The doctrine of atonement in Coleridge and Maurice

Abstract

THE PURPOSE of this Thesis is to advocate a return-to a preAnsclinic conception of Atonement theory, and to make an appeal for renewed attention to the Patristic idea of a "Ransom". The Death of Christ is a Ransom - a Price - which God has to pay for the redemption of men.

I do not profess to put forward any new discovery in this fully excavated - even over excavated - field of Atonement controversy, every inch of which has been examined and re-examined with a minuteness which itself speaks for the importance of the subject and its vital concern to the human heart; but it is the fact that with Anselm there cane a radical change of emphasis which has more or less coloured tho treatment of the doctrine ever since, and has - as I have been forced to think - introduced a certain obsession or prejudice, a certain biassed point of view that has been too readily accepted in dealing with the Atonement. Anseln gave the death blow to the theory of a "Ransom to the Devil" which prevailed before his tine. That theory has never really raised its head again. It has in most books on the Atonement boon exhumed for a nomont only to be battered with fresh blows and flung into the grave again with renewed contumely. "That hideous theory", Rashdall calls it,- "the coarse mythology of the Ransom theory". And ho says, "Never in the whole history of Christian thought has a doct¬ rine been so decidedly destroyed by criticism and more univorsally abandoned".(Ideas and Ideals.158)

I venture to think it is just this universal abandonment of it, this utter refusal to look at what it means and to nako use of (ii) the principle underlying it that has introduced into the doctrine and retained in the doctrine a sense of obscurity and mystery which need not bo there. As an act of God, and an outcone of God'* nature and character, the Atonement is naturally mysterious, hike all the greatest things it ultimately - exit in mysterium. • hut apart from the welcome grandeur of this inevitable and aweinspiring mystery, one fools - in reading the history of the doctrine up to the prosent timo, in tracing the efforts of tho greatest writers to find an explanation of the fact - one cannot resist the impression that there is a difficulty which ought, to yield, there is a sense of baffled effort, to some extent there i3 the fooling of a koy lost, a missing dlaitent that, were it found, would illumine a dark region.

I may indicate the Scope of the Thesis as follows I shall first of all deal with the two writers, Coleridge and Maurice, in turn, indicating in each case the various points of their actual teaching 011 the Atonement. I shall then endeavour to show the affinity of their leading principles with that theory to which I wish to call fresh attention, viz,- the Patristic theory of Ransom. This theory itself will then require some description,-and I shall set it forth, briefly, as it appears in the pages of Gregory of hyssa - where we have it in its purest form. Kext will follow - an account of Anselm's refutation of the theory - my own counter criticism of Anselm and of the whole "Satisfaction" idea in Atonement doctrine - criticism of the purely subjective theory of "Moral Influence", showing the defects of that theory as an explanation of the Atonement, and pointing out how essentially the teaching of Coleridge and Maurice is to be distinguished from it. This will be followed, finally, by a constructive summary of the doctrine.