THE ATONEMENT SERIES: PART 8
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QUESTION: The Gospel story as recorded in Mark has as its first event, John the Baptist preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus’s first words in Mark are similar, for people to repent and believe in the Gospel. Do you think that the concept of repentance is important when considering the atoning work of Christ? Why or why not?
VICARIOUS REPENTANCE is a theory of the Atonement that views Christ’s suffering and death as a perfect repentance, with both retrospective and prospective effects. Retrospectively, Christ’s suffering and death on the cross addresses the justice and satisfaction required of God, and has Christ’s suffering and death appeasing God’s wrath. However, this is not to be understood as penal substitution. Rather, God’s wrath is appeased by the perfect repentance of Christ, who lived a sinless life and therefore did not owe God repentance. Repentance in Campbell’s theory therefore replaces the function that punishment has in the theory of penal substitution. Prospectively, Christ’s perfect repentance is offered to God on our behalf by the Son and is accepted by the Father, entirely with the prospective purpose that it is to be reproduced in us. That is, God accepted Christ’s perfect repentance, and we can vicariously participate in it.
JOHN MCLEOD CAMPBELL (1800-1872) is the originator of Vicarious Repentance. He was a Scottish pastor and theologian who found pastoral difficulties with the Reformed understanding of the Atonement only being for the predestined elect. Campbell presents his alternative theory of the Atonement in his major work, The Nature of the Atonement. Our readings come from Chapter 5, which describes the problems with penal substitution theory of the Atonement, Chapter 6, which describes the retrospective aspects of the Atonement, and Chapter 6, which describes the prospective aspects of the Atonement.
READING 1: [I]t was the spiritual essence and nature of the sufferings of Christ, and not that these sufferings were penal, which constituted their value as entering into the atonement made by the Son of God when He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. [John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, Ch. 5]
READING 2: That oneness of mind with the Father, which towards man took the form of condemnation of sin, would, in the Son’s dealing with the Father in relation to our sins, take the form of a perfect confession of our sins … it was necessarily a first step in dealing with the Father on our behalf … a peculiar development of the holy sorrow in which He bore the burden of our sins … He who so responds to the divine wrath against sin … He responds to it with a perfect response … and in that perfect response He absorbs it. For that response has all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man. [John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, Ch. 6]
READING 3: We see further that what is thus offered on our behalf is so offered by the Son and so accepted by the Father, entirely with the prospective purpose that it is to be reproduced in us. The expiatory confession of our sins which we have been contemplating is to be shared in by ourselves: to accept it on our behalf was to accept it as that mind in relation to sin in the fellowship of which we are to come to God. [John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, Ch. 7]
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