MR. DALE ON THE ATONEMENT.* Tuts "Lecture "—in fact a
series of ten lectures—is the third course of a Lecture " established with a view to the promotion of Biblical science and theological and ecclesiastical literature." Mr. Dale exhibits all the qualifications for the task : learning, a masculine intellect too often wanting in the religious teachers of our day, deep personal faith and piety, and an eloquence which is not disfigured by florid or tinsel ornaments. But his intellectual force is so great that we have more than once regretted that he has treated his subject in this form of lectures, or quasi-sermons. The diffusiveness and the persuasive rhetoric which are appropriate and even essential to spoken discourse have sometimes weakened the force of Mr. Dale's arguments as they present themselves in a book to the student, who can there read and ponder them at his leisure ; and they have even, as it seems to us, concealed from the author a weakness in some of these arguments which, if he had been thinking more drilyand severely, he would have himself been conscious of, and able to strengthen.
Mr. Dale's method is exactly that followed by us in our review of Dr. Busjsnell's treatise on Forgiveness and Law in May last, though these lectures were then unknown to the re- viewer, and indeed were not, we think, then published, though they had been orally delivered. Mr. Dale says :—"I propose, therefore, in this series of lectures, to show that there is a direct relation between the death of Christ and the remission of sins, and to investigate the principles and grounds of that relation. I have first to establish a fact, and then to attempt the construction of a theory." He asserts, and appeals to the consciousness of every Christian man whether he does not know it to be true, that we have a spiritual as well as a natural life, and are related to a world of spiritual facts and persons as really as we are to a • The Atonement. The Congregational Union Lecture for 1875. By B. W. Dale MA., Birmingham. London• Hodder and Stoughton. 1875.
world of physical phenomena. Of both we have an immediate and direct, though limited, knowledge ; and theology is the attempt to give an intellectual and intelligible explanation of the spiritual facts and of their relation to each other, analogous to that which science proposes to obtain for physical phenomena and their relations. A complete and adequate explanation of the spiritual life has never been found, and probably, from the very conditions of the investigation, never can be found, in this world. Yet to abstain from the attempt, as some good men have desired, and to have no theory on the efficacy of the death of Christ, while accepting the fact of that efficacy, is, as Mr. Dale shows, hardly possible. It is one of the instincts of our Christian life to add knowledge to faith. The rudiments of a theory are contained in the very terms in which Christ himself and the Evangelists speak of his death as suffered for the sins of the world ; these have been developed by the Apostles, and by their successors in every age of the Church ; and now a number of theories, often conflict- ing and contradictory, are familiar to us all, and we can hardly, whether we will or no, avoid accepting or rejecting them, or finding something to modify, if not to supersede them. And yet the fact is independent of all theories :—
" There are large numbers of Christian men who have never been able to discover any direct relation between tho Death of Christ and the forgiveness of sin, and who sometimes protest with vehement moral in- dignation against the doctrine which alone explains the power of the Cross over their own conscience and heart. It remains true that Christ's death—though they know neither how nor why—has done more than either His teaching or His life to constrain and enable them to trust in the mercy of God for the pardon of sin ; and because Christ is the pro- pitiation for the sins of the world, God has responded to their trust, and they are eternally saved. For it is not the doctrine of the death of Christ that atones for human sin, but the death itself; and great as are the uses of the doctrine in promoting the healthy and vigorous develop- ment of the spiritual life, the death of Christ has such a wonderful power, that it inspires faith in God and purifies the heart, though the doctrine of the Atonement may be unknown or denied."
In evidence of the fact that Christ died to save us from our sins, Mr. Dale does not merely or mainly rely on an array of texts, which work, he says, has been already done completely by others before him. While quoting texts, he shows that the whole spirit of the Gospels and Epistles implies, no less than their words assert, that fact. Our Lord spoke of his death, and the Evangelists narrate its circumstances, and his mental sufferings, before and during the crucifixion, in a way which declares, as plainly as words can do, that it was not merely the death of an ordinary martyr, but au event of transcendent and unique im- port. The apostles Peter, John, James, and Paul bear the like testimony to the same fact, and this not merely in isolated phrases which might be explained perhaps as metaphorical, but as the basis of the very faith which they hold and proclaim to be the Gospel—the good tidings of salvation—made known to men. And from an elaborate and, in our judgment, conclusive- exami- nation of these Scriptures, our author proves that "to the Apostles the death of our Lord Jesus Christ was the objective ground of the remission of sins; that this conception of His death is contained in the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself ;" and to those " who confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh, and who receive the Apostles as trustworthy repre- sentatives of His teaching, must accept the fact that by His death He atoned for the sins of men, although we may be unable to con- struct a theory of the Atonement." He then proceeds to argue, not less conclusively, that we have an ample confirmation of the reality of an objective atonement in the successive, yet ever-failing attempts of the theologians for eighteen hundred years to con- struct such a theory, and which attempt he thus sums up :— " From this brief review of the history of the doctrine, it appears that for nearly a thousand years many of the most eminent teachers of the Church were accustomed to represent the death of Christ as a ransom by which we are delivered from captivity to the Devil ; that for nearly five centuries the most eminent teachers of the Church were accustomed to represent the death of Christ as an act of personal homage to the personal greatness and majesty of God ; that daring the last three centuries the great Protestant Churches have represented the death of Christ as having a relation neither to the Devil nor to the personal claims of God, but to the moral order of the universe. . . The Fathers attempted to explain why it is that through the death of Christ we escape from the penalties of sin, and their explanations were rejected by the Schoolmen. The Schoolmen attempted to explain it, and their ex- planations were rejected or modified by the Reformers. The Reformers attempted to explain it, and within a century after the Reformation Grotius and his successors were attempting to explain it again. But the faith of the great body of the Church in the fact that Christ's sufferings came upon Him because of our sin, and that on the ground of His sufferings we are delivered from the penalties of sin, has survived the theories which were intended to illustrate it.
" The idea of an objective atonement invented by theologians to satisfy tho exigencies of theological systems ! It would be almost as reasonable to maintain that the apparent motion -of the sun was invented by astro- nomers in order to satisfy the exigencies created by astronomical theories.
The idea has perplexed, and troubled, and broken up successive systems of theology. It was precisely because they failed to account for it that theological systems which were once famous and powerful, and from which their authors hoped for an immortal name, have perished. If it had been possible to expel the idea from the faith of Christendom, then the task of theology would have been made wonderfully easier. The history of the doctrine is a proof that the idea of an objective atonement was not invented by theologians."
From the establishment of the fact, Mr. Dale then passes to the consideration of the theory, or intellectual explanation and expression of the fact. He justly says that the latter is of less importance in itself, and perhapd less possible of being ascertained by himself, or any man in this life, than the former. Nor can we say that he is so satisfactory in his treatment of the one as of the
other part of his subject. We do not know that there is anything completely new in this treatment, nor that he claims such
originality, though he does not avowedly seek—as Mr. Maurice would have done—for some partial ray of truth in each of the many theories of which he has given an account, and so bring them to something of a concentrated image of the truth. His argument, as we understand it, is as follows :—Though the tendency of modern thought and feeling is not favourable to any strong sense of sin, and of the necessity for its punishment as an assertion of the righteousness of God, and for its remission as a condition of our restoration to his love, still these things are true, and men's consciences do still recognise and acknowledge their truth. " But if the punishment of sin is a divine act—an act in which the identity between the will of God and the eternal law of righteousness is asserted and expressed—it would appear that if in any case the penalties of sin are remitted, some other divine act of at least equal intensity, and in which the ill-desert of sin is expressed with at least equal energy, must take its place." Such a divine act was the death of Christ, as Mr. Dale argues, while urging, against the usual objec- tion, that this was not the death of a noble and generous man, offering himself for execution that the felons might be set free by the judge, but the self-sacrifice of the Lawgiver and Judge himself,—God manifest in the flesh. And thus "the conscience will grasp the assurance' that since He has suffered to whom it belonged to inflict suffering, it must be possible for Him to grant -remission of sins." And then this conception of Christ sacri- ficing himself to vindicate the righteousness of his law is made clearer and more complete as we realise that he, being God, is also the head and representative of the human race, and "his life the original spring of our own." For through this relation- ship the submission made by Christ to the righteous penalties of sin was made for us, and "it is ours, for it is the transcendent expression and act of that eternal life in which we live, and which is perpetually revealed in our own character and history."
The weak point in this argument, where much else is strong and conclusive, seems to us to be in the assumption that the righteousness of God could not be asserted without the actual in- fliction of penalties, but that the assertion colild be made by their infliction upon the divine Judge by himself, instead of upon the sinner. if the sinner remains impenitent, to him the penalty is not remitted by Christ's death ; if he heartily repents, is not his repentance a truer and better recognition of God's righteous law than the endurance of any penalties—whether borne by Christ or by the sinner himself—would be ? Here, above all places in the book, we think that Mr. Dale has concealed from him- self the defects in his argument by the vehemence of his rhetoric ; had he reasoned more concisely and more drily, he would either have established his position more completely, or have distinctly recognised that here was a mystery which it was not yet possible to clear up.
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