John McLeod Campbell · 19 of 23

CHAPTER XV. · Part 1

THAT GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, THE ULTIMATE TRUTH ON WHICH FAITH MUST HERE ULTIMATELY REST.

THAT natural relation of the atonement to Christianity, on which so much weight has now been laid, is the full meeting of a demand which must be more or less felt in any deep realisation of the divine righteousness; the demand which is so far met when those who represent our acceptance with God as turning upon our trust in the merits of Christ's work, are I still careful to illustrate the moral tendency of such trust, founding systems of "Christian Ethics" on the atonement; the demand which is recognised when those who regard the actual imputation of Christ's righteousness as what justifies us in the sight of God, are careful to deny the character of justifying faith to any faith that does not sanctify: for Luther alone have we found setting forth the excellent righteousness which is in the faith which justifies viewed in itself. In truth, all care to exclude antinomianism, in whatever way that care is expressed, is an indication of the depth and authority of the feeling which forbids our ascribing to the righteous God any constitution of spiritual and moral government, which does not contemplate results in harmony with the divine righteousness, and which has not its justification in these results. So that, though, in form of thought, a near approach is made to saying, that the great husbandman values the fruitful branch, not because of His delight in the fruit it bears, but because of His delight in the imputed excellence of the vine; still the real feeling of the heart is in harmony with the words of our Lord, "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit." But, as these words, "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit," indicate, we find that it is only in the light of the relation in which the scheme of redemption stands to the fatherliness of God that the necessity for a natural relation of the atonement to Christianity can be adequately conceived of.

The great and root-distinction of the view of the atonement presented in these pages, is the relation in which our redemption is regarded as standing to the fatherliness of God. In that fatherliness has the atonement been now represented as originating. By that fatherliness has its end been represented to have been determined. To that fatherliness has the demand for the elements of expiation found in it been traced. But the distinction is broad and unmistakeable between simple mercy proposing to save from evils and bestow blessings, and finding it necessary to deal with justice as presenting obstacles to the realisation of its gracious designs,--which conception is that on which the other view of the atonement proceeds; and this of the love of the Father of our spirits going forth after us. His alienated children, lost to Him, dead to Him through sin, and desiring to be able to say of each one of us, "My son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found."

Not, indeed, that supposing the only elements of the divine character concerned in determining the nature of the atonement to have been mercy and righteousness, the conception to which I object, would meet the requirements of these attributes more adequately than that which I offer instead. On the contrary, the moral and spiritual expiation for sin which Christ has made, has dealt with the justice of God, whether contemplated as absolute or as rectoral, in a way infinitely more glorifying to the law of God, and more fitted to open a free channel for mercy to flow in, than an atonement consisting in the endurance of penal sufferings by the Son of God as our substitute, would have done. But while this lower ground is tenable, we should not be justified in coming down from the point of view to which the gospel raises us, to what, while true, is not the ultimate truth revealed. So to do, would be to forget that the gospel, and not the law, affords us full light here; the law being subordinate to the gospel, as our relation to God as our righteous Lord, is subordinate to our relation to Him as the Father of our spirits,--the original and root-relation, in the light of which alone all God's dealings with us can be understood. How far, indeed, this subordinating of our relation to God as we are the subjects of His righteous rule, to our relation to Him as we are His offspring, is from depreciating that which is subordinated, has, I trust, been made abundantly manifest, seeing that it is the law of the spirit of the life that is in Christ Jesus, that is to say, sonship, in which alone the power is found to accomplish the fulfilment of the righteousness of the law in us, and that our being reconciled to God, whose law we have violated,--the writing of His law on our hearts, so that it becomes to us a law of liberty, is the result of revealing to us our Father in our Lawgiver, and shewing us the law of the Lawgiver in its fountain in the Father's heart.

But while to reveal the Father in the Lawgiver is that which reconciles us to the Lawgiver, the only adequate statement of the high result accomplished, is, that it is reconciliation to the Father,--the quickening in us of the life of sonship. However high a conception it is that the "disobedient should be turned to the wisdom of the just," that alone is commensurate with the excellence of the salvation granted to us which is conveyed by the words, "Following God as dear children walking in love."

As to the place now recognised as belonging to the fatherliness of God in the history of our redemption, viz., that it is the ultimate ground for faith, I would add to what I have urged above these two considerations: 1st, It is a special glory to God that the fatherliness, which originates our salvation, and determines its nature--that it shall be the life of sonship--is itself that in which the saving power resides. For, as we have seen, the Son of God saves us by a work whose essence and sum is the declaring of the Father's Name. A result so high, accomplished by the power over our spirits found to be in the Name of God,--that is to say in what God is, is manifestly the highest glory to God. No result referable to simple Almightiness could be the same glory. That God should by a miracle change a rebellious child into a loving child, would be no such glory to God, as that the knowledge of the fatherliness rebelled against, should, by virtue of the excellence inherent in that fatherliness, accomplish this result. "We love Him because He first loved us." The power to quicken love in us is here ascribed to the love with which God regards us, considered simply as love. For it clearly is not the meaning, that, because God loved us. He wrought a miracle of Almighty power to make us love Him. And do we not feel a special glory to accrue to the divine love from this, as the history of our love to God? a special glory which vanishes, whatever other manner of glory may be supposed to remain, the moment the fact of our loving God is resolved into a miracle of Almighty power. 2nd, But not only is this history of our being reconciled to God what is full of glory to God. If we consider well we must see that our being reconciled to God must have this history. We have seen that the words "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," indicate the difference between that blood of Christ which cleanseth from all sin, and the blood of bulls, and of goats, which could not take away sin. And so the Apostle, when illustrating this, goes on to say, "By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once." Our sanctification therefore is accomplished by the will of God as acting on our will by the moral and spiritual power of what that divine will is in itself. For the will of God, in order to be welcomed with that welcome which is holiness, i. e., the free consecration of our will, must be welcomed just because of WHAT IT IS.

This is a point which it is most important that we should see clearly. Nothing extraneous to the nature of the divine will itself to which we are to be reconciled, can have a part in reconciling us to that will. Fear of punishment, hope of reward, have here no place. However they may have been included in the history of our awakening to the importance of the relation in which our will stands to the divine will, they must go for nothing--they have ever been found to go for nothing--when the soul is alone with God, feeling itself under His searching eye, all its self-consciousness quickened by the realisation of the divine knowledge of its thoughts "when yet afar off." Simple earnestness, intense desire to be safe and assured of happiness, is then valued only at its true value; neither is itself deceivingly supposed to generate anything better than itself. In the light of God, all that springs from the desire of safety and happiness, is seen to continue but the desire of safety and happiness still; and this, though not wrong,--nay, though in a lower sense right, as the working of an instinct in our being which God acknowledges, and which God addresses,--yet assuredly is not holiness, nor any approach to a delight in God's holy will. Nor, if we should, on any ground, have come to conclude that we are assured of the safety and happiness which we have desired, and, in consequence, should feel grateful to God for this great boon, is such gratitude, though a higher feeling than mere fear, or hope, to be recognised as holiness, or as what implies our being reconciled to God spiritually and truly.

At how great a distance from all oneness of will with the Holy God a human spirit may still be, even when esteeming itself saved, and thanking God for salvation, is most instructively illustrated by President Edwards, in his analysis of delusive appearances of conversion which had come under his own observation, occurring under the awakening power of much urging of the importance of salvation. But, indeed, clearly understood, the statement is felt to be self-evident, that the will of God must reconcile us to itself by the power of what it is, or not at all. Therefore that the Son reconciles us to the Father by revealing the Father, is not only a way of salvation full of glory to God, but is, in truth, the only possible way. So that our salvation would have been impossible had there not been in the heart of the Father what, being revealed to us, and brought to bear on our spirits, would reconcile us to Him, making His condemnation of our sin to become our own condemnation of it. His choice for us our own free choice for ourselves, His love the light of life to us, His fatherliness the quickening of sonship in us. There being that in God which was adequate to this result, our salvation was not only possible, but the way and manner, as well as the nature of our salvation, were thereby fixed and determined.

The Apostle John says, "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world." I John iv. 14. I have had occasion above to notice the way in which the Divinity of the Saviour has been contemplated in relation to the atonement in the two forms of Calvinism; in the one as implying a capacity of infinite suffering, adequate because infinite; in the other, as giving infinite value to any suffering in respect of the dignity of the sufferer; instead of recognising the divinity of the sufferer as what has determined the nature of His sufferings, and has given them their moral and spiritual fitness to expiate sin and purge it away. There has not been the same result of positive error, but there has beyond doubt been great loss of light of truth, through an unwise resting of attention on the simple fact of the divinity of Christ, which has veiled the teaching of the words "the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world," chosen by the Apostle to express that light of eternal life in which He consciously was. Labour has been bestowed on proving the divinity of the persons thus spoken of in connexion with our salvation,--that the Father is God, that the Son is God--and the excellent dignity and importance of salvation have doubtless been in this way magnified. But the special teaching intended by the Apostle is clearly that which is received in contemplating the Father as the Father, and the Son as the Son. Thus considered, the statement that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world, sheds light on the whole scheme of redemption, its origin, its end, and that by which that end is accomplished.

Exclusive occupation with the personal dignity claimed for the Saviour by the name "the Son of God," has, indeed, had the general result of causing men to lose the teaching contained in that name, so that it has suggested the greatness only of the love of God to man revealed in Christ, and not its manner and nature; and yet neither is its greatness known, while its nature is not understood. "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him:" let the name "Son" here suggest to us what it has been intended to suggest, and the nature of the life which it has been intended that we should "live through Him" will be taught by it. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins:" let the name "Son" here teach us what it should teach, and it will shed light upon that propitiation for sin which Christ is, and illustrate to us the relation of the life of sonship to the atonement,--the relation of the revelation of the Father by the Son to our being reconciled to God.

Fatherliness in God originating our salvation; the Son of God accomplishing that salvation by the revelation of the Father; the life of sonship quickened in us, the salvation contemplated: these are conceptions continually suggested by the language of scripture if we yield our minds to its natural force; and they are conceptions which naturally shed light on each other, and which, in their combined light, and contemplated together, so illustrate the nature of the atonement, as to impart a conviction like that produced by the internal light of axiomatic truth. Our Lord complains that He had come in His Father's name, and they had not received Him: yet as coming in the Father's name must He be ultimately received; any other reception is not the reception of the Son of God by which we become sons of God. "He came unto His own, and His own received

Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to be the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name." This those understand whose deepest conviction of having found salvation in Christ is as the experience of orphans who have found their long lost Father. For, corresponding to the yearning of the Father's heart over us, while yet in our sins, is the working of the misery of our orphan state as the ultimate contradiction to the original law of our being; some measure of conscious realisation of which misery is the truest preparation for receiving the gospel, being the first yielding to the teaching of the Father drawing us to the Son, who alone reveals the Father,--that in articulate groaning of our spirits to which Philip gave expression in saying, "Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us."

It is justly held that the faith that there is a God, has a root in us deeper than all inferential argument, a root in relation to which all inferential argument is but, so to speak, complemental; owing its authority rather to that root than that root at all to it, though being what that root demands and prepares us to expect. And surely those who deal with men who are attempting to be atheists, act most wisely when they throw them back on this root of faith in God in their own inner being, instead of permitting a course of argument which allows their thoughts to run away to find without them what unless found within them will never be found at all. That this God, in whose existence we necessarily believe, is the Father of our spirits, is to be regarded as a further truth, the faith of which has a corresponding depth of root in us; and this I understand the Apostle to recognise in the use he makes, in preaching to the Athenians, of the expression as used by one of their own poets, "For we are also His offspring."

That one of their own poets had said so would have been no reason for assuming that they ought to have believed that it was so, and to have determined their manner of worshipping God accordingly, unless these words of the poet had been the utterance of a truth that was deep in all their hearts. In assuming, as I have been doing, a relation of men to God as the Father of spirits, antecedent to, and to be regarded as underlying their relation to Him as their moral governor, I have, in like manner, been calculating on a response from the depths of humanity. And it is in the hope of awakening that response into a distinct consciousness that I have proceeded in treating our relationship to God as the Father of our spirits, as the ultimate truth, in the light of which we are to see the scheme of our redemption, the Father's sending the Son to be the Saviour of the world. If we are in very truth God's offspring, if it is as the Father of our spirits that He regards us while yet in our sins, it accords with this that the Father should send the Son to save us, that the Son should propose to save us by the revelation of the Father, and that our salvation shall be participation in the life of sonship.

There is a corresponding witness of truth in the results which the faith of the atonement accomplishes. These in being the truth of sonship towards God and the truth of brotherhood toward men, deepen the conviction that it is the very truth of God that our faith is receiving.

1. Sonship quickened in us by the revelation of the fatherliness that is in God, is sonship in the true and natural sense of the expression. If our redemption has its origin in the feelings with which God regards us as the Father of our spirits, if the Son of God accomplishes our salvation by revealing the Father to us, then is our salvation necessarily the truth of sonship. In living harmony with the light of life, drawn by the Father to the Son, knowing the Son as He is present in our inmost being--our true life, and ever seeking to be our actual life--yielding our hearts to Him to reign in them, "receiving with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save our souls," we call God "Father;" and the utterance is from us a true and natural and simple approach to the Father of our spirits, such as He desires, a speaking to Him according to the truth of what He is to us, the cherishing of an immediate direct confidence in His fatherly heart. For indeed our right confidence in the Father is direct, and is confidence in His fatherly heart towards us, as also is our confidence in the Son direct, viz., a direct confidence in Him as our proper life; which several manners of confidence we are to discriminate and to realise. For in the Son it is, and not apart from the Son, that we have the life of sonship; and as to exercise confidence in the Father is to confide in Him as our Father, so to exercise confidence in the Son is to welcome the life of sonship which we have in Him. And this is the manner of our being alive to God through Jesus Christ, and it is self-evidenced to my mind as the truth of sonship, as what and what alone we can believe to meet and satisfy that fatherliness in God which it presupposes, and by the revelation of which to our spirits by the Son it is quickened.

I cannot recognise this truth of sonship, in what, in connexion with the other conception of the atonement, is held as "adoption;" of which I desire to speak plainly, yet warily, knowing how much more difficult it is to do justice in the choice of one's words to the faith of others, than to one's own faith; and having, also, the awe on my spirit of the true savour of the life of sonship, which it has been my privilege to meet in connexion with the form of thought on this subject which yet I feel constrained to reject.

The adoption of us as sons, as superadded to justification by faith, no element of sonship being present in the faith that justifies us, nor exercise of fatherliness contemplated as an element in the divine acceptance of us, the adoption itself a boon bestowed upon us in connexion with the imputation of Christ's merits to us,--this is a manner of sonship as to which it is obvious that the confidence with which we may so think of ourselves as sons of God, and draw near to Him expecting to be acknowledged as such, is no direct trust in a Father's heart at all, no trust in any feeling in God of which, we are personally the objects as His OFFSPRING, but is in reality a trust in the judicial grounds on which the title and place of sons is granted to us.

I know that it is held that, when in connexion with the faith that justifies, God bestows on us the adoption of sons, He gives us also the spirit of sonship, that we may have the spiritual reality as well as the name and standing. But the spirit of sonship is the spirit of truth, the Son himself is the truth--"I am the way, the truth, and the life." That the Son should say, "I am the way"--"no man cometh unto the Father but by me," teaches us that sonship alone deals with fatherliness as fatherliness; that we must come to God as sons, or not come at all. On this co-relativeness of sonship and fatherliness, I have dwelt above. So also that He should say, "I am the life," fixes our faith on Him as our proper life, according to "the testimony of God, that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son,"--but that He should say, and say in humanity, "I am the truth," teaches us, that not only is it the case that to come near to the Father we must come near in the Son, and that the life of sonship is the life to which we are called, but, besides, that to come to God in the Son, and so to come to Him as sons, is, and alone is, in harmony with THE TRUTH of our relation to God.

I have in some measure anticipated this contrast between sonship towards God, as quickened in us by the revelation to us of the Father by the Son, and sonship conceived of as added to our legal standing of justified persons, through the imputation to us of Christ's merits, when noticing above the practical difficulty of harmonising, in conscious experience, two manners of confidence, so opposite in their nature, as a legal confidence, on the ground of the imputation to us of a perfect righteousness, and a filial confidence such as the faith of a Father's heart is fitted to quicken. In truth, the assumed filial confidence, being cherished in this dependence on the legal confidence, and the fatherliness conceived of being, not a desire of the heart of God going forth towards us as His offspring, to which sonship is the true and right response, but the divine acknowledgment of a standing granted to us according to the arrangement assumed, though our conception of the mercy and grace of which we assume ourselves to be the objects may still be high, the true and simple feeling of dealing with a Father's heart is altogether precluded.

But thus to think of the intercourse with God which eternal life implies, as resting for its peace and security on another ground than its own essential nature;--to think of sonship as cherished freely otherwise than as the natural response to the Father's heart, to think of the Father as rejoicing in this sonship as present in us otherwise than as the Father;--to feel that the prodigal son feels secure in the welcome of his forgiving father on any other ground than the fatherly forgiveness itself which has embraced him, falling on his neck and kissing him;--to feel that the father is justified in his own eyes, or would justify himself in the eyes of the rest of his family, in the gracious welcome which he accords to the returning prodigal, on any other ground than that which he expresses when he says, "My son was dead, and is alive again;"--to suppose that the filial standing must rest on a legal standing, and that all this intercourse between the Father of spirits and His redeemed offspring must be justified by the imputation to them of Christ's righteousness, and that this reality of communion with the Father and the Son must be reconciled, in this way of at least seeming fiction, with the moral government of God, instead of recognising that communion itself as what is the highest fulfilment of moral government, and the ultimate and perfect justification of all the means which God has employed in bringing it to pass: these are thoughts which can have no place in the light in which the Apostle says--"It became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings."

The natural character now claimed for the consciousness of sonship as belonging to our communion with God in Christ,--that is to say, that it shall be felt the due response to the Father's heart, and not the mere using of a privilege and right graciously conferred upon us, corresponds with, or, I should rather say, is one with, the self-evidencing character claimed above for justifying faith.

The liberty to call God Father, which we feel in the light of the revelation of the Father to us by the Son, we in that light cannot but feel: for in that light we not only apprehend the divine fatherliness, through the perfect response of sonship yielded to it by the Son of God in humanity, and, at the same time, the sonship itself, which is that response, but we have this apprehension necessarily with a personal reference to ourselves.

How important this statement is--assuming its truth--those will feel who are acquainted with the questionings on the subject of adoption by which the most earnest and deeply exercised spirits have been most tried, while their right to call God Father has been conceived of by them as turning upon the previous question of their justification through imputation of Christ's righteousness, and that again upon the soundness of the faith from which justification has been expected. What is here taught is that to call God Father, and draw near to Him in the confidence of sonship, is simply to conform to, and walk in, the light of life which shines to us in Christ.

Assuredly that word from heaven--"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye Him"--each man that hears is called to hear as a word addressed to himself,--a revelation of a will in God in relation to him. This is not to be questioned. Why is this divine sonship manifested in humanity? Why, brother man, is our attention called to it? Why are we told of the Father's being pleased in the Son, and in this connexion bade to "hear the Son?" Surely the fatherliness thus presented to our faith is fatherliness in which we are interested, for surely it is interested in us--has desires with reference to us; and surely the sonship on which our attention is thus fixed concerns us, yea, can be nothing else than the very condition of humanity which these desires of the Father contemplate and seek for us. Therefore when we are turned to the kingdom of God within us,--when that spiritual constitution of things, which the words that have raised our eyes to the Father, and our hopes to sonship, have pre-supposed, is revealed to our spiritual apprehension;--when we know "that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world," as these words state a condition of things with the advantages of which we are encompassed, and the truth and reality of which is to be known by us in our own inner being;--when that testimony of the Father to the Son, and of the Son to the Father, which pervades the Scriptures, is known by us as also in ourselves: then what is contemplated by the call addressed to us--"Hear ye Him," is understood by us;--we understand how, in the love of the Father of our spirits, the Son, in whom the Father is well pleased, has in Him the life of sonship for us, and how, through Him, and in Him, we also may be sons in whom the Father shall be well pleased.