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Dabney:

1) Yet not per
acceptilationem.

Yet, we shall by no means agree, with the Scotists, and the early Remonstrants, that Christ did not make a real and equivalent satisfaction for sinners’ debts. They say, that His sacrifice was not such, because He did not suffer really what sinners owed. He did not feel remorse, nor absolute despair; He did not suffer eternally; only His humanity suffered. But they suppose that the inadequate sufferings were taken as a ransom-price, per acccptilationem: by a gracious waiver of God’s real claims of right. And they hold that any sacrifice, which God may please thus to receive, would be thereby made adequate. The difference between their view and the Reformed may be roughly, but fairly defined, by an illustration drawn from pecuniary obligations : A mechanic is justly indebted to a land-owner in the sum of one hundred pounds; and has no money wherewith to pay. Now, should a rich brother offer the land-lord the full hundred pounds, in coin of the realm, this would be a legal tender; it would, ipso facto, cancel the debt, even though the creditor captiously rejected it. Christ’s satisfaction is not ipso facto in this commercial sense. There is a second supposition: that the kind brother is not rich, but is himself an able mechanic; and seeing that the landlord is engaged in building, he proposes that he will work as a builder for him two hundred days, at ten shillings per diem (which is a fair price), to cancel his poor brother’s debt. This proposal, on the one hand, is not a “legal tender,” and does not compel the creditor. He may say that he has already enough mechanics, who are paid in advance; so that he cannot take the proposal. But, if he judges it convenient to accept it, although he does not get the coin, he gets an actual equivalent for his claim, and a fair one. This is satisfactio. The debtor may thus get a valid release on the terms freely covenanted between the surety and creditor. But there is a third plan : The kind brother has some ” script” of the capital stock of some company, which, ” by its face ” amounts nominally, to one hundred pounds, but all know that it is worth but little. Yet he goes to the creditor, saving: ” My brother and I have a pride about bearing the name of full payment of our debt. We propose that you take this ‘ script’ as one hundred pounds (which is its nominal amount), and give us a discharge, which shall state that you have payment in full.” Now, if the creditor assents, this is payment per acceptilationem. Does Christ’s satisfaction amount to no more than this ? We answer emphatically, it does amount to more. This disparaging conception is refuted by many scriptures, such as Isa. xlii : 21; liii : 6. It is dishonorable to God, representing Him as conniving at a “legal fiction,” and surrendering all standard of truth and justice to confusion. On this low scheme, impossible to see how any real necessity for satisfaction could exist.

Christ Suffered the
very Penalty.

The Reformed assert then, that Christ made penal satisfaction, by suffering the very penalty demanded by the law of sinners. In this sense, we say even idem fecit.

The identity we assert is, of course, not a numerical one, but a generic one. If we are asked, how this could be, when Christ was not holden forever of death, and experienced none of the remorse, wicked despair, and subjective pollution, attending a lost sinner’s second death? We reply: the same penalty, when poured out on Him, could not work all the detailed results, because of His divine nature and immutable holiness. A stick of wood, and an ingot of gold are subjected to the same fire. The wood is permanently consumed: the gold is only melted, because it is a precious metal, incapable of natural oxidation, and it is gathered, undiminished, from the ashes of the furnace. But the fire was the same! And then, the infinite dignity of Christ’s person gives to His temporal sufferings a moral value equal to the weight of all the guilt of the world. Dabney, Lectures in Systematic Theology, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1972), 504-505. [Some spelling modernized; marginal headers cited inline; and underlining mine.]

2) But the member from New Orleans, Dr. Palmer, insists that the report is, to say the least, “not happily worded,” in that its phraseology leaves a loop-hole for the lubricity of the new theology. Well, Mr. Moderator, I presume that the committee would at any time have partly assented to this judgment; for you will bear us witness that our estimate of our labors has been modest. We did not claim that our phraseology was absolutely the best, but only that it would do. We admitted that language is an instrument so flexible that an indefinite improvement may be made in the verbal dress of any thoughts by continued care and criticism. But, sir, the course of this discussion inclines me to place a more self-applauding estimate upon our humble labors; and I must profess that I think our doctrinal statements are rather happily worded on this point. I have been convinced of this by the very objections of the critics.

One of these was that the phrase, Christ bore his sufferings “as the penalty” of guilt, was loose and incorrect, because it suggested, by the little word as, not only a substitution of one person for another–Christ for the sinner–but of one penalty for another; whereas, it was urged, we should have taught that Christ suffered the identical penalty due the sinner. Thus, they complained, the deceitful errorist was enabled to cheat us honest folk by talking about a penal satisfaction for sin, when, after all, he only meant a loose sort of quasi satisfaction. Now I have been made very happy to find that our much abused little “as” expresses so much truth and so accurately. For the substitution, not only of one person for another, but of one penalty for another, in the atoning transaction called by theologians satisfaction, is the very thing asserted by the standard authors. It is obvious that if one person is substituted for another, then the penalty substituted cannot be identical with that in the room of which it came, in the sense of a numerical identity, however absolutely conformed it might be in a generic identity. And this distinction the acute Whately points out, in the introduction to his Logic, if I remember aright, in connection with this very subject. But farther, these divines all assert most emphatically, that in a case of penal satisfaction there is not an absolute generic identity between the penalty due and the penalty substituted. Turrettin, Rill, Dr. John H. Rice, I find saying, with entire unanimity, that satisfaction is where something else, not exactly the debt due, but a moral equivalent, is accepted as sufficient by the injured party. According to those acute critics, the Southern Presbyterian and Southern Presbyterian Review, little “as” suggested this idea. But this, say these great masters, is just the idea of Christ’s satisfaction. Is not this rather happy? R.L. Dabney, ‘Speech on the Fusion of the United Synod,” in Discussions: Evangelical and Theological, 2:308-309. [Some spelling modernized and underlining mine.]

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Woodbridge:

The like answer I give to Rom. 5:10, “We were reconciled unto God by the death of his Son,” to wit, that Christ’s death was the price of our reconciliation, and so it is through the death of Christ that we are reconciled, be it when it will be that we are reconciled. Here then we must distinguish, as it were of three periods of the will of God. 1. As it may be conceived immediately after sin committed, before the consideration of the death of Christ. And now is the Lord at enmity with the sinner, though not averse from all ways and means, by which he may return to friendship with him again. 2. As it may be conceived after the consideration of the death of Christ, and now is the Lord not only appeasable, but also does promise that he will be reconciled with sinners, upon such terms as he himself shall propose. 3. As the same will of God may be considered after the intercession of Christ’s part, and faith on the sinner’s part, and now is God actually reconciled and in friendship with the sinner, when then the Apostle says, “We are reconciled through the death of Christ,” he does not mean, that immediately upon the death of Christ we are actually reconciled unto God (for in the very next verse he says, that through Christ “we have now,” (not before), “received the atonement,” or reconciliation, which in plainer terms is this, that now, that is, since we are believers, we are actually reconciled unto God. But his meaning is, that through the death of Christ it is, that the promise of reconciliation is made, by and according to which we are actually reconciled unto God after we believe, suitable to that of the Lord Jesus, “This is the New Testament in my blood,” (obtained and sealed in my blood), “which was shed for the remission of the sins of many,” Matt. 26:28.

The ground of all this, because the death of Christ was not a solutio ejusdem, but tantidem, not the payment of the which was in the obligation, but of the equivalent, being not the payment of the debtor, but of the surety, and, therefore, it does not deliver us ipso facto, but according to the compact and agreement between the Father and him, when he undertook to be our surety. If a debtor bring me what he owes me, it discharges him presently, but the payment of a surety, is a payment refusable of itself, and therefore effects not the discharge of the principal debtor, but at the time, and according to the conditions agreed upon between the surety and the creditor.

If then our adversaries could prove, either that it was the will of God in giving up Christ to the death, or the will of Christ in giving himself to the death, that this death of his should be available to the immediate and actual reconciliation and justification of the sinner, without any condition performed on the sinner’s part, it were something to the purpose. But till this be done (which, indeed, can never be done) they were as good as say nothing,: When Christ gives us an account both of his own and his Father’s will in this matter, he tells us. “That it is the will of him, ‘That whosoever sees the Son and believes on him, may have everlasting life,’” John 6:40, without which faith, Christ “shall profit us nothing,” Gal. 5:4; I John 5:11,12: “He that has not seen the Son has not life.” So much for that objection.

Benjamin Woodbridge, Justification by Faith: Or a Confutation of that Antinomian Error, That Justification is before Faith; Being the Sum and Substance of a Sermon Preached at Sarum, by Benjamin Woodbridge, Minister of Newberry in Barkshire (London: Printed by John Field for Edmund Paxton, and are to be sold at his Shop in Pauls Chain, over against the Castle-Tavern, near to the Doctors Commons, 1653), 22-23. [Some reformatting; some spelling modernized; and underlining mine.]

[Notes: 1) What Woodbridge says here stands in direct denial of Owen’s claims regarding the exact identity and irrefusability of Christ’s satisfaction (contra Baxter). 2) Woodbridge’s sentiments are solidly echoed by Charles Hodge relative to the same point. 3) The theological implications are clear: When understood correctly, the satisfaction of Christ does not entail any notion of an actual pre-faith justification. For as long as the sinner declines to comply with any conditions proposed by the Father and the Son, that sinner remains under the wrath of God wherein he stands before God in an unjustified state. 4) The view that the satisfaction of Christ was a strict and proper payment to the idem of the law laid the foundation for the more basic distortion that the imputation of sin involved a literal transference of the debtor’s obligation to the surety. However, construed in this way (as a strict and literal payment to the idem of the law’s demands), forgiveness of the debtor is no longer an act of grace, but an act of justice; contra Owen, who for the same reason reasons pushed “grace” back into election, displacing it from the act of forgiveness and pardon (c.f., Dabney’s lectures 42 and 43 in his Lectures of Systematic Theology. 5) What is unfortunate is that in modern times, this conception of the relationship between the Father and the Son in the death of Christ has been eclipsed by the rush to reaffirm Owen’s theological conclusions, all the while being ignorant of the defective theological assumptions which under-gird those conclusions. The net result is that the theological waters regarding the death of Christ have been muddied and distorted.]

Payne:

Dr. Owen, also, who at an earlier period of his life espoused the notion that the Redeemer suffered the exact quantum of punishment which the elect must have endured,–an opinion. which necessarily implies that his atonement was not in itself sufficient for the salvation of all,–in more advanced age warmly recommended Polhill’s Treatises on the Divine Will,” the arguments of which,” he says, “are suited to the genius of the age past, wherein accuracy and strictness of reason bear sway.” And yet this treatise ‘argues in the following manner; “If Christ did in no way die for all men, which way shall the truth of these general promises be made out? ‘Whosoever will, may take of the water of life.’ What, though Christ never bought it for him? ‘Whosoever believes shall be Saved.’ What, though there was no lutron, no price paid for him? Surely the gospel knows no water of life, but that which Christ purchased, nor any way of salvation but by a lutron, or price paid. If Christ no way died for all men, how can these promises stand true? All men, if they believe, shall be saved;–saved, but how? Shall they be saved by a lutron, or price of redemption? There was none at all paid for them t the immense value of Christ’s death doth not make it a price as to them for whom he died not; or shall they be saved without a lutron, or price? God’s unsatisfied justice cannot suffer it, his minatory law cannot bear it, neither doth the gospel know. any such way of salvation; take it either way, the truth of those promises cannot be vindicated, unless we say that Christ died for all men.” I do not wish to be understood as expressing approbation of the whole of this language. The writer seems to have entertained obscure conceptions in reference to the nature of the atonement,–the manner in which the death of Christ secured the pardon of sin. I merely quote it as involving the opinion that his sacrifice is in itself sufficient for the whole family of man; which is all for which I think it necessary to contend.

George Payne, Lectures on Divine Sovereignty, Election, the Atonement, Justification, and Regeneration (London: James Dinnis, 62, Paternoster Row, 1838), 220-221.

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Dagg:

An unrestricted invitation to all who hear the gospel, to come to Christ for life, seems to imply that universal provision has been made in him; and in order to the making of universal provision, it appears necessary that he should have borne the sins of all men.

But the supposition that he bore the sins of the whole human race, is attended with much difficulty. Multitudes died in impenitence before he came into the world, and were suffering for their sins in the other world, while he was hanging on the cross. How could he be a substitute for these, and suffer the penalty for their sins, when they were suffering it in their own persons? And if he endured the penalty for the sins of all who have since died, or shall hereafter die in impenitence, how shall they be required to satisfy justice a second time by personal suffering?

For a solution of this difficulty, with which the minds of many have been much perplexed, it has been supposed that the amount of suffering necessary to make an atoning sacrifice, is not increased or lessened by the amount of the sin to be atoned for. This hypothesis is entitled to respect, not only because of the relief which it affords the mind, but also because it has recommended itself to the general acceptance of learned and pious men. Nevertheless, like every other hypothesis invented for the removal of difficulty, it should not be made an article of faith, until it has been proved.

In support of the hypothesis, it has been argued that since the wages of sin is death, Christ must have died for a single sin, and he needed only to die, in making atonement for the sins of the whole world.

This argument does not sustain the hypothesis, unless it be assumed that death is the same in every supposable case. But death may be an easy and joyful transition from this world to the world of bliss. Such was not the death of Christ. Death, as the wages of sin, includes more than the mere dissolution of the body: and Christ, in dying for sin, endured an amount of sorrow which was not necessary to mere natural death. In this suffering, the expiatory efficacy of his death chiefly consisted; and we dare not assume that the amount of it must be the same in every supposable case. The sufferings of Christ derive infinite value from his divine nature; but, being endured by his human nature, their amount could not be infinite; hence it is supposable that the amount might have been different in different circumstances. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah will, in the last day, be doomed to the second death, equally with the more guilty inhabitants of Chorazin and Bethsaida: but the anguish attendant will be more intolerable in one case than in the other. Analogy would seem to require, that Christ, suffering for the sins of the whole world, must endure more than if suffering for only one sin.

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