10. Sabatier. The Doctrine of the Atonement, and Its Historical Evolution, And Religion and Modern Culture
By the late Auguste Sabatier. Translated from the French by Victor Leuliette, B.-ès-L. (Paris), A.K.C. London: Williams
& Norgate; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1904. 1 o one who has ever read ten lines of the writings of the late Prof.
N Auguste Sabatier but will have been impressed with the grace of his style and the truly Gallic attractiveness of his method of opening and presenting a subject. His learning seemed only to adorn, his polemic zeal only to add zest to, what seemed always primarily a piece of literature.
Whatever else he was he was always eminently readable. The two essays which combine to make up the little volume at present before us are like the rest of his writings in these things. They are like the rest of his writings also in the poverty-stricken thinness of the religious conceptions which they present to us as the only form in which Christianity can hope to live— or rather must expect to die—in the conditions presented by modern culture.
The second of these essays is really an address which was delivered at the Religious Science Congress at Stockholm, September 2, 1897. It undertakes to elucidate precisely the problem of the relations of religion and modern culture. These relations, we are told, are summed up in the one word "conflict." The principle of modern culture is expressed in the single term "autonomy"—that is to say, "the unconquerable assurance of the human mind, in its present advanced state of development, that it possesses within itself the norm of its life and of its thought" (p. 169). It, of course, scouts the "heteronomy" in which traditional religion entrenches itself.
Traditional religion, on the other hand, too timid to trust the human soul to its inherent religious instinct, and clinging in one way or another to "external authority," profoundly distrusts the efforts of the human spirit, characterizing every department of modern culture, to realize its independence. What is to be done and what is the outlook for the future?
Prof. Sabatier counsels cessation of the external conflict, and points with hope to the mutual interpenetration of religion and culture.
At this point, we delight to say, we are heartily at one with Prof.
Sabatier; and the section of the address in which he pictures the coming reconciliation through mutual internal influence, is a beautiful expression of a noble conception, and as well, as we shall be happy to believe, a true forecast of the ultimate issue. "To the violent and sterile conflict which we have just described there succeeds the closest and most active solidarity" (p.
212). Scientific men having become religious, the science they produce will exhibit the traits of their religion. Religious men having become scientific, the religion they serve will take on the forms of rational and intellectually defensible expression. "Being an inner inspiration, a deep-seated life, kindled within the soul itself by the spirit of God, piety will not act from without upon science in order to curb it beneath a strange law; it will not impose its methods or assign its limits to science, still less will it dictate its
conclusions. But it will call forth and maintain, within the heart of the scientist, the sacred flame of the religious, that is to say, absolute love of truth" (p. 212). Similarly religion will manifest itself as "in communication and close touch with human culture" (p. 218). It is the vision of the lion and lamb lying down together: and, we praise God for it, it is a vision that is to be realized.
It is all the more regrettable that, when we look closely at Prof.
Sabatier's personal expectation—perhaps we would better say, individual prophecy—of the precise manner in which this great end shall be attained, we discover that the side of the lion where he looks (and hopes) to see the lamb lie down is the inside. He tells us, indeed, that religion is to borrow nothing from culture, but to go its own way to its own perfect development. But he conceives that religion in its perfect development will possess nothing that culture can take the least interest in. The process by which religion is to make itself "agreeable to the general culture of modern times" is a process of "freeing itself from worn out forms and old ideas."
And to Prof. Sabatier every form and idea is old and worn out except the pure products of the religious sentiment itself. The Socinian criticism, the Rationalistic assault, the demands of Modern Culture, these, in Prof.
Sabatier's apprehension, are the successive instruments by means of which religion has been progressively purified; and the pure religion he commends to us as the religion of the future is accordingly just a highly sentimentalized natural religion. He expresses this dreary conclusion in terms so gracious and so suggestive that we scarcely realize that it is merely bald natural religion that is commended to us. We read almost without shock of the doctrines of the Trinity, of the Person of Christ, of the Sacrificial Atonement as so much "Christian mythology" which has
"broken down beneath the blows of the rationalism of the eighteenth century" (pp. 221 f.). Under the sense of the beauty of the conception of
piety which describes it as "the sensitiveness of the heart for God," we almost fail to catch what is meant when we are told that "the permanent
Christian consciousness will be the religious consciousness of man, induced by the experience of filial piety wrought in the soul of Christ" (p. 204). It is with all the more shock that we realize in the end that when Prof. Sabatier commends to us the religion of Jesus, he means rather the religion which Jesus had than the religion that has Jesus.
The earlier of the two essays affords an illustration of how fully Prof.
Sabatier in the religion he commends to modern men was prepared to do without Jesus and all that Jesus has stood for in the religion He founded. Its subject is the doctrine of the Atonement, and its method is what Prof.
Sabatier calls "the historical method." That is to say, it is dominated by the assumption that when you have worked out the historical development of a doctrine you have "explained" that doctrine—which in the view of writers of this class is the same as to say you have explained it away. The object of this essay is to trace "the historical evolution of the doctrine of the Atonement," with a view to rendering any doctrine of Atonement incredible. The first half of it is occupied with the Biblical conceptions of Atonement; the last half with the ideas that have been entertained by the teachers of the Church. The one class of conceptions is treated as of as little authority as the other: and it is not unassuring to those of us who believe in a doctrine of Atonement on the authority of Scripture, to observe from such an exposition as is here given us that it can be got rid of only along with the authority of Scripture. When we are told that the sacrifices of the Old Testament are of merely human origin and significance, for example, it comforts us somewhat to learn that it has to be allowed that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (a treatise we admire even more than we do
Prof. Sabatier's) thought very differently. And when we are told that the idea of substitution is crude and impossible, it brings us some consolation
to learn that confessedly it is positively contained in the teaching of Paul, a writer in whose view we cannot help placing some confidence with respect to such a matter.
The essay is professedly a historical one. Perhaps it is not wrong in us to take interest in it, therefore, chiefly from the historical point of view. Its main interest to us at all events arises not from any help it brings us for understanding the Atonement, but from the information it gives us of what Prof. Sabatier was accustomed to teach concerning the Atonement.
For it cannot be without very great significance to those living in this modern age to have so authoritative an exposition of what it is that is commended to us by the leaders of the new thought as to the essence of Christianity. Let us say at once, however, that we find nothing particularly new in Prof. Sabatier's doctrine of the Atonement. He himself is conscious that it is the outcome of the Socinian and Rationalistic criticism, and in point of fact it merely reproduces the characteristic view of these schools of destructive criticism, driven to the last extremity.
According to Prof. Sabatier the gospel is summed up in the parables of the prodigal son and of the publican (p. 123), and he makes it the reproach of the orthodox that they find only a part of the gospel in these parables and seek a supplement for them in other passages of Scripture. Accordingly
"God needs neither mediation nor satisfaction" (p. 120). "The Father is satisfied if the prodigal son, confessing his sins and condemning his errors, earnestly repents and returns to his Father's house" (p. 120). "In order to accomplish the work of the salvation of sinners, Jesus then had no need to influence God, whose love has taken and forever retains the initiative of forgiveness. God has no need to be brought back to man and reconciled with him" (p. 125). Christ's entire work consists, therefore, in reconciling man to God, "in bringing about in the individual and in humanity the state of repentance in which alone the forgiveness of the Father can become
effective" (p. 126). For the only thing God asks and can ask as the ground of forgiveness of the sinner is simply repentance on the sinner's part.
"Forgiveness for the sinner who repents from the bottom of his heart: such is the message of the Gospel. What constitutes the superiority of the Christian conception of the Father is precisely that it rises above the feeling of retaliation and vengeance, and that it wills not the death of the sinner, but his conversion and life. What satisfaction does the Father in the parable require in order to forgive his repentant son who returns to him?" (p. 112).
"From one end of the Gospel to the other, forgiveness of sins is promised simply to repentance and faith, because, in the inner life of the soul, repentance and faith are in reality the beginning of the defeat and destruction of sin" (p. 120). It is not taught indeed that "repentance is the cause of the forgiveness of sins": "this cause," it is remarked, "is none other than the love of the Father for His children." "But repentance is the necessary and sufficient condition"; and "it is impossible to conceive God the Father rejecting one of His children who returns to Him, condemning himself, deploring his sins, and craving forgiveness" (p. 124). Repentance, in one word, "is salvation itself" (p. 127). "There is no atonement other than repentance" (p. 127). From which it would seem to follow that the atoning act is the act of man, not of Christ, and that Christ's whole work consists in bringing man to perform this atoning act of repentance.
How Christ accomplishes this, is that He so touches our hearts as to make us grieve over our evil entreatment of our loving Father. In this work of touching our hearts, no doubt, His passion and death have their high part to play. But we must not fancy that they in any way affect God and stand in any sense in His sight as a reason or ground of His acceptance of our persons. "The death of Christ is an essentially moral act, the significance and value of which proceed solely from the spiritual life and the feeling of love which it reveals" (p. 110). "The cross is the expiation for sins
only because it is the cause of repentance to which remission is promised"
(p. 127); and there is no other atonement than this repentance (p. 127).
Jesus is, then, only in a modified sense our Saviour. Indeed, though He has done what He did supremely, what He did has no uniqueness about it—it is in kind no other than what many others than Himself have done and are still doing. "The work of Christ ceases, then, to be isolated and incomprehensible" (p. 131); "the sufferings and death of the righteous and of the good operate in the same way as the passion of Christ upon the conscience of the wicked; … which signifies that they help to produce that state of repentance in which the forgiveness of sins and the work of salvation devised by the divine mercy may be realized" (p. 133). Not merely
Paul then, who claims (Col. 1:24) a part in this work, "to the scandal of all future orthodoxies" (p. 133), but "all God's servants" have stood by the side of Jesus, as along with Him and in the same sense (though not in the same degree) in which He is, our saviours. Christianity thus emerges before us
"as the religion of universal redemption by love" (p. 134).
The point that ultimately focuses our attention as we read Prof.
Sabatier's exposition emerges in this last declaration. Christianity, we are told, is the religion "of universal redemption by love." Whose love? Even the old Socinianism would reply, as a matter of course, God's love. Not so Prof.
Sabatier. With him, it is everybody's love. He has, in a word, transmuted Christianity into bald Altruism; in his soteriological theory he has substituted the universe of sentient creatures for God and His Christ. Such, he tells us, "are the authentic data of the Christian consciousness": and with this he would stop. The deeper basis he declines to probe. "But if the philosophic mind would go further and ask whence proceeds this supreme law of the moral world which has made self-denial, disinterested selfsacrifice, and brotherly love the ransom of sin and the means of its progressive destruction, we may well be led to confess our inability to
answer" (p. 135). Perhaps, then, the reader may be excused if he takes leave to doubt whether there is any justification in reason or Scripture for representing "brotherly love" as "the ransom of sin"—especially if his own
Christian consciousness (taught, no doubt, by the Scriptural declarations) declines to add its seal to it. If we are to rest on an ipse dixit we may without offense, perhaps, prefer the ipse dixit of our Lord Himself (Matt. 20:28) and of the Apostle Paul (1 Tim. 2:6, Titus 2:14) that our Lord is Himself our Ransom, because He has given His life for us.
Prof. Sabatier's new Christianity has too much the appearance of old infidelity to attract us. And when he tells us that it is only in some such form as this that Christianity can hope to persist in the conditions of modern culture—the watchword of which is "autonomy"—we should be dull indeed if we did not apprehend that the meaning of this, translated into terms of more brutal frankness, is simply that there is no place for Christianity in the modern world. "Altruism"—yes, we may wonderingly admit that altruism works and on a basis of pragmatism may find a place for itself, though we are at a loss for an ultimate justification of it to "reason."
But "Christianity"—well, certainly as Christianity has been heretofore understood (except by the Socinians and Rationalists), there can be no place for it. Do not the eighteen centuries of this "heteronomic"
Christianity which have been lived out in the world, then, give an indication that it too "works"? And are we so sure that it will not find a justification for itself in "reason"—provided that "reason" has not been hopelessly warped by too great hospitality to the assaults of Socinian and Rationalistic criticism? The fact is that the ipse dixit of Prof. Sabatier weighs no more than that of Faustus Socinus or of Julius Wegscheider, and we see no reason for listening in him to what we should pay no attention to in them.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, iii. 1905, pp. 506–509.