LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

direct them to their various appointed ends. God’s moral government describes his specific interaction with rational creatures. President Edwards himself had a robust doctrine of God’s moral government, commenting,

Hereby it becomes manifest, that God’s moral government over mankind, his treating them as moral agents, making them the objects of his commands, counsels, calls, warnings, expostulations, promises, threatenings, rewards and punishments, is not inconsistent with a determining disposal of all events, of every kind, throughout the universe, in his providence; either by positive efficiency or permission.36

      This brings us to our second thesis:

2) God governs his rational creatures by instituting the moral law.37

For Edwards and his successors alike, the moral law is the means by which God displays the righteousness of his self-love, makes his moral perfection and holiness comprehensible to the creature, and threatens those who despise his general benevolence toward and authority over his rational creatures.38 Again, consider Edwards, who writes:

The chief and most fundamental of all the commands of the moral law requires us “to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls, with all our strength, and all our mind”: that is plainly, with all that is within us, or to the utmost capacity of our nature: all that belongs to, or is comprehended within the utmost extent or capacity of our heart and soul, and mind and strength, is required. God is in himself worthy of infinitely greater love, than any creature can exercise towards him: he is worthy of love equal to his perfections, which are infinite: God loves himself with no greater love than he is worthy of when he loves himself infinitely: but we can give God no more than we have.39

      By including references to President Edwards amongst these number theses we are intentionally trying to draw attention to the fact that are indeed doctrinal continuities regarding the moral government of God that are rightly labelled “Edwardsian.” Given this, the following thesis is a fairly critical distinction that Edwards’ successor made with some frequency is arguably the principal point of theological departure of the Edwardsians from their mentor.

      3) God’s moral government is revoked by sin, which, strictly speaking, is an offence against the moral law, not God.

By making the moral law the measure of sin’s offence and thus ensuring that the problem that the atonement solves is a punitive one—an offence that requires the satisfaction of God’s retributive justice—they end up supplanting the idea that Christ’s work is in any way a substitutionary act.40 Edwards Amasa Park explains:

Our Lord suffered pains, which were substituted for the penalty of the law, and may be called punishment in the more general sense of the word, but were not strictly and literally the penalty which the law had threatened. . . . The humiliation, pains, and death of our redeemer were equivalent in meaning to the punishment threatened in the moral law, and thus they satisfied Him who is determined to maintain the honor of this law, but they did not satisfy the demands of the law itself for our punishment. . . . The active obedience [of Christ], viewed as the holiness of Christ was honorable to the law, but was not a work of supererogation, performed by our Substitute, and then transferred and imputed to us, so as to satisfy the requisitions of the law for our own active obedience.41

      This brings us to our fourth thesis:

4) Sin requires atonement in order to satisfy the penal consequences of retributive justice, which rectoral justice demands by the moral law.42

      This too is quite an important point of distinction. For where penal substitution demands that the offender suffer a penalty, rectoral justice has clear penal implications and Christ must suffer these implications in order to restore the honor that is due God’s moral law; the difference here being that Christ suffers this penal as an example, not as a substitute for any individual. And this leads us to our final thesis:

5) Christ makes atonement, not as a penal substitute but as a penal example, making it possible for God to forgive sin.43

In other words, Christ’s death for sinners was never intended to absolve them from their individual debts of punishment to God. Rather, Christ’s death publicly satisfied sins impunities against the moral law, making the forgiveness of the sins of individuals possible.44

      Now, insofar as these five thesis reflect a core sample of those ideas expressed by Edwardsians on the moral government, we can make three summary observations that puts initially seems to put greater theological distance between Edwards and his successors on the matter of the atonement. We shall limit ourselves to just three brief observations in order to bring sufficient shape to the foregoing theses, and to set up our discussion of Crisp’s penal non-substitution.

First, we note that for Edwards and his successors alike, the atonement is a distinctly punitive matter. The precise reason for which Christ absorbs this penalty is, however, a question for which Edwards and his successors have markedly different answers. For Edwards, and his doctrine of penal substitution, Christ absorbs the penalty for the sin(s) of particular individuals through his vicarious suffering and death. For later Edwardsians, such as Bellamy or Hopkins or Park, and more specifically for Edwards Jr, the penalty that Christ absorbs is not person-specific, that is, Christ does not die for any particular person(s).45 Second, we observe that for Edwards, Christ’s death is directed primarily toward satisfying God’s retributive justice. For his successors, on the other hand, it is principally rectoral justice for which Christ dies, not the rectoral justice that God requires, but that required by his moral law. Herein lies the apparent mechanism of the Edwardsian doctrine of atonement, which is our third observation. For the Edwardsians, sin appears to be an offence against the moral law, not God. This is perhaps the sharpest distinction between Edwards and his successors. A detailed account of this distinction is something that requires further consideration and is beyond the scope of our purposes here. It is a problem that certainly has more than one explanation. There are three things we ought to understand about this distinction. According to the Edwardsians: 1) God can somehow be entirely insulated from direct insult(s) to his nature; 2) God is chiefly concerned with rectoral rather than retributive justice; and 3) atonement requires that Christ dies as a penal example rather than a penal substitute. With all this in mind, having now a birds-eye-view of what is at stake for the New England moral government model, we transition to Crisp’s account of Jonathan Edwards Jr’s doctrine of Penal Non-Substitution.

      II.2. Crisp, Edwards Jr, and Penal Non-Substitution

      According to Crisp, Edwards Jr puts forward a fairly robust model of atonement that deserves the attention of contemporary scholarship, not least for which, its having developed (though often unnoticed and certainly under appreciated) at such a unique period and place in the history of theology. In order to re-invigorate this otherwise diminished model, Crisp exposits the theory for contemporary analysis. Interestingly, in as much as Crisp’s efforts to retrieve Edwards Jr’s model for analysis, it is Crisp’s analysis of Edward Jr that deserves further consideration. For, a wider look at Edwards Jr’s works points both to his development of Crisp’s so-called penal non-substitution model, and rather curiously, what appears to be a version of the doctrine of penal substitution model of atonement. Our engagement with Crisp’s work serves the purpose of showing that the New England model of atonement is perhaps more complex or “thicker” (to borrow a term from Crisp) than Crisp’s account boasts. Indeed, there is far more that is of profitable interest in the literature

Скачать книгу