Antithesis of Protestant Soteriology
The Reformers greatly developed the
passive satisfaction of Innocent by adding speculative details, such as literal
appeasement of wrath, the equivalent or identical endurance of our penalty; so
that their agreement with Anselm is verbal, not real. As Dr. Dale remarks, the
Reformation idea of the Atonement is “the precise antithesis of the conception
in the Cur Deus Homo. . . . The theological distance between the
theories cannot be measured.” (The Atonement, p. 292) The contrast is
marked in four particular:
(1) First, the Anselmic satisfaction
was active, and the Reformation doctrine was chiefly, and tended to be
exclusively, passive. Jonathan Edwards the younger, who carried it to an
extreme said: “I venture to say further that, not only did not the Atonement of
Christ consist essentially in His active obedience, but that His active
obedience was no part of His Atonement, properly so called, nor essential to
it.” (Works, II 41) Ansem made much of the fact of Christ’s death; but
he treated it, not as a passive endurance of the whole life. He did not,
indeed, attribute any redemptive power to the life of the Lord, whose obedience
was owed to God, and was of merely “private significance.” It was the
supererogatory obedience to the will of God for our salvation which availed,
the obedience which resulted in death, but which was not commanded and
which consequently He did not owe, and which could therefore restore the lost
honour of God. he referred to the suffering, but it was particularly the
suffering of death, and then considered as the effect of obedience rather than
as suffering in itself. The Reformers, however, emphasised the literal sense of
the word Passion, and enlarged upon the details of the sufferings which the
Redeemer underwent on our behalf; and it was in these that they found the
efficacy of His satisfaction. This constitute a fundamental difference between
the two theories, and creates a striking contrast between what Hagenbach not
too strongly calls “the chaste and noble, tragical style, too, in which the
subject is discussed” by Anselm, and “the weak and whining, even sensuous,
‘theology of blood’ of later ages.” (Hist. Doct., II. 46)
The separation of the life from the
death of Christ, the distinction between the significance and effects of the
active and passive obedience, is not tenable. It is evident that St. Paul had
in mind no such artificial discrimination when he said that “through the
obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous” (Rom. V. 19). The spirit
of the death was the consummation of the spirit of the life, and it is
psychologically impossible to set off one moment of its manifestation from all
that preceded and prepared for it, and assign to it alone a redemptive value.
Moreover, as a historic fact, the active and passive elements entered into our
Lord’s entire obedience. From the circumcision to the cross, there was
suffering involved in His participation in our humanity. In His active
fulfilment of His Father’s will and in His ministry of teaching and service, He
suffered from His sensitiveness to men’s physical ills and mental dullness and
spiritual hostility and degradation. On the other hand, there was an active
spirit of self-surrender throughout the endurance, and, above all in the
supreme moments of it. “Indeed,” says Mr. Lidgett, “so entirely predominant is
that activity, that the words passive endurance seem wholly out of place. Of
His life our Lord said, ‘No one taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of
Myself,’ From the moment when ‘He set His face to go up to Jerusalem’ to the
moment when He cried, ‘It is finished,’ our Lord’s attitude was that of one who
was consummating a great act of self-oblation.” (The Spiritual Principle of
the Atonement, p. 146) If attention is led away from the spirit of Him in
whom the Father was well pleased to the mere physical and mental sufferings,
the exaggerated importance attached to the latter deprives them of all ethical
significance; for suffering, as such, has no moral value. It leads also, by the
withdrawal of the ethical or active element to the penal aspect of the
Atonement, by which “the measure of the sufficiency of the satisfaction was the
intensity of the suffering.” (Ibid., p. 150).
(2) Secondly, the Reformers taught
that our Lord’s sufferings were penal, and Anselm expressly
distinguishes between punishment and satisfaction: “necesse es tut omne
peccatum satisfactio aut poena sequitur” (i. 15, 11; also i. 13, 7). As
a commutation, satisfaction was instead of punishment; but they
transformed it into satisfaction by punishment. He has been criticized
as unethical in several of his positions; but, as between the passive
satisfaction of punishment and the active satisfaction of obedience, there can
be no question as to which was more ethical. He says nothing of the endurance
of the Divine curse, or the burden of the wrath of God; on the contrary, penal
satisfaction is the rejected alternative, he denies that Christ could have been
miserable (i. 11-14; ii. 12). But they followed Innocent in making the
sufferings penal, and enlarging upon them with rhetorical detail, making them
superlative in accordance with the deserts of sin. Their descriptions of His
preeminent anguish read strangely enough by the side of the reverent reticence
of the Evangelists.
The language of Luther is every
extreme, although it is rhetorical and inconsistent, and probably was not
intended to be interpreted with the scientific accuracy of definite dogma. Mr.
Lidgett says of it: “When he speaks of the Atonement the same characteristics
are present which are so marked elsewhere: namely, a perfervid intensity,
sometimes breaking through the restraints of both reverence and prudence; a
curious mixture of extreme literalism with profound mysticism; and, above all,
the overmasting sense of perfect deliverance, in Christ, from the condemnation
of sin.” (Op Cit., p. 463) Still, his acceptance of the penal character
of the satisfaction is unmistakable. He said: “it was the anger of God itself
that Christ bore—the eternal anger which our sins had deserved. . . . The inner
sufferings of Jesus, His anguish—an anguish in comparison with which all human
anguish and fear are but a slight matter—was the feeling of the Divine Anger.”
(Quoted in Simon, Redemption of Man, p. 31)
He thus described Christ’s
substitutive endurance of the curse of God: “Our most merciful Father, seeing
us to be oppressed and overwhelmed by the curse of the law, . . . laid upon Him
the sins of all men, saying, ‘Be Thou Peter, that denier: Paul, that
persecutor, blasphemer, and cruel oppressor; David, that adulterer; that sinner
which did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief which hanged upon the cross;
and, briefly, be Thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men. See
therefore that Thou pay and satisfy for them.’ Here now cometh the law and
saith, I find Him a sinner, and that such a one as hath taken upon Him the sins
of all men, and I see no sins else but in Him, therefore let Him die upon the
cross; and so he setteth upon Him, and killeth Him.’” (Galatians, p. 205
folio edition of 1760) And again: “If thou wilt deny Him to be a sinner and
accursed, deny also that He was crucified and was dead. . . . It is not absurd
to say that He was accursed, and of all sinners the greatest.” (Ibid.,
p. 203)
Melanchthon and the Reformed divines
departed from the Catholic statements of all the preceding history of this doctrine.
The Saxon Confession says: “Such is the severity of Hs justice, that
there can be no reconciliation unless the penalty is paid. Such is the
greatness of the anger of God, that the eternal Father cannot be placated, save
by the beseeching and death of His Son.” (Lias, p. 133; Simon, p. 32) The Würtemberg
Confession says: “The Son of God alone is the placatory of the anger of
God.” The Heidelberg Catechism (Quaest. 37) declares that Christ
“bore in body and soul the anger of God against the sins of the whole race.”
(Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, III. 319) The Belgic Confession
(Art. XXI.) also speaks of Him “in body as in soul, feeling the terrible
punishment which our sins had merited.” (Ibid., p. 40)
Calvin is supposed by some to have
been more cautious in his language; and he evidently tries to keep in harmony
two entirely contradictory ideas. He makes the love of God to precede the
reconciliation, the cause and not the consequence of placation; which, of
course, makes placation utterly meaningless. He says: “We do not admit that God
was ever hostile to Him, or angry with Him. For how could He be angry with His
‘Beloved Son, in whom His soul delighted’? . . . But we affirm that He
sustained the weight of the Divine severity, since, being smitten and afflicted
by the hand of God, He experienced from God all the tokens of wrath and
vengeance.” Also, compare the following; “It was requisite that He should feel
the severity of Divine vengeance [ultionis], in order to appease the
wrath of God, and satisfy His justice.” “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.” “The cross was accursed, not only in the opinion of men, but by the
decree of the Divine law. Therefore, when Christ was listed up upon it, He
renders Himself obnoxious to the curse. . . . From the visible symbol of the
curse, we more clearly apprehend that the burden, with which we were oppressed,
was imposed upon Him.” And what that burden was is thus defined: “For sinners,
till they be delivered from guilt, are always subject to the wrath and
malediction of God. . . . We are obnoxious to the wrath and vengeance of God,
and to eternal death. . . . We all, therefore, have in us that which deserves
God’s hatred.” (Institutes, lib. ii. cap. xvi. Sect. 1-4, 6, 10, 11)
Such sentences and expressions are constantly to be found in him, and it is
needless to show how foreign they all are to the theology of Anselm
(3) Another contrast between the
Reformers and Anselm logically follows from that just mentioned. From Christ’s
endurance of punishment ensued His endurance of the self-same punishment
as was due to mankind: this was especially the contribution of Calvin: “He was
made a substitute and surety for transgressors, and even treated as a criminal
Himself, so sustain all the punishment which would have been inflicted on
them.” The idea of equivalence was carried so far as to represent Him as
suffering the mors aeterna, the actual torments of hell. “Hence it was
necessary for Him to contend with the powers of hell, and the horrors of
eternal death. . . . Therefore it is no wonder, if He be said to have descended
into hell (!), since He suffered that death which the wrath of God inflicts on
transgressors. . . . He suffered in His soul the dreadful torments of a soul
condemned and irretrievably lost.” (Ubi supra, sect. 10) This was
inconsistent with the conception that He suffered only in Hus human nature, and
was properly called by Bellarmine “a new and unheard-of heresy.” (Baur, Christ
Lehre von der Versohnung, p. 348) It is manifestly unscriptural and even
pagan.
Calvin indeed combined the active and
passive satisfactions. “Now, in answer to the inquiry, how Christ, by the
abolition of our sins, has destroyed the enmity between God and us, and
procured a righteousness to render Him favourable and propitious to us, it may
be replied in general, that He accomplished it for us by the whole course of
His obedience. . . . There is no exclusion of the rest of His obedience which
He performed in his life. . . . His voluntary submission is the principal of
circumstance even in His death.” (Ubi supra, sect. 5) The difficulty of
harmonizing this position with passive penal satisfaction has been already
alluded to; and it can hardly be denied that, in systematising the Reformation
doctrine, he added some abhorrent features, which however were implicit in the
teaching of Luther. They only serve to show how unwise it is to theorise about
the infinite; for either Christ could suffer only one eternal death and so
could pay the debt of only one sinner, or else that eternal death is equal to
all eternals, in which case the perdition of all mankind is exactly equal to
the perdition of one. Such quantitative comparisons between guilt and
satisfaction are called by Harnack “frivolous arithmetical sums.” (Op. cit.
III. 306)
The idea of the literal punishment of
the Son of God is to-day unthinkable. It is inconceivable that the Father’s
wrath could be visited upon the blameless and holy One. It is utterly confusing
to the moral sense to imagine that the justice of God makes no distinction
between the innocent and the guilty, and that the sufferings of Christ can in
any proper sense be called penal. The necessity for a penal satisfaction is
derived from the supposed conflict of the Divine attributes; but, as is always
the case with this dualistic conception, the governing attribute is justice—not
the love which is the fundamental description of God’s character, and punitive
justice at that—not the righteousness which is both loving and holy.
Thus Dr. Shedd makes justice “the
unconditional necessity to punish.” Accordingly, justice is imperative, while
mercy is optional; or, as Dr. Strong puts it: “God may be merciful, but must
be holy.” (Stevens, op. cit. p. 248. It is not difficult to
understand why the Calvinists of our day desired revision of the Westminster
standards, in order to introduce ideas essential to the Gospel) But the
objection to making punitive justice the ruling principle of the Divine
administration is radical. As Dr. Stevens remarks: If it “lies deeper than love
in God, and is independent of it, and has its infinite energy of wrath excited
against sin, how is it logically conceivable that an inferior, optional, and
(in its relation to ‘holiness’) dependent and non-determining attribute (love)
should succeed in checking this punitive energy? The theory lays no logical
basis in the nature of God for a work of salvation. It sacrifices the very
motive to salvation in its effort to show how God surmounted the difficulty of
making it possible
(4) A further inference from the
passive and penal details is the idea of imputation. Anselm knows no
more than the Scriptures of the imputation of our sins to Christ, or of His
righteousness to us. (The New Testament speaks only of the imputing of our sins
to us under the law, the non-imputing of our sins to us through forgiveness,
and the imputation by grace of “the righteousness of the faith” which we have
in Christ [Rom. v. 13, 20; iv 8; 2 Cor v. 19; Rom. iv. 9-11]) He conceives of
Christ as rewarded for His unique righteousness; the Reformers conceive of Him
as enduring the penalties which we deserve, but which are transferred to Him by
imputation.
Luther thus literally interprets Gal.
iii. 13: “All the prophets saw this in the Spirit, that Christ would be of all
men the greatest robber, murderer, adulterer, thief, sacrilegious person,
blasphemer, etc., than whom none greater ever was in the world, because He who
is a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world now is not an innocent person,
and without sin, is not the Son of God born of the Virgin, but a sinner who has
and bears the sin of Paul who was a blasphemer, a persecutor and violent, of
Peter who denied Christ, of David who was an adulterer, a murderer, and made
the Gentiles blaspheme the name of the Lord; to sum up, who has and bears all
the sins of all men in His own body, not because He committed them, but because
He took them, committed by us, upon His own body to make satisfaction for them
with His own blood.” (Op. cit. p. 203) He further says: “If the sins of
the whole world are on that one man Jesus Christ then they are not on the
world; but if they are not on Him, they are still on the world. So if Christ
Himself was made guilty of all the sins which we all have committed, then we
are absolved from all sins, yet not through ourselves, our own works or merits,
but through Him.” The peril of this kind of statement is that it leaves no room
for justifying faith, although justification by faith was to him articulus
stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae. If all our sins are absolutely taken from
us and their full punishment endured and complete satisfaction made, there is
no need for further conditions, since we stand before God as though we had not
sinned. The logical implication, also, is that as Christ has taken upon Him all
the sins of the future as well as of our past, we need no more concern
ourselves about the former than the latter; and that is the practical
Antinomianism which has been so often charged against Luther’s doctrine, which
has been not seldom exhibited by some who adopted it, but which, it must be
confessed, has been usually avoided by the inconsistent influence of a devoted
faith and love. Language as incautious as the following is certainly very dangerous:
“Ab hoc non avellet nos peccatum, etiamsi millies millies unto die
fornicemur aut occideamus.” (Hallam, Literature of Europe, I. 299 [RB:
Sin will not tear us away from this, even if we commit adultery or murder a
thousand times in one day])
Calvin seems in one passage to deny
external imputation. “We do not contemplate Him at a distance out of ourselves,
that His righteousness may be imputed to us; but because we have put Him on,
and are ingrafted into His body, and because He has deigned to unite us to
Himself, therefore we glory in a participation of His righteousness.” (Inst.,
III xi. 10) But this is with reference to justification by faith; when he
speaks of the Atonement, he uses such expressions as these: “Theus we shall
behold Christ sustaining the character of a sinner and malefactor, while from
the lustre of His innocence it will at the same time evidently appear, that He
was loaded with the guilt of others, but had none of His own. . . . This is our
absolution that the guilt, which made us obnoxious to punishment, is
transferred to the person of the Son of God. . . . Our guilt and punishment
being as it were transferred to Him, they must cease to be imputed to us. . . .
When He was about to expiate our sins, they were transferred to Him by imputation.”
(Ibid., xvi. 5, 6)
It is evident that this element is
necessary to complete the theory, for the passive satisfaction could not have
been penal and equivalent if the sins of mankind were not imputed to the
sinless One. It was, however, often revolting even to men who embraced the
chief Reformation doctrines; for Osiander calls it “forensic and sophistical,
contrary to Scripture, and verging on blasphemy.” (Oxenham, p. 242) Its defect
is that it involves crude and literal substitution, which cannot be made
rational or moral. Suffering by the innocent for the guilty is a common fact of
experience, and is one of the redemptive forces of human life; but it is never
in their stead, in the sense that the due of one is borne by the other, or the
same consequences, or an equivalent amount, or a similar quality, and it has
nothing of the character of punishment. (The modern distinction between
substitutionary punishment and vicarious suffering is convenient, though
somewhat inaccurate) “Vicarious punishment is pure injustice, and vicarious
guilt pure nonsense.” (H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, I. 217)
whatever our Lord endured, it was in no respect penal; moral responsibility
cannot be transferred, and the infliction of so much suffering for so much sin
by means of a mechanical substitution is irrational and inequitable. The
Christian concept of God will not permit us to represent Him as “so just that
He cannot forgive the guilty, but so unjust that He can punish the innocent. “(Stevens,
p. 250)
These four additions to the Anselmic
idea of satisfaction were undoubtedly associated with a spiritual conception of
the personal relation of Christ to the human soul, which greatly obviated their
dogmatic defects. Nevertheless, they ushered in that eta of Protestant
scholasticism which developed so many statements of doctrine which have now
become unpalatable and are rapidly passing into oblivion. The theologians of
the two following centuries worked out the consequences of the Reformers’
teaching on the Atonement to their pitiless logical issue; the orthodoxy of
Protestantism was fixed in its final form by Francis Turretin, towards the
close of the seventeenth century. The exaggerations of these speculations on
the method of the Atonement, their disregard of Scriptural and primitive forms
of thought, their dogmatic tyranny, contributed to the inevitable reaction which
is reaching its full proportions in our own day. (George Cadwalader Foley, Anselm’s Theory
of the Atonement: The Bohlen Lectures, 1908 [New York: Longmans, Green, and
Co., 1909], 216-31)
