Socinus' arguments were incorporated in the Racovian Catechism, published at Racow (the modern Cracow) in 1605, which set forth the Unitarianism of the 'Polish Brethren'. After several revisions of detail down to 1680 the text was finalized and in due course translated into English by Thomas Rees (London, 1818). It is a document of classical importance in Unitarian history.
See L. Berkhof,Systematic Theology , Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, and Banner of Truths, London (1949) 373-383. Berkhof's zeal to show that God did nothing illegal or unjust makes a strange impression on the post-Watergate reader.
See F. Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elenchticae Geneva (1682), II. xiv, 'De Officio Christi Mediatoris', and A. A. Hodge, The Atonement, Nelson, London (1868). Turretin's position is usefully summarized in L. W. Grensted, A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement, Manchester University Press (1 920) 241-252. Cf. J. F. Heidegger's parallel account in his Corpus Theologiae Christianae, Zurich (1700), which R. S. Franks reviews in The Work of Christ, Nelson, London (1962) 426ff.
In his influential book Christus Victor, tr. A. G. Hebert, SPCK, London (1931), which advocated a 'dramatic', non-rational way of declaring God's conquest of evil through the cross, Gustaf Aulén describes the 'Latin' account of the atonement (i.e. that of Anselm and Protestant orthodoxy) as 'juridical in its inmost essence' (p. 106), and says: 'It concentrates its effort upon a rational attempt to explain how the Divine Love and the Divine Justice can be reconciled. The Love of God is regulated by His Justice, and is only free to act within the limits that Justice marks out. Ratio and Lex, rationality and justice, go hand in hand... The attempt is made by the scholastics to elaborate a theology which shall provide a comprehensive explanation of the Divine government of the world, which shall answer all questions and solve all riddles... .' (pp. 173f.) What Aulén fails to note is how much of this implicitly rationalistic cast of thought was a direct reaction to Socinus' rationalistic critique. In fact, Aulén does not mention Socinus at all; nor does he refer to Calvin, who asserts penal substitution as strongly as any, but follows an exegetical and Christocentric method which is not in the least scholastic or rationalistic. Calvin shows no interest in the reconciling of God's love and justice as a theoretical problem; his only interest is in the mysterious but blessed fact that at the cross God did act in both love and justice to save us from our sins. Cf. P. van Buren, Christ in our Place: the substitutionary character of Calvin's doctrine of Reconciliation, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh (1957).
Ayer voiced his doubts in Language, Truth and Logic, Gollancz, London (1936, 2nd ed. 1946), Flew his in 'Theology and Falsification', New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. A. G. N. Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre, SCM, London (1955) 96-130. There are replies in, among other books, E. L. Mascall, Words and Images, Longmans, London (1957); Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell, Allen and Unwin, London (1957); Frederick Ferré, Language, Logic and God, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London (1962; Fontana ed. 1970); W. Hordern, Speaking of God, Macmillan, New York (1964).
Of the church in the patristic period H. B. W. Turner writes: 'Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience' (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption, Mowbray, London (1952) 13; cf. chapter V, 'Christ our Victim'). On T. F. Torrance's sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation, Robert S. Paul's comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1961), 37, note 2, is just: 'To me he has made his case almost too well, for at the end I am left asking the question, "In what sense, then, could the Church change this much and still be the Church?" In fact, Torrance's thesis needs the qualification of Turner's statement quoted above.
Inst. II. xvii. 2. This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II: 'Christ ... truly suffered ... to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.' On propitiation, cf. note 21 below.
For surveys of the present state of play, Ferré's Language, Logic God; Ian C. Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms, SCM, London (1974); John Macquarrie, God-Talk, SCM, London (1967).
The pioneer in stating this was Ian T. Ramsey: see his Religious Language, SCM, London (1957); Models and Mystery, Oxford University Press London (1964); Christian Discourse, Oxford University Press, London (1965). For further discussion of models in theology cf. John Maclntyre, The Shape of Christology, SCM, London (1966), especially 54-81; Thomas Fawcett, The Symbolic Language of Religion, SCM, London (1970) 69-94; Barbour, op. cit.
The Shape of Christology, 63.
The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v., as follows: 'A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects.' Aquinas' account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I. xiii and can be read in Words about God, ed. Ian T. Ramsey, SCM, London (1971) 36ff.
For Thomists, the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology). For a technical Thomist discussion, concentrating on analogy in natural theology, see E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy, Longmans, London (1949) 92-121.
For Ramsey's overall view of models, see the works cited in note 9. On most theological subjects his opinions, so far as he reveals them, are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road, but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on 'Atonement Theology' in Christian Discourse (pp. 28ff.) he hails Hastings Rashdall's Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as 'definitive' (p. 29; no reasons given); limits the 'cosmic disclosure' evoked by the cross to a sense of 'the victorious will of God', whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp. 32, 34), and whose love this victory shows (pp. 59f.); rejects the grounding of justification on substitution or satisfaction as involving 'frontier-clashes with the language of morals' (p. 40; the old Socinian objection); and criticizes the exegeting of justification, substitution, satisfaction, reconciliation, redemption, propitiation and expiation as if these words 'were not models at all, but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering' (p. 44). Profound confusion appears here. Certainly these words arc models, but what they are models of is precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement, transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf. The contents apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain, and to assume, as Ramsey seems to do, that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary. Indeed, Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference, for he dwells on 'love' as a model of God's activity (p. 59) and If love can be such a model, why not these other words? It seems evident that Ramsey brought Abelardian-Socinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words, rather than deriving his views from that study.
Cf. Vincent Taylor's remark, in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching, Epworth Press, London (1940) 301f.: 'The thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess; yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated ... is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonement.'
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, tr. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe, SCM, London (1968) 268, 259.
See R. E. Davies, 'Christ in our Place—the contribution of the Prepositions', Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff.
F. W. Camfield, 'The Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonement', SJT I (1948) 282f., referring to Vincent Taylor, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching. Taylor, while allowing that Paul 'in particular, is within a hair's breadth of substitutions' (p. 288), and that 'a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x. 45, Romans vi. 10f., 2 Corinthians v. 14, 21, Galatians iii. 13, and 1 Timothy ii. 5f.,is more difficult to dislodge than many New Testament students imagine' (p. 289), rejects substitution as implying a redemption 'wrought entirely outside of, and apart from, ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits' (p. 125). He describes Christ's death as a representative sacrifice, involving endurance of sin's penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanity's wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R. C. Moberly. We participate in this sacrifice, Taylor continues, by offering it on our own behalf, which we do by letting it teach us to repent. Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is 'a gap in Pauline teaching. With clear eyes St Paul marks "the one act of righteousness" in the obedience of Christ (Romans v. 18f.) and the fact that He was "made to be sin on our behalf" (2 Corinthians v. 21), but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father' (p. 291).
See Pannenberg, op. cit., pp. 258-269; Barth, Church Dogmatics IV. I, tr. G. W. Bromiley, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh (1956), viif., 230ff., 550ff.
'He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered. And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted. His passive suffering became active obedience, and obedience to a holy doom' (The Work of Christ, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1910) 163). In a 2,000-word 'Addendum' Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view, later to be espoused by C. H. Dodd, that the wrath of God is simply the 'automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor . , . as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin, and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner' (p. 239). He argues to the position that 'what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin, but a sense of the sinner's relation to the personal vis-à-vis of an angry God. God never left him, but He did refuse Him His face. The communion was not broken, but its light was withdrawn' (p. 243).
Op. cit., pp. 164, 182, 223, 225f. 'Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul' (p. 182, note).
'Propitiation' (which means quenching God's wrath against sinners) is replaced by 'expiation' (which means removing sins from God's sight) in RSV and other modern versions. The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means; thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent, but to cut out a reference to quenching God's anger that was previously thought to be present. The case for 'expiation' was put forward by C. H. Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support, but a generation of debate has shown that 'the linguistic evidence seems to favour "propitiation"' (Matthew Black, Romans, New Century Bible, Oliphants, London (1973) 68). See the full coverage of literature cited by Black, and also David Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48.
Denney, The Death of Christ, 2nd ed., including The Atonement and the Modern Mind, Hodder and Stoughtons, London (1911) 73. Denney's summary of the meaning of Rom. 3:25f. is worth quoting. 'It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation; that is, it is Christ who died. In dying, as St Paul conceived it, He made our sin His own; He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in God's sight and to God's law: He became sin, became a curse for us. It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power; in other words, which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus... . I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if "vicarious" or "substitutionary" does not, nor do I know any interpretation of Christ's death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners, if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied' (p. 126). Denney's point in the last sentence is that Christ's death only reveals God's love if it accomplished something which we needed, which we could not do for ourselves, and which Christ could not do without dying.
It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view, whereby one's 'representative' is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for one's own, 'representative' may (and usually does) signify simply this: that one's status is such that one involves others, for good or ill, in the consequences of what one does. In this sense, families are represented by fathers, nations by kings, presidents and government ministers, and humanity by Adam and Christ; and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute. Cf. pp. 33fbelow.
The Death of Christ, 304; cf. 307, 'Union with Christ' (i.e. personal, moral union, by faith) '... is not a presupposition of Christ's work, it is its fruit.'
Leon Morris, The Cross in the New Testament, Paternoster Press, Exeter (1965) 401.
Christus Victor, 175. etc.
G. W. H. Lampe, 'The Atonement: Law and Love', in Soundings, ed. A. R. Vidler, Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff.
Denney, op. cit., 271f.; from The Atonement and the Modern Mind. Denney's last sentence over-states; as J. S. Whale says, 'the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim, but also as "Criminal"' and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim, Cambridge University Press (1960) 70).
Denney, The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1917) 187, 214, 208, 273. On pp. 262f. and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christ's actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment; to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race', whatever it meant, did not mean that.
Brunner, The Mediator, tr. O. Wyon, Lutterworth Press, London (1934) 443.
Two quotations give Luther's viewpoint here. The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22): 'This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ's: and the righteousness of Christ not Christ's but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it, and fill us with it: and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them ... in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins, and was confounded, in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness' (Werke (Weimar, 1883) 5.608). The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein: 'Learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to pray to him and, despairing of yourself, say: "Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am thy sin. Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine. Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not"' (Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. Theodore C. Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press, London (1955) 110.
Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361.
Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly, as was always his way. 'All the prophets did foresee in spirit, that Christ should become the greatest transgressor, murderer, adulterer, thief, rebel, blasphemer, etc., that ever was ... for he being made a sacrifice, for the sins of the whole world, is not now an innocent person and without sins ... our most merciful Father ... sent his only Son into the world and 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 ... therefore let him die upon the cross ...' (Galatians,ed. Philip S. Watson, James Clarke, London (1953) 269-271; on Gal. 3:13). Aulén (Christus Victor, chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luther's account of the cross and resurrection, but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christ's victorious work is basically defined. The essence of Christ's victory, according to Luther,is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satin's power by overcoming God's curse; if Luther's whole treatment of Gal. 3:13 (pp. 268-282) is read, this becomes very plain. The necessary supplement, and indeed correction, of the impression Aulén leaves is provided by Pannenberg's statement (op. cit., 279): 'Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus' death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering.' Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way, commenting on Jesus' trial before Pilate. 'When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat, accused and put under pressure by testimony, and sentenced to death by the words of a judge, we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer ... we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ, yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own... . This is our acquittal, that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of God's Son... .' 'At every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption' (Inst. II. XVI. 5, 7). It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc. cit.)should say that Calvin retreated from Luther's insight into penal substitution.
For 'representative', cf. M. D. Hooker, art. cit., 358,and G. W. H. Lampe, Reconciliation inChrist,Longmans, London (1956) chapter 3; for 'first-fruits', cf. D. F. H. Whiteley, The Theology of St. Paul, Blackwell, Oxford (1964) 132ff. The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christ's vicarious sin-bearing, as distinct from the new obedience to which, in Dr. Hooker's phrase, we are 'lifted' by Christ's action.
Cf. pp. 22-25 above.
Is. 53:6. J. S. Whale observes that this Servant-song 'makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the pena1ty of other men's sins: not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth, fifth and sixth verses. These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideas' — and our earlier argument prompts the comment, a good job too! — 'but they are clearly connected with penalty, inflicted through various forms of punishment which the Servant endured on other men's behalf and in their stead, because the Lord so ordained. This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively: either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself, or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free. But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary: "In my place condemned he stood; Scaled my pardon with his blood" (op. cit., pp. 69f.)
Cf. Anglican Article XI: 'We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.'
'Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind, we cannot have an unlimited atonement. On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut to one of two alternatives — a limited efficacy or a limited extent; there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement' (John Murray, The Atonement, Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia (1962) 27).
Cf. W. Cunningham, Historical Theology,Banner of Truth, London (1960) II. 337, 370; C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, Nelson, London (1974) II. 544-562. The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648: Work, ed. W. Goold, Banner of Truth, London (1968) X. 139ff.), on the argumentation of which J. McLeod Campbell commented: 'As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the atonement, while differing with him as to the extent of its reference, this seems unanswerable' (The Nature of the Atonement, 4th ed., Macmillan, London (1873) 51).
Thus, in The Atonement (1868) A. A. Hodge, while speaking freely, as his Reformed predecessors did, of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under God's penal law, complained that in theology the word 'substitution' had no fixed meaning, and organized his exposition round the idea of 'satisfaction', which he claimed was more precise than 'atonement' and was the word 'habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century, both Lutheran and Reformed' (31ff., 37f.). By contrast the I.V.F-U.C.C.F. Basis (1922) speaks of 'redemption from the guilt, penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ', not mentioning satisfaction at all, and L. Berkhof's textbook presents Hodge's view, which it accepts entirely, as 'the penal substitutionary or satisfaction doctrine' (Systematic Theology,373).
Works,, X. 269. To construe Owen's statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in 'quantitative' terms, as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied, would be a misunderstanding, though admittedly one which Owen's constant reliance on the model of payment invites, and against which he did not guard. But Denney's statement expresses what Owen means.
Edwards, Works, ed. E. Hickman, Banner of Truth, London (1975) II. 575. Cf. Luther: 'Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrath;' 'it was not a game, or a joke, or play-acting when he said, "Thou hast forsaken me"; for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken" (Werke, 5. 602, 605); and Calvin: 'he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man' (Inst. 11. xvi. 10). Thus Calvin explained Christ's descent into hell: hell means Godforsakenness, and the descent took place during the hours on the cross. Jesus' cry of dereliction has been seriously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion, (b) genuine perplexity, (c) an 'as if' feeling, (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22, which ends with trust triumphant), (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse), (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know. Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology. For a compelling discussion, cf. Leon Morris, op. cit., 41-49)
C. F. D. Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offender's personhood, requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him ... The original self-concern which, in the process of repentance, is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured, makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is.' It is certainly right to replicate God's forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model; though whether Moule is also right to dismiss God's justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to God's wrath and punishment as atavistic survivals and 'anomalies' is quite another question ('The Theology of Forgiveness', in From Fear to Faith: Studies of Suffering and Wholeness, ed Norman Autton, SPCK, London (1971) 61-72; esp. 66f., 72).
Op. cit., 55.
Owen, Works, X. 284.
See on this Leon Morris, op. cit., ch. 10, 364-419.
A. M. Hunter, The Words and Works of Jesus, SCM, London (1950) 100.
A. M. Hunter, Interpreting Paul's Gospel, SCM, London (1954) 31f.
