By George Barker Stevens, Ph.D., D.D., LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1905.1
Dr. Stevens, although since 1895 Professor of Systematic Theology in Yale Divinity School, has hitherto been known to the wider public chiefly as a writer upon themes of Biblical Theology, the fruit, doubtless, of his studies while he was Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation in the same University (“The Pauline Theology,” 1892; “The Johannine Theology,” 1894; “The Theology of the New Testament,” 1899; “The Teaching of Jesus,” 1901). There was no doubt a little volume of not very great significance called “Doctrine and Life” published in 1895. And more to the point, there was always a strong dogmatic tone in the professed Biblical studies, and there were always intruded into them not merely a dogmatic method, but large elements of purely dogmatic discussion. And as Dr. Stevens has been very much of a dogmatist from the beginning, so he has from the beginning been very much the dogmatist he exhibits himself in the present volume. From his earliest publication the same tendencies of thought which meet us here in their full flower were already present. Already in the volume on “The Pauline Theology” (1892), for example, the divine righteousness is resolved into the divine love, and the doctrines of “original sin” and “satisfaction” are rejected. Even the same methods of argumentation and the same insufficiency in the statement of opposing views which characterize the present volume are already noticeable in that. We must confess to some surprise, therefore, at the chorus of astonishment which has greeted the appearance of this volume. Doubtless, Dr. Stevens’ theological conceptions have somewhat ripened during the interval which separates it from its predecessors, and in the process of his special studies for it, but this is very much the kind of book on “the Atonement” which any reader of his former works should have expected to receive from Dr. Stevens.
We shall not profess to have found the volume pleasant reading. The polemic tone in which it is cast from beginning to end, strident from the commencement, finishes by becoming rasping. It is not obvious that the opinions thus endlessly controverted have been sympathetically appreciated. It is not even obvious that the trouble has been taken thoroughly to understand them. Certainly they are not always stated in their completeness; and they are not seldom refuted in mere caricature. The reader acquires an unpleasant feeling as he proceeds in the volume that the language of scorn, rising even to vituperation, is now and again depended upon to do the work of argument. Dr. Stevens does not like the doctrine of “penal satisfaction.” Not liking it, he is entitled to argue against it, and (if he can) to refute it. It may be questioned, however, whether its refutation is advanced by declaring that it makes God a Shylock (p. 410) whose most distinguishing characteristic is “his appetite for revenge” (p. 331 et seq.). And it seems more than questionable whether this procedure is justified by the open declaration that the advocates of such a doctrine are past arguing with. Take, for example, this sentence: “It seems to me that one who can adopt the principle which underlies the penal theory of our Lord’s sufferings—that God is so just that He cannot forgive the guilty until He has first punished the innocent—thereby renders himself inaccessible to all considerations of equity and morality” (p. 383). In Dr. Stevens’ view sin itself, in its most complete development, does not reduce man to so hopeless a condition (p. 316): he remains always accessible to appeal and open to conviction. It is inconceivable that he really considers his Christian opponents in worse case than the worst of sinners. His language is the language of simple vituperation.
The book is laid out, on lines usual in such treatises, in three parts. These parts would commonly be described as occupied successively with laying the Biblical foundation, tracing the historical development, erecting the dogmatic construction. These descriptions appear, however, to apply to Dr. Stevens’ three parts only in a somewhat modified sense.
The discussion of the First Part (pp. 1–135), for example, seems devoted less to laying firmly a Biblical basis for a doctrine of Atonement than to removing all Biblical basis for such a doctrine. In Dr. Stevens’ view there are almost as many Biblical doctrines of Atonement as there are Biblical writers: which is as much as to say that there is no Biblical doctrine at all. He does not deny that the “theory of penal satisfaction” is taught in the Bible. He intimates rather that it is taught by Paul; although when he expounds Paul’s teaching for us, it takes in his hands much more of the appearance of the governmental theory (p. 60). He seems not very averse to allowing even that it may be implied in certain sayings attributed to our Lord in even the Synoptic narrative. But on that very account he doubts the authenticity of these sayings. And he does not feel bound to believe all that Paul taught. He is a modern man, and can no more “think in terms of late Jewish theology” (as Paul did) than he “can think in terms of pre-Socratic philosophy” (p. 74). He claims the right, then, to distinguish “between the specifically Christian and the characteristically Jewish or rabbinic in Paul” (p. 75). Making this distinction, he ascribes Paul’s doctrine of a substitutive atonement, of a “propitiation of God” (p. 61, note), to his Jewish inheritance; and rejects it from the possibilities of thought. “The men of to-day can no more appropriate the outward forms of Paul’s Jewish thought respecting expiation than they can adopt the cosmology or demonology which he derived from the same source” (p. 74). “What is Pauline? What is Scriptural? Is every conception of which Paul made use a necessary part of his religion, and of ours,—physical death due to sin, our sin due to Adam’s, Christ’s speedy, visible return to earth? As I have frequently intimated, it seems to me that no fruitful investigation of the beginnings of Christian theology can be made without recognizing the distinction between the contingent thought-forms of the first Christian thinkers and the essential religious life and fundamental Christian certainties concerning God and the experience of salvation which they were seeking to expound and to philosophize” (p. 131). The upshot of his discussion of “the Biblical basis of the doctrine,” therefore, is to free himself from the trammels of much of the Biblical teaching. Only the teaching of Jesus, it seems, is to be implicitly trusted: and that, not the entire teaching attributed to Jesus, but only the Synoptic tradition of His teaching: and not even that in its completeness, but only so much of it as Dr. Stevens’ criticism spares.