Gloria Crucis: addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907Beibitz, J. H. (Joseph Hugh)
Religion
Gloria Crucis: addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907
Beibitz, J. H. (Joseph Hugh)
Good Friday sermons; Holy Week sermons
(_d_) Finally, the idea of a transaction between the Father and the Son
is clean contrary to the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Unity of
God. Once locate justice in the Father, and love in the Son, and view
the Atonement as the result of a bargain, or transaction between the Two,
and once more we are left with a doctrine not Christian, but heathen and
polytheistic. There is unhappily little doubt, that the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity suffers, just as that of the Atonement, even more from its
defenders than from its assailants. Properly understood, that doctrine
is the vindication of the complete fulness of the personal life of the
One God. Too often it is so held, and so preached and represented, as in
this case, that monotheism is tacitly abandoned in favour of ditheism or
tritheism. It needs to be plainly said, that the transaction theory is
inconsistent with the trinitarian doctrine. The Three Persons are so
called in our Western theology owing to defects inherent in human thought
and speech. To set one over against the other as two parties to a
contract, is to found a theory upon those very defects. The Miltonic
representation of the Father and the Son is Arian; the popular view is,
more often than not, a belief either in two gods, or in a logical
contradiction.
To sum up, the view of the Atonement with which we have been occupying
ourselves, is opposed to the fundamental moral instincts, and to the
Christian consciousness, both as it finds expression in the New
Testament, and as it reveals itself in the best minds of to-day. And
this type of theory, although without some of its coarser features, is by
no means extinct. There is all the more need then, in spite of all that
has been so well done in this direction, to exhibit the Atonement as the
supreme vindication of those instincts which are the witness of the
Divine in man. There is laid on all who would preach or teach
Christianity to-day to show that Calvinism, and all that is touched with
the taint of Calvinism, is not the doctrine of the Atonement which is
taught in the Bible or held by the Church. But, as nothing can be built
on negations, there is an even greater and more imperative need to
exhibit the truth of the Atonement in its beauty and majesty and
transcendent moral power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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