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Updated: May 3, 2025
And there are many good but ill-instructed men among ourselves who have just this taint of that old heresy cleaving to them still this taint, namely, that they are tempted to carry over the suretyship and substitutionary work of Christ into such regions, and to carry it to such lengths in those regions, as, practically, to make Christ to minister to their soft and sinful living, and to their excuse and indulgence of themselves.
Always, where we have Christian experience to deal with, it is the Christ through whom the divine forgiveness comes to us at the Cross the Christ of the substitutionary Atonement, who bore all our burden alone, and did a work to which we can for ever recur, but to which we did not and do not and never can contribute at all it is this Christ who constrains us to find our representative with God in Himself, and to become ourselves His representatives to men.
And we must believe from his whole life's teaching, not to save their souls from some future punishment; not through any demand of satisfaction on the part of God; not as any substitutionary sacrifice to appease the demands of an angry God for it was the exact opposite of this that his whole life teaching endeavoured to make known.
Faber seems to me to give too little prominence in his exposition to Daniel and John's beast of the sea, as an enemy to Christ. Indeed, he appears to overlook the leading idea involved in the name Antichrist, as a substitutionary, false, and therefore inimical or hostile christ.
He goes so far as to admit that 'if we look at the matter from what may be called an external point of view, no doubt we may speak of the death of Christ as in a certain sense substitutionary. What this 'certain sense' is, he does not define.
He rejected, on intellectual grounds, their doctrine of the eternal Godhead of Christ; and he rejected on moral and spiritual grounds their doctrines of the total depravity of man, of eternal punishment, and of the substitutionary sufferings of Christ. He wrote a pathetic letter to his father. "I cannot accept these doctrines," he said.
The boldest expression of this I have ever seen occurs in some remarks in the Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review on the doctrine of St. Paul. The reviewer is far from saying that a writer who finds a substitutionary doctrine throughout the New Testament is altogether wrong.
In Psalm 8:3 the creation of the solar system is mentioned as the work of the fingers of God: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained," but in Isa. 53:1, where the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ is referred to, it is spoken of as the effort of the Creator's arm: "Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?"
In determining the exact point of the truth that is to be omitted from the Satanic counterfeit, it is important to distinguish between the Person and work of Christ. In the one is included His teachings and example, both in His life and death: in the other is included His substitutionary, sacrificial, and atoning death for the sin of the world.
As the fruit of such study the Socinians not only propounded an Anti-trinitarian doctrine derived from Scripture, but in particular emphasized the arguments against the substitutionary atonement as presented in the popular Augustinian scheme and philosophically expounded in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo.
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