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would have been forever in the making and hence could not result in redemption; vicarious
atonement leads to reconciliation and life everlasting.
b. The possibility of vicarious atonement.
All those who advocate a subjective theory of the
atonement raise a formidable objection to the idea of vicarious atonement. They consider it
unthinkable that a just God should transfer His wrath against moral offenders to a perfectly
innocent party, and should treat the innocent judicially as if he were guilty. There is
undoubtedly a real difficulty here, especially in view of the fact that this seems to be contrary
to all human analogy. We cannot conclude from the possibility of the transfer of a pecuniary
debt to that of the transfer of a penal debt. If some beneficent person offers to pay the
pecuniary debt of another, the payment must be accepted, and the debtor is ipso facto freed
from all obligation. But this is not the case when someone offers to atone vicariously for the
transgression of another. To be legal, this must be expressly permitted and authorized by the
lawgiver. In reference to the law this is called relaxation, and in relation to the sinner it is
known as remission. The judge need not, but can permit this; yet he can permit it only under
certain conditions, as (1) that the guilty party himself is not in a position to bear the penalty
through to the end, so that a righteous relation results; (2) that the transfer does not encroach
upon the rights and privileges of innocent third parties, nor cause them to suffer hardships and
privations; (3) that the person enduring the penalty is not himself already indebted to justice,
and does not owe all his services to the government; and (4) that the guilty party retains the
consciousness of his guilt and of the fact that the substitute is suffering for him. In view of all
this it will be understood that the transfer of penal debt is well-nigh, if not entirely, impossible
among men. But in the case of Christ, which is altogether unique, because in it a situation
obtained which has no parallel, all the conditions named were met. There was no injustice of
any kind.
c. Scriptural proof for the vicarious atonement of Christ.
The Bible certainly teaches that the
sufferings and death of Christ were vicarious, and vicarious in the strict sense of the word that
He took the place of sinners, and that their guilt was imputed, and their punishment
transferred, to Him. This is not at all what Bushnell means, when he speaks of the “vicarious
sacrifice” of Christ. For him it simply means that Christ bore our sins “on His feeling, became
inserted into their bad lot by His sympathy as a friend, yielded up Himself and His life, even, to
an effort of restoring mercy; in a word that He bore our sins in just the same sense as He bore
our sicknesses.”[Vicarious Sacrifice, p. 46.] The sufferings of Christ were not just the
sympathetic sufferings of a friend, but the substitutionary sufferings of the Lamb of God for the
sin of the world. The Scriptural proofs for this may be classified as follows: