Remarks on the Princeton Review [pp. 306-347]

1851.]
The Systems lrreconecilable.
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payment has been made in his behalf. No less different is the
doctrine that Christ's work renders the remission of sin possible,
and the doctrine that he has made a full satisfaction for the sins of
his people. As these doctrines are different in their nature, so they
differ in their effects. The one gives the sense of justification,
of that peace which arises out of the apprehension that our sins
have been punished, that justice is satisfied, that the law no
longer condemns, but acquits and pronounces just. If any man
is unable to reconcile this conviction, that justice no longer condemns the believer, with the most humbling sense of ill-desert,
he must be in a state of mind very different from that which
has characterized the great body of God's people. It is this
sense of personal ill-desert combined with the assurance that justice can lay nothing to the charge of God's elect, when clothed in
the righteousness of Christ, which produces that union of peace
with a sense of unworthiness, of confidence with self-distrust,
of self-abasement and self-renunciation with the assurance of
,God's love, which gleams and burns through all the writings of
the Apostles, and which found utterance in the devotional language of the saints in all ages.*
* In referenee to this subject Professor Park uses the following language in his
remarks on our review. In regard to the remark that Christ has fully paid the
debt of sinners, he asks,, Does not the Reviewer himself qualify this phrase, in his
common explanations of it? Why does he to often teach that Christ has not paid
the debt of sinners in any such sense (which would be the ordinary sense of the
phrase) as to make it unjust in God to demand the sinner's own payment of it?
Why does he teach, that although the debt of sinners is paid, in a very peculiar
sense, yet it is not so paid but that they may be justly cast into prison until they
themselves have paid the uttermost farthing? Another illustration is,' the unqualified remark that Christ suffered the whole punishment which sinners deserve.' And
does not the Reviewer elsewhere thrust in various modifications of this phrase,
saying Christ did not suffer any punishment in such a sense, as renders it unjust
for the entire punishment of the law to be still inflicted on transgressors; that he
did not suffer the whole, the precise eternal punishment which sinners deserve,
that in fact he did not suffer any punishment at all in its common acceptation of
pain inflicted on a transgressor of law on account of his transgression, and for the
purpose of testifying the lawgiver's hatred of him as a transgressorS' Why, then,
does the Reviewer here represent this unqualified remark' as identical with the
ambiguous phrase'Christ bore our punishment,' and as a,summation of the manifold and diversified representations of Scripture'" Reply, p. 162.
It may serve to convince the author that there is a real difference between the
two systems under comparison, to be told, that his Reviewer does hold that Christ
has paid the debt of sinners in such a sense that it would be unjust to exact its
payment from those who believe. The Reviewer does hold that Christ has suffered the punishment of sin, in such a sense that it would be unjust to exact that
punishment of those who accept of his righteousness. This is the very idea ofjus