"THE VICARIOUS
SACRIFICE"
"The Latin or Western or scholastic type of theology ... is wholly different. Its dominant thought is the divine transcendence the thought of God as the Sovereign, Ruler, and Judge, remote from the earth in some sphere of light unapproachable; and of nature and man as something alien to God, or alienated from Him, the mere subject of His laws. Latin theology is the description of a scheme for bridging over this vast interval. It is 'saturated with Roman Law.' This conception, essentially dualistic, tends to dualism and division everywhere. It sharply distinguishes the natural from the supernatural, the material from the spiritual, the sacred from the profane, the human from the divine. It leads on to distinctions of converted from unconverted, laity from clergy, inspired from uninspired, Church from world. It creates a passion for distinctions. It separates the Father from the Son; God's justice from His mercy; the gift from the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It defines everything; and definition almost necessitates the materialization of our thoughts; it defines the stages of salvation, the modes and conditions of transmission of the Divine Life through the Sacraments and the other kindred rites of the Church; and it identifies the acceptance of such definitions with Churchmanship, and even with faith. . . . This type of theology colors opinion on every region of thought. Miracle tends to he regarded as an occasional interference of God with His own laws. Life is dwelt on rather as a probation than as an education. The Fall is interpreted as a historical or quasi-historical event in time. It is explained as having involved all Adam's posterity in guilt and alienation from God, and necessitated an intervention, almost an after-thought in God's plans; a transaction by which men, though sinful, might be relieved of the penalty of their sin. The whole of Latin theology follows by a sort of logical necessity; and theology has occupied itself rather with the logic of its deductions than with the fundamental ideas on which all depends. It is inventive and it is insistent. Salvation is a scheme of 'interposition between two permanently distant objects.' It is a superhuman transaction rather than a spiritual process. It may take the vulgar but fatally intelligible form of a commercial transfer of merit from Christ to us, and of penalty from us to Christ. Even this must come, it maybe taught, through fixed and definable channels." The Rev. J. M. WILSON, Archdeacon of Manchester, The Gospel of the Atonement (Hulsean Lectures, 1898-99), p. 144.
THE Atonement, used as the general name for the work of Christ, was never absent from the mind of Bushnell, but the first hint we have of his purpose to write upon it is found in a letter to a friend in 1859: "I think the day is at hand when something can be done for a better conception of the work of Christ. Here is the great field left that I wait for grace and health to occupy." Two years later, in a letter to his wife, he states his plan, - from which, however, he varied somewhat, and reveals also the spirit in which he entered upon his work. "Things now are getting into some shape in this great field, where, you know, I have been toiling after shape for these two years. I mean to realize my original, heaven-given thought of a book on the Vicarious Sacrifice for Christian experience, and propose to make it possible by a volume, to precede, on the doctrine of the Sacrifice, to precede, however, not in time, but in order, and to be published, both, as separate, and also as volumes I. and II. Call the one, say, 'Vicarious Sacrifice in Christ;' and the other, 'Vicarious Sacrifice in Believers,' or by any such like title. . . .
238
"I never saw so distinctly as now what it is to be a disciple, or what the keynote is of all most Christly experience. I think, too, that I have made my last discovery in this mine. First, I was led along into initial experience of God, socially and by force of the blind religion instinct in my nature; second, I was advanced into the clear moral light of Christ and of God, as related to the principle of rectitude; next, or third, I was set on by the inward personal discovery of Christ, and of God as represented in him; now, fourth, I lay hold of and appropriate the general culminating fact of God's vicarious character in goodness, and of mine to be accomplished in Christ as a follower."
The stages to which he refers are, first, his early conversion in youth hood; second, his experience while a tutor, described in a sermon on "The Dissolving of Doubts;" third, that revelation of the meaning of the gospel which led to his writing "God in Christ;" fourth, the conceptions of sacrifice and forgiveness which were to ripen into the present volume. There seems to be an evolution almost scientific in the order and accuracy with which one thing led to another, but it was evolution under an environment as well as through an inner force. In one sense there was not this orderly advance from one subject to another: all were thrust upon him at the very outset. But he had a habit of "hanging up a subject;" "I let time chew my questions for me." Still, the environment pressed upon him, and at last drove him to utter-
239
ance. He found himself face to face with doctrines which he could accept only under wide qualifications, and a prevailing habit of thought with which he had little sympathy. If he is regarded as a development, we can see that the time had come when it was possible for him to do his work, even in the very order in which it has been named. At the beginning of his ministry he would have found no audience and no toleration. It would seem that Calvinism must run an ordained course and exhaust itself under its own self-destructive energy. Its "improvements" and modifications did not point to continuance, but to extinction; they were not as leaf to bud and fruit to flower, but were the crumbling away of foundations.1
Theology, like nature itself, may rest on the Will of God, but it cannot forever rest on a doctrine of divine sovereignty that vests itself in decrees of election to salvation or reprobation on the ground that each is necessary to reveal the glory of God. It is not easy to account for its existence in a system of Christian theology. Its history can be partially traced, but nothing wholly accounts for it except the uncertain play of the human mind when it undertakes to reduce the thoughts and purposes of God to a system drawn out of existing institutions and based on a handbreadth of knowledge. Its
1 "It has been said that Calvinism is a philosophy in its essence; and I do not object to it on that account, but because it is not to me a true philosophy." (John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, p. 53.)
240
defenders are as inexplicable as itself. The history of the doctrine in New England is an ecclesiastical tragedy, and often it turned personal life into one. After its full restatement by Edwards, that process of "improvement" began by which it wasted itself just in the degree in which it commended itself to reason; it could not overtake the thought of the world, nor resist the spirit of humanity that underlay Arminianism, and was bedded in English literature and institutions. It was a system incapable of real improvement for the simple reason that it took away ethics as between God and men, and denied the divine Fatherhood. When Hopkins modified Edwards by asserting that God is essential love rather than justice, yet retained the doctrine of decrees in its unmitigated form, the very incongruity weakened the system as a whole. It was at this point that the inevitable dismemberment began which has left the churches of the "Standing Order" in New England, that once held the entire ground, one of many sects, and so greatly changed that it can hardly recognize itself as even the remnant it has become. It was then that Universalism and Methodism came in like a flood, one protesting against the inhumanity of Calvinism, the other against its necessarianism. It was then that the Unitarian movement began to take form as a general protest; but being chiefly such, it failed to realize the organic life which the Standing Order has preserved, having other springs of life than its doctrinal system.
241
It was in connection with the doctrine of the atonement that the "improvements" in theology were of greatest moment. A limited or semi-limited atonement, however logical its deduction from a doctrine of decreed reprobation, could not forever withstand the first fact of the gospel that Christ died for all men. Nor could the conception of it as a satisfaction of divine justice made by Christ's bearing the penalty of sin, whether of all men or only the elect, long stand up against those conceptions of the individual which, born of Puritanism, had ripened and were bearing fruit in the political life of the country. Under the younger Edwards and President Dwight it was modified until it became what is known as the "governmental theory;" that is, roughly stated, the atonement maintains the general justice of God by expressing his hatred of sin; this done, his government is sustained and He is able to forgive sin. It contains an idea, which no one who believes in the atonement denies, but that it constitutes the atonement is another matter. It simply states the universal truth that suffering may be a symbol or expression of broken law, but the claim that its chief purpose is to maintain the rectoral honor of God is a narrow judicial treatment of a wide human fact. Under Dwight and Taylor and other New England divines it was built up into a vast scheme, in which the Christian truths were clothed in legal forms and made to do duty in maintaining what was termed the moral government of God.
242
It had a great deal to do with justice, but little with life. It was a legal transaction, not a moral achievement. It is true, if one cares to think of it in that way, but it is not the way in which men incline to think except under the drill of a system that requires it.1
Bushnell shrank from it, even when a student at New Haven, where it was taught with power. It was for him too shadowy a form to hold the great reality; too far off from life to meet its necessities, and it lacked the link that bound the individual to the living and dying Christ.2
He took to himself at the outset the advantage of a descriptive title that well nigh covers his entire
1 John McLeod Campbell quotes Luther's warning "to abstain from the
curious teaching of God's majesty," and while not laying it at the door of
Owen and Edwards in their discussion of the question, "What is divine
justice?" says: "It would have been well that they had used the life
of Christ more as their light." He adds, "I feel as if the recorded
work of Christ were contemplated in their systems in the light of (their)
reasoning, rather than that reasoning engaged in after the due study of the
life of Christ." (The Nature of the Atonement, pp. 50, 53.) (This
criticism is fundamental and covers all Calvinistic theories of the atonement,
including the "governmental theory.")
2 Professor A. A. Hodge, in his Outlines of Theology, on other grounds than these, speaks of it as "a theatrical inculcation of principles which were not truly involved in the case;" and that "it degrades the infinite work of Christ to the poor level of a governmental adjustment, whereas it was the most glorious exhibition of eternal principles." While Princeton spoke thus of the theory of the atonement, almost universally held in New England, it is not strange that the wayfaring man was puzzled as to the way whenever he crossed the Hudson; nor is it strange that Bushnell felt driven to find a third position that might either absorb or consume the other two.
243
contention: "The Vicarious Sacrifice Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation." In later editions the title was varied by changing "of universal obligation" to "interpreted by human analogies." The change was made when a later book, "Forgiveness and Law," was incorporated as a second volume. It is not to be understood that he abjured the phrase "universal obligation;" it is far more expressive of his underlying thought than the adopted phrase. "Universal obligation" offered surer ground for his main contention, than "human analogies." The differentiating element in analogy is deceitful; the unlikeness is lost in the general likeness, and the analogy is often made to carry a point from which the unlikeness would exclude it. Moreover, as government is a human analogy, it leads back into the governmental theory, where Bushnell had no thought of going; but "principles of universal obligation" sharpen his meaning in the "moral view."
"I have called the treatise by a name or title that more nearly describes it than any other. It conceives the work of Christ as beginning at the point of sacrifice, 'Vicarious Sacrifice;' ending at the same, and being just this all through, so a power of salvation for the world. And yet it endeavors to bring this sacrifice only so much closer to our feeling and perception, in the fact that it makes the sacrifice and cross of Christ his simple duty, and not any superlative, optional kind of good, outside of all the common principles of
244
virtue. 'Grounded,' I have said, 'in principles of duty and right that are universal.' It is not goodness over-good, and yielding a surplus of merit in that manner for us, but it is only just as good as it ought to be, or the highest law of right required it to be; a model, in that view for us, and a power, if we can suffer it, of ingenerated life in us" (p. 32).
No attempt will be made to present the contents of these two volumes beyond the barest outline of the argument and a few quotations that sum up his thought and indicate the spirit in which he wrote. The latter is of far more concern than the former. We are not now interested, except in the antiquarian's way, in the discussion by which one view or another of the atonement was upheld, and we feel almost as little interest in the discussion by which it was redeemed from them. The age has its point of view, and does not depend upon that of the past.
The first volume is divided into four parts, the first of which contends that there is "nothing superlative in vicarious sacrifice, or above the universal principles of right and duty."
"Love is a principle essentially vicarious in its own nature, identifying the subject with others, so as to suffer their adversities and pains, and taking on itself the burden of their evils. It does not come in officiously and abruptly, and propose to be substituted in some formal and literal way that overturns all the moral relations of law and desert,
245
but it clings to the evil and lost man as in feeling, afflicted for him, burdened by his ill deserts, in-capacities, and pains, encountering gladly any loss or suffering for his sake. Approving nothing wrong in him, but faithfully reproving and condemning him in all sin, it is yet made sin - plunged, so to speak, into all the fortunes of sin, by its friendly sympathy. In this manner it is entered vicariously into sacrifice on his account. So naturally and easily does the vicarious sacrifice commend itself to our intelligence, by the stock Ideas and feelings out of which it grows" (p. 42). "What we call the vicarious sacrifice of Christ Is nothing strange as regards the principle of it, no superlative, unexampled, and therefore unintelligible grace. It only does and suffers, and comes into substitution for, just what any and all love will according to its degree. And in this view, it is not something higher in principle than our human virtue knows, and which we ourselves are never to copy or receive, but it is to be understood by what we know already, and is to be more fully understood by what we are to know hereafter, when we are complete in Christ. Nothing is wanting to resolve the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus but the commonly known, always familiar principle of love, accepted as the fundamental law of duty, even by mankind. Given the universality of love, the universality of vicarious sacrifice is given also. Here is the centre and deepest spot of good, or goodness, conceivable. At this point we look into
246
heaven's eye itself, and read the meaning of all heavenly grace" (p. 48).
He protests against "the fiction of superlative merit," and contends that "Christ was under obligation to do and suffer just what he did" (p. 58). The thought is extended to God: "In these bur-dens (of Christ) God as the Eternal Father suffered before him. "Here Bushnell's favorite and even dominant thought of the passibility of God comes out, - an idea that supplements his treatment of the humanity of Christ, and practically fills its place.
"Christ is a mediator only in the sense that, as being in humanity, he is a medium of God to us; such a medium that, when we cling to him in faith, we take hold of God's own life and feeling as the Infinite Unseen, and are taken hold of by Him, reconciled, and knit everlastingly to Him, by what we receive" (p. 71).
"Whatever we may say, or hold, or believe, concerning the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, we are to affirm in the same manner of God. The whole deity is in it, in it from eternity, and will to eternity be" (p. 73).
He contends that "vicarious sacrifice belongs to men;" that it is a mistake to suppose that" Christ in the matter of vicarious sacrifice is a being by himself" (p. 106). He asserts that "sacrifice is the economic law of discipleship" (p. 116).
Part second is devoted to showing that "the life and sacrifice of Christ consists in what he
247
does to become a renovating and saving power" (p. 127). He says that "Christ is not here to die, but dies because he is here;" and brings to his support the great name of Anselm, who said: "He suffered death of his own accord, not as an act of obedience, but on account of his obedience in maintaining right; for he held out so persistently, that he met death on account of it" (p. 181). The primary object of Christ is "the healing of souls," and is illustrated by the "Christed consciousness of the disciples:" -
"It is not the account of their Christian experience, and of the gospel as related thereto, that Christ has done something before God's throne, and wholly apart from all effect in them, to make their acceptance possible; and then that the Holy Spirit, by a divine efficiency in them, changes their hearts. No such theological gospel of dry wood and hay is the gospel of the apostles. They find everything, in their human nature, penetrated by the sense and savor and beauty and glory of Christ. Their whole consciousness is a Christ-consciousness, - everything good and strong in them is Christ within. Worsted in all their struggles of will-work and self-regeneration, they still chant their liberty in Christ and say, 'For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free.' Their joy is to be consciously Christed, fully possessed by Christ; to have him dwell in them, and spread himself over and through all the senses and sentiments, and willings, and works of their life" (p. 159).
248
The remaining chapters of this part show how "Christ in his sacrifice becomes the moral power of God," and set forth his life and teachings in that light.
"The view of Christ's mission I have been trying to establish excludes the possibility, it will be seen, of any dogmatic formula in which it may be adequately stated. It is not a theorem, or form of thought, but a process, and the process includes all the facts of a life. . . . The Scriptures themselves do not know how to make up any formula . . . that will adequately express, in the manner of our theologians, the import of Christ's reconciling work. That work, accurately speaking, consisted in exactly the whole life of Jesus, - all that he said and did, and, to human impression, was, in the conditions through which he passed" (p. 213).
The moral power of Christ reaches its highest point in the fact that "he humanizes God to men" 1 (p. 230). It is at this point that Bush-
1 "The true relation of mankind to the Lord Jesus is not grasped
until he is regarded as the Incarnation of the Eternal Humanity in which the
race is constituted. The philosophy of the prologue to the Fourth Gospel is
essential to the understanding of the advent and career of Jesus. There is
eternally in the Godhead a rational, creative humanity, and in that divine
humanity our race is constituted. . . . The Eternal ideal humanity and the
historic fact meet in the prophet of Nazareth. The Eternal thus manifests
himself through the divinely human career, and, after the history is made which
forever renders impossible the denial that the ideal is the real, the Eternal
returns to his preincarnate fullness and universality." (Rev. George A.
Gordon, D. D., The Christ of To-day, p, 235.)
"That the divine Logos rules in history is the sole presupposi-
249
nell urges at length and with great force the passibility of God: "Here then it is, in the revelation of a suffering God, that the great name of Jesus becomes the embodied glory and the Great Moral Power of God. In it, as in a sun, the divine feeling henceforth shines; so that whoever believes in his name takes the power of it, and is transformed radically, even at the deepest centre of life, by it, - born of God" (p. 230). But it is moral power, neither penal nor expiatory; the natural sympathy of one being with another by reason of love.
We could almost wish the book had ended at this point. So far it has been a plea for the "moral view" of the atonement; and there could hardly be a stronger one. It might well be detached from the rest of the treatise and made a handbook on the subject. It may be surpassed in theological and exegetical accuracy, but not easily can its contention be made with profounder insight or closer sympathy. It was hardly possible at the time of his writing wholly to avoid the legalism of the subject. The doctrine had almost no place in the thought of the day except in its relations to justice, penalty, forgiveness, righteousness, and justification, all treated in a forensic
tion of faith, which Evolution sets up. To follow the manifold phenomenal forms of this Logos is the task of science. Theology, go far as it is a science of religion, and not merely ecclesiastical piecework, finds the revelation of the divine Logos in the totality of religious history, in all the expressions and forms of development of the human consciousness of God." (Pfleiderer, "Evolution and Theology," The New World, September, 1898, p. 429.)
250
way. But these are matters that are now left to every-day thought, to the natural action of con-science, to the play of the religious nature, to the established convictions of mankind, to what all men believe and no man denies, to the life of Christ, and to a conscious experience of that life. They cannot be made factors in a legally conceived theory of a phase of Christ's history called the atonement.1
It was not so in the middle of the century. Notwithstanding the modifications of the doctrine since Edwards, some of which were improvements and some not, it was still imbedded in a mixture of legalism and metaphysics, each interpreted by the other. Much had been cast off, such as the theory that Christ suffered the penalty of sin; imputation of sin to Christ and of his righteousness to the believer; willingness to be forever cast out for the glory of God; the sinfulness of "unregenerate doings;" sin the necessary means of the greatest good; salvation freely offered yet conditioned on election, all of which bore in one way or another on the atonement.2
Its hold on the people was largely due to the vast amount of intolerable doctrine it supplanted, - such as a limited atonement, in the light of
1 "A theology which does not correspond with the deepest thoughts
and feelings of human beings cannot be a true Theology." (F. D. Maurice,
Introduction to Theological Essays.)
2 For a most lucid statement of the early New England doc-trine, see Professor Fisher's History of Christian Doctrine, pp. 394-419.
251
which It seemed reason itself. But it was cold, hard, and distant; it was expressive, not impressive; spectacular, not real. In a word, it was not life, but a legal interpretation of a phase of life, which had been modified until it seemed to be the whole of it. It is possible to set the atonement, as it was unfolded in New England, in many lights. The able authors of "Progressive Orthodoxy" (p. 51) say of New England theology that "it attempted to find the ethical ends secured by the atonement. It emphasized the fact that other methods than punishment can express the character of sin." The New Haven School led up to this point by its theory of the atonement as consisting in an expression of God's abhorrence of sin, and regard for his law. Bushnell broadened and ultimated this expression by making the ethical good of men the end of the atonement; that is, he took it out of the region of legalism and laid it straight down upon life itself. The difference is as great as that between a picture and the landscape it outlines. It may be possible to get on without one, but not without the other. Bushnell, rather needlessly, devotes much time to the picture. He thought it was necessary to enter into this world of legalism in order to deliver the doctrine out of it. It must also be said that he himself had not fully escaped from it. No man wholly rids himself of the dominant ideas of his age; or if he does, he is without a field and a vocation. He felt that he must justify "the moral view" in this
252
world of legalism. The doctrine thus preserved something of historical continuity and allied itself to the form at least of natural growth; and above all, it avoided schism. It is possible, indeed, that the thought of the coming age would itself have eliminated the legalism left in the doctrine, and saved a discussion that could not do the work of time and growth.
He begins by a protest against resolving Christ's work under "political analogies" unless they are carefully qualified by others. "What is said of law and justice, under the analogies of human government, does not appear to hold, without qualifications not given. It cannot be that such analogies of law and justice and penalty and pardon, prepared in the civil state, are not to be used in religion. Like all other analogies of the outward life, they were designed to be. And yet there are few close observers, I suspect, who have not sometimes been so far impressed, by the fatalities discovered in attempts to resolve Christ's work under this kind of analogy, as to seriously doubt whether anything reliable can be thus accomplished. There certainly cannot be, unless the analogy is carefully qualified by others, such, for example, as those of the family, the field, the shop, the market. There is also another kind of qualifier, that is obtained by getting a partially distinct footing for the subject, in a province of thought which is not under such analogies" (p. 233).
253
This province is the assumption that law is "before God's will and before his instituting act:" it is "that necessary, everlasting, ideal law of right, which, simply to think, is to be forever obliged by it" (p. 235). Obedience to this law makes a complete society until disobedience brings in confusion and disorder, when God institutes "government and redemption together" (p. 243). While asserting the reality of the Fall, he admits that it is mythical in form. It stands between primal or ideal law and instituted government. Here he finds "the want and true place of redemption. It must have some primary and even principal reference to the law before government, and not to any instituted law, or statute, or judicial penalty existing under that" (p. 251).
However uncertain this line of thought may be, his purpose is clear; namely, to get the doctrine out of the cumbering analogies of human justice into the realm of eternal law, where it easily and naturally allies itself to life and the direct consciousness of right and wrong, and especially, as "instituted government inaugurates justice and penal sanctions," he closes the door against these troublesome factors and secures an open field for "the moral view." Still, he admits that if instituted government does not contain redemption, it is a necessary co-factor of it, but at the same time he rejects all penal views and compensations to justice, and the like. In short, he takes out of instituted government what suits his purpose and
254
leaves the rest. In this he is entirely justified, using, as he does, a criterion superior to that of human analogies. "God nowhere signifies that he has given up the world to the prior right of justice, and that mercy shall come in, only as she pays a gate-fee for the right of entrance. "Still, after many pages of keen analysis, he finds that they "coalesce at the root." The only surprise is that this should ever have been doubted. His conclusion is: -
"On the whole, this matter of a contrived compensation to justice, which so many take for a gospel, appears to me to contain about the worst reflection upon God's justice that could be stated, without some great offense against reverence; for in whatever manner the compensation, or judicial satisfaction, is conceived to be made, in the suffering of Christ, we shall find everything pushed off the basis of truth. The justice satisfied is satisfied with injustice! the forgiveness prepared is forgiveness on the score of pay! the judgment-day award disclaims the fact of forgiveness after payment made, and even refuses to be satisfied, taking payment again! What, meantime, has become of the penalties threatened, and where is the truth of the law? The penalties threatened, as against wrongdoers, are not to be executed on them, be-cause they have been executed on a right-doer! viz., Christ. And it is only in some logically formal, or theologically fictitious sense, that they are executed even on him" (p. 293).
255
But if Christ does not bear the penalty of the law, he honors it: "Christ has set the law precept in a position of great honor and power, enduing it with such life and majesty, in men's convictions, as it otherwise never could have had. (1.) He proposes, we have seen, no remission of sins, which does not include a full recovery to the law. (2.) All that he does and suffers in his sacrifice, he as truly does for the re-sanctification of the law as for our recovery. (3.) In his incarnation, he incarnates the same, and brings it nigh to men's feelings and convictions, by the personal footing he gains for it in humanity. (4.) He honors it again by his obedience, which is, in fact, a revelation of God's own everlasting obedience, before the eyes of mankind; the grandest fact of human knowledge" (p. 321).
Still, legal penal enforcements are necessary, and are associated with the power of Christ, so that he "combines both kinds of motivity," his own moral influence and natural retributive forces. Disengaging this from its setting, we find ourselves very near the simple fact that the influence of Christ and the everyday laws of morality are hand in hand. Since Christ has taken into his work the natural retributions of sin as a co-working factor, he declares the fact in two ways: "First, eternal punishment; second, the judgment of the world by himself." Bushnell, shrinking somewhat from the first, says that "eternal need not mean eternal in the exact speculative sense," but "it is the pun-
256
ishment of the eternal state, and is best apprehended here, when taken as a practical finality." He refuses to "make a bad eternity hang on the form of a word." He was incapable of hedging, but this careful use of words is made to lead in opinions which, though stated hypothetically, reached almost to convictions, such as the wasting away of the soul until the "religious nature is likely to be nearly, or quite gone by" (p. 337); not extinction, it will be observed, but practically that, "an asymptote curve forever approaching a fixed point, but never reaching it." The subject is practically treated in a sermon on "The Capacity for Religion Extirpated by Disuse." (Sermons for the New Life, p. 165.)
It is before such speculation as this that one draws off. His definition of "eternal" opens a door that humanity would enter. "Purgatorial restoration-ism," he says, "has no show of evidence or possibility." His argument requires a penalty commensurate with the moral elements contained in salvation, and he finds it not in conscious pain, but in a wasting away of faculties, thus depriving penalty of its edge under such psychological possibilities that it may cease to be penalty. The mind refuses to follow him on this conjectural path. But, still shrinking from eternal punishment, he devotes two pages (pp. 338, 339) to a vigorous protest against "the infinity of future punishment," meaning quantity, not duration. He thus ran counter to the prevailing thought on the subject,
257
which, made much of time and intensity, "Since the law of God is the best law possible, he ought, in true justice, to make the strongest expression of attachment to it that is possible; therefore that he ought to inflict the strongest possible punishment for the breach of it" (p. 389), - an argument that he treats with ridicule, and asserts that penalty will be according to demerit. He also admits with Baxter, though less heartily, "that God is ready, at any future point in the run of it (misery), to embrace, in everlasting reconciliation, any truly repenting soul" (p. 340). Bushnell reduces the possibility of this to hopeless improbability under psychological processes for which there are no sure data. His full position on endless punishment is this: -
"Assuming all these qualifications of measure and degree, there is nothing left in the matter of endless punishment, by which we can fitly be disturbed, except that it does not bring out the kingdom of God in that one state of realized unity and complete order which we most naturally desire, and think to be worthiest of his greatness and sovereignty. It certainly would be more agreeable, if we could have this hope; and many are resolved to have it without Christ's permission, if they cannot have it with. They even make it a point of merit to seize this honor bravely for God, on their own responsibility, and for it, if they must, defy the Scripture. I think otherwise, and could even count it a much braver thing to willingly be less
258
brave, and, despite of our natural longings for some issue of God's plan that is different, follow still the lead of the Master" (p. 341).
It is strange that Bushnell was not more impressed by what he so clearly saw; namely, that endless punishment" does not bring out the Kingdom of God in that one state of realized unity and complete order which ... we think worthiest of his greatness and sovereignty." It is difficult to explain this lowering view of the kingdom of God, which his statement would seem to contradict. Bushnell held the key to a better interpretation in his theory of language, but failed to use it here. His treatment of the subject is labored and uncertain; the heart protested against the head, and the head still felt the sway of theories of inspiration and interpretation that were to endure yet longer. But in spite of this stringency, he was vigorously criticized as "scarcely knowing what the conception of penalty is" (The New Englander, vol. xxv. p. 252). His defective conception was thought to determine his theory of atonement. If atonement is an endurance of penalty, the two must be fully correlated; and if penalty is the expression of God's displeasure, the atonement must express it. Such was the logic. Bushnell did not deny it, but he denied that it exhausted the atonement or was its central idea. But to say that he had no conception of penalty is like asserting that Newton knew nothing of gravitation. His pages blaze and thunder with it, but he speaks of more than displeasure with sin.
259
The remaining chapters of part third are devoted to a thorough exposition and criticism of the prevailing theory of substitution and the older theories of penal satisfaction, followed by an exceedingly able discussion of justification by faith, finding in "the moral view" the exact field where this great doctrine has full and free play.
But a stronger objection to the "moral view" than any he had dealt with was to be found in the sacrificial terms in which the work of Christ is clothed in the Scriptures. To get the sacrificial Christ out of the category of legal expiation into that of moral power was necessary in order to make good his contention. It is where the doctrine halts to-day, - held back by literalism, by over stringent views of inspiration, by the not yet ascertained place of sacrifice in the ethnic religions, but chiefly by failure to understand what the writer contended for, namely, moral power; and also by failure to see that Christ, so far as he was related to Judaism, was in the line of the prophets and not of the priests. Bushnell fought his battle at close quarters over the meaning and use of sacrifices. They are "a language faculty," "vehicles of religion," "spiritual word figures," "altar-forms," but they had their meaning for the people who used them, and were not to them types of Christ, though they have become such, - "in that common, widely general, always rational sense, that all physical objects and relations, taken up as roots of language, are types, and are designed
260
to be, of the spiritual meanings to be figured by them, or built into spiritual words upon them. A type is, in this view, a natural analog on, or figure, of some mental or spiritual idea; a thing in form to represent, and be the name of, what is out of all physical conditions, and therefore has no form" (p. 458). Christ is a sacrifice, but not a Jewish sacrifice, and while he takes away sin, it is not in the way in which the sacrifices of the altar were thought to take it away. He thus carries the whole matter over into the world of the spirit, - something very necessary to be done, unless Christianity is to be a continuation of Judaism.
Bushnell's theory of language always stood him in good stead; and it was by no means a weak staff to lean upon. It did for him what evolution does for the theologian of today, who views Christ not as a type of Jewish sacrifice, but as a final and perfect form of all sacrifice. Bushnell went even deeper, and found the spiritual meaning under all forms of sacrifice. The subject is most ably treated in his essay on "Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination," perhaps his best minor contribution to theology.1 "Call the words 'old clothes' then of the Hebrews, putting what contempt we may upon them, still they are such types and metaphors of God's mercy as he has been able to prepare, and Christ is in them as in 'glorious apparel'! No living disciple, having once gotten the sense of these types of the altar, will ever try to get his gospel
1 Building Eras.
261
out of them and preach it in the common terms of language. Quite as certainly will he never try, having once gotten their meaning, to hold them literally, - Christ made literally sin for us, a literal Lamb, literal sacrifice, bleeding literally for the uses of his blood. But he will want them as the dear interpreters and equivalents of God's mercy in the cross, putting himself before them to read and read again, and drink and drink again, their full divine meanings into his soul. Beholding more truths in their faces than all the contrived theories and speculated propositions of schools, he will stay fast by them, or in them, wanting never to get clear of them, or away from the dear and still more dear impression of their power."
His final and best word on the subject is in the same essay, where he speaks of the "metaphors of the altar."
"Take them as they rise in the apostolic teachings, God's figures for the men of old, in the time then present, and for us in the time now present; then as facts of atoning, now as metaphors of the same; and they will be full of God's meaning, we shall know ourselves atoned once for all by their power. But if we undertake to make a science out of them, and speculate them into a rational theory, it will be no gospel that we make, but a poor dry jargon rather; a righteousness that makes nobody righteous, a justice satisfied by injustice, a mercy on the basis of pay, a penal deliverance that keeps on foot all the penal liabilities. All at-
262
tempts to think out the cross and have it in dogmatic statement have resulted only in disagreement and distraction. And yet there is a remarkable consent of utterance, we plainly discover, when the cross is preached, as for salvation's sake, in the simple use of the scripture symbols taken all as figures for the time then present."
The first volume closes with a valuable homiletic chapter in which is urged a preaching of Christ's life: "I think it would hardly be possible for a preacher to be too much in the facts of his life" (p. 583). This remark gives both the keynote and unity to his treatise: namely, what he was fond of calling "a first-hand" gospel, Christ in contact with the believer until the power of one is realized in the other, and he is "Christed" through and through; "Christ, the mould of our doc-trine, the medium of our prayers, the soul of our liberty, the informing grace and music of our hymns, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption" (p. 551).
The second volume of "The Vicarious Sacrifice" was written ten years after the publication of the first. It awoke less interest than any other of his treatises. While the first volume, especially the first two parts, stands for a theory of the atonement clearly defined and well recognized in the theological world, the second is regarded as a refinement, and refinements in theology are not mow popular, even if they are true. But the growth of this volume is most characteristic.
263
Bushnell never could let go a subject in which he had become interested. His mind was of a penetrative, exploring character. Wherever he was, in Europe, Cuba, Minnesota, California, he saw all there was to be seen, and worked his way down to the last analysis of whatever was explicable. Had he been an inventor, and the blood ran in his veins, - the patents would have appeared in rapid succession. Theology, from its nature, admits of endless phases; and because it is a science, it is always unfolding under the increase of knowledge. Bushnell was through and through a theologian, though not a technical one, and he fulfilled his vocation. "New light" was always corning to him. He cared more for the new than for the old, nor was he careful to preserve a formal harmony between them. More than once he virtually retracted or greatly altered positions he had taken, but it should be said, generally not with advantage to himself as a thinker. His first contentions usually carried his real convictions, and he gravitated back to them.
We do not mean to imply that the two volumes of "The Vicarious Sacrifice" are at variance. His own word is sufficient on this point. He says: "I recant no one of my denials." "I still assert the 'moral view' of the atonement as before, and even more completely than before." He describes the genesis of the book as follows: -
"I was writing a discourse on the inquiry, how shall a man be able to entirely and perfectly for-
264
give his enemy, so as to forever sweeten the bitterness of his wounded feeling and leave no sense of personal revulsion? I cannot give the whole argument here, but it must suffice to say that I was brought squarely down upon the discovery that nothing will ever accomplish the proposed real and true forgiveness, but to make cost in the endeavor, such cost as new-tempers and liquefies the reluctant nature. And this making cost will be his propitation of himself. Why not say this of all moral natures, why not of the Great Propitiation itself?" (vol. ii. p. 12).
He thus comes to his subject in a natural way. The first volume treated "the work of Christ as a reconciling power on man;" he will now treat it on the God-ward side. The human analogy suggests that God forgives as man does, by entering painfully into some experience or work for the offender; this assures him of forgiveness, and that no impediments lie in the way of it. So far in the first volume; in the second, the analogy is carried further and made to cover the alleged fact that one object of a man's suffering for an offender against him is to allay the resentment of his own moral nature against the offense, and thus to make himself propitious or ready to forgive; and it is the knowledge that this has been done that se-cures power over the offender. Bushnell carries the analogy to God, who in the sufferings of Christ propitiates himself. If this is true "of all moral natures, why not of the Great Propitiation itself?"
265
He defines his position, as compared with that taken in volume one, as follows: -
"I asserted a propitiation before, but accounted for the word as one by which the disciple objectivizes his own feelings, conceiving that God him-self is representatively mitigated or become propitious, because he is himself inwardly reconciled to God. Instead of this, I now assert a real propitiation of God, finding it in evidence from the propitiation we instinctively make ourselves, when we heartily forgive. So if it should be imagined that I now give in to the legal-substitution, legal-satisfaction theory, it will only be true that I assert a scheme of discipline for man, which is contrived to work its own settlement, in being fulfilled and consummated by an obedience in the higher plane of liberty itself.
"I still assert the 'moral view' of the atonement as before, and even more completely than before, inasmuch as I propose to interpret all that is prepared and suffered in the propitiation of God and the justification of men, by a reference to the moral pronouncements of human nature and society; assuming that nothing can be true of God, or of Christ, which is not true in some sense more humano, and is not made intelligible by human analogies. We cannot interpret God, as any one may see, except by what we find in our own personal instincts and ideas" (p. 14).
It will be observed that he strives to keep clear of the legalism he has abjured, and to find the grounds
266
of his contention, not in contrived theories of justice and forgiveness and satisfaction and the like, but in "human analogies." He thus keeps among the laws "before government," for which he contended at the outset, and in the real world of human life. However it may be with his main point, it is here that the book has substantial value. Whatever is done in this realm is legitimate, but while our author steers fairly clear of legalism, the suspicion arises that but for legalism he would not have laid down his thesis, and that something of its shadow overclouds it. Still, if he errs, it is not legalism that leads him astray, but symbolism, the chief seducer in the world of thought, its necessity and its snare. If given full rein, it drives straight towards pantheism; if too sternly checked, thought takes refuge in its own unwarranted creations that are sure to lack the unity secured by symbol. It was a rule and a passion with Bushnell to think under symbols. Had he not lived in New England, he might have been a pantheist. If he is ever at fault, it is in overworking the apparent likeness of one thing to another, so much more does he see the likeness than the unlikeness, and not sufficiently perceiving that it is through unlikeness that complexity comes in and prevents the world from becoming a solid uniformity. It is well to be able to perceive symbols; it is better to be able to define their scope. Bushnell himself sees the need of such limitation when he speaks of "the grand analogy,
267
or almost identity, that subsists between our moral nature and that of God; so that our moral pathologies and those of God make faithful answer to each other, and He is brought so close to us that almost anything that occurs in the workings or exigencies of our moral instincts may even be expected in his" (p. 35). It is on the strength of this word almost that we hesitate to carry a possible feature of human forgiveness into the divine nature to such an extent as to claim that God has need to propitiate himself in order to bring about a full sense of forgiveness. That God suffers with and for men in Christ rests on the broad analogy of Fatherhood, but that He suffers in order to become propitious, or rather by suffering becomes propitious, for this point is guarded on page 53, is a doubtful feature of the analogy. It seems to detract from simple love, which needs nothing to complete itself, and certainly in God needs nothing to start it into exercise. It savors of the schools and the systems and the schemes rather than of the simple human love that overspreads the life of Christ. This, indeed, Bushnell would have, and fills pages with protests against regarding it in any other light, but he fails to remove the impression.
The book was hailed by his orthodox critics as indicating a return to their ranks, but while yielding them a certain satisfaction, it brought no real gain to the older orthodoxy; it was too full of patripassianism, and the Sabellian flavor still hung
268
round the writer, notwithstanding his assent to the Nicene phrases. Nor could it be incorporated into the older systems as a working factor; it crowded out more than it brought to them. It is read by his sympathizers with admiration and approval of its side discussions, but it wins little assent to the main point; the currents of thought run in other directions and will not be turned back. In some respects the book is quite modern. Its intense patripassianism, often magnificent in the energy with which it is urged, goes well with the following quotation from a writer who represents a prevalent philosophy, and even suggests whether they do not bring up at the same point of semi-pantheism. "Your suffering, just as it is in you, is God's suffering. No chasm divides you from God. He is not remote from you even in his eternity. He is here. His eternity means merely the completeness of his experience. But that completeness is inclusive. Your sorrow is one of the included facts." 1 What Mr. Royce says of God's relation to the evil of suffering, Bushnell would say of his relation to sin; that is, God enters into the very pains of the sinner both by a necessity of his nature, and as a real way of securing power over him. The use made by both authors of the passability of God one in explaining evil, the other redemption is interesting in its bearing on Theism, and possibly each serves to "point the way we are going." In summing up these two volumes we would
1 Professor Josiah Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, p. 26.
269
say that their value consists In a clear and forceful presentation of "the moral view" of the atonement. Bushnell domiciled it in the religious thought of the day, and saved it from utter loss by recasting it in the terms of human experience. It is a view of the atonement that deepens and strengthens life at every point. Its central idea is that it puts the believer directly into the very process by which Christ became a redeemer, and is saving the world; that Christ does nothing for a man beyond what the man himself is required to do for other men, and that it is exactly at this point that the world is redeemed; - the principles underlying salvation are of "universal obligation." It is also at this point that the nature of man as a son of God is fulfilled, and he becomes one with God. It is by suffering himself to be drawn into the life of Christ, and by sharing it in every phase and particular, that he becomes one with Christ and one with God; it is thus that Father-hood and son ship are fully established. The older views did not exclude these moral processes, but by making the atonement an expiation or a penal satisfaction, they could secure them only as incidental accompaniments rendered out of gratitude and sense of duty. But "the moral view" makes life consist in them; turns them into saving forces that are one with the saving energy of Christ himself. And it is a reasonable view because it is the supreme expression of what is going on in the everyday processes of human life.
270
The first volume, which carries the main force of his contention, was written during the civil war for the Union. His mind played back and forth between the tragedy of the Cross and that which was going on in the battlefields of the country, and he saw that each was "grounded in principles of universal obligation," and therefore had saving power. He identified the atonement with human life and history, instead of separating it from them as other theories of the atonement had done. To have brought this truth out of its manifold perversions and made it what it was in the beginning, and what it will be so long as it is an actual redemption, is an achievement in theology that belongs to the first order of intellectual greatness.
The criticism called out by the first volume was severer than that visited on any previous book. Outside of New England, the condemnation was total. From the penal view to the moral was too long a step for the Presbyterian critics to take. The most notable and perhaps ablest review appeared in the "New Englander" (vol. xxv. 1866, p. 228). After more than fifty pages of close yet always generous criticism of Bushnell's "over-sights and errors," turning chiefly on propitiation, the writer closes with these remarkable words: "No one can be named who has taken nobler and more comprehensive views of the completeness of Christ for every exigency which he recognizes. No one can conceive more vividly the tenderness, the sublimity, the subduing and constraining power of
271
his self-sacrificing and vicarious love. No one certainly can draw out by a finer analysis the workings of that love upon the soul of man to purify and humble, to elevate and ennoble, to sanctify and save his ruined nature. 'It is singular,' remarks an acute critic in a private letter, 'that men who, like Bushnell and Robertson, reject the full import of the death of Christ, should make Christ a far more living and effective power than the majority of those who receive it. It is singular, yet, it must be confessed, it is true.' "Why, indeed? Nothing could more clearly show the need of a new conception of the atonement in place of that supposed to state "the full import of the death of Christ" than this naive confession of its weakness, as held by the majority, in comparison with that which is asserted to be defective. It raises a question as to the relative value of a scientifically correct theology as compared with an effective gospel. It is not too much to say that Bushnell and Robertson preached the Christ who is now accepted by the majority of intelligent believers in Great Britain and America, and the reason is that stated by the "acute critic." In the practical world it would have the force of a surrender; but the theological world of that day was not practical; it insisted on scientific correct-ness, whatever became of the sinner.