because we are unimpressed by the great power and the admirable spirit of the English divine, but because Dr. Bushnell's treatise presents the Moral View' in a form rather more convenient for criticism. The two writers agree in their rejection of the theory of Expiation; and in answering one we answer both.

1. We take objection to the very first sentences of Dr. Bushnell's argument. He thinks it will be conceded that the whole theory of the Atonement is still an open question in the Christian Church, and that after the lapse of more than eighteen centuries of Christian life and controversy, we have just arrived at that point at which some satisfactory solution may be possible. He claims to be no mere innovator-but one who is trying in good faith to make up some defect, more or less consciously felt by everybody, and bring on just that stage of progress in the 'truth which its own past ages of history have been steadily pre'paring and asking for.'* In an historical review of the doctrine which he had prepared, but which he has not published, he believes that he was able to show that no doctrine of the Atone'ment or reconciling work of Christ, has ever yet been developed that can be said to have received the consent of the Christian world.'† In a sense, this is true; but not in a sense that can be of any use to Dr. Bushnell. No doubt the doctrine of the Atonement' has assumed in successive ages of the Church very various forms -some of them grotesque, some of them horribly repulsive. Nor has the Church ever accepted any definition of the doctrine with the unanimity with which it has accepted the Athanasian definition of the Trinity. The theory of the relation of the death of Christ to God's moral government has been entangled in the philosophical and ethical speculations of many different schools of thought, and has never assumed a form to which the consent of hostile churches, and of a long line of theologians, could be secured. But had Dr. Bushnell published the chapter he has suppressed, it would have been evident to his readers that in every theory which has found general acceptance, there has been present the very idea which provokes his antagonism.

The Apostolic Fathers attempted no scientific development of the doctrine: but that they connected the sacrifice of Christ directly with the Divine forgiveness, it is difficult to dispute. The vicarious idea is as distinctly present in their representations of our Lord's death as in the representations of any • Page 1. + Page 2.

Calvinistic divine. They do not teach that Christ suffered simply to make us better, and so to effect our rescue from sin, but that 'He gave His body for our body, His soul for our soul,' and that the remission of sins is by the shedding of [His] blood.' If anything could demonstrate the depth and strength of the convictions of the early Church that the Atonement was not intended merely to exert a sanctifying influence on the human soul, but to accomplish a strictly objective deliverance from the penalties of wrong-doing, it would be the strange fancy that our Lord's death was a price paid to the devil for our release from his power. Had any tendency to the Moral View' prevailed in the first five centuries, it is inexplicable how this revolting form of the doctrine could have arisen. It can be accounted for only on the hypothesis that, unable as the theologians of those times were to develope the true philosophy of the Atonement, it was a matter of faith that Christ died to deliver man from great objective evils. The notion that Christ died to satisfy the claims of the devil would never have been suggested, had the Church believed that the only, or even the principal, purpose of His death was to reveal to the soul the infinite mercy of God. The errors of theologians are sometimes among the plainest and most valuable indications of where Christian truth really lies.

We do not care to challenge the accuracy of Dr. Bushnell's account of Anselm's theory in his famous Cur Deus homo. Even if it be true that, according to Anselm, 'retributive justice... or penal suffering has nothing to do with the supposed satisfac'tion;' and that 'the satisfaction to God's honour turns wholly on the matter of Christ's obedience unto death,' the objective element of the Atonement is not eliminated. The whole argument of Anselm's treatise rests on the principle that 'with God there is no freedom, but to do what is expedient or fitting;' and that if it is not fitting for God to do anything unjustly or out of order, it does not belong to His freedom, or His kindness, or His will, to let go unpunished the sinner who does not pay that of which he has robbed God.'+ The same moral necessities which forbid God to lie or to act unjustly, forbid Him, according to Anselm, to pardon sin without satisfaction. Whether that satisfaction consists in what theologians have called the active obedience of Christ, or in His sufferings, or in both, is unimportant in relation to the characteristic principle of Dr. Bushnell's book.

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* See the discussion of Neander's account of Anselm's theory in Shedd's History of Christian Doctrine,' vol. ii. pp. 281, 282, Note. + Cur Deus Homo, Book i. cap. 12.

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After Anselm,' writes Dr. Bushnell, comes a long roll of 'teachers, reaching down to our own time, who have it as their ' endeavour more or less distinctly, to unfold some conception of the Cross, that will make it a salvation by its power on life and 'character. In this line we have Abelard, Hugo of St. Victor, Robert Pulleyn, Peter Lombard, Wycliffe, and Wessel and Tauler; and nearer our own times, John Locke, Dr. J. Taylor, Kant, De Wette, and Schleiermacher.'*

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The necessary limits of this article forbid us to develope the theories of the theologians to whose reputation Dr. Bushnell virtually appeals on behalf of his own position; but it may be worth while to consider what is the real weight to be attached to these imposing names. That Abelard found the whole significance of the sufferings and death of Christ in the revelation they gave of the Divine love to man is admitted; but Abelard, throughout his life, was in open antagonism to the prevailing faith of Christendom. Hugo of St. Victor, while asserting strongly the importance of the moral influence of our Lord's death, did not abandon even the earlier notion of a legal transaction with the devil, and explicitly maintained the doctrine of expiation.† Peter Lombard who, like Pulleyn, adhered to the general theory of Abelard, retained the proper idea of vicariousness, and he revived, in a most ludicrous form, one of the most eccentric fancies about the relation of Christ's death to Satan. As for Wycliffe, he taught that it is a light word to say that God might of His power forgive this sin [Adam's] 'without the aseeth [satisfaction] which was made for it, for God might do so if He would; but His justice would not suffer it, but requires that each trespass be punished, either on earth or in hell. And God may not accept a person to forgive him his sin without satisfaction.'s Wessel is not less explicit. He says, 'According to the second or servant form, the Lord Jesus is not only mediator between God and man, but is rather mediator for man between the God of justice and the God of mercy; for it behoves that the whole law of God's justice should 'be fulfilled, without failure of one jot or tittle; and as this has 'been achieved by Jesus, it is easy to find the way in which mercy can flow forth in streams of compassion. The wisdom Page xxxi.

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Christus ergo nascendo debitum hominis Patri solvit et moriendo reatum hominis expiavit.'-De Sac., cap. 4. (Hagenbach.)

Non enim sufficeret illa poena, qua poenitentes ligat ecclesia, nisi pona Christi co-operaretur, qui pro nobis solvit. . . Quid fecit Redemptor captivatori nostro? tetendit ei muscipulam crucem suam, posuit ibi quasi escam sanguinem suum.' (Hagenbach.)

§ Tracts and Treatises of Wycliffe,' p. 84.

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' of the Father, however, made the way by the device (artificio) ' of a mediator.' Even Locke said, in reply to the charge of Socinianism, It is very hard for a Christian who reads the Scriptures with attention and an unprejudiced mind, to deny 'the satisfaction of Christ;'t and Dr. John Taylor, unable wholly to escape from the traditional faith that it is for Christ's sake that God saves mankind, taught that obedience, or doing the will of God, was the sacrifice of a sweet-smelling 'savour which Christ offered unto God for us. It was His 'righteousness, or righteous, kind, benevolent actions, His 'obedient death, or the sacrifice of His blood and obedience, 'which made atonement for the sins of the world; so far, and in this sense, that God, on account of His goodness or perfect 'obedience so highly pleasing to Him, thought fit to grant unto 'mankind, whom He might in strict justice have destroyed for 'their sin and wickedness, the forgiveness of sin.' There is something more than Dr. Bushnell's theory here.§

To maintain that the moral view of the death of Christ is an adequate account of the awful mystery, is an innovation after all; an innovation which, we acknowledge, has been attempted more than once in past centuries, by men of the most distinguished genius, but which has never been able to secure a firm hold on the faith of the Church. The essential principle of Dr. Bushnell's scheme, is not a new contribution towards the settlement of a doctrine never yet fully matured; it is the revival of a rejected error. Whatever authority belongs to what we know to have been the faith of Christendom from the earliest times to our own, though it cannot be invoked for any developed theory of the Atonement, sustains its objective character.

2. But it was not Dr. Bushnell's intention to claim these illustrious names on behalf of his own position; he only mentions them as belonging to a long roll of teachers who have it as their endeavour, more or less distinctly, to unfold 'some conception of the Cross, that will make it a salvation by its

Ullman's Reformers before the Reformation,' vol. ii. p. 450.

† A Second Vindication of "The Reasonableness of Christianity," Works, vol. vi. p. 418.

Taylor's Key to Apostolic Writings,' pp. 45, 46.

Even the theory developed in the striking and profound treatise on the Atonement by Mr. McLeod Campbell goes farther than Dr. Bushnell's. Mr. Campbell acknowledges what might be called a vicarious repentance and a vicarious confession on our Lord's part, by which our sins were expiated.