The ‘moral influence’ theory
The ‘moral influence’ theory
The cross remains such an evident display and demonstration of God’s love that several theologians, in different eras of church history, have tried to find its atoning value there. To them the power of the cross lies not in any objective, sin-bearing transaction but in its subjective inspiration, not in its legal efficacy (changing our status before God) but in its moral influence (changing our attitudes and actions).
The most famous exponent of this view, it is usually claimed, was the French philosopher-theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142). He is best known for his passionate attachment to Heloïse (whom he secretly married after the birth of their son), which had such tragic consequences for them both. In his public academic life, however, his scintillating lectures and debates attracted large audiences. A younger contemporary of Anselm, he agreed with him in repudiating the notion that Christ’s death was a ransom paid to the devil. But he violently disagreed with his teaching that it was a satisfaction for sin. ‘How cruel and wicked it seems’, he wrote, ‘that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything, or that it should in any way please him that an innocent man should be slain – still less that God should consider the death of his Son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world!’21
Instead, Abelard depicted Jesus as having been primarily our Teacher and Example. Although he continued to use traditional phrases like ‘redeemed by Christ’, ‘justified in his blood’, and ‘reconciled to God’, he interpreted the efficacy of Christ’s death in exclusively subjective terms. The voluntary self-sacrifice of the Son of God moves us to grateful love in response, and so to contrition and repentance.
Redemption is that greatest love kindled in us by Christ’s passion, a love which not only delivers us from the bondage of sin, but also acquires for us the true freedom of children, where love instead of fear becomes the ruling affection.22
In support of his thesis Abelard quoted Jesus’ words: ‘her sins are forgiven because she loved much’ (Luke 7:47). But he misunderstood the text, making love the ground of forgiveness instead of its result. Forgiveness to him was indeed the result of Christ’s death, but indirectly, namely that the cross evokes our love for Christ, and when we love him, we are forgiven. ‘Justification’ has become for Abelard a divine infusion of love. As Robert Franks put it, ‘he has reduced the whole process of redemption to one single clear principle, viz. the manifestation of God’s love to us in Christ, which awakens an answering love in us’.23
Peter Lombard, who became Bishop of Paris in 1159 and could be described as a disciple of Abelard, wrote in his famous Book of Sentences:
So great a pledge of love having been given us, we are both moved and kindled to love God who did such great things for us; and by this we are justified, that is, being loosed from our sins we are made just. The death of Christ therefore justifies us, inasmuch as through it charity is stirred up in our hearts.24
By the beginning of the twelfth century, then, a theological debate of immense importance had clarified, whose chief protagonists were Anselm and Abelard. Anselm taught that the death of Jesus Christ was an objective satisfaction for sin, Abelard that its efficacy was largely subjective in the moral influence it exerts on us. The ground on which God forgives our sins was to Anselm the propitiatory death of Christ; but to Abelard it was our own love, penitence and obedience which are aroused in us as we contemplate the death of Christ.
The most outspoken champion in the twentieth century of the ‘moral influence’ theory has probably been Dr Hastings Rashdall, whose 1915 Bampton Lectures were published under the title The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology. He insisted that a choice had to be made between Anselm’s objective and Abelard’s subjective understandings of the atonement, and there was no question in his mind that Abelard was correct. For according to Jesus, Rashdall maintained, the only condition of salvation was repentance: ‘the truly penitent man who confesses his sins to God receives instant forgiveness’ (p.26). ‘God is a loving Father who will pardon sin upon the sole condition of true repentance’, and the death of Jesus Christ ‘operates by actually helping to produce that repentance’ (p.48). More than that, ‘God can only be supposed to forgive by making the sinner better, and thereby removing any demand for punishment’ (p.359). In other words, it is our repentance and our conversion, produced within us as we contemplate the cross, which enable God to forgive us. The significance of the cross is not that it expressed God’s love in dealing with our sins, but that it has evoked our love and so made any divine dealing with sins unnecessary. Good works of love, instead of being the evidence of salvation, become the ground on which it is bestowed.
There are three reasons why the ‘moral influence’ or ‘exemplarist’ theory must be confidently declared to be untenable, at least by those who take Scripture seriously. The first is that those who hold this view tend not take it seriously themselves. Rashdall rejected every text which was incompatible with his theory. Jesus’ ransom-saying (Mark 10:45) he declared to be a ‘doctrinally coloured insertion’, and his eucharistic words about the blood of the new covenant and the forgiveness of sins similarly secondary. On what ground? Simply that ‘our Lord never taught that his death was necessary for the forgiveness of sins’ (p.45), which is a notable example of circular reasoning, assuming what he wishes to prove. He is more candid when he says that our belief in biblical inspiration must not prevent us from ‘boldly rejecting any formulae which...seem to say that sin cannot be forgiven without a vicarious sacrifice’ (p.207). In other words, first construct your atonement theory, then defend it against all objections, and do not allow a little matter like divine inspiration to stand in your way. Instead, simply maintain that the pure message of Jesus was corrupted by pre-Pauline Christianity, based on Isaiah 53, and that Paul completed the process.
Secondly, we need to quote against Abelard and Rashdall the words of Anselm, ‘you have not yet considered the seriousness of sin’. The ‘moral influence’ theory offers a superficial remedy because it has made a superficial diagnosis. It appeals to Enlightenment man because it has boundless confidence in human reason and human ability. It entirely lacks the profound biblical understanding of man’s radical rebellion against God, of God’s wrath as his outraged antagonism to human sin, and of the indispensable necessity of a satisfaction for sin which satisfies God’s own character of justice and love. James Orr was right that Abelard’s ‘view of atonement is defective precisely on the side on which Anselm’s was strong’,25 namely in his analysis of sin, wrath and satisfaction.
Thirdly, the moral influence theory has a fatal flaw in its own central emphasis. Its focus is on the love of Christ, which both shines from the cross and elicits our responsive love. On these two truths we desire to lay an equal stress. We too know that it is because Christ loved us that he gave himself for us.26 We too have found that his love awakens ours. In John’s words, ‘we love because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). We agree with Denney when he wrote: ‘I do not hesitate to say that the sense of debt to Christ is the most profound and pervasive of all emotions in the New Testament.’27 So far then we are agreed. The cross is the epitome of Christ’s love and the inspiration of ours. But the question we desire to press is this: just how does the cross display and demonstrate Christ’s love? What is there in the cross which reveals love? True love is purposive in its self-giving; it does not make random or reckless gestures. If you were to jump off the end of a pier and drown, or dash into a burning building and be burnt to death, and if your self-sacrifice had no saving purpose, you would convince me of your folly, not your love. But if I were myself drowning in the sea, or trapped in the burning building, and it was in attempting to rescue me that you lost your life, then I would indeed see love not folly in your action. Just so the death of Jesus on the cross cannot be seen as a demonstration of love in itself, but only if he gave his life in order to rescue ours. His death must be seen to have had an objective, before it can have an appeal. Paul and John saw love in the cross because they understood it respectively as a death for sinners (Rom. 5:8) and as a propitiation for sins (1 John 4:10). That is to say, the cross can be seen as a proof of God’s love only when it is at the same time seen as a proof of his justice. Hence the need to keep these two demonstrations together in our minds, as Berkouwer has insisted: ‘In the cross of Christ God’s justice and love are simultaneously revealed, so that we can speak of his love only in connection with the reality of the cross.’28 Again, ‘God’s graciousness and justice are revealed only in the real substitution, in the radical sacrifice, in the reversing of roles’ (p.311). Similarly, Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:14–15,
Christ’s love compels us (literally ‘grips us’ and so leaves us no choice), because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
The constraint of Christ’s love, Paul says, rests upon a conviction. It is because we are convinced of the purpose and costliness of the cross, namely that we owe our life to his death, that we feel his love tightening its grip upon us and leaving us no alternative but to live for him.
R. W. Dale’s great book The Atonement was written in order to prove that Christ’s death on the cross was objective before it could be subjective, and that ‘unless the great Sacrifice is conceived under objective forms, the subjective power will be lost’ (p. li). The cross is the supreme revelation in history of the love of God. But ‘the revelation consists essentially in a redemption, rather than the redemption in a revelation’.29
We should not, therefore, allow Anselm and Abelard to occupy opposite poles. In general terms, Anselm was right to understand the cross as a satisfaction for sin, but he should have laid more emphasis on God’s love. Abelard was right to see the cross as a manifestation of love, but wrong to deny what Anselm affirmed. Anselm and Abelard need each other’s positive witness, the one to God’s justice and the other to his love. For it was precisely in making a just satisfaction for sin that the manifestation of love took place.
Even after these arguments have been deployed, however, the advocates of the ‘moral influence’ theory consider that they have a trump card left. It is that Jesus himself, in at least three of his parables, taught forgiveness without atonement, on the basis of repentance alone. In the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, the latter cried ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner’, and was immediately ‘justified’ (Luke 18:9–14). In the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, the king freely forgave him, cancelling his debt without insisting on its repayment (Matt. 18:23–35). And in the Parable of the Lost Son the father welcomed the young man home and reinstated him, when he returned in penitence; no punishment was exacted (Luke 15:11–24). All three parables illustrate God’s forgiving mercy, it is said, and contain no hint of the need for an atoning sacrifice. Three points may be made in reply, however.
First, the parables in question make no allusion to Christ either. Are we to deduce from this that not only his cross, but he himself, is unnecessary for our forgiveness? No. Parables are not allegories; we have no right to expect an exact correspondence, point by point, between the story and its message.
Secondly, each of the three parables contains two actors who are deliberately contrasted with each other – two worshippers in the temple (the self-righteous Pharisee and the self-humbling tax collector), two servants in the royal household (one freely forgiven by his king and the other refused forgiveness by his fellow servant), and two sons in the home (the one unrighteous but penitent, the other righteous but arrogant). The parables highlight, through this contrast, the condition of forgiveness, not its ground. They tell us what we must do, but say nothing directly about what God has done, for our forgiveness.
Nevertheless, thirdly, Christians see the cross in all three parables, because the forgiving mercy shown to the humble tax collector, the bankrupt servant and the prodigal son received its supreme historical demonstration in the self-giving love of God-in-Christ, who died that sinners might be forgiven.
Of these three parables it is that of the Prodigal Son which has seemed to many to teach most clearly a ‘gospel’ of forgiveness without atonement. This was the argument of Hastings Rashdall in his 1915 Bampton Lectures, mentioned above. Jesus taught, he said, that God is a loving Father who pardons all sinners who repent. This is the ‘simple teaching about the forgiveness of God which is taught in the Parable of the Prodigal Son’, and which the early church proceeded to corrupt (p.27). A few years later Douglas White maintained the same thesis: ‘Jesus taught...that God loves us and longs for us to be reconciled to him. If he ever taught anything at all, it was the freedom of forgiveness....There was no question of penance or punishment; only love and forgiveness. Its great illustration was the prodigal son....According to this teaching, there is no pre-requisite to God’s forgiveness, save the spirit of repentance.’ It was Paul who perverted this simple message, making the cross necessary for salvation, using ‘repugnant’ phraseology, and thereby ‘obscuring the doctrine of Jesus as to the unconditioned freedom of God’s forgiveness’.30
Dr Kenneth Bailey has explained how this interpretation of the parable is common in the Muslim world:
Islam claims that in this story the boy is saved without a saviour. The prodigal returns. The father forgives him. There is no cross, no suffering, and no saviour. If man seeks forgiveness, says Islam, God is merciful and will forgive. The incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection are all quite unnecessary. If God is truly great, he can forgive without these things. The story of the prodigal son is for them proof that Christians have sadly perverted Christ’s own message.31
So in his book The Cross and the Prodigal Dr Bailey, who has for many years taught New Testament at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, takes a fresh look at Luke 15 ‘through the eyes of Middle Eastern peasants’. He explains that the whole village would know that the returning prodigal was in disgrace, and that punishment of some kind was inevitable, if only to preserve the father’s honour. But the father bears the suffering instead of inflicting it. Although ‘a man of his age and position always walks in a slow, dignified fashion’, and although ‘he has not run anywhere for any purpose for 40 years’, he yet ‘races’ down the road like a teenager to welcome his home-coming son. Thus risking the ridicule of the street urchins, ‘he takes upon himself the shame and humiliation due to the prodigal’. ‘In this parable’, Kenneth Bailey continues, ‘we have a father who leaves the comfort and security of his home and exposes himself in a humiliating fashion in the village street. The coming down and going out to his boy hints at the incarnation. The humiliating spectacle in the village street hints at the meaning of the cross’ (pp.54–55). Thus ‘the cross and the incarnation are implicitly yet dramatically present in the story’, for ‘the suffering of the cross was not primarily the physical torture but rather the agony of rejected love’. What was essential for the prodigal’s reconciliation was a ‘physical demonstration of self-emptying love in suffering.... Is not this the story of the way of God with man on Golgotha?’ (pp.56–57).
We conclude, then, that the cross was an unparalleled manifestation of God’s love; that he showed his love in bearing our penalty and therefore our pain, in order to be able to forgive and restore us, and that the Parable of the Prodigal Son, far from contradicting this, implicitly expresses it. I think T. J. Crawford was right to put it in this way, that before we can see in the sufferings of Christ any proof of the Father’s love for us, ‘some good must accrue to us from them, not otherwise to be obtained, or some evil must be averted from us by them, not otherwise to be removed or remedied’.32 This ‘otherwise unavoidable evil’ is the fearful judgment of God, and this ‘otherwise unattainable good’ is his adoption of us into his family (p.375). By securing such great blessings for us at the cost of such great sufferings, God has given us an unequalled demonstration of his love.