RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Atonement
and far more than his cogency, depth, and richness, by the late R. C. Moberly (Atonement and Personality, London, 1901). This theory supposes that our Lord, by sympathetically entering into our condition (an idea independently suggested by Schleiermacher, and emphasized by many continental thinkers, as, for example, to name only a pair with little else in common, by Gess and Haring), so keenly felt our sins as his own, that he could confess and adequately repent of them before God; and this is all the expiation justice asks. Here " sympathetic identification " replaces the conception of substitution; " sodality," of race-unity; and " repentance," of expiation. Nevertheless, the theory rises immeasurably above the mass of those already enumerated, in looking upon Christ as really a Savior, who performs a really saving work, terminating immediately on God. Despite its insufficiencies, therefore, which have caused writers like Edwards A. Park, and A. B. Bruce (The Humiliation of Christ, ut sup., pp. 317-318) to speak of it with a tinge of contempt, it has exercised a very wide influence and elements of it are discoverable in many constructions which stand far removed from its fundamental presuppositions.
The so-called " middle theory " of the Atonement, which owes its name to its supposed intermediate position between the " moral influence " theories and the doctrine of " satisfaction," seems to have offered attractions to the latitudinarian writers of the closing eighteenth and opening nineteenth centuries. At that time it was taught in John Balguy's Essay on Redemption (London, 1741), Henry Taylor's Apology of Ben Mordecai (London, 1784), and Richard Price's Sermons on Christian Doctrine (London, 1737; cf. Hill's Lectures on Divinity, ed. 1851, pp. 422 sqq.). Basing on the conception of sacrifices which looks upon them as merely gifts designed to secure the 9. Certain good-will of the King, the advocates " Sacrificial of this theory regard the work of Theories.V Christ as consisting in the offering ' to God of Christ's perfect obedience even to death, and by it purchasing God's favor and the right to do as he would with those whom God gave him as a reward. By the side of this theory may be placed the ordinary Remonstrant theory of acceptilatio, which, reviving this Scotist conception, is willing to allow that the work of Christ was of the nature of an expiatory sacrifice, but is unwilling to allow that his blood any more than that of " bulls and goats " had intrinsic value equivalent to the fault for which it was graciously accepted by God as an atonement. This theory may be found expounded, for example, in Limborch (Theologia Christiana, 4th ed., Amsterdam, 1715, "i, chaps, xviii-xxiii). Such theories, while preserving the sacrificial form of the Biblical doctrine, and, with it, its inseparable implication that the work of Christ has as its primary end to affect God and secure from him favorable regard for man (for it is always to God that sacrifices are offered), yet fall so far short of the Biblical doctrine of the nature and effect of Christ's sacrifice as to seem uttle less than travesties of it.
The Biblical doctrine of the sacrifice of Christ finds full recognition in no other construction than that of the established church-doctrine of satisfaction. According to it, our Lord's redeeming work is at its core a true and perfect sacrifice offered to God, of intrinsic value ample for the expiation of our guilt; and at the same time is a true and perfect righteousness offered to God in fulfilment of the demands of his law; both the one and the other being offered in behalf of his people, and, on being accepted by God, accruing to their benefit; so that by this satisfaction they are relieved at once
from the curse of their guilt as breakers
io. The of the law, and from the burden of the
Doctrine of law as a condition of life; and this by
"Satisfac- a work of such kind and performed
tion." in such a manner, as to carry home
to the hearts of men a profound sense of the indefectible righteousness of God and to make to them a perfect revelation of his love; so that, by this one and indivisible work, both God is reconciled to us, and we, under the quickening influence of the Spirit bought for us by it, are reconciled to God, so making peace — external peace between an angry God and sinful men, and internal peace in the response of the human conscience to the restored smile of God. This doctrine, which has been incorporated in more or less fulness of statement in the creedal declarations of all the great branches of the Church, Greek, Latin, Lutheran, and Reformed, and which has been expounded with more or less insight and power by the leading doctors of the Churches for the last eight hundred years, was first given scientific statement by Anselm (q .v. ) in his Cur Deus homo (1098); but reached its complete development only at the hands of the so-called Protestant Scholastics of the seventeenth century (cf., e.g., Turretin, The Atonement of Christ, transl. by J. R. Willson, New York, 1859; John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, 1650, Edinburgh, 1845). Among the numerous modern presentations of the doctrine the following may perhaps be most profitably consulted. Of Continental writers: August Tholuck, Lehre von der Siinde und von der Versohnung (Hamburg, 1823); F. A. Philippi, Kirchliche Glaubenslehre (Stuttgart, 1864-82), IV, ii, 24 sqq.; G. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk (3d ed., Leipsic, 1886-88), vol. ii; E. Bohl, Dogmatik (Leipsic, 1887), pp. 361 sqq.; J. F. Bula, Die Versohnung des Menschen mit Gott (Basel, 1874); W Kolling, Die Satisfactio vicaria (2 vols., Gutersloh, 1897-99); Merle d'AubignS, L'Expiation de la croix (Geneva, 1868); A. Gretillat, Expose de theologie systematique (Paris, 1892), iv, pp. 278 sqq.; A. Kuyper, E Voto Dordraceno (Amsterdam, 1892), i, pp. 79 sqq., 388 sqq.; H.Bavink, Gereformeerde Dogmatik (Kampen, 1898), iii, pp. 302-424. Of writers in English: The appropriate sections of the treatises on dogmatics by C. Hodge, A. H. Strong, W G. T. Shedd, R. S. Dabney, and the following separate treatises: W Symington, On the Atonement and Intercession of Jesus Christ (New York, 1852; defective, as excluding the "active obedience " of Christ); R. S. Candlish, The Atonement, its Efficacy and Extent (London, 1867);
Atonement Atterbury