righteousness of Christ in humanity no promise for humanity apart from the Son of God's having power over all flesh to impart eternal life." 1 "What it is to be a man, what we possess in humanity, we never know until we see humanity in Him who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God."2 "Our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.' 'Father' and 'Son' here do more than indicate persons: they indicate that in these persons with which the fellowship is experienced. Eternal life is to the apostle a light in which the mind of fatherliness in the Father, and the mind of sonship in the Son, are apprehended and rejoiced in. . . . . To me it appears that the temptation to stop short of the light that shines to us in the communion of the Son with the Father in humanity is strong, and greatly prevails. But this light is the very light of life to us; for this communion is the gift of the Father to us in the Son."3 "What is thus offered on our behalf is so offered by the Son and so accepted by the Father, entirely with the prospective purpose that it is to be reproduced in us. The expiatory confession of our sins which we have been contemplating is to be shared in by ourselves: to accept it on our behalf was to accept it as that mind in relation to sin in the fellowship of which we are to come to God." "Our faith is, in truth, the Amen of our individual spirits, to that deep, multiform, all-embracing, harmonious Amen of humanity, in the person of the Son of God, to the mind and heart of the Father in relation to man,-the divine wrath and the divine mercy, which is the atonement. This Amen of the individual, in which faith utters itself towards God, gives glory to God according to the glory which He has in Christ; therefore does faith justify. Amen of the individual human spirit to the Amen of the Son to the mind of the Father in relation to man, is saving faith-true righteousness; being the living action, and true and right movement of the spirit of the individual man, in the light of eternal life.”5

The

And yet, while he labours to emphasize our relation to Christ, he seems always to stop short, both in phrase and in thought, of that conception of our identification with Christ, which is at once the higher, the more comprehensive, and the more scriptural, conception. His thought is hampered, on the one hand, by the phrase justifying p. 160 (138). p. 170 (147). p. 172-3 (148-9). p. 177 (153). p. 225-6 (194, 5).

faith, and all its conventional associations and claims in that atmosphere in which it has most been reverenced (with strange disproportion) as a thing abstract and apart : and on the other hand, by his comparatively imperfect familiarity with that conception and experience which may be said to be the most characteristic conception and experience of the historic Church, that is to say, its intense and instinctive realization of identity of spirit, in the life of sacramental communion, with the very Spirit of the Sacrifice of the crucified Christ. Even, then, when his thought is upon our relation to Christ, he is consciously or unconsciously separating us overmuch from Christ. The emphasis with which he speaks of Christ's righteousness as the 'divine' life in Christ,1 when the equally true, and more characteristic, thought would be that it was a realization of 'human' righteousness, already in some faint degree lends itself to this. The phrase touches His contrast rather than His identity with ourselves. But we feel the same thing more clearly in the form of some of Dr Macleod Campbell's most favourite phrases. Two of them are the Son's dealing with the Father in relation to our sins'; and the description of this as taking 'the form of a perfect confession of our sins.' These occur together in the sentence quoted above from p 135 (116, 117). Both phrases are characteristic, and both are misleading. If Christ was humanity perfectly penitent, humanity perfectly righteous, humanity therefore in perfect accord with, and response to, the very essential character of Deity, it is both inadequate and unfortunate to describe this, His re-identification of humanity with holiness by what He Himself was, as His 'dealing with the Father in relation to' us. Yet this 'dealing with' is one of Dr Macleod Campbell's regularly recurring phrases.2

Again to summarize Christ's atonement on Calvary as His expiatory confession of our sins, is to use a phrase which at once, and inevitably, distinguishes Him from us. The phrase is really almost a disastrous one. It seems, to our natural thought, at once so easy and so irrelevant-so irrelevant because so easy-to confess the sins of other people; that a theory of the atonement which is content to describe itself in this phrase 'Christ's confession of our sins' has no real hope of commending itself to the conscience of

1 E.g., on pp. 141-3, etc. (132 fol.).

See pp. 135, 138, 204, 287, 288, 289, 294, etc. (116, 117, 120, 176, 183, 246, 247, 250, 252; or 260, 264, 266, 269).

2

8

mankind. The phrase, we may say at once, does very imperfect justice to the real thought of Dr Macleod Campbell. And yet it is his own most characteristic phrase. He quite certainly means by it much more than the words suggest. And he uses, occasionally, other phrases which come nearer to the fulness of his meaning. Thus, 'a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man-a perfect sorrow-a perfect contrition'; a 'perfect response in Amen to the mind of God in relation to sin'; 'a condemnation and confession of sin in humanity which should be a real Amen to the divine condemnation of sin, and commensurate with its evil and God's wrath against it'; 'the divine mind in humanity which alone could suffer, and which did suffer sufferings of a nature and virtue to purge our sins'; these are phrases which go far deeper, for they make absolutely clear that what is meant is (1) a perfect realization of penitence, with that complete self-identity at once with holiness and with sin-consciousness which is the impossible paradox of perfect penitence; and (2) a realization of penitence, that is, of holiness, in and by humanity. Yet again, and again, as the volume goes on, Dr Macleod Campbell is content to refer back to his own theory as though it were adequately summarized by the phrase 'His confession of our sins': so that we feel that it is not quite wholly the fault of Dr Dale that he is content to refer to the theory with a passing reference so inadequate as this, "Had He simply made a confession of sin in our namethe theory advocated by Dr Macleod Campbell in his very valuable treatise on the atonement-He would still have remained at a distance from the actual relation to God in which we were involved by sin."5 Utterly inadequate as this reference is, it nevertheless indicates a real blot. The identity of Christ with humanity, and of humanity with Christ, is not adequately conceived. His confession of our sins before the Father,' His 'dealing with the Father in relation to our sins,' are phrases which do not rise to the truth that in Him 'to confess' was 'to be.' He 'confessed the Father' by being the very manifestation of the Father to men. He confessed the sin of humanity by being the very manifestation of humanity, in its ideal reality of penitential holiness, before the Father.

1

P. 137 (117, 8).

Cf. together pp.

2

p. 138 (119).

8

p. 142 (122).

135, 136, 152, 157, 158, 177, 178, 182, 183, 204, 287,

288, 303, 308, 309, etc. (117, 126, 135-7, 150-3, 156-7, 169, 246-8, 260, 264, 265). Dale, On the Atonement, p. 424.

pp. 135, 136 (117).

There is one passage in particular in which the lack of the simplicity of this conception is illustrated by the very attempts which he makes, incompletely as well as clumsily, to approach the result which this conception would at once have fully given. "In order," he writes, " to the completeness of the parallel between the hypothetical case" (ie. the imagined case of a single man who had committed all the sin of the world and had also reached the ideal righteousness of penitence), "and the constitution of things in Christ which the Gospel reveals, Christ's confession of our sin must be seen in connection with our relation to the righteousness of Christ, and the sin confessed, and the righteousness in which it is confessed, be seen as if they were in the same person-being both in humanity; though the sin really exists only in humanity as in us, and used in rebellion by us rebels, and the righteousness only in humanity as in Christ, who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God.'" This antithesis between His humanity and ours, and the 'as if' which it involves, illustrate the hesitation of his thought upon this side, and the difficulties which result.

1

But the attenuation of his theory, which in its real completeness is a very grand one, down to the one misleading word 'confession,' is not the only result which follows from an undue assumption of distinction and antithesis between Christ and ourselves. It is probably, at bottom, the same thing which leads Dr Macleod Campbell to give explanations of Christ's mental anguish in the Passion, such as may seem to match his individual consciousness, as a holy man suffering, rather than what may be called His representative consciousness, as humanity realizing penitential holiness. In Himself, regarded as a separate individual, there could be, of course, no penitential heaviness at all. Therefore in Him, regarded only as a separate individual, whatever seems to approach towards such heaviness of spirit, must needs be explained from some wholly different side. This might, perhaps, in itself be enough to warn us that any explanation of the heaviness of spirit in the Passion, which looked to Him only in Himself by Himself, and not to Him as inclusive Humanity, bearing 'man's' sin and consciousness in relation to sin, must necessarily, for that reason alone, be at fault. Yet this is the mistake which Dr Macleod Campbell appears to make.

We may notice this in a subordinate way, in the ex1 1 p. 158 (136).

aggerated prominence which he gives, in commenting on the' shame' of the cross, to the extreme sensitiveness felt, by loving goodness, to an unloving response. "Therefore our Lord, the true brother of every man, desired this response of heart from every man; and the refusal of it, the giving of contempt instead of favour, and scorn instead of that accord of true brotherhood which would have esteemed Him, as was due to Him, as 'the chief among ten thousand, and altogether lovely,' was as a death to that life which desired the favour thus denied."1 The whole thought is a striking one. It is only when the thought is pressed as if it were the special meaning of the shame of the cross, that it is felt not as adding light, but rather as minimizing, if not explaining away.

These same things are true, on a far more striking scale, when we come to his explanation of the great cry on the cross. If this is a touchstone by which theories of atonement are tried, we shall have to admit that there must at least be something defective in the theory of Dr Macleod Campbell. He is indeed the extreme opposite to Dr Dale. Dr Dale made it the actual infliction of the retributive punishment due to sin. Against this Dr Macleod Campbell utterly protests. So far as he is protesting against this, we may sympathize with him without reserve. But when we come to his positive explanation, it is impossible not to feel that he has not so much explained the cry, as explained it away. What are the facts? The climax of the crucifixion, on the side of physical outwardness, is the darkness of the three hours. The sole interpretation of the inwardness of the darkness is in that cry, the most wonderful in the history of the world. The cry is itself a cry of pleading remonstrance. Because of what? Because of the sense

of being forsaken of God. By no possibility can we say less than this. What, then, is at the heart of Dr Macleod Campbell's explanation, as the basal fact by which all interpretation must be characterized? Strange to say, it is this that the suffering Christ never felt Himself forsaken at all. It is not a question of a contrast drawn between an absolute reality, and a temporary consciousness, of forsakenness. It is not a question of why, or how far, or in what way, or with what meaning, the sense of being forsaken could enter into His consciousness. It is, in fact, a denial that anything of the kind did enter into His consciousness at all.

1 p. 269 (231).