In Quest of the Gospel

by Rev. John I. Samsvick

While serving a church in Waterbury, CT, in 1957, I rubbed shoulders with several local Congregational ministers who encouraged me to pursue seminary education. I was fresh out of Bible school but still full of questions and passionate about theology, and Yale Divinity School was the place to address them.

It was providential that ten years earlier I had picked up a small book by James Denney, the late nineteenth, early twentieth-century Scottish New Testament scholar, theologian, and pastor, entitled The Atonement and the Modern Mind. For Denney, preaching the gospel meant preaching the atonement—Christ died for our sins—but doing it in a way that did not offend “by an ostentation of unreason, or by a defiance of morality, the reason and conscience of man.”[1] According to Denney, those five words—Christ died for our sins—tell us that “on the basis of an incontrovertible experience…the forgiveness of sins…was mediated through the death of Christ.”[2]

It was here that I first discovered the difference in Denny’s approach from the one I had been taught. His focus was on how God forgives us, rather than seeing the gospel as the solution to a problem—how a sinful man shall be made right with God.  Many argue that Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness differs from Paul’s. The most common objection references the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-31) in which, it is claimed, there is no mention of atonement or mediation of forgiveness but only the son’s penitence and the father’s love. But Denny disagrees. “There is no Christ in it either—no elder brother who goes out to seek and to save the lost son, and to give his life a ransom for him. Surely we are not to put the Good Shepherd out of the Christian religion.”[3] He explains:

The Atonement is concerned [not with] the freeness of pardon, but the cost of it; not the spontaneity of God’s love…but the necessity under which it lay to manifest itself in a particular way if God was to be true to Himself…The Atonement is not the denial that God’s love is free; it is that specific manifestation or demonstration of God’s free love which is demanded by the situation of men…Repentance…is the fruit of the Atonement…[and] not possible apart from the apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ. It is the experience of the regenerate.[4]

Denney’s stress on the love of God as the source of the atonement led to a radical shift in my thinking about the character of that love. “[Christ] is not wringing favor or forgiveness for men from a God who is reluctant to bestow it; He is manifesting the love which God eternally is and eternally bears to his creatures."[5] But Denney protests the inferences that are sometimes drawn from these truths. "We must give up all that is meant by an objective atonement—that is, a work of Christ as Reconciler which tells upon God as well as upon the sinful…and abandon as misleading the use of such terms as propitiation, expiation…tainted incurably with the idea that the Son represents mercy and the Father judgment.[6] Denney believes that such arguments betray a profound lack of understanding about the deepest truth of Christ's work. His atoning death is intended to produce in sinners "God's mind about sin. It cannot do this simply as an exhibition of unconditioned love."[7]

The modern mind views the love of God as acting only in the communication of good and seems incapable of grasping the profound truth that God’s love seeks the highest good for humankind and therefore must oppose to the utmost everything that works against that purpose (see Robert Law’s The Test of Life: A Study of the First Epistle of St. John, Being the Kerr Lectures for 1909 (Baker Books, 1978).  It is this kind of love which is revealed when God set forth Christ Jesus as a propitiation in his blood (Rom. 3:25). As Denney says, "A love which owns the reality of sin by submitting humbly and without rebellion to the divine reaction against it; it is love doing homage to the divine ethical necessities which pervade the nature of things and the whole order in which men live."[8]

It is in this radical sense that Jesus "repents for us." It is Jesus' redeeming affirmation of God's righteousness: "Thou art righteous, O Lord, who judges us" (Rev. 16:407). And it is this profound experience of repentance that is reproduced in those of us who believe in Jesus; "and unless men are caught up into it, and made participant of it somehow, we cannot be reconciled [to God]."[9]

Denney has more to say on the subject of propitiation that touches the deepest level of human experience, the experience of being forgiven. He discovered that many of his parishioners had no idea what forgiveness means in the New Testament. They seemed to feel that the only thing required of them as sinners was to repent, to say to God, "I am sorry" and that settled matter. Their pastor objected:

[Sin's] reality is not exhausted so [by the sinner’s confession], even if… repentance is adequate to the offense. Sin is real in the universe, beyond the sinner's control. It is real to God; and before it can be forgiven by Him—or rather in the very act in which it is forgiven, as part of the very process of forgiving—His sense of its reality must be declared. This is what is done in the propitiation, and it is in proportion as we appreciate this that the Divine forgiveness appears an unspeakable gift.[10]

To those of his own generation who opposed any concept of propitiation (understood too often as appeasement) he appeals with a touching simplicity:

I have wondered whether [they] had ever had the experience of being truly forgiven for a real wrong by a fellow creature…. Real forgiveness, forgiveness by another whom we have wronged, and in whom there is a love, which forgiveness reveals, able at once to bear the wrong and to inspire the penitence through which we can rise above it; and it is tragic on both sides—to him who has borne the sin which he forgives, and to him who stoops with a penitent heart to be forgiven. What the propitiation stands for is the divine side of this tragedy. It is tragic for God to forgive — a solemn and awful experience… for Him; just as to be forgiven is tragic—a solemn and awful experience for us. This is the truth… which underlies all the New Testament teaching about propitiation. To evade it is… to pluck the heart out of the Christian religion… and to cut devotion at the root.[11]

 [1] James Denney, The Death of Christ, Revised and Enlarged Edition Including The Atonement and the Modern Mind (London, Hodder & Stoughton), 269.

[2] Ibid, 249.

[3] Ibid, 252.

[4] Ibid, 251-253.

[5] James Denney, The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation (New York, George H. Doran Company, 1918), 233.

[6] Ibid, 234.

[7] Ibid, 234.

[8] Ibid, 234.

[9] Ibid, 235.

[10] James Denney, The Way Everlasting (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 302.

[11] Ibid, 304.