By J. K. Mozley, M.A. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1916.1
Mr. Mozley has packed an immense amount of detail into these two hundred and odd small pages, and has done so without in the least overweighting them. The book is written in a charming style, clear and pointed; and so far as its two main sections are concerned—those on the Biblical material and on the history of the doctrine—it is not only informing but illuminating. We do not think Mr. Mozley has done justice to himself in the third—the constructive—section. He devotes only twenty of his two hundred and twenty pages to it, and although he enhearteningly tells us that we cannot live without a doctrine of the Atonement, he ventures only to give us, not a doctrine, but merely suggestions “towards a doctrine.” The worst of it is that the reader is apt to think in the end that this is just as well. The doctrine to which the lines of suggestion laid down appear to point, seems to be of a surprisingly low order—for Mr. Mozley: lower than the doctrine which he himself finds suggested by Paul, or by our Lord Himself, or by the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. A book on the Atonement, which, after two thousand years of Christian living and thinking and teaching, manages to come to a close without telling us just what the Atonement is, can scarcely be thought other than a portent: but it is better so than that such a book should seek dogmatically to impose upon its readers, as the issue of all these years, a wholly inadequate doctrine of the Atonement.
The notion of Atonement which Mr. Mozley suggests may possibly lie at the end of our search after a doctrine, could we penetrate far enough, may perhaps be shadowed out in the following two sentences. Christ’s death has a relation to sins not His own, which implies an intervention that amounts to a mediation between God and man. As the result of this mediation, the situation as between God and man changes. In expounding the notion thus vaguely expressed, Mr. Mozley lays stress primarily on sin’s desert of punishment, a punishment which is at bottom retributive; and on the penitent soul’s recognition of the justice of its punishment and yearning after the removal of that estrangement from God which is the primary effect of sin. The divine response to this penitence, he tells us, is forgiveness; and if we cannot quite equate forgiveness with the cancellation of punishment, we can say that it cancels a situation, that it changes punishment from retributive to restorative. Suffering, we are now told, always implies sin. The sufferings of Christ, therefore, who, we must bear well in mind was not Himself a sinner, but the Son of God, must therefore stand in relation to sin and could not leave things as they were. They altered the nature of the reference of suffering and death to sin; they so transformed death to us, indeed, that it loses its character as judgment: “the element of judgment, universal in death, spends itself in the Cross” (p. 216).
This may be expressed, says Mr. Mozley, “by saying that Christ bore penal sufferings for us and in our stead.” We do not discover in his further exposition, however, any adequate justification of this excellent mode of expression. What we get instead is an explanation of how Christ is related to the race, by virtue of which His acts stand in a quite unique relation to the action of the race. Mr. Mozley does not think of Christ’s humanity as “inclusive” or “generic.” His mind rests rather, in accordance with modern feelings of solidarity, on the “almost limitless reaction of individuals and their acts upon other personalities” (p. 217). Apparently this carries us no further than the notion that Christ’s saving work is accomplished by His so affecting men as to lead them “to identify themselves by way of aspiration with the work of Christ.” This enables Mr. Mozley to say of this “work of Christ,” that it is not the work of man but Christ’s own work; though he adds as if that were the significant point, “it is also not the work of a divine non-human redeemer, but of Christ as Man fulfilling human obligations” (p. 218). The upshot, then, seems to be no more than that Christ, entering the human race and sharing with it the sufferings and death which had come to it as the punishment of sin, transmutes suffering and death for this race from retributive to restorative, and in the reactions of personality on personalities quickens men to identify themselves with “His work”—which seems scarcely to mean more than to imitate His lofty attitude towards life and its evils.
If we have not misunderstood Mr. Mozley’s exposition of it, we can hardly look upon the theory of Atonement which he thus tentatively suggests as more than an elevated form of what is known as “the moral influence theory,” the nerve of which is the reaction of Christ’s personality on the lives of His fellow men. The actual atoning fact appears to be discovered not in what Christ does, nor even in what He is—but in what men do under the inspiration of His life among them. And therefore the discussion is brought to a close with such questions as these (p. 218): “Is there anything immoral if God looks at men’s inchoate moral achievements and forgives their moral shortcomings, that is, their sins, in the light of the moral completeness of Christ’s life? If He reckons faith as righteousness, when in the act of faith man recognizes the moral obligations that press upon him for fulfilment, confesses his own failures, admits the justice of punishment as that which he has deserved, and at the same time points to the complete fulfilment of the law, the complete confession of God’s holiness, and the voluntary endurance of penal suffering and death by Christ from within humanity?” Translating these questions into affirmations, there is suggested here that God, looking at men’s inchoate moral achievements, forgives their moral shortcomings, that is, their sins,—for so sin is inadequately defined—and that He does this “in the light of”—whatever that may mean, but scarcely “on the ground of”—“the moral completeness of Christ’s life.” It is suggested again that God reckons faith as righteousness in certain circumstances, namely, when in the act of faith man recognizes the moral obligations that press upon him for fulfillment, confesses his own failures, admits the justice of punishment as that which he has deserved, and at the same time points to Christ’s complete fulfillment of the law, complete confession of God’s holiness, and voluntary endurance of penal suffering and death from within humanity.