Moral Influence theory of atonement

The moral influence theory of the atonement holds that Christ’s death satisfies no divine justice and pays no penalty. Its sole purpose is to display God’s love so vividly that sinners are moved to repentance and reconciled to God, rather than God being reconciled to them.¹ First distinctively elaborated by Peter Abelard (d. 1142) against Anselm’s satisfaction theory, the view was held by the Socinians and revived among 19th-century English and American theologians, most notably Horace Bushnell.²

Historical Origin

Herman Bavinck credits Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo with crowning the church’s long-standing emphasis on the juridical or satisfaction element in Christ’s sacrifice, a contribution Anselm made partly in contrast to two rival readings: Duns Scotus, who treated the atonement as an arbitrary act of God’s power, and Peter Abelard, “who found only exemplary significance in it.”² Abelard’s reading found few defenders in the centuries immediately following, but it resurfaced as the settled doctrine of the Socinians in the sixteenth century, who rejected any notion that Christ’s death was a payment to divine justice at all.³

The theory returned to prominence in nineteenth-century England and America. Samuel Taylor Coleridge restated it in Aids to Reflection, and John Young defended it at length, both arguing that no attribute of “vindicatory justice” exists in God to satisfy.⁴ Horace Bushnell restated it at length in The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866), and John McLeod Campbell argued an independent but related case in The Nature of the Atonement.⁵ Bavinck traces a parallel English strand through Thomas Erskine, R. C. Moberly, F. D. Maurice, and R. J. Campbell, and notes that French and Swiss theology moved in the same direction, so that “the doctrine of vicarious satisfaction gradually made way for the mystical, ethical, or moral view of the work of Christ.”⁶

Core Tenets

A. A. Hodge summarizes the theory’s governing points:

There is no such principle as vindicatory justice in God.
Benevolence is the single ultimate principle determining God’s provisions for human redemption.
The sole object of the life and death of Christ is to produce a moral effect on the individual sinner, subduing his aversion to God and his distrust of God’s willingness to forgive, “thus reconciling man to God instead of God to man.”
The Socinians held in addition that Christ’s death was the necessary precondition of his resurrection, by which he brought immortality to light.¹

Charles Hodge traces three forms the theory has taken over the sole question of what, specifically, in Christ’s life and death produces this moral effect. In its first form, Christ saves only as a teacher, introducing a higher religion that redeems people from heathen darkness. In a second form, he saves as a martyr: his doctrine is “sealed with blood,” and his death confirms the truth of what he taught, particularly concerning God’s love and willingness to forgive. In a third form, taken by Bushnell, Christ saves through the sheer moral power of his self-sacrificing love, a love so far exceeding any other example that he is “the Saviour by way of eminence” even though other loving people save others “in their sphere and in their measure” by the same kind of influence.⁷

Variants

Boyce distinguishes two forms of the theory by what they hold about Christ himself. Its Socinian advocates “recognized the work of Christ simply as that of the exalted man, Christ Jesus,” denying his deity along with denying any real satisfaction of justice. Bushnell and McLeod Campbell, both professing Trinitarians, instead held that “God in Christ has thus identified himself with man in his misery and sin.” Campbell went further than Bushnell, representing Christ as the “representative penitent and confessor of sin,” offering to the Father a vicarious repentance on humanity’s behalf rather than bearing a vicarious penalty.⁸

Even within his own book, Bushnell did not hold the theory consistently. Charles Hodge observes that toward its end, Bushnell “virtually takes it all back,” conceding that the facts of Christ’s death, taken by themselves, are “no sacrifice, or oblation, or atonement, or propitiation, but simply a living and dying thus and thus,” and that some further “thought-form” borrowed from the altar has to be laid over those facts before they can reconcile anyone to God. Bushnell concluded that Christians “cannot afford to lose these sacred forms of the altar,” since “they fill an office which nothing else can fill.”⁹

Confessional Contrast

The Second London Baptist Confession states that Christ, in his mediatorial office, “underwent the punishment due to us, which we should have borne and suffered, being made sin and a curse for us,”¹⁰ and that by his obedience and sacrifice he “hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him.”¹¹ This is a payment of the specific penalty sin incurs, not merely a demonstration calculated to move sinners toward repentance; on the confession’s own terms, the moral effect Christ’s death has on believers is real but is downstream of, not a substitute for, an actual satisfaction of divine justice.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the theory still capture something true about Christ’s death? Charles Hodge grants that it does: the restoration of sinners to holiness really is the end of Christ’s work, and his death really is the highest manifestation of divine love ever exhibited to sinners. But retaining this partial truth does not rescue the theory, since it “leaves out entirely what is essential to the Scriptural doctrine of atonement.” Scripture presents Christ as a priest offering himself a sacrifice for the expiation of sin, bearing sin in his own body, made a curse, and given as a ransom; a theory that denies any of this “rejects the very essence of the Scriptural doctrine of atonement,” even while affirming the parts of it a moral reformer’s death could equally have supplied.¹²

Even granting there is no debt to pay, doesn’t removing a sinner’s corruption remove his problem? No, Hodge answers, because guilt and pollution are separate and equally real facts of conscience. “We are sinners; we are guilty as well as polluted,” and “expiation for the one is as much a necessity as sanctification for the other.” A scheme that addresses only pollution, by moral influence, leaves guilt before justice wholly unanswered, and it is the removal of that guilt, not moral improvement alone, that Scripture presents as the ground of the peace “which passes all understanding.”¹³

Does it matter, practically, whether Christ’s death is a moral example or an actual expiation? Hodge argues that it changes the whole nature of the religion in question. Historically, “the two doctrines of the divinity of Christ, and expiation through the blood of the Son of God, have gone hand in hand,” since a real payment for the sins of the world requires a divine Savior, while a “human saviour is all that is needed if the moral theory of the atonement is to be adopted.” Christianity is one thing if Christ is a sacrifice for sin, and an altogether different thing if he is only a moral reformer, an example, or a martyr.¹⁴

Doesn’t a theory built entirely on the moral effect Christ’s sufferings have on us leave out anyone who never learned of those sufferings? Boyce presses this as a further difficulty: any scheme that depends entirely on a subjective response to Christ’s example fails those who never knew of it: “Thus are cut off from all the blessings of salvation, not only all infants and idiots, but also the many saints of God who died before the birth of Jesus.”¹⁵

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 422. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩ ↩²
Charles Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 571. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 564-566. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 564-567. ↩
James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XXVIII. The Atonement of Christ,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 297. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 567-568. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 8.4. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 8.5. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 569. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 569-570. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter IX. Theories of the Atonement,” 570-571. ↩
Boyce, “Chapter XXVIII. The Atonement of Christ,” 298. ↩