APPEAL ΤΟ SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION. Part III. ON THE DOCTRINE OF A SATISFACTIONAL OR AFTER DISSERTATION. FTER the Gospel had spread for some time among the Gentiles, the figures and peculiar idioms of the Jewish writers, and in particular their sacrificial allusions, began to be misapprehended; but the ancient ideas respecting the purposes to be effected by Christ's death fell very short of the doctrine of satisfaction, which, in its full scholastic extent, is absolutely modern. Some of the ancient Fathers either maintain quite contrary opinions, or pass over in silence what is now insisted upon, in the usual spirit of theological dogmatism, as "one of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity." Others explain the ransom, which is the Scripture-metaphor for the means of our deliverance from sin and death, in a very different manner. far as it was Some of these writers, indeed, speak of the blood of Christ as shed for our salvation, in so a motive for obedience; but, so far from holding the utter inefficacy, and still less the sinfulness of human righteousness, they suppose that good works and dispositions, humility, charity, compassion, induce God to forgive, and even make satisfaction for sin; an idea which would be now reprobated as heterodox. They do not indeed say that they are of themselves justifications, but that they are so through God's mercy and propitious acceptance of them, and on account of faith; by which is not meant a faith in Christ's vicarious righteousness, but, in the genuine Gospel sense of the term, a faith in Jesus as the Son of God. They assign, as the purposes of Christ's coming, the example which he set of living and dying, and the necessity of death being destroyed through the union of corruptible humanity with incorruptible divinity; and they speak of Christ's buying us with his blood, but explain it only by his purchasing to himself faithful Christians and martyrs, and not at all in the sense of his having paid a price for our forgiveness. Athanasius supposes that Christ died to procure the resurrection; but even this does not come up to the idea of a propitiatory sacrifice for the obtaining of pardon for sin. Austin says, "in this way, by good works, we come to God, and are reconciled to him. When we shall be brought before his presence, let our good works there speak for us, and let them so speak as to prevail over our offences." But he says not a word of Christ's all-atoning merits, and the inefficiency of our own works and repentance. He talks, indeed, of Christ's taking our punishment, but he adds, "not our guilt;" and says, "by taking our punishment, not our guilt, he abolished both guilt and punishment." This is quite contrary to the received notion of his "bearing our sins;" which, in the original Scripture-term, implies "the bearing them away." There was an idea that the price paid (the common Scripture-term for the means of deliverance), was paid to the Evil Being. Austin thought that the sin of the first man was transmitted to his posterity, and that the human race were delivered over to the Devil; from whom God, having become incarnate in Christ, bought us by his blood: and Proclus explains the necessity of God dying for us, by no Angel having the power to pay a sufficient price to Satan. This scheme, absurd as it is, is not so much so as that which is now generally thought a vital part of Christianity, and which either supposes the Omnipotent and Eternal Creator of the Universe to die, that he might enable himself to forgive his own creatures, or that his Eternal Son died to induce him to forgive them. In dividing almighty power with another being, of malignant nature, the modern believers in a. personal Spirit of Evil are not far behind these ancient redemptionists. This was an approach towards the doctrine of Vicarious Satisfaction; but we see that it was something still very different. The idea concerning the death of Christ was neither definite nor settled. Some writers speak of it with uncertainty; by others it is wholly neglected, or treated with but meagre mention. It is impossible to account for this, had the doctrine of the atonement, in the modern arbitrary sense, been an apostolic tradition. It is complained of by the writers of ecclesiastical history, that the bishops, or presbyters, who lived near the age of the Apostles, had very imperfect notions of what they conceive to be the vital pervading principle of Christianity. The Atonement, in its present orthodox acceptation, was carried to its height by the Protestant reformers, in their zeal to oppose the Romish abuse of the merit of works-works of supererogation, or exceeding the necessary proportion of righteousness, and superabundant and transferrible merit. They threw themselves therefore into the opposite extreme, of the abominableness of human righteousness, and the necessity of imputed merit. The doctrine of a satisfaction made to God for human sin, without which he would not or could not forgive, is held only by the Trinitarians; who believe CHRIST to be equal with the FATHER, or the same as the FATHER, the original Creator of all worlds, and doing every thing by inherent and underived divinity. The advocates of the middle scheme, who believe in the Son of God as his created image before the ages, and his instrument in the making of this world, consider the death of Christ as in some measure disposing the divine nature to mercy, but only by the method of an acceptable sacrifice, and not in the sense of vicarious punishment, or satisfaction for a debt incurred; nor do they assent to the strange doctrine of original or transmitted sin. It is thought by the Trinitarians, not that the mère physical consequence of the penalty, mortality of nature,9 attached to the sin of our common ancestor, but that a moral consequence, the actual sin itself, descended upon all his posterity, as from their federal head, independently of their volition, consent, or participation. That therefore all infants, though they had committed no sin, were regarded by GOD, their CREATOR, as equally guilty with ADAM, and, as such, deserving his infinite wrath and vengeance for ever and ever; and that this: would actually have been their doom, had not the eternal Son of God, who at the same time was GOD, made a compact with GOD, and graciously interposed to avert the wrath of GOD from the children of Adam; and by submitting, as man, though really GoD, to suffer the wrath of GOD, and die in their stead, made an infinite satisfaction to GOD for the infinite original sin of Adam, of which Adam's whole posterity were, without their knowledge or assent of will, equally guilty: this sin of Adam being imputed to Christ, who "did no sin;" Christ, as God made Man, feeling the weight and consciousness of all human guilt, of which by his nature he was notwithstanding incapable; he, as God, being smitten by God's wrath, and forsaken of God; and his righteousness being imputed to them, the children of Adam, whose sin was imputed to him. They were thus accepted of God, not for any works of piety and virtue of their own, but for their faith in the merits of Christ. Such works they were, by their nature, incapable of doing: they did them, therefore, through irresistible grace or arbitrary favour; yet these works, although, since men could do nothing good of themselves, they could be only the effects of divine operation on the mind, were, notwithstanding, in themselves so far from pleasing to the Maker of man, who had commanded them to be done by those his creatures who yet of themselves could not do them, that they were in fact odious, and so many presumptuous sins, unless performed under a sense of Christ's imputed righteousness; nor were they accepted from the free grace and rich mercy of their Creator and Father, or owing to any essential goodness in his nature, but solely on account of the merits of Christ, in being without sin; he, as GOD, being incapable of sin. Christ therefore was their original and proper Saviour, by interposing between the wrath of the Creator against the work of his own hands, by suffering their punishment, and being righteous in their stead. The faith spoken of in the Gospel is thus not a faith in the divine authority of Christ, as the medium of God's spiritual favour to men, and the "first fruits of those who slept" or died the |