satisfactory exhibition." "God's own sin-bearing satisfies God, and his exhibition of it in Christ completes his satisfaction" (p. 349).

It will be seen from this brief sketch that Dr. Clarke occupies essentially the same point of view as Dr. Bushnell, though he discards governmental language and analogies much more completely than Dr. Bushnell did. We do not read here, as in The Vicarious Sacrifice, about "law before government," "legal enforcements" and "God's rectoral honor." The terms of the discussion are more exclusively and warmly personal. The subject is concerned with God's ethical nature, not with a supposed governmental system. Dr. Bushnell still retained much of the governmental terminology current in his time; later exponents of substantially the same doctrine have aimed to conceive and interpret the work of Christ in terms of personal relation, to construe it not as satisfying, as it were from without, an official Deity, but as revealing and expressing the righteous and loving Father whom Christ declared that he had come to make known and to bring near to men.1

1 Other illustrations of this tendency and mode of thought may be found in Dr. George A. Gordon's A New Epoch for Faith, pp. 146–149; in President Henry C. King's Reconstruction in Theology, pp. 174, 175; in Archdeacon Wilson's Hulsean Lectures for 1898-1899, entitled The Gospel of Atonement, and in Professor B. P. Bowne's brochure, The Atonement. The same general view which has been sketched above is presented in the sermons of F. W. Robertson, Phillips Brooks, and T. T. Munger. The most elaborate recent presentation of the moral theory is contained in the Angus Lectures, entitled The Christian Idea of Atonement, by Principal T. Vincent Tymms. (Macmillan. London and New York, 1904.)

CHAPTER VI

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

IF, now, we leave aside the extinct patristic conception of a ransom paid to Satan, we may conclude from the foregoing review that five fairly distinct types of theory concerning the death of Christ have held, and still hold, the field in Christian thought: (1) The theory which conceives God as a private dignitary, offended by sin, to whom Christ makes reparation by the payment of his life (Anselm). (2) The theory which regards sin, not as an offence against the dignity of a private party, but as a breach of public law, and contemplates God as the administrator of that law, the inexorable magistrate who is bound to punish every sin with its full desert of penalty. Now, since God has chosen not to punish all sinners, he must express his wrath in the punishment of a substitute, -a rôle which Christ voluntarily assumes. This view (mingled, to some extent, with the elements of other views) is found in Luther, Calvin, and, especially, Melanchthon, and was carried out to its full logical consequences by the Lutheran and Calvinistic divines of the seventeenth century. (3) The theory which conceived the government of God as a kind of entity whose interests he must protect. In this view sin is, as in the preceding theory, a breach of public law, but God is a Governor, rather than a Judge; he has not simply to enforce the law, but may decide and regulate its application, even relaxing it, for sufficient reasons. He graciously chooses to withhold its penalties from repentant sinners, but in order to protect the dignity of his government and to attest the blameworthiness of sin, he makes a penal example of Christ. By this means he is able, consistently with the uprightness of his moral rule, to pardon sin (Grotius, the

Arminian theology and the New School or New England theology as represented by Edwards and his successors). Later theories are less definite and less sharply distinguishable, but we may note two general types, and therefore add: (4) an ethicized governmental view which no longer conceives God after the analogy of a political ruler, but contemplates him under the categories of fatherhood and holy love and regards the work of Christ as a satisfaction, not to a set of official demands, but to God's own inner, ethical life. When, now, it is contended that, from this point of view, there can be no satisfaction of God ab extra, that his satisfaction must be self-satisfaction in love, sacrifice, and sin-bearing, the step is taken (5) to the socalled "subjective" theory, according to which God satisfies himself by revealing and expressing his nature and realizing the gracious purpose of his holy love in salvation. It will thus be seen that the line between these last two interpretations is quite indefinite. The difference is more in the terms used than in any fundamental principle. Hence I am quite ready to admit that some of the writers whom I ranged under (4) might, perhaps, have been as appropriately included under (5), and vice

versa.

What judgment, now, shall be passed upon these various theories? What estimate, for example, is the modern man likely to form of Anselm's interpretation of Christ's saving work? Dr. Denney's verdict is that "the Cur Deus Homo is the truest and greatest book on the atonement that has ever been written.” 1 That which is held to justify this judgment is Anselm's "profound grasp" of the doctrine "that sin makes a real difference to God, and that even in forgiving, God treats that difference as real, and cannot do otherwise "; hence "the divine necessity for the atonement" in order that God may not "do himself an injustice, or be untrue to himself."2 Dr. Moberly has passed quite a different judg

1 The Atonement and the Modern Mind, p. 116.

2 Op. cit., p. 117. One can but wonder what the theories of salvation are which do not regard sin as making any difference to God, or in what

ment. He declares that Anselm's definition of sin 1 is so fatally defective as to vitiate his whole discussion. "It makes sin in its essence quantitative, and, as quantitative, external to the self of the sinner, and measurable, as if it had a self, in itself." 2 Hence he thinks there could hardly be a better example of a conspicuous failure to deal with the real question of salvation than this reparation-scheme of Anselm; "nothing could be more simply arithmetical or more essentially unreal." 3

But not alone the value, but also the nature, of Anselm's theory, is in dispute. If Dr. Denney had found its unparalleled greatness in its parade of syllogisms and logical puzzles rather than in the truth of its underlying ideas, his dictum would have won, I think,

a

more general assent. Anselm's theory is popularly called "the commercial theory" because it so constantly uses the terms of quantity, payment, and equivalence. Dr. Moberly evidently regards it as the mathematical theory par éminence. It appears to me, however, to be, far more fundamentally, a feudal theory- an interpretation based on the ideas of medieval chivalry. Sin is lasa majestas-an offence against the sacred person of the sovereign, and for this reason nothing but a great reparation can ever satisfy for it. Now the mathematical terms which are used to describe the greatness of this reparation and its equivalence to the demand are incidental and illustrative. I grant that there is a constant mixture of mathematical and chivalric terms, but I hold that the latter express Anselm's more essential and fundamental ideas. Sin is an enormous affront, a shocking insult to the heavenly Majesty; a single look contrary to his command would outweigh the value of the universe,

respects other theories-the penal and governmental theories, for example-fall short of the greatness and truth of Anselm's view in this matter of magnifying sin. I find it difficult to imagine what the views and estimates of the history of this doctrine must be which could give rise to the opinion just quoted.

1 "Sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due" (Bk. I. ch. ii.); that is, it is a robbery of God which necessitates repayment. 2 Atonement and Personality, p. 370.

p. 371; cf. p. 218.

including all created souls.1 Anselm certainly does describe sin as huge, enormous, something that “makes a real difference to God." But does he describe it as it is? Does he show the true reasons why it "makes a real difference to God"? Does he display any Does he display any marked appreciation of its essential unreasonableness, its real ethical character? Does he exhibit it as an offence against inherent right and truth? Does he portray its actual nature as selfishness or depict its effects in character and in society? Does he correlate the work of Christ in any real way with man's actual state in sin, and show, or make any effort to show, how his death effects a real salvation? I should answer that in all these respects Anselm's argumentation is as unreal and as irrelevant as the misleading analogy on which it is based, and as remote from the actual business of saving men as the mediaval scheme of satisfactions, imputations, and merit-treasuries of which it is a part. According to this theory, sin is high treason, not moral corruption; it is not a character; it remains outside the human conscience; it is, indeed, a great fault, but it is hardly a moral fault; it is sternly condemned, but not by holiness in God or conscience in man. There is in Anselm's "plan of salvation," as Dr. Candlish has pointed out,2 no essential connection between Christ and the saved; whether mathematics or chivalry be the more fundamental to the theory, matters little; both are irrelevant. It would be difficult to name any prominent treatise on atonement whose conception of sin is so essentially unethical and superficial.

If, as Dr. Moberly justly claims, "the atonement is not to be conceived of as an external transaction, from which God returns, armed, by virtue of it, with a newly acquired

1 The idea assumed by Anselm and later asserted by those who held a modified Anselmic view (e.g. Edwards and Shedd), that a finite act (sin) becomes infinite when it is directed toward an infinite object, would seem to require no refutation. It is of a piece with Descartes' well-known view that our idea of an infinite Being (assumed to be itself infinite) requires an infinite Cause to explain its origin and presence in These notions are figments of mediæval metaphysics.

us.

2 The Christian Salvation, p. 44.