The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.3

90 The Fundamentals New, which emphasize the gravity of the guilt of sin and the necessity of sacrifice as the objective ground of its forgiveness. They all of them incline to represent the sufferings of Christ as sympathetic, rather than vicarious; and, with the Sweden- borgians, make the atonement to consist not in what Christ did or offered by dying in our stead, so much as what He accomplished for us in His reconciling love. The atonement was the Incarnation. That was the revelation of God’s love; and the sufferings of Christ were not a substitute for the penalty of sin, but Christ’s expiatory-penitential confession of the sins of humanity. McLeod Campbell, who is followed by Moberly, held the theory that the repentance of Christ, or the penitence of Christ, had in it atoning worth, and was the proper expiation of sin (Moberly, 129, 401; “The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought,” p. 375; Clow, 160; Stalker, 135). (This theory, by the way, is becoming very popular nowadays.) In one word; the object of the death of Christ was the production of a moral impression, the subduement of a re­ volted world-heart by the exhibition of dying love. This is practically also the Ritschlian view, which, after all, is a re-statement of the old Socinian theory, of the distrust-remov­ ing and confidence-re-establishing effect of the cross. Frederick Maurice and Robertson of Brighton (the noblest spirit of them all) may also be referred to as leaders in this the broader school (Crawford, 303, 348). They were followed by such Church writers as Farrar, Moberly, Freemantle, and by Cave, Adeney, Horton, R. J. Campbell, in the Old Country, and in the United States by Lyman Abbott, Washington Glad­ den, Munger, and a host of others. MODERNISM When we come to the most daring of the present day theories with regard to the atonement, as set forth, for in­ stance, in Sabatier, or the latest work of American modern-

Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker