CHAPTER VI: GOD'S RECTORAL HONOR EFFECTIVELY MAINTAINED.

GOD'S RECTORAL HONOR EFFECTIVELY MAINTAINED.

TO maintain the precept and enforce the sanctions of law, are not the only matters of concern to be provided for, in the promulgation of forgiveness; a third matter, much insisted on, is that the magistrate himself keep good his Rectoral Honor and the Legal Justice of his magistracy. Regarded as the administrator of instituted government, he is practically the government himself, and is looked upon as being the government. Hence if it should happen that, in the introduction of a free justification, God's magisterial character--his Rectoral Honor and Justice--is let down, or loses the necessary impressiveness, the damage incurred will be fatal. And this, it will be remembered, was one of the alleged forms of detriment, or damage, to be apprehended, unless some kind of satisfaction is made to God's justice. All the compensation theories have a principal respect to this supposed necessity. For how shall God be just, and have respect in the character of justice, unless he executes justice? or unless he somehow has his justice satisfied, by volunteer pains contributed for that purpose?

Hence the many, variously turned contrivances of substitution, by which this point is supposed to be carried, and a ground of justification prepared that saves the justice and public honor of God, in a release of his penalties. These various schemes or theories are made up in the terms, official substitution, penal suffering, expiation, judicial satisfaction, ransom, purchase, bearing the curse, payment of the debt, and the like; used sometimes interchangeably as being, to some extent, equivalents, or more commonly set up, each by itself, as the idol figure of some peculiar doctrine dominated by it.

Our New England teachers, for nearly a century past, have commonly taken a form of representation that has not as yet obtained general currency, The New England scheme of substitution. any where else. Pressed by the difficulty of any scheme that supposes a literal satisfaction of God's justice, or the release of the guilty obtained by the penal suffering of the innocent--because it so profoundly shocks the most immovable, and most nearly innate convictions of our moral nature--also by the new-sprung inference of universal salvation that inevitably follows; viz., that, if Christ has borne the punishment of the world, no principle of justice in God will allow him to inflict that punishment again upon the transgressors themselves--pressed by these difficulties they began to conceive that Christ, in his cross, maintained the righteousness of God without punishment, by what was expressed, to the same effect as in punishment, of God's abhorrence to sin. Christ, they conceived, has simply shown, by his death, the same abhorrence to sin that would have been shown by the punishment of the guilty. The righteousness of God therefore stands erect and fair, even though punishment is released.

Of this latter and later mode of doctrine I will speak first and briefly, recurring afterwards to the older, which turns on the penal suffering of Christ, and the maintenance and satisfaction thereby of God's justice.

There is no room for scruple in affirming, that every thing done by Christ gets its value, under laws of expression, No fault that it turns on what is expressed. or, as in modern phrase, under terms of esthetic representation; christianity as a power on the world, is expression. Nay, the incarnation itself is what is expressed, and not what is contained, or suffered quantitatively as a compensation to justice, in the incarnate person. Punishment itself, apart from the matter of penal enforcement, considered in the last previous chapter, has besides a most sacred and noble efficacy in what it expresses of God--the determination of his will, his righteousness, in a word his rectoral fidelity to the law. This expression, too, is wanted as being the equivalent of a like impression; for nothing is expressed to us, save as it is impressed in us, in the same degree. And in just this way the gospel itself is resolvable into expression, because it is wanted in a way of impression; which is the real effect and mode of its value.

Thus far we have no difficulty; but the question still remains whether a fit compensation is really made for the release of punishment, by what is expressed of abhorrence to sin, in the sufferings of Christ? That no compensation is wanted--justice and forgiveness being co-factors, working together in the instituted government of God, and the justice-factor being even confirmed in its vigor, by the revelation of future punishment and the inauguration of Christ as the judge of the world--was abundantly shown in the last chapter, But consenting, for the present, to waive this advantage, we accept the question, whether any expression made of abhorrence to sin is a proper and sufficient substitute for punishment?

And here it occurs to us, at the outset, as a very obvious fact, that abhorrence to sin expresses almost nothing that would be expressed by punishment. Abhorrence to sin no fit equivalent of justice. Abhorrence is a word of recoil simply and not a word of majesty. There is no enforcement, no judicial vigor in it. I may abhor what I am only too weak, or too much in the way of false pity, to handle with the due severity. It does not even require a perfect being to abhor sin, especially in the wicked forms of it--that is to draw back from it, as being disgusted and shocked by it. But there is no such drawing back in justice. Justice moves on in the positive vigor of the wrath-principle, girded with inflexible majesty, for the doing upon wrong of what wrong deserves. To put forward an expression therefore of God's abhorrence to sin, as a substitute for justice, is to give it the weakest possible substitute. If the abhorrence could be shown keeping company with justice and justice with it, there would be no deficiency, but to make a governmental sanction out of abhorrence by itself, and publish a free forgiveness to sin, on the ground of it,: is to make forgiveness safe by a much less positive and weaker way of handling than forgiveness itself. All doubt on this point ought to be forever ended, by simply asking what kind of figure, as regards efficiency, any government of the world would make, dropping off its punishments and substituting abhorrences?

But this abhorrence theory encounters another objection equally fatal, in the fact that really no abhorrence No abhorrence expressed in Christ's death. at all to sin is expressed in the suffering death of Christ. All manifestations of goodness and purity are implicit evidences of such abhorrence, but beyond that we discover no evidence more direct. To what in the transaction of the cross can God's abhorrence, by any possibility, fasten itself? Does God abhor the person of Jesus? No. His character? No. His redeeming office? No. The sins of the world that are upon him? They are not upon him, save in a figure, as the burden that his love so divinely assumes. His standing in the place of transgressors? He stands not in that place at all, as having their moral desert upon him--only in their place as a good man stands in the place of his enemy, to bear his wrongs and make his own violated feeling the argument of pity and patience with him. Where then does the abhorrence of God take hold of Christ or of his death at all? What does it find in him, or about him, or on him, or under him, that can be any wise abhorrent? If it should be said that God really abhors nothing in him, but only lays severity upon him, to be taken by us as the sign of his abhorrence, then how does it appear that the severity laid upon him has any moral significance at all, if it is not penal suffering? If he is put in our place to suffer the penalty of our sins, then we can easily see abhorrence to our sins expressed in his suffering. But mere severities and pains laid upon him, even though God violated his own deep sympathies and loving approbations to do it, can only show the fact of something very abhorrent somewhere, and is much more likely to raise abhorrence in us, than to signify God's abhorrence to us.

It will be found accordingly, if the language of those who take up this abhorrence theory is carefully watched, that they have a latent reference back Latent resumption still of the penal suffering. always to Christ, as being in some penal condition, without which our sin is no way concerned with his suffering, or his suffering with it. The object was to get away from the very repulsive idea of a penal character in Christ's suffering, and so from the appalling objections that seemed to be incurred by it; but when the point of difficulty is once turned by the softer word "abhorrence," we look back and find the penal suffering held mentally in reserve, in order to get the Divine Sufferer into an attitude, where God's abhorrences can be imagined to adhere to him, or find expression through him. Thus it will be said continually, that "God's abhorrence to sin was laid upon his Son"--which means, if it means any thing, that God's judicial indignations were laid upon him; that God withdraws from the Son in the agony and upon the cross, to signify his displeasure, that is, his judicial displeasure; nay, the doctrine will sometimes be even doubled round again so as to say that God's "justice is satisfied" in his death; only to be doubled back, of course, when the objections incurred by the scheme of penalty are to be met; for then it will be answered that Christ does not suffer penally, but only in a way to let God's abhorrence to sin be expressed through his suffering.

I conclude, on the whole, that this New England expedient of conceiving the substitution of Christ, as being only God's way of showing his repugnances to sin by the suffering of Christ, instead of doing it by the punishment of the guilty, has in fact, no base of reality, even to those who resort to it, save as it reverts to the older scheme of penal suffering and resumes all the methods of that scheme. Indeed it will even be found, that Dr. Edwards, having taken the ground [47] that "the death of Christ manifests God's hatred of sin, in the same sense as the damnation of the wicked," still carries out his reasonings, under the very scheme of penal suffering that has been renounced, to a point of excess in that scheme that is abundantly shocking; viz., to the conclusion that "the sufferings of Christ were agreeable to God." "If, by mere pain," he says, [48] "be meant pain abstracted from the obedience of Christ, I can not see why it may not be agreeable to God. It certainly is in the damned; and, for the same reason might have been, and doubtless was in the case of our Lord."

To pursue this particular scheme or doctrine farther appears to be unnecessary, after we have found it lapsing always in the older doctrine it undertook to qualify, or displace. To this older doctrine we accordingly return.

Here it is conceived that God, as a ruler, must execute justice because he is just--if not upon the guilty, then upon Christ their substitute. Justice Immutable Justice only not sufficiently just. he must have, the inexorable, everlasting wrath [orge] of his judicial nature must be satisfied; and as it was to be satisfied by the penal suffering of transgressors, so it can only be satisfied, in case of their release, by a full compensation of penal suffering offered by their deliverer. Now if it were simply conceived that God, by a necessary, everlasting charge upon his moral nature, is fated to be the absolute Nemesis of wrong,--unable therefore to avert himself, or be averted, till every iota and least speck of it has gotten its full desert--there would, at least, be a certain sublimity in the conception. But there is no such thought as that; the inexorable justice [wrath] wants only suffering it is conceived for its satisfaction, and the suffering of innocence will be just as good as the suffering of guilt, if only there is enough of it; which is about the same thing as to say that God's justice is so immovably set on having its due of pains and penalties, that it will be just as well satisfied in having them, apart from all relations of justice. There was never a doctrine that more obviously broke itself down by its own simple statement. Nor is it any wise relieved, when it is added that the pains and penalties which justice obtains for satisfaction are not exacted, but yielded by consent; for then we have a kind of justice under all most sounding epithets of majesty, immutable, necessary, sovereign, which is yet willing to get its pains and penalties by contract!

I ought perhaps to say that, under the general phraseology of this doctrine, there appears to be some variety Softened or varied forms of the doctrine. of impression indicated by a softening, or modified definition of terms. Many do not understand by God's justice any vindictive attribute or instinct that must have satisfaction, but only a character of public justice, or general justice, that is necessary to be maintained, by a firm and exact distribution of penalty, in order to keep the instituted government in respect and authority. These only want the character of public justice made good, by some other expression--commonly by that of abhorrence--when that which is made by punishment is taken away. Some can not satisfy themselves in what manner the needed compensative expression is made, and not finding how to explain the difficulties met, take refuge at last in mystery--not observing that where confessedly nothing is known, there can be nothing expressed. These lower, softer kinds of commutation however do not satisfy, at all, the more logical, firmly dogmatic natures, and the tendency has been, more and more distinctly of late, to settle into what are called the deeper grounds of the subject, and plant the doctrine in the soil of first principle; viz., in what is conceived to be the eternal, necessary attribute of divine justice itself.

I could hardly trust myself to state the argument, or vindication, by which this more adequate and deeper doctrine is supposed to be maintained; and therefore I am constrained to cite the language of two late writers of distinction, that they may accurately represent themselves and their view of the subject. I do it for no purpose of controversy, but only to obtain, for the great matter in question, the easiest and surest mode of settlement.

Thus it is formally argued by a teacher in great authority, [49] that--"A being determined by considerations outside of Himself [considerations of Absolute Justice how to be conceived. public effect for example] can not be God. It is essential to the very nature of God that he be independent and omniscient; but with these attributes a determination ab extra [as where God is conceived, in the death of his son, to be actuated by considerations of public law and authority, and results of salvation gained, or to be gained, by his sacrifice] is utterly and forever irreconcilable. * * * Were theologians to receive this first truth and couple it with that noble utterance with which the Shorter Catechism opens--Man's chief end, etc.,' they would never be found framing theories, which would strip God of his justice and set the universe [i. e., the benefit of it] above the throne of their Creator. * * * God is himself the highest end for which he could act."

Now it is very true that, in one view, there is and can be nothing out of God, and that, in the same, he can act for nothing out of Himself. It is also true that his acts and purposes are not for things, or creatures taken up as ends, after their creation; but these things and creatures, present eternally to God's thought as possibilities, in Himself, were as truly his ends, before they began to exist externally, as they could be afterward. They were, in fact, as truly other and not himself, as they came to be afterward. For them and their benefit accordingly he has eternally acted. To say otherwise, denying that he can have ends out of himself, under the supposed Calvinistic pretext of doing honor to his sovereignty, is to make him Allah and not God. He is even radically unchristianized in his God is not Allah nevertheless.. perfections. For it is the glory of God, the summit even of his glory, that, being sovereign, he knows, not justice only, but self-sacrifice, and is so sublimely given to ends out of Himself, that he can even be a suffering God in his feeling, for the recovery and salvation of his enemies. Doubtless he does all things, in' a sense, for his own glory; which is only saying, if we speak with intelligence, that he does all things to make the luster of his greatness and moral perfections visible; in other words to radiate abroad his love and goodness, in a way of imparting himself; which is to all created minds their only hope of perfection and complete beatitude. We are brought round thus, in fact, upon the noble conclusion that he does every thing for ends ab extra, not for Himself. The argument, therefore, that God must have the everlasting anger of his justice satisfied, because he is acting wholly for Himself, appears to be about as repulsive, in every way, as any thing well call be. It even makes the grim orge or vindictive attribute, to be itself the summit of God's perfections. Insisting that he must do every thing for himself, nothing for any public ends of benefit and blessing to creatures, it seems even to say, what certainly can not be meant, that his very perfection is, to stand, first of all, for the satisfaction of his wrath, and kindle his glory at the point of his resentments!

Another attempt has also been made, in quite another quarter, to maintain what is virtually the same ground, only it is done by a more ingenious Another conception of Absolute Justice. and plausible way of argument. Consenting virtually to the principle, as every intelligent thinker must, that we can properly conceive God only by drawing on material included in our own human consciousness, the writer finds, in all "ethical natures," whether it be the nature of God, or of man, a certain prime element that he calls "Justice," and which is instinctively arrayed, roused to vindictive energy, against all wrong, or transgression. This judicial nature, called "justice," he also conceives to be the point absolute in moral character. This must stand, and nothing else which will not stand with it. Thus he says-- [50]

"A fundamental attribute of Deity is justice. This comes first into view and continues in sight to the very last, in all inquiries into the Divine Nature. No attribute can be conceived that is more ultimate and central than this one. This is proved by the fact that the operation of all the other divine attributes, love not excepted, is conditioned and limited by justice. For whatever else God may be, or may not be, he must be just. It is not optional with him to exercise this attribute, or not to exercise it, as it is in the exercise of that class of attributes which are antithetic to it. We can say--God may be merciful, or not, as he pleases,' but we can not say, God may be just or not as he pleases.' It can not be asserted that God is inexorably obligated to show pity; but it can be categorically affirmed that God is inexorably obligated to do justly."

His all-conditioning, first attribute of justice therefore must have "plenary satisfaction" he maintains, else there can be no deliverance. The conditionated grace of love must wait on the unconditionated, absolute impulse of justice, and drink the cup of its indignations dry. Thus it is conceived that, "In the incarnate Son, God voluntarily endures the weight of his own judicial displeasure, in order that the real criminal may be spared. The Divine compassion itself bears the infliction of the Divine indignation, in the place of the transgressor. The propitiation is no oblation ab extra, it is wholly ab intra, a self-oblation upon the part of Deity itself, by which to satisfy those immanent and eternal imperatives of the Divine Nature, which, without it, must find their satisfaction in the punishment of the transgressor." "Side by side in the Godhead, there dwell the impulse to punish and the desire to pardon; but the desire to pardon is realized, in act, by carrying out the impulse to punish; not indeed upon the person of the criminal, but upon that of his substitute. And the substitute is the Punisher Himself."

I have stated thus at large and carefully this newly elaborated scheme of satisfaction, partly because it has a certain point of merit, and partly because it is a failure where a sufficiently strong failure was wanted. The point of merit is that it has the ingenuousness to put entirely by the doubling, battledooring art commonly practiced in discussions of this subject; it does not make Christ other than God, that he may offer something to God's justice; and then a divine person [God] that he may be able to offer what is sufficient; and then again human that the divine may not suffer; but it takes the ground and faithfully adheres to it, that the satisfaction made is wholly ab intra, or within the divine nature itself. The point of failure is equally important, because it brings the doctrine of penal suffering and judicial satisfaction, to just that issue, where its failure is likely to be final and conclusive.

First of all, the ingenuous admission, here made, that the justice of God is satisfied from within Himself, or by punishment dispensed upon Himself, A very weak justice that God exacts of himself. is even admirably fatal. What kind of power any Ruler must hold, in the impressions of his subjects who, to make sure of justice, takes all his punishments out of himself, it is not difficult to see. There plainly could not be a weaker figure in the name of government.

Besides the justice gotten, in this manner, must be as insipid to Him, as it is useless for the purposes of government. Justice wants what is just if And the justice is not just beside. it wants any thing, and here it is found feeding itself out of that which is exactly not just--what vestige of justice can there be in any punishment which a righteous God gets out of Himself? Is it so then, after all, that this inexorable, undivertible, Nemesis of God's ethical nature, this judicial sentiment which must be satisfied first and before every thing else, will be just as well satisfied with a punishment not just, as with one that is?

There also appears to be a remarkable oversight here, in the scheme of satisfaction proposed, as regards the God suffers--not his compassions. penal suffering itself. "The Divine compassion itself bears the infliction of the Divine indignation in the place of the transgressor." Why the divine compassion, more than the divine justice? Does the justice punish the compassion? For aught that appears there is no suffering in the compassion more than in the justice. By supposition, the truth is, merely, that there is a conflict between the two contrary impulses, justice and compassion, and the divine nature--not specially the compassion, not specially the justice--suffers. These words justice and compassion do not as having each distinct sensibilities make up the deity; they inhere in a Being, and that being, as being, suffers, by their conflict. Does it then satisfy justice, that the being in whom it inheres, suffers partly on account of it?

Besides, if it were conceivable that the being took so much suffering wholly on his love, or on account of his love, did it never occur to the writer that Withheld from suffering would have suffered more. if He had refused, for love's sake, to encounter so much suffering he would certainly have suffered infinitely more? Nay, that such a refusal would even have turned the Divine bosom itself into a hell of suffering forever? Given the fact of God's Infinite Love, he suffers demonstrably, not more, but less, in consenting to be the deliverer of men--by suffering however great.

But the scheme breaks down most fatally of all in the confusion of meaning, or the covering up of a double meaning, in the word justice. A The Justice conceived is ambiguous. sufficient discrimination here would have shown that the absolute justice pertaining to ethical natures is a fiction, without any shadow of reality. It is almost incredible, that a really intelligent writer should throw himself upon the axiom, "God must be just," "God is inexorably obligated to do justly," without perceiving that we assent to it for no other reason than that the words "just" and "justly" mean "righteous" and "righteously." God can not of course do any thing unrighteous, or, in that sense, unjust; that is God must keep his integrity. Is that the same thing as to say that God has no option left, but to stand by retributive justice and do by all men exactly as they do to others? Calling "the impulse to punish" justice, has he no liberty left, but to follow that impulse, just as far as it must go to be exhausted? If that should possibly be true, it will require something more to establish it than simply to propound it as an axiom. Interpose, at this point, two very simple distinctions and the supposed infallible argument vanishes.

First, the distinction between righteousness and justice; righteousness, being a character grounded in the Righteousness and Justice, Wrath and Justice. absolute, unconditioned law of right existing before government; and justice, being a rectoral, politico-judicial character, maintained by the firm vindication of government; conditioned of course by the wants of government. Second, the distinction between the wrath-principle and justice; the wrath-principle being only that moral sensibility, or passion, that impels a moral nature to the infliction of evil in redress of wrong, and steels it against the restraints of false pity; and justice being, in the administration, a due infliction of such evil, according to the ill desert of the wrong. By the first distinction, righteousness is seen to be absolute, and justice to be a matter only of means to ends, and so of deliberative counsel. By the second, the wrath principle is seen to be no law at all, but only an impulse to be regulated by counsel; which, when it is, makes justice; when it falls short, laxity; when it runs to excess, revenge and cruelty. I have the same kind of ethical nature as God, and it is even a praise in me, nay, an obligation upon me, to do by my enemy better than he deserves--to forget my injuries and even to suffer for his good. Is it then a fault in God that he does the same? It is very true that I administer no government over my enemy, and so far there is a difference. But this difference leaves it optional with God to do by his enemy still better than he deserves, when-, ever he can do it, without injury to the public interest of government. And if that is agreed, where is the absolute, all-conditioning, unconditioned justice-element of his nature--the wrath that is to bridle and bestride everlastingly his will and counsel? Ceasing ii this manner to call righteousness justice, and justice wrath, the claim that wrath is God's first attribute, and must be satisfied, is seen to be quite groundless. And the supposed adamantine cup, that requires to be kept exactly full of blood, to let forgiveness into the world, is happily found to be only an ambiguous term in speech and nothing more!

It will occur to almost any one, that this very huge mistake respecting the absolute nature of justice, originates in a confounding of righteousness and justice. That is absolute, unconditioned, unconditional, a law to all moral natures and even to God; a law, as we have seen, [51] before God undertakes to so much as organize a government for it. For this law absolute, the government Righteousness absolute, not justice. of God including his justice only maintains guard, just as guillotines do for statutes; but guillotines are not statutes themselves, neither is justice the same as the everlasting law of right whose wrongs it avenges. It was not the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the smoke, and the sound of a trumpet that were engraved in stones, but it was the law. Law is the principal and absolute matter, the variable and conditional is what counsel arranges and does to vindicate law. [52] or executive counsel, as truly as the fire that fell on Sodom, or the destruction of the golden calf. Or if we use the epithet as a word of character, the character is not original and absolute in God, but is obtained by doing justice. Which again requires to be done, only because, and just so far as, it is means to ends in a way of maintaining government; not because God's nature contains a wrath-principle absolute, that must be exactly satisfied. And still it is, with many, a question how far, or whether in fact ever, it can be relaxed? also whether, if relaxed by forgiveness, it must not be somehow compensated? And they even go so far as to be sensitively concerned for God's law, if he is conceived to let go any sin, without some exact equivalent obtained. To proclaim a free remission, without some such equivalent, they do not hesitate to say would quite break down his government; he might be a good adviser still, they will say, but nothing more--no real governor at all.

And yet we can easily see that any such kind of concern is theologic with us, and not practical. We do not practically feel, after all, that in After all, have no such concern for God's justice. the universal free remission published by Christ, God's rectoral authority is at all weakened, or requires any new buttress of support to be added. And the probable reason is that the immense reinforcement of eternal obligation by Christ's doctrine of future punishment, and of the future judgment by himself, puts all thought of concern for God's authority so far away, that it can not even occur to us. We find ourselves quivering for dread, under even mercy itself. The necessity of some compensation made to God's justice occurs to no man, save in a way of theory.

Passing now into another field, let us consider, in a way more positive, what Christ has really done that affects, or may be seen to affect, the interests of justice. The remainder of the chapter will be occupied with matter that I could well enough put forward as a way of compensation; suffering no doubt whatever that it would be more satisfactory, closer to the problem of compensation itself, and more genuine than the others of which I have been speaking. But I shall offer it, instead, simply as proof, how closely God adheres to law and justice still in the very matter of vicarious sacrifice. And I let go, in this way, what might be a considerable relief, or commendation to many, just because I have too little respect for the compensations, to be accessory, in any way, to this kind of wrong against the simplicity of the gospel. These compensations have a too contrived look, and suggest too easily the ingenious littleness and tumid poverty of man's invention. I would rather have the gospel in God's way of dignity without them, than to have it in a guise so artificial and meager without the dignity.

It lies in the very conception of vicarious suffering, I am giving in this treatise, that Christ is entered practically into the condition of evil and made Christ is incarnated into the curse. subject to it. This condition, too, of evil, we shall find is, in some very important sense, a penal condition. It is what is called, in one of the epistles, "the curse;" an epithet which has reference, I suppose, indirectly, if not formally, to the expulsion from paradise set forth in the third