BUSHNELL'S "FORGIVENESS AND LAW."*
Dn. BUSHNELL begins by telling his readers that the present volume is intended as a substitute for the last half of his former treatise, entitled the Vicarious Sacrifice. To the first half, which treats of "Christ as a power on character," he holds, as still ex- pressing his present views; but as to the other half—that "included topically in our theology under the bead of Atonement"—he has seen his way to a more satisfactory treatment of the subject. This he now gives, introducing it with an account of the mental process by which he was "brought squarely down upon the dis- covery," and which in quaintness resembles Bunyan's account of how he came to write his book.
The doctrine of the Atonement—the intellectual explanation of the fact that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners— has been under discussion in the Christian Church from the days of Christ himself to our own. "Cur Deus homo ?" was asked before Anselm, and is still the most interesting of all questions, and a question always meeting new answers, because each genera- tion finds that to be inadequate which had satisfied those that went before. The fact is one thing ; the doctrine, or proposed explanation of the fact, another ; and the adequacy of the latter no way affects the reality of the former. The facts were the same when men explained how Apollo drove his chariot through the sky as they were when Newton gave his account of them, and as • Forgiveness and Law: Grounded on Principles Interpreted by Raman Analogies. By Horace Bushnell, D.D. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1874. they will be when even the solutions of Newton and his successors to our time shall be followed by still further discoveries of the laws and the reasons of the facts. The proofs of the fact of the Atonement are to be found in the consciousness of men and the history of the world, but to those who recognise the fact as a fact, the intellectual explanation, or doctrine, has always an in- terest of its own. No adequate explanation has indeed been found of this, any more than of any other fact, whether of human life or of the physical world, which from its infinite greatness cannot be brought completely within our grasp. The finite may apprehend, but cannot comprehend the infinite. Be our doctrine, our formula, never so ingenious, never so logical, and we shall still find ourselves like the alchemist in the tale, who., when he had at last produced the universal solvent, was obliged to confess that if it were indeed able to resolve all things, it could not be contained in a ladle. So it is with every doctrine of the Atonement : in every age there has been some intellectual pro- position, or set of propositions, which men have held to be an adequate explanation of the fact, but which has again and again been rejected as not adequate, in spite of all the efforts to main- tain it by intellectual subtlety, by spiritual warning and anathema, and by the rack and stake ; and still the demand continues for some solution which shall be adequate, if not absolutely, yet relatively, to our actual moral and intellectual capacity. For the belief in the fact continues, and therefore so does the necessity for its explanation. And whatever forms these explanations have taken from the days of the Apostles to our own, we find them to consist partly of illustrations drawn from real or apparent analogies in men's relations with each other, and partly of logical arguments and inferences from these illustrations, but which are only valid in as far as the illustrations are real analogies, having real counterparts in the facts illustrated thereby. Among the illustrations which from the first presented themselves were the sacrifices of sheep and oxen by the priests, the redemption of captives ransomed by their family from the conqueror in a war, the enfranchisement of slaves, the condemnation and the pardon of offenders against the law, the intercession of the brother, and the forgiveness of the father. And then all these have been, and still are, converted—as we have said—into logical arguments, and many of them pressed so far beyond the legitimate bounds of their real applicability, as to have often become not only un- meaning, but morally no less than intellectually revolting. This undue and misleading conversion of illustrations into arguments is a common error, but strengthened in this case by the supposed infallible authority of all Scriptural illustrations. No man, however spiritual his faith, can rise wholly above the use of anthropomor- phic language to express the relatiops between God and man ; he must make the truths and realities of the spiritual life visible to himself and others, by illustrations and analogies drawn from the relations of men with each other, and though he ought to know that every analogy must necessarily be imperfect, his actual sense of the imperfection will be limited by the moral and mental condition of the age in which be lives. In times when men believed that there was something really, though inscrutably, divine in the power of kings, and when they accepted as beyond discussion, and as a matter of duty and not mere submission to force, methods and practices of government which now seem to us coarse and cruel, and wanting in all sorts of indispensable distinctions between justice and arbitrary will ;—in such times, men's conception of the character of Q1, and of the relations of God with man, must have been affected by the v, moral and mental habits, the whole moral and mentil ■tn around them, and in which they drew their breath. They had all their lives been accustomed to see what we should now dis- tinguish into crimes and venial offences, or even innocent and praiseworthy acts, all punished with severities which to us are too cruel for the worst crimes, and also to see men pardoned and delivered from such punishments by what had to them the dignity and excellence of a divine, because royal, favour ; and it was in- evitable that they should be satisfied with the analogy between such cases and that of their own spiritual experience, when they found that they had been delivered from their condition of prisoners, and had entered into that of children of God. And while the practical men took the language of the New Testa- ment without qualification, both because it was Scripture and because it corresponded with the experience of their ordinary life, and the analogies which that supplied, the men of the Schools, whether in the middle ages or the eighteenth century—a Thomas Aquinas or a Jonathan Edwards—set them- selves to frame logical propositions, and so a body of doctrine, with complete logical coherence, out of the same New Testament
language. Their Christian faith was real, they felt and knew that they were not merely dealing with worth: yet they be- came the slaves of their words and their logic ; and when their dbctrine of the Atonement had been built up in a perfect set of logical propositions, it was only to be convicted of being mere words, without any corresponding realities, moral or intellectual. As Dr. Bushnell puts it, in his quaint way :—
Just here is the sin of all our theologic endeavour in the past ages, especially as regards this particular subject,—that we invent so many Ingredients that are verbals only, having no reality and no assignable meaning. We contrive a justice in God, which accepts the pains of Innocence in place of the pains of wrong, and which is, in fact, the very essence of injustice. We contrive a forgiveness on the score of compensation which, to our human conceptions, mocks the idea We put the bits of glass and crockery into our kaleidoscope, and turn- ing it round and round, we make theologic figures that we call truths and which, having no ideas in them, we think must surely stand, be- cause they look go regular, and are milled in the scientific way of the scientific instrument Thus we go on from age to age trying vainly to fasten theologio notions that represent God by nothing in ourselves. Is it not time now, after so many centuries gone by, to have it discovered that there is no truth concerning God which is not somehow explicated by truths of our own moral consciousness?"
Dr. Bushnell turns away from those "forensic" illustrations and analogies which, as he says, have been used by the theologians to convert justification into a mere " posting-up " and "evening of the books"—"a really ignoble matter in the experience, sordid and low in its motive, rising scarcely, if at all, above the level of a jail-delivery transaction." He turns from these to analogies from those finer and nobler relations of man with man—those " sub-gos- pels," as he calls them—in which the good man may be seen sacri- ficing himself for the bad man, and so actually saving him out of his evil state. The good man seeks, and actually finds, innumerable ways in which he has to share the evil in order to raise the other out of it. If it be poverty, he can give his wealth ; if it be sick- ness, he can incur the deprivations and the dangers of the sick- room or the hospital ; if it be suffering, whether of body or mind, for which there is no cure, he can mitigate it by that sympathy which is, indeed, suffering with another ; if it be moral degradation, whether of ignorance, selfishness, or crime, what more common story of human life than that of the patriot, the friend, the husband or wife, the parent or child, who goes down into the midst of that degradation, and there "sues and begs for leave to do good" to the unhappy ones who have bound them- selves in the chains of their own evil-doing ? How common it is to see one member of a household thus morally suffering and dying for the sake of the rest, and by this habitual self-sacrifice not only keeping the family together, in spite of its own selfishness, but at last raising it out of, and saving it from, its own evil. And then, by these analogies we may understand something of how Christ took our nature upon him, and suffered and died for us, that he might make us partakers of his life. But this is not all. The child needs in its inmost heart to be forgiven by his father or mother, and not merely relieved from the consequences of its wrong-doing; and at the same time is conscious that forgiveness is not another name for good-natured indifference to something which did the father or mother no real harm, but implies a real sense on the part of the parent that he has been both wronged and grieved, the putting-away of which is an essential part of the forgiveness and of the love which it expresses. And thus we may see that atonement involves not only vicarious sacrifice, but forgiveness and also propitiation. In their moral revulsion from the theological dogma of a divine justice which is mere injustice, 0 are often ready to substitute the conception of a God of
,x–IwInitre good-nature, and to repudiate as without meaning the lan- guage of the Bible and of the Christian Church in all ages as to the justice of God, the wrath of God, and the need of a propitia- tion for sin ; but such a conception of God has never met the -demands of the spirit of man, which insists that there is some meaning in those other representations of the character of God without which it cannot be satisfied. Dr. Bushnell does not give this illustration from the relation of father and child, which is the simplest of all; but he thus, with an analytical skill which, in spite of his strange style, is really scientific, examines and ex- plains the meaning of propitiation as essential to forgiveness :— " True forgiveness, then, that which forgives as God in Christ has forgiven, is no such letting-up simply of revenge against the wrong- -doer as was first described,—no shove of dismission, no dumb turning of the back. Neither is it any mere setting of the will to a deed of love, as we often discover in really good men,—no drumming of the hard sentiments and revulsions and moral condemnations to sleep. Perhaps they were not meant to go to sleep, but to stay by rather in such welcome as the new cast of a right propitiation will suffer.
"And in order to this, two things are necessary ; first, such a sym- spatliy with the wrong-doing party as virtually takes his nature; and
secondly, making cost in that nature by suffering, or expense, or pains- taking sacrifice and labour. The sympathy must be of that positive kind which wants the man himself, and not a mere quiet relationship with him ; wants him for a brother, considers nothing to be really gained till it has gained a brother. The sympathy needs to be such RS amounts to virtual identification where there is a contriving to feel the man all through, and read him as by inward appreciation, to search out his good and evil, his weaknesses and gifts, his bad training and bad associations, his troubles and trials and wrongs,—eo to understand and, as it were, be the man himself; having him interpreted to the sours love, by having all tenderest, most captious affinities in play, finding how to work enjoyment in him, and learn what may best be touched or taken hold of in a way to make him a friend. Taking the wrong-doer thus upon itself, it will also take, in a certain sense, his wrong to be foreign; for its longing is after some most real identifica- tion with the fellow-nature sought after. Thus we see that, to really forgive and make clean work of it, requires a going-through into good, if possible, with the wrong-doer, and meeting him there, both reconciled. And when it is done thoroughly enough to configure and new-tone the forgiving party as well as the forgiven, he is so far become himself a reconciled or propitiated man, as truly as the other is become a forgiven or restored man. Or if the man so propitiated is repelled in the forgiveness he offers, he is, humanly speaking, but as one that came unto his own, and his own received him not.
"But there remains, as was just now intimated, a second indis- pensable condition, by which the advances of sympathy, finding their way into and through wrong-doers and enemies, will become a more nearly absolute power in them, and a more complete propitiation for them,—viz., in the making cost and bearing heavy burdens of painstaking and sorrow to regain them and be reconciled to them. The injured party has a most powerful and multiform combina- tion of alienated and offended sentiment struggling in his nature And in one view, it is right that he should have. He could not be a proper man, least of all a holy man, without them. His integrity is hurt, his holiness offended, his moral taste disgusted-. He is alienated, thrown off, thrust back into separation, by the whole instinct of his moral nature. The fires of his purity smoke. His indig- nations scorch his love, and without any false fire of revenge, which is too commonly kindled also, he seems to himself to be in a revulsion that he has no will to subdue. He is a wounded man whose damaged nature winces even in his prayers. So that if he says, 'I forgive, with his utmost stress of emphasis, he will not be satisfied with any meaning he can force into the words. Is he therefore to be blamed that he has so many of these dissentient feelings struggling in him to obstruct his forgiveness ? No, not in the sense that he has them, but only in the sense that he does not have them mitigated or propitiated, so as to be themselves in concert or subjected by sacrifice. Let him find how to plough through the bosom of his adversary by his tenderly appreciative sympathy, how to appear as a brotherly nature at every gate of the mind, standing there as in cost, to look forgiveness without saying it, and he will find, however be may explain it, that there is a wonderful consent in his feeling somehow, and that he is perfectly atoned (at-oned) both with himself and his adversary."
We trust that the uncouth style of this extract will not deter the reader from giving it the deliberate attention and consideration which it really deserves. It will well repay study, as will the whole book, of which it is a specimen, and in which all the prin- cipal bearings of the argument upon the question are examined in detail under the two heads of Forgiveness and Law,—that is, of the relation of man to a personal God, and also to that impersonal constitution of things which we call Law. We have often been disposed to wish, while reading the volume, that the author had found some translator of his dark sayings into plainer language ; yet there may be some advantage in the unwonted phraseology. To the doctrine of the Atonement, more perhaps than any subject, may we apply Coleridge's saying that the greatest truths too often lie bed-ridden by the side of the greatest errors, because we have so long accustomed ourselves to clothe them in a routine phraseo- logy which has long lost its meaning. And if so, it may be well to have attention aroused by a treatment of the subject in a lan- guage so entirely foreign to that of popular orthodoxy, while the meaning is not the less orthodox, in the best sense of the word. The doctrine of Dr. Bushnell is the doctrine of St. Paul, and springs from the same faith as his.
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