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The Fundamentals Christ’s death upon the cross, both as a substitute and as the federal representative of humanity, voluntary, altruistic, vicarious, sinless, sacrificial, purposed not accidental, from the standpoint of humanity unconscionably brutal, but from the standpoint of love indescribably glorious, not only satis fied all the demands of the Divine righteousness, but offered the most powerful incentive to repentance, morality, and self- sacrifice. The Scripture in its completeness thus sets forth the substance of the two great theories, the moral and the vicarious, and we find in the rotundity or allness of the Scriptural presentment no mere partial or antagonistic seg ments of truth, but the completeness of the spiritual, moral, altruistic and atoning aspects of the death of Christ. (Hodge on the “Atonement,” pp. 292-320, and Workman, “At-one-ment and Reconciliation with God,” may in different ways be taken as representative of a one-sided way of treating a great sub ject. The Socinian view that Christ’s death was mainly, if not exclusively, to produce a reconciling influence upon the heart of mankind, which Workman espouses, is as narrow, if not narrower, and as partial as Hodge’s advocacy of the theory that Christ died for the elect only). II . TH E HISTORICAL We will discuss this aspect of the subject in four brief sections: The Primitive, the Mediaeval, the Reformational, the Modern. THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH WITNESS With regard to the writers and writings of the primitive church in the Ante-Nicene and the Post-Nicene era, it may be said, broadly speaking, that the atonement is presented by them as a fact, with its saving and regenerative effects. The consciousness of the primitive church did not seem to be alive to the necessity of the formation of any particular theory of the atonement. It follows the Apostle’s Creed, which makes
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