66 connection with 2 Cor. v. 21, he declares that Christ chose to be of all men "the greatest robber, murderer," etc., a sinner who bears the sin of men, and adds: "Should any one say, It is extremely absurd and irreverent to call the Son of God a sinner and accursed, I reply, If you wish to deny that he is a sinner and accursed, deny also that he suffered, was crucified and dead. For it is not less absurd to say that the Son of God was crucified, bore the penalties of sin and death, than to say that he was a sinner and accursed. If, indeed, it is not absurd to confess and believe that Christ was crucified between robbers, neither is it absurd to say that he was accursed and a sinner of sinners." But expressions like these must be balanced by Luther's mysticism and by his strong assertions of the divine love. It may well be doubted whether even this language, apparently descriptive of an external substitution and imputation, may not have had for its author a mystical sense; whether Christ's bearing of our sins was not primarily to Luther's thought a matter of inner spiritual experience, a carrying of the cross in his heart.1 Calvin is more guarded in his language. He raises the question how God could have become reconciled to us in Christ "unless he had already embraced us in gratuitous favor." To this he answers, in part, that the biblical language about reconciliation "is accommodated to our sense in order that we may better understand how miserable 1 Ritschl declares: "Luther surpassed all previous theology when he brought love into prominence as the character which exhaustively expresses the Christian idea of God; and in this fundamental conception of God he recognizes also the ultimate determining motive for the redemption and reconciliation of the sinner that were wrought by Christ. However strongly he may insist upon God's wrath against sinners, however emphatically he may proclaim Christ's vicarious punishment as the means of appeasing it, his meaning is never that God's relation to sinful man has previously resolved itself wholly into one of wrath; that in that wrath his love had ceased, and could be reawakened only by the merits of Christ. . . . His true opinion is essentially that God's love as the ultimate motive of the sinner's redemption is the superior determination of his will, while penal justice or wrath is considered as the subordinate motive of his action in carrying out the work of redemption." History, p. 201. See, further, Dorner, Lehre von der Person Christi, II. 513 sq.; Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, ch. ii. and calamitous is our condition out of Christ," though he does not mean by this that it is not "strictly true." He also speaks of God as reconciling us to himself “by abolishing whatever of evil is in us," and says that Christ does this by "the whole course of his obedience." Calvin's exposition is more like that of Augustine than it is like that of Luther. The work of redemption flows from God's love, and the necessity of it is grounded rather in a divine decree than in an immediate requirement of distributive justice. Still, there was in God's holiness an obstacle to forgiveness. God was angry at man as a sinner, even though he discovered something in him-his kinship to himself that his goodness might love. With Augustine he holds that "in a wonderful and divine manner he both hated and loved us at the same time.” "In this situation, Christ took upon himself and suffered the punishment which by the righteous judgment of God impended over all sinners, and by this expiation the Father has been satisfied and his wrath appeased." 1 This penal satisfaction theory was developed and elaborated by the post-Reformation divines of the seventeenth century, that period of Protestant scholasticism and hyper 1 Institutes, Bk. II. ch. xvi. §§ 3, 4. Calvin constantly uses expressions like these: "Christ suffered the punishment of our sin and so satisfied the justice of God"; he "appeased God"; "reconciled God"; " appeased the wrath of God"; "rendered the Father favorable and propitious." He declares that "God was angry with us and must be appeased by a satisfaction"; that "God was our enemy till he was reconciled to us by Christ"; that "on Christ's righteous person was inflicted the punishment which belonged to us"; that "the guilt which made us obnoxious to punishment is transferred to him"; and that "he felt the severity of the divine vengeance." He interprets the article of the creed: "He descended into hell," to mean that "he suffered that death which the wrath of God inflicts on transgressions" and "endured in his soul the dreadful torments of a person condemned and irretrievably lost." Still Calvin insists with Augustine that God loved us before Christ placated him, and that he was moved by his "pure and gratuitous love," which "precedes our reconciliation in Christ," to plan and execute this appeasement of his wrath. Nor does he attribute salvation solely to the death of Christ, but also, in part, to his "whole life," though this idea is not developed. He is also at pains to explain that God was not personally hostile to or angry with Christ. His "punish. ment" was due to official, judicial necessity. II. xvii, passim. orthodoxy. It rested upon a certain view of the justice of God. He must punish. His relation to the sinner is not that of private ownership or personal sovereignty; neither has he any choice of ways or means in dealing with sin. Retributive justice-the principle of quid pro quo-is primary and fundamental in his being and must express itself in penalty. Hence sin cannot be forgiven until it has first been punished.1 This is the view which is elaborated by Turretin, Mastricht, Gerhard, and Quenstedt. For example, Gerhard writes: "Christ in the time of his passion and death, but especially in the garden at the foot of Mount Olivet, when he sweated blood, experienced in his most holy soul the bitterest tortures, griefs, terrors, and truly infernal anguish, and so thoroughly experienced the wrath of God, the curse of the law, and the penalties of hell. For how could he have truly taken our sins upon himself, and afforded a perfect satisfaction, unless he had truly felt the wrath of God, conjoined by an inseparable connection (individuo nexu) with sin? How could he have redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, unless he had fully experienced the judgment of an angry God (nisi judicium Dei irati persensisset) ? " 2 Quenstedt declares that "Christ was substituted in the place of the debtors," and that "in his satisfaction he sustained all that the rigor of God's justice demanded, so much so that he felt even the very pains of hell, although not in hell or eternally. "3 We shall have occasion to return to this type of thought as it has been illustrated by more recent writers. The point to be noted here is, how wide a departure it is from the theory of Anselm. It took its rise, no doubt, in modifications of Anselm's view, but it has become a widely 1 "Melanchthon makes God's forensic punishment-demanding justice to be the fundamental conception (in the idea of God) —justice which can be turned into grace only by means of the sacrifice of Christ. He therefore is the true author of the subsequent orthodox doctrine." Ritschl, History, p. 202. 2 Loci theologici, Locus XVII, De causa meritoria justificationis, cap. ii. § 54. 8 Theologia Didactico-polemica, I. 39. different theory, "the precise antithesis," as Dr. Dale says, "of the conception in the Cur Deus Homo." 1 1 Dale thus expresses the difference between the views of Anselm and those of Luther: "Anselm, though not with unvarying consistency, represents the voluntary submission of Christ to death as a transcendent act of righteousness and of devotion to the honour of God, and maintains that God rewarded Christ by forgiving the sins of men. Luther represents the death of Christ as the endurance of the suffering due to the sins of our race. On Anselm's theory, Christ has secured our salvation because in his death he clothed himself with the glory of a unique righteousness, for which God rewards him. On Luther's theory, Christ has secured our salvation because in his death he clothed himself with the sins of the human race, so that God inflicted on him the sufferings which the sins of the race had deserved. The theological distance between the theories can hardly be measured. CHAPTER II THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS THE treatise of the distinguished Dutch jurist, Hugo. Grotius (1583-1645), on the Satisfaction of Christ, was written in refutation of the theory of Socinianism. This theory was elaborated by Lælius Socinus (1525–1562) and, more fully, by his nephew, Faustus Socinus (15391604), and found expression in the manifesto of the Polish Unitarians called the Racovian Catechism, published in 1605. The system included an acute and radical criticism of the orthodox theory of atonement. Its chief exponent, Faustus Socinus, took common ground with Anselm in viewing sin as a violation of private right, and from this conception derived the conclusion that it is competent for God to pardon an affront to his majesty, without satisfaction, if he chooses. This was a conclusion which the principles of Anselm were powerless to exclude; the Reformers and post-Reformation divines, however, had forestalled it by their definition of justice. According to them, justice meant the necessity to punish sin; hence the possibility of forgiveness without a satisfaction, and, indeed, a penal satisfaction, was out of the question. Socinus challenged this definition of justice. He declared that God's justice is a name for his fairness and equitableness. What the orthodox called justice, that is, the determination to punish, is, like mercy, an effect of the divine will, and may be exercised or not, at God's option. It will be noticed that Socinus related distributive justice to the divine will in the same way as orthodoxy related mercy thereto; in either case it was declared to be optional with God to exercise it or not; in principle, the two extremes On this basis Socinus confuted the orthodox theory met. |