Post by Josh Parsley on Dec 21, 2006 16:06:48 GMT -5
Charles G. Finney & The Atonement
by Leon Stump
Having already covered his teaching on the subjects of original sin and justification in previous articles, in this issue of LifeLines we turn our attention to Charles Finney’s teaching on the atonement. Let me say at the outset that this is going to be far more difficult than the previous subjects we have addressed, for a number of reasons. There is a vast amount of material in Scripture on the subject of the atonement, that is, the substitutionary death of Christ and how it saves us. It is extremely difficult to get your arms around it all at once; whole volumes would not exhaust the subject. It involves some of the deepest concepts in Scripture, some of the deepest thoughts and ways of God, including much that remains a mystery or at least evades the utmost effort to understand fully: the complexity as well as the vastness of the subject makes it difficult. Finney’s terminology and style certainly doesn’t help. Then I must include something of the history of theories of the atonement, and besides all this, write in such a way that you can make some sense of it all. I will simply do my best with God’s help. You will have to do your best to prayerfully and thoughtfully consider what I (and the others I quote, including Finney) have to say.
As we have already noted, there are no subjects more crucial to the Christian faith than those on which we are concentrating—justification by faith, the atonement, and the new birth. Any error in Christianity is a matter for concern because God is a God of truth (Deut. 32:4); Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14:6); the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth (Jn. 14:17); and the gospel is the way of truth (2 Pet. 2:2). Many errors, however, are of relatively minor consequence. With many issues in Christianity there is room for charitable disagreement owing to different perspectives, especially in those things about which there is not a great deal of information in the Bible or which occupy a relatively minor place of importance. Even with major subjects in Christianity, such as justification, the atonement, or the new birth, there may exist minor errors or disagreements which do not seriously effect one’s standing with God and which can and should be borne with tolerance. But the subjects upon which we are concentrating regarding Finney are so central and the errors which he holds concerning them are so great that the situation could not be more serious. It is necessary to refute them.
As we have also noted, justification, atonement, and the new birth are inseparably related to each other; how we view one will affect how we view the others. As we have seen, Finney denies that we are justified by faith in the Scriptural sense and insists instead that only entire obedience to the moral law is accepted by God as righteousness. It is no wonder, then, that, as we shall show, he should deny that Christ’s atoning death brought about our justification or salvation in any direct way. The common view of the atonement is that since death is the penalty for sin, Christ paid that penalty by dying for us, making it possible for God to forgive us and give us eternal life without violating His justice. Finney denies that Christ’s death was punishment and insists that the way His death saves us is by showing how seriously God takes sin and much He loves us, and that when we see this we are motivated to take sin seriously, too, love God in return, and live a holy life. This view of the atonement is not Finney’s personal creation. It is a combination of what are known as the "moral influence" and "governmental" theories. Of the "moral influence" view, B.B. Warfield writes in The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia:
The essence of all these theories [there are many slight variations of it] is that....the work of Christ takes immediate effect not on God but on man, leading him to a state of mind and heart which will be acceptable to God, through the medium of which alone can the work of Christ be said to affect God. At its highest level, this will mean that the work of Christ is directed to leading man to repentance and faith....The most popular form of the "moral influence" theories has always been that in which the stress is laid on the manifestation made in the total mission and work of Christ of the ineffable and searching love of God for sinners, which, being perceived, breaks down our opposition to God, melts our hearts, and brings us as prodigals home to the Father’s arms.....(The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge; Samuel Macauley Jackson, editor in chief; Baker Book House: Grand Rapids, MI; Vol.I, pp.352,353)
H. D. McDonald writes:
What has come to be called the moral influence theory of the atonement was first given formal expression by Peter Abelard [1079-1142]. (The Atonement of the Death of Christ, H.D. McDonald; Baker Book House: Grand Rapids, MI; 1985, p.174)
Abelard was a monk born in Britain but living most of his life in France, who, as most of those who later to adopted this view of the atonement, was a theological "liberal." Schaff-Herzog says of him:
His originality is seen in his doctrine of the Trinity and the Atonement....[He] does not limit inspiration to the writers of the Scriptures, but holds that it was imparted also to the Greek and Roman philosophers and to the Indian Brahmans [Hindus]. He...recognizes degrees of inspiration, and admits that prophets and apostles may make mistakes....As for his ethics, he teaches that moral good and ill inhere not in the act but in the motive....(Ibid., p.9)
Later the moral influence and governmental views of the atonement were adopted by liberal theologians because through these views they could keep something of the gospel while ridding it of, to them, distasteful aspects such as the judgment and wrath of God against sin. To them, God was all love and needed no propitiation or sacrifice to appease His wrath and make forgiveness possible. Finney adopts this same view of the atonement but for quite different reasons. For him, the moral and governmental views were convenient for destroying the false security of those who were sure that because of the atonement, they could sin with impunity. In his characteristic manner, he goes after the standard, age-old doctrines of the church, that is, the teaching of the Word of God itself, in order to remove the refuge of sinners. In his zeal for holiness, he removes every doctrine that may be construed as standing in the way, and in the process, leaves the believer as well as all mankind with nothing but free will and obedience to the moral law of God as our salvation. But this is to destroy the gospel itself. It is, as Paul put it concerning the Judaizers who threatened the Galatians, to preach "a different gospel—which is really no gospel at all" (Galatians 1:6,7).
Again, in characteristic fashion, Finney is moved by reason and pragmatism (he sees the woeful state of Christians and Christianity of his day regarding holiness). If the sinner will be punished forever in hell for his sins and the "believer" who continues in sin will meet the same judgment, then Christ must not in any real objective sense have borne our sins on the cross. Neither was He punished for them; otherwise how could God justly punish sinners for the same sins? Practical concerns and logic drive Finney’s theology, not Scripture. If Scripture seems to stand in the way of his logic and pragmatism, he has no scruples about changing Scripture by way of re-interpretation so as to fit his thinking. The end result, though through different means and from a different perspective and for different reasons, is the same as with liberal theologians who reject the authority of Scripture outright.
The liberal theologian Hastings Rashdall (1920) wrote in glowing praise of Abelard’s "moral influence" theory:
At last we have found a theory of the atonement which thoroughly appeals to reason and conscience..... ntellectual, and still more religious, progress often consists simply in setting an idea free from a context which is really inconsistent with it. In the history of the atonement doctrine this task was accomplished by Abelard. For the first time—or rather for the first time since the days of the earliest and most philosophical Greek fathers—the doctrine of the atonement was stated in a way which had nothing unintelligible, arbitrary, illogical, or immoral about it....When we see in the death of Christ the most striking expression and symbol of the spirit which dominated His whole life, our recognition of the divine love which shines forth in that death ceases to be dependent upon our accepting any of those always difficult and sometimes repulsive theories of substitutive or expiative or objective efficacy which were once connected with it. (The Idea of Atonement in Christian Thought; London: Macmillan; 1920, pp.360-362; quoted in McDonald, op.cit., p.179)
Development of the moral influence view can be traced from Abelard on to Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) who wrote in vigorous opposition to the penal views of the Reformers:
The Socinian doctrine of atonement lies outside the mainstream of Protestant thought and is worked out in deliberate rejection of the thesis that Christ’s work satisfied a principle in God of divine justice. It is usual to speak of the Socinian doctrine of the atonement; but in truth this is a misnomer, for the whole effort of Socinus was to deny to Christ’s death any specific atoning value. And with his Arian view of the person of Christ and his Pelagian view of man’s sin, it follows that he can have no serious soteriology [doctrine of salvation]....Socinus puts forward a number of propositions which must, he thinks, make the penal doctrine of atonement void. His basic thesis is that the idea of satisfaction excludes the idea of mercy. He formulates the dilemma: if sin is punished, it is not forgiven; if it is forgiven, it is not punished....In Pelagian fashion, Socinus declared sin a personal matter; it cannot be set to another’s account....He argues that since the law threatens endless death, and thus each owes endless punishment, each must then have a substitute to pay his everlasting debt. It is evident that Christ did not endure such sufferings.... Socinus considers the penal theory to introduce an antagonism between God’s mercy and his justice. But he denies any such hostility....The cross draws us to accept divine mercy. "Though the intervention of the blood of Christ did not move God to grant us exemption from punishment of our sins, nevertheless it has moved us to accept the pardon offered and to put our faith in Christ himself—whence comes our justification—and has also in the highest way commended to us the ineffable love of God." (McDonald, op.cit., pp.196-199)
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), in response to Socinus, is credited as the first to formally set forth what is called the "governmental" view of the atonement to which Finney subscribes. Grotius acknowledged some of the points made by Socinus against the penal view while at the same time trying to hold on to as much of the traditional view of the atonement as he could:
Grotius accepts with Socinus that justice is not an inherent necessity of the divine nature....Grotius consequently conceives of God as ruler rather than judge. This relationship of God to man as Governor over the governed has occasioned the title for its view, the governmental or rectorial theory of the atonement.... "ll punishment presupposes some common good—the conservation and example of order." But it is unjust that the punishment should fall upon someone other than the doer of the evil....He accepts Socinus’s criticism of the penal doctrine of Christ’s sufferings as an exact equivalent for the divine penalty of sin....If...the law were completely abrogated, then its authority would be endangered and the forgiveness of sin regarded as too easy an affair. The government of God cannot be maintained unless there is reverence for law. The death of Christ is consequently a signal exhibition of this regard for the law and the heinous guilt of having broken it....Forgiveness cannot be so given as to make sin unimportant. Christ, however, did not bear the exact penalty but the substitute for a penalty.... (McDonald, op.cit., pp.203-205)
by Leon Stump
Having already covered his teaching on the subjects of original sin and justification in previous articles, in this issue of LifeLines we turn our attention to Charles Finney’s teaching on the atonement. Let me say at the outset that this is going to be far more difficult than the previous subjects we have addressed, for a number of reasons. There is a vast amount of material in Scripture on the subject of the atonement, that is, the substitutionary death of Christ and how it saves us. It is extremely difficult to get your arms around it all at once; whole volumes would not exhaust the subject. It involves some of the deepest concepts in Scripture, some of the deepest thoughts and ways of God, including much that remains a mystery or at least evades the utmost effort to understand fully: the complexity as well as the vastness of the subject makes it difficult. Finney’s terminology and style certainly doesn’t help. Then I must include something of the history of theories of the atonement, and besides all this, write in such a way that you can make some sense of it all. I will simply do my best with God’s help. You will have to do your best to prayerfully and thoughtfully consider what I (and the others I quote, including Finney) have to say.
As we have already noted, there are no subjects more crucial to the Christian faith than those on which we are concentrating—justification by faith, the atonement, and the new birth. Any error in Christianity is a matter for concern because God is a God of truth (Deut. 32:4); Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14:6); the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth (Jn. 14:17); and the gospel is the way of truth (2 Pet. 2:2). Many errors, however, are of relatively minor consequence. With many issues in Christianity there is room for charitable disagreement owing to different perspectives, especially in those things about which there is not a great deal of information in the Bible or which occupy a relatively minor place of importance. Even with major subjects in Christianity, such as justification, the atonement, or the new birth, there may exist minor errors or disagreements which do not seriously effect one’s standing with God and which can and should be borne with tolerance. But the subjects upon which we are concentrating regarding Finney are so central and the errors which he holds concerning them are so great that the situation could not be more serious. It is necessary to refute them.
As we have also noted, justification, atonement, and the new birth are inseparably related to each other; how we view one will affect how we view the others. As we have seen, Finney denies that we are justified by faith in the Scriptural sense and insists instead that only entire obedience to the moral law is accepted by God as righteousness. It is no wonder, then, that, as we shall show, he should deny that Christ’s atoning death brought about our justification or salvation in any direct way. The common view of the atonement is that since death is the penalty for sin, Christ paid that penalty by dying for us, making it possible for God to forgive us and give us eternal life without violating His justice. Finney denies that Christ’s death was punishment and insists that the way His death saves us is by showing how seriously God takes sin and much He loves us, and that when we see this we are motivated to take sin seriously, too, love God in return, and live a holy life. This view of the atonement is not Finney’s personal creation. It is a combination of what are known as the "moral influence" and "governmental" theories. Of the "moral influence" view, B.B. Warfield writes in The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia:
The essence of all these theories [there are many slight variations of it] is that....the work of Christ takes immediate effect not on God but on man, leading him to a state of mind and heart which will be acceptable to God, through the medium of which alone can the work of Christ be said to affect God. At its highest level, this will mean that the work of Christ is directed to leading man to repentance and faith....The most popular form of the "moral influence" theories has always been that in which the stress is laid on the manifestation made in the total mission and work of Christ of the ineffable and searching love of God for sinners, which, being perceived, breaks down our opposition to God, melts our hearts, and brings us as prodigals home to the Father’s arms.....(The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge; Samuel Macauley Jackson, editor in chief; Baker Book House: Grand Rapids, MI; Vol.I, pp.352,353)
H. D. McDonald writes:
What has come to be called the moral influence theory of the atonement was first given formal expression by Peter Abelard [1079-1142]. (The Atonement of the Death of Christ, H.D. McDonald; Baker Book House: Grand Rapids, MI; 1985, p.174)
Abelard was a monk born in Britain but living most of his life in France, who, as most of those who later to adopted this view of the atonement, was a theological "liberal." Schaff-Herzog says of him:
His originality is seen in his doctrine of the Trinity and the Atonement....[He] does not limit inspiration to the writers of the Scriptures, but holds that it was imparted also to the Greek and Roman philosophers and to the Indian Brahmans [Hindus]. He...recognizes degrees of inspiration, and admits that prophets and apostles may make mistakes....As for his ethics, he teaches that moral good and ill inhere not in the act but in the motive....(Ibid., p.9)
Later the moral influence and governmental views of the atonement were adopted by liberal theologians because through these views they could keep something of the gospel while ridding it of, to them, distasteful aspects such as the judgment and wrath of God against sin. To them, God was all love and needed no propitiation or sacrifice to appease His wrath and make forgiveness possible. Finney adopts this same view of the atonement but for quite different reasons. For him, the moral and governmental views were convenient for destroying the false security of those who were sure that because of the atonement, they could sin with impunity. In his characteristic manner, he goes after the standard, age-old doctrines of the church, that is, the teaching of the Word of God itself, in order to remove the refuge of sinners. In his zeal for holiness, he removes every doctrine that may be construed as standing in the way, and in the process, leaves the believer as well as all mankind with nothing but free will and obedience to the moral law of God as our salvation. But this is to destroy the gospel itself. It is, as Paul put it concerning the Judaizers who threatened the Galatians, to preach "a different gospel—which is really no gospel at all" (Galatians 1:6,7).
Again, in characteristic fashion, Finney is moved by reason and pragmatism (he sees the woeful state of Christians and Christianity of his day regarding holiness). If the sinner will be punished forever in hell for his sins and the "believer" who continues in sin will meet the same judgment, then Christ must not in any real objective sense have borne our sins on the cross. Neither was He punished for them; otherwise how could God justly punish sinners for the same sins? Practical concerns and logic drive Finney’s theology, not Scripture. If Scripture seems to stand in the way of his logic and pragmatism, he has no scruples about changing Scripture by way of re-interpretation so as to fit his thinking. The end result, though through different means and from a different perspective and for different reasons, is the same as with liberal theologians who reject the authority of Scripture outright.
The liberal theologian Hastings Rashdall (1920) wrote in glowing praise of Abelard’s "moral influence" theory:
At last we have found a theory of the atonement which thoroughly appeals to reason and conscience..... ntellectual, and still more religious, progress often consists simply in setting an idea free from a context which is really inconsistent with it. In the history of the atonement doctrine this task was accomplished by Abelard. For the first time—or rather for the first time since the days of the earliest and most philosophical Greek fathers—the doctrine of the atonement was stated in a way which had nothing unintelligible, arbitrary, illogical, or immoral about it....When we see in the death of Christ the most striking expression and symbol of the spirit which dominated His whole life, our recognition of the divine love which shines forth in that death ceases to be dependent upon our accepting any of those always difficult and sometimes repulsive theories of substitutive or expiative or objective efficacy which were once connected with it. (The Idea of Atonement in Christian Thought; London: Macmillan; 1920, pp.360-362; quoted in McDonald, op.cit., p.179)
Development of the moral influence view can be traced from Abelard on to Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) who wrote in vigorous opposition to the penal views of the Reformers:
The Socinian doctrine of atonement lies outside the mainstream of Protestant thought and is worked out in deliberate rejection of the thesis that Christ’s work satisfied a principle in God of divine justice. It is usual to speak of the Socinian doctrine of the atonement; but in truth this is a misnomer, for the whole effort of Socinus was to deny to Christ’s death any specific atoning value. And with his Arian view of the person of Christ and his Pelagian view of man’s sin, it follows that he can have no serious soteriology [doctrine of salvation]....Socinus puts forward a number of propositions which must, he thinks, make the penal doctrine of atonement void. His basic thesis is that the idea of satisfaction excludes the idea of mercy. He formulates the dilemma: if sin is punished, it is not forgiven; if it is forgiven, it is not punished....In Pelagian fashion, Socinus declared sin a personal matter; it cannot be set to another’s account....He argues that since the law threatens endless death, and thus each owes endless punishment, each must then have a substitute to pay his everlasting debt. It is evident that Christ did not endure such sufferings.... Socinus considers the penal theory to introduce an antagonism between God’s mercy and his justice. But he denies any such hostility....The cross draws us to accept divine mercy. "Though the intervention of the blood of Christ did not move God to grant us exemption from punishment of our sins, nevertheless it has moved us to accept the pardon offered and to put our faith in Christ himself—whence comes our justification—and has also in the highest way commended to us the ineffable love of God." (McDonald, op.cit., pp.196-199)
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), in response to Socinus, is credited as the first to formally set forth what is called the "governmental" view of the atonement to which Finney subscribes. Grotius acknowledged some of the points made by Socinus against the penal view while at the same time trying to hold on to as much of the traditional view of the atonement as he could:
Grotius accepts with Socinus that justice is not an inherent necessity of the divine nature....Grotius consequently conceives of God as ruler rather than judge. This relationship of God to man as Governor over the governed has occasioned the title for its view, the governmental or rectorial theory of the atonement.... "ll punishment presupposes some common good—the conservation and example of order." But it is unjust that the punishment should fall upon someone other than the doer of the evil....He accepts Socinus’s criticism of the penal doctrine of Christ’s sufferings as an exact equivalent for the divine penalty of sin....If...the law were completely abrogated, then its authority would be endangered and the forgiveness of sin regarded as too easy an affair. The government of God cannot be maintained unless there is reverence for law. The death of Christ is consequently a signal exhibition of this regard for the law and the heinous guilt of having broken it....Forgiveness cannot be so given as to make sin unimportant. Christ, however, did not bear the exact penalty but the substitute for a penalty.... (McDonald, op.cit., pp.203-205)