The general teaching in the Early Church on the doctrine of the Atonement was that Christ, as the Representative of Humanity, faced and conquered Satan, the representative of the Dark Powers, who held humanity in bondage, wrested his captive from him, and set him free. Slowly, as Christian teachers lost touch with spiritual truths, and they reflected their own increasing intolerance and harshness on the pure and loving Father of the teachings of the Christ, they represented Him as angry with man, and the Christ was made to save man from the wrath of God instead of from the bondage of evil. Then legal phrases intruded, still further materialising the once spiritual idea, and the "scheme of redemption" was forensically outlined. "The seal was set on the 'redemption scheme' by Anselm in his great work, _Cur Deus Homo_, and the doctrine which had been slowly growing into the theology of Christendom was thenceforward stamped with the signet of the Church. Roman Catholics and Protestants, at the time of the Reformation, alike believed in the vicarious and substitutionary character of the atonement wrought by Christ. There is no dispute between them on this point. I prefer to allow the Christian divines to speak for themselves as to the character of the atonement.... Luther teaches that 'Christ did truly and effectually feel for all mankind the wrath of God, malediction, and death.' Flavel says that 'to wrath, to the wrath of an infinite God without mixture, to the very torments of hell, was Christ delivered, and that by the hand of his own father.' The Anglican homily preaches that 'sin did pluck God out of heaven to make him feel the horrors and pains of death,' and that man, being a firebrand of hell and a bondsman of the devil, 'was ransomed by the death of his only and well-beloved son'; the 'heat of his wrath,' 'his burning wrath,' could only be 'pacified' by Jesus, 'so pleasant was the sacrifice and oblation of his son's death.' Edwards, being logical, saw that there was a gross injustice in sin being twice punished, and in the pains of hell, the penalty of sin, being twice inflicted, first on Jesus, the substitute of mankind, and then on the lost, a portion of mankind; so he, in common with most Calvinists, finds himself compelled to restrict the atonement to the elect, and declared that Christ bore the sins, not of the world, but of the chosen out of the world; he suffers 'not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me.' But Edwards adheres firmly to the belief in substitution, and rejects the universal atonement for the very reason that 'to believe Christ died for all is the surest way of proving that he died for none in the sense Christians have hitherto believed.' He declares that 'Christ suffered the wrath of God for men's sins'; that 'God imposed his wrath due unto, and Christ underwent the pains of hell for,' sin. Owen regards Christ's sufferings as 'a full valuable compensation to the justice of God for all the sins' of the elect, and says that he underwent 'that same punishment which ... they themselves were bound to undergo.'"[214]
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Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries — Part 68
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