The following excerpt, as Don Horrocks notes in his book Laws of the Spiritual Order, carried with it far-reaching implications for traditional Calvinist soteriology, involving the nature of atonement, imputation, original sin, the fall, and the supposed depravity of humanity. A new, fully annotated edition of Erskine’s The Spiritual Order and Other Papers is nearing completion. Stay tuned for updates.
“No suffering of a penalty due to sin, either by ourselves or by another in our place, can put sin away, for sin is a spiritual thing and can only be put away by a return to righteousness and as sin has also a strictly individual character, it is only by becoming righteous ourselves and not by another being so in our stead that sin in us can be truly put away. Salvation in its highest sense must be a personal and individual thing, and therefore, in order to attain it, each man must himself participate in the filial trust of Christ which is righteousness.
But although Christ’s work is not substitutional or, in the ordinary sense of the word, vicarious,1 still it is work done for man in a sense applicable to the work of no other human being. He does nothing instead of us—nothing, that is, to save us from doing it. He does things for us that we also may in him have power to do them. He did not die to save us from dying but that we might in the power of an endless life die with him, that we might by partaking in his death—by surrendering our life as he did into the hand of the Father in loving confidence—be also partakers of his resurrection. When he assumed our nature under all its evil conditions, he lived by faith. He accepted sorrow and death in faith. It was the cup his Father had given him to drink, and in doing so, he overcame death and him who had the power of death, thus by his example giving guidance and encouragement to every child of man. And further, he did this not as an individual but as the Head of the race thereby lifting all humanity along with himself up from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. None certainly can enter into his victory except by partaking in his trust. But in that general elevation of the nature, there must be contained real help for every man in his special work as well as a pledge that He who has raised Jesus to His own right hand will not cease His labor of love till He has raised there also the last and least of his members. In the victory of our Head, He has given us an all-sufficient foundation for the most absolute trust as well as a manifestation of the certain effects resulting from its exercise. None but a son could have made this revelation, and none but those who are created in the Son could be capable of apprehending or receiving it. He came to draw and guide the hearts of the children back to the Father, and he did so by his own life of filial trust.”
- Although Erskine rejects the way the words “substitutional” and “vicarious” were being used in his day, his understanding of Christ’s role as humanity’s Head and representative before the Father is remarkably similar to what T. F. Torrance termed “the vicarious humanity of Christ”—the doctrine that Jesus lived, trusted, obeyed, died, and rose again not just for us but as us, acting as the representative substitute for all humanity. He assumed our fallen human nature to heal, sanctify, and reconcile it to God from within, substituting his perfect faith and obedience for our own. ↩︎
Leave a Reply