The merits of this view are practically that
this work of Jesus is not an "atonement" in the theological sense at
all. The defects of Campbell's book are inseparable from his creed,
as he argues from a belief in the deity of Jesus, from an unconscious
limitation of God's knowledge (as though God did not understand man
till he was revealed to him by Jesus) and from a wrong conception of the
punishment due to sin. I said, at starting, that the Atonement was the
_raison d'être_ of Christianity, and, in conclusion, I would challenge
all thoughtful men and women to say whether good cause has or has not
been shown for rejecting this pillar "of the faith." The Atonement has
but to be studied in order to be rejected. The difficulty is to persuade
people to _think_ about their creed, Yet the question of this doctrine
must be faced and answered. "I have too much faith in the common sense
and justice of Englishmen when once awakened to face any question
fairly, to doubt what that answer will be."
ON THE MEDIATION AND SALVATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL CHRISTIANITY.
THE whole Christian scheme turns on the assumption of the inherent
necessity of some one standing between the Creator and the creature,
and shielding the all-weak from the power of the All-mighty. "It is a
fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God;" such is the
key-note of the strain which is chanted alike by Roman Catholicism, with
its thousand intercessors, and by Protestantism, with its "one Mediator,
the man Christ Jesus." "Speak _thou_ for me," cries man to his favourite
mouthpiece, whoever it may be; "go thou near, but let me not see the
face of God, lest I die." The heroes, the saints, the idols of humanity,
have been the men who have dared to search into the Unseen, and to gaze
straight up into the awful Face of God. They have dashed aside all that
intervened between their souls and the Eternal Soul, and have found it,
as one of them quaintly phrases it, "a profitable sweet necessity to
fall on the naked arm of Jehovah." Then, because they dared to-trust Him
who had called them into existence, and to stretch out beseeching hands
to the Everlasting Father, they have been forced into a position they
would have been the very first to protest against, and have been made
into mediators for men less bold, for children less confiding. Those
who dared not seek God for themselves have clung to the garments of the
braver souls, who have thus become, involuntarily, veils between
their brother-men and the Supreme. There is, perhaps, no better way of
demonstrating the radical errors from which spring all the so-called
"schemes of redemption" and "economies of Divine grace" than by starting
from the Christian hypothesis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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