BY DR JOHN DUNCAN.
WE are asked to throw aside every theory of the Atonement and repose in the fact. But I cannot receive the Atonement as a blank mystery, though it is ultimately inscrutable and incognisable, as are all great truths. I speak with trembling, but I doubt the fact of an Atonement would not be clear to me apart from its reasons and relations. God announces to conscience the principles on which it can rest. Can God be just, and pardon me? I must know the consistency between these two things, before I believe in their union; and I don’t think I go farther than the Scripture carries me. It seems to me a terrible thing to say that there was no intrinsic necessity for Christ’s death, for then we virtually say that He died for sin that He need not have died for; and it seems to me that we have the softer theology who affirm He did not, and could not. And I think that to die for the sake of sinners whose sin is not actually taken away, would be a clear waste of moral action. So that we must either with the Calvinist deny the universal extent of the Atonement, or with the Socinian eviscerate its meaning. And I think that Magee, in his book on the Atonement, has sold himself into the hands of the Calvinists, though he is ever bringing in a salvo against them. Does God pardon as a mere sovereign? He either pardons arbitrarily, or He pardons on the ground of some Atonement. Now, I hold that conscience demands that vicariousness which history and experience bring before us. This is the very antithesis of Kantism. Kant may be right as regards the conscience in its crude and unenlightened state. For conscience is out of order through the fall. But conscience quickened by contact with the divine word demands a satisfaction which man has not rendered, and is unable to render. It is also true that the healthy conscience repudiates the legal element when separated from the moral; it repudiates justification divorced from sanctification. A justification that left us as it found us, conscience would disown. What it demands and approves is not an extrinsic act, but an intrinsic fact. Christ came that I might have life, and this includes both a justified and a sanctified life.-“Colloquia Peripatetica.”