The Moral Governmental Theory of Atonement: Re-envisioning Penal Substitution

By Obbie Tyler Todd and Oliver D. Crisp

The American moral governmental theory of the atonement (MGT) was arguably the most contextualized doctrine of atonement in the history of the Protestant tradition. Hewn from the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and engineered to address the theological, political, philosophical, moral, and even economic milieu in the early republic, MGT became the doctrinal centerpiece of "the first indigenous American school of Calvinism." As a result, it stands as a kind of theological time capsule to the people and principles that shaped the tumultuous period between the first Great Awakening and the Civil War when it flourished in America. For over a century in the Anglo-American world, the doctrine of atonement was under heavy construction in the broader Reformed community. By endowing new meaning to old theological terms like imputation, substitution, justice, punishment, and even atonement, MGT represents a theological watermark of sorts in Reformed dogmatics, defining its limits, testing its boundaries, and demanding a level of precision from today's theologians. This book offers a contextualization, distillation, and conversation with this Edwardsean doctrine of atonement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725260320

Obbie Tyler Todd

Obbie Tyler Todd is pastor of Third Baptist Church of Marion, Illinois and adjunct professor of theology at Luther Rice College & Seminary in Lithonia, Georgia.

Book preview

Introduction

The fact is that Calvinism did survive the Second Great Awakening. Indeed, Edwardseanism thrived as never before.

—Douglas A. Sweeney

¹

The best starting point for this book is its purpose. Why is it important to learn about a theory of atonement no longer held in the church today? What’s the point? Although a variety of theories on the atonement still persist in the church, the language of God’s moral government has largely ceased. After all, when was the last time you heard a preacher exhorting his congregation to behold the glory of the Moral Governor? Not recently. However, in the early days of the American experiment, such language was actually quite common. In fact, moral government was one of the theological themes that tethered nearly every Protestant denomination in the early republic. The first American-born school of Calvinism established moral government as the centerpiece of their doctrine of atonement and their entire theology. First and Second Great Awakening revivalists preached a moral governmental atonement to hundreds of thousands. Moral governmental theory (MGT) was a nation-shaping and epoch-defining doctrine now largely forgotten. Consider this book a reintroduction.

Most American evangelicals today do not recognize nicknames like the New Divinity and Consistent Calvinism, but they would certainly recognize some of the names that shaped or promoted versions of MGT: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, Timothy Dwight, Adoniram and Ann Judson, Andrew Fuller, Sarah Osborn, Nathaniel Taylor, Richard Furman, Lemuel Haynes, Charles Finney, Jesse Mercer, Edwards Amasa Park, and so on. If we could ever define such a seemingly nebulous thing as American religion, moral government would certainly be an important ingredient.

²

While not everyone utilizing the trope of moral government was promoting MGT, and although some evangelicals drew their ideas from overseas rather than from Jonathan Edwards and the Edwardseans, the source was usually the same: New England.

³

As a result, MGT became the signature doctrine for something called the New England Theology.

However, in focusing on New Englanders, most works on moral governmental theory have overlooked the fact that MGT was a national and even international phenomenon. Although, for example, Congregationalists and Southern Baptists, Hopkinsians and Finneyites did not share identical systems of thought, moral governmental theory was bound by a set of fixed principles that united theologians of different denominations and different backgrounds. Moral governmentalists were not a monolith, but they shared a basic theological DNA, so to speak. Whereas scholars from D. P. Rudisill to Douglas Sweeney to Daniel W. Cooley have emphasized the genetic link between Edwards and the Edwardseans and the differences within the Edwardsean tradition, I will present moral governmental theory as a coherent whole, even with its various permutations and phases.

⁴

Rather than emphasizing what the Edwardseans had in common with Edwards, this book will demonstrate what the Edwardseans had in common with themselves, which, not surprisingly, was often shaped by Edwards—but not always. As William Breitenbach and others have observed, the early Edwardseans were neither truly original nor completely epigonic. In fact, because they were so dedicated to Edwards’s project, they were almost destined to innovate.

⁵

When Edwards Amasa Park defined New England Theology, he argued that it did not consist in the peculiarities in which any one of his followers differed with one another, but instead comprehends the principles which bound them all together.

⁶

In other words, despite its remarkable adaptability to a number of movements and milieus, MGT had a consistent ideological framework. As the Edwardseans were fond of saying, MGT was part of a careful theological system. This book will offer (a) contextualization (b) distillation and (c) conversation with that system.

The following is a systematic theology of moral governmental theory, one that engages with the view both historically and critically. In Jonathan Edwards studies, historians and theologians are often difficult to distinguish. The historians are theologically minded and the theologians are historically oriented. The same difficulty applies when studying the Edwardseans. My research builds on the work of a number of these polymaths, including Douglas Sweeney and Oliver Crisp. Their co-edited volume After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology (2012) first introduced me to the world of the Edwardseans and their moral governmental theory of atonement.

⁷

Crisp’s chapter on The Moral Government of God and his 2008 article Penal Non-substitution have contributed significantly to my understanding of MGT.

⁸

Sweeney and other theological historians like Joseph A. Conforti have written so thoroughly on the history of the Edwardsean tradition that one cannot attempt to dissect the moral governmental theory of atonement without engaging their works.

⁹

A great deal of thanks is owed to Sweeney and Crisp for their emails and time spent over coffee, helping me to clarify the Edwardsean project. More than simply echoing their thoughts, this book builds on their work and, at times, revises a few misconceptions of Edwardsean theology.

Most importantly, this book is an attempt to lend greater understanding of Christ’s work on the cross. Studying MGT in the twenty-first century is similar to studying Latin: while it is certainly not used today, its roots and stems help us to parse out our own theological language and explain why evangelicals past and present speak as they do. By redefining traditional theological terms like imputation, justice, substitution, and even atonement, the Edwardseans force us to drill down to the most basic definitions of these words, consider what they mean, and contemplate our own theological system. For instance, although I am in firm agreement with the Reformed understanding of penal substitution, I do not hesitate to critique certain aspects of the tradition in order to demonstrate how the strengths and weaknesses of moral governmental theory help us to speak with greater theological accuracy. One of the most remarkable features of MGT is the fact that its many proponents fully believed their view to be consistent with the Reformed tradition and yet contrary to the traditional understanding of penal substitution, a distinction that might surprise many Christians today. Therefore, MGT can still press us to define what we mean by words such as Reformed and even substitution. The Edwardseans were re-envisioning penal substitution for their revolutionary world, a rather bold endeavor for one of the boldest generations in American and human history. By examining the New Divinity project and how other groups in the early republic bought into that project, we can gather conceptual tools to better present the atonement in our own milieu, adopting the Edwardsean spirit of contextualization without necessarily adopting their creativity.

Three-Part Approach

This book will be divided into three parts: (1) contextualization, (2) distillation, and (3) conversation. In the first section, chapters 1 and 2 will address the origins of MGT. Chapter 1 examines the seminal theology of Jonathan Edwards and how it profoundly shaped the moral governmental view. Chapter 2 will present the Edwardseans as Americanized theologians who interacted with their changing world and tailored their model of the atonement for that world. MGT was a product of Edwards as well as the theological, political, social, moral, and even economic landscape in which the New Divinity lived.

Once moral governmental theory has been situated in its historical context, section two will distill the five core principles behind MGT: (1) glory, (2) goodness, (3) sovereign grace, (4) public justice, and (5) faith. These principles were the conceptual backbone of the moral governmental view. In chapter 3, glory and goodness will be examined together, as they were the most fundamental principles in shaping the theory and the entire Edwardsean worldview. Like two rails on a track, these two ideas guided every other idea in MGT and produced a tendency to depict sin and soteriology in the most public of terms. In chapter 4, we will look at the idea of sovereign grace and how the Edwardseans were determined to frame the atonement in a way that emphasized God as a Moral Governor who pardoned sinners rather than a divine Creditor who gave people what they were owed. As a result, MGT was a non-saving atonement. As an extralegal atonement, Christ did not suffer exactly what sinners endure under the law, but something equivalent to it. In chapter 5, the concept of public or general justice will be dissected. Rejecting distributive and commutative justice and really all commercial themes, the Edwardseans believed that Christ’s death was not about receiving the penalty of the law for each sinner individually nor about exchanging his righteousness with theirs. Instead, Christ vindicated the honor of the law, even though he did not endure its actual penalty. By honoring the Moral Governor and his law and promoting the most good in the moral universe, Christ’s moral governmental atonement satisfies public justice. In chapter 6, we will assess the Edwardsean principle of faith as duty. This emphasis upon faith was supported by Jonathan Edwards’s notion of natural ability. The concept of duty faith also helped the Edwardseans reconcile an unlimited atonement with unconditional election in their four-point Calvinistic scheme. Edwardseans were not hypothetical universalists, but did subscribe to something I call potential universalism.

After moral governmental theory has been broken down into its most basic ideological parts, we will assess the Edwardsean project as whole. In section three, I will place MGT further under the microscope and consider whether the view was penal substitutionary in nature and whether it can help us re-envision the atonement for our context today. In chapter 7, I ask the question: was the moral governmental theory of atonement really a Reformed atonement? Using J. I. Packer’s criteria for penal substitution as a rubric, I will measure the Edwardseans’ claims to Reformed theology against other Reformed theologians. As I conclude (and as the title suggests), moral governmental theory was indeed penal substitutionary in nature. However, this requires a degree of explanation and nuance. In chapter 8, I will engage modern critiques of penal substitution and seek to utilize the strengths of MGT to help rebut those claims. In this chapter, I engage other thinkers in conversation and bring moral governmental theory into contemporary light, retrieving its strengths for a new generation of theologians seeking to defend Christ’s penal substitutionary atonement. To be clear, I am not seeking to critique penal substitution so much as to clarify and fortify the view with the best of MGT, a view likewise penal substitutionary in nature. The result is something we might call a robust penal substitution.

In all nine chapters, whether in critiquing their views or drawing them into conversation with other thinkers, I’ve labored to present MGT through the lens of those who held to the view. These pastor-theologians prided themselves on their theological precision and their clarity of thought, and their moral governmental view is best articulated in their own words. Therefore, I’ve drawn from a range of primary sources, most notably Edwards Amasa Park’s The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises by Edwards, Smalley, Maxcy, Emmons, Griffin, Burge, and Weeks (1859).

¹⁰

Park’s introductory essay is, in the words of Joseph Conforti, the first systematic history of the governmental theory in Edwardsian thought and therefore became a canonical text for supporters of the New England theology.

¹¹

Park’s observations are included throughout the book. However, I also draw from those who have not been associated with the strict Hopkinsian school. For instance, while Timothy Dwight was a moderate Edwardsean, his views on the atonement were very similar to those of Hopkins. As one of the chief developers of the moral governmental trope, Dwight wrote a prodigious amount on the atonement, and his biographer John R. Fitzmier was helpful as well.

¹²

One of the distinctive features of this book is its inclusion of Edwardsean Baptists like Andrew Fuller, William B. Johnson, and others. I also seriously engage with Charles Finney and his sui generis view.

In regard to methodology, when possible, I have attempted to show where the Edwardseans differed on significant aspects of MGT, particularly between Bellamy and later New Divinity men. However, consistent with the thesis of the book, all moral governmentalists abided by a set of laws that characterized MGT. For the sake of good scholarship, I have also sought to present alternative views—both historical and present-day—to the moral governmental scheme and even to the traditional penal substitutionary model. While these sources are certainly not comprehensive, they at least represent some of the other voices in the discussion.

In order to facilitate the reader as they begin reading my work, I would like to submit a technical definition of the moral governmental theory of atonement.

MGT can best be defined as follows:

As a public exhibition of the evil consequences of sin and God’s displeasure with it, Christ suffered the equivalent of damnation in order to maintain the honor of the law, to vindicate the Moral Governor, and to achieve the most good for his moral universe. Christ did not endure the actual penalty of the law, but suffered extralegally, non-savingly, and non-transferrably as a substitute for punishments in order satisfy public (general) and rectoral justice and to open the door for sinners to be pardoned of their sins upon faith by a good and just Ruler.

¹³

With a working definition in place, we can now set sail. In the first chapter, we will examine the historical and theological background of MGT, tracing its roots primarily to Jonathan Edwards and secondarily to the American milieu its architects inhabited.

1

. Sweeney, Evangelical Tradition in America,

220

.

2

. Mark Noll’s America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln is one of the best attempts to do exactly that. Not surprisingly, Noll spends time dissecting the concept of moral government (Noll, America’s God,

290

–

92

,

305

–

6

,

442

).

3

. Oliver Crisp has identified American Methodist John Miley as one who held to a Grotian view of the atonement instead of an Edwardsean view (Crisp, Penal Non-substitution,

141

n

3

). Others adopted the moral governmental view through English Edwardseans, such as Jesse Mercer, who was influenced by the thinking of Andrew Fuller (Mercer, Ten Letters). Others were influenced by both New England Edwardseans and English Edwardseans, like Richard Furman, who sought to blend traditional penal substitution with MGT. See Todd, Baptist at the Crossroads.

4

. Rudisill, Doctrine of Atonement; Sweeney and Guelzo, New England Theology; Cooley, New England Theology and Atonement; Douglas Sweeney has identified three major phases in the New England Theology: a phase succeeding the Great Awakening, when Edwards’s New Divinity followers systematized his doctrinal views; a phase at the height of the Second Great Awakening, when Edwardseans such as [Nathaniel] Taylor recontextualized these views, making them serviceable for evangelism in early national America; and a phase in the antebellum period, when myriad evangelicals claimed a New England doctrinal pedigree, but the movement grew so large that it began to pull apart—and Edwards A. Park tried desperately to stitch it together (Sweeney, Evangelical Tradition in America,

225

).

5

. William Breitenbach has critiqued the validity of Joseph Haroutunian’s piety-versus-moralism model, which pitted the theology of Edwards against that of his successors. In addition to recognizing Edwards’s most creative and important contributions to New England theology, Breitenbach also insists that this Edwardsian theology, for all its originality, should be seen as maintaining the fundamental commitment of New England Puritanism to the reconciliation of grace and law (Breitenbach, "Piety and Moralism,"

177

–

204

).

6

. Park, New England Theology,

7

.

7

. Crisp and Sweeney, After Jonathan Edwards.

8

. Crisp, Moral Government of God,

78

–

90

; Crisp, Penal Non-substitution,

140

–

68

.

9

. Sweeney, Nathaniel Taylor; Kling and Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad; Cooley and Sweeney, Edwardseans and the Atonement,

109

–

25

; Sweeney, Taylorites, Tylerites, and the Dissolution,

181

–

99

; Sweeney, Evangelical Tradition in America,

217

–

38

; Conforti, Jonathan Edwards; Conforti, Samuel Hopkins.

10

. Park, The Atonement [

1859

].

11

. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards,

124

.

12

. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator.

13

. As will be shown, public justice is established when (

1

) God is properly honored as Ruler of the universe and (

2

) when the well being of the moral universe is secured. Rectoral justice, on the other hand, is God’s rectitude as Ruler as he righteously upholds his moral law. Therefore, public justice necessarily entails rectoral justice, although the two are not identical.

I. The Origins of a Doctrine

Chapter 1

The Epilogue to Edwards

The New Divinity did not come out of the blue. It came out of Edwards.

—William Breitenbach

¹⁴

The American moral governmental theory of the atonement (MGT) was arguably the most contextualized doctrine of atonement in the history of the Protestant tradition. Hewn from the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and engineered to address the theological, political, philosophical, moral, and even economic milieu in the early republic, MGT became the doctrinal centerpiece of the first indigenous American school of Calvinism.

¹⁵

As a result, it stands as a kind of theological time capsule to the people and principles which shaped the tumultuous period between the first Great Awakening and the Civil War when it flourished in America. However, nothing gold can stay. Due to the early American crucible in which it was forged, the moral governmental view could not survive the Gilded Age nor could it outlast its much older Reformed sibling, the traditional form of penal substitution (PSA).

¹⁶

But while it burned, it burned brightly.

In the early nineteenth century, MGT was adopted in various forms by theologians in numerous Protestant schools of thought who promoted their own brand of Reformed revivalism. Indeed, while the First Great Awakening can rightly be considered the genesis of the view, the Second Great Awakening featured an explosion of moral governmental thinking. Edward Dorr Griffin, a Congregationalist minister and the foremost figure in the revivals of Northwestern Connecticut, was thoroughly committed to a moral governmental scheme.

¹⁷

At Yale, professor of didactic theology Nathaniel William Taylor, the founder of the so-called New Haven Theology, taught the moral government of God as his central theme.

¹⁸

In the South, the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention, William B. Johnson, rejected the traditional penal substitutionary view in favor of a moral governmental model.

¹⁹

MGT could even be contextualized to suit other Arminian and Calvinistic schemes. By the end of the Second Great Awakening, in western New York, New Light Presbyterian Charles Finney preached an Arminian version of MGT that fused models of moral government and moral influence.

²⁰

Conversely, in Kettering, England, Particular Baptist Andrew Fuller reconciled a form of MGT with limited atonement.

²¹

In other words, the American moral governmental theory of atonement was not an ephemeral doctrine relegated to New England that quickly died out after the revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. Instead, it captured the American spirit in a way that transcended generations, denominational lines, geographical boundaries, and even the explosive issue of slavery.

²²

For over a century in the Anglo-American world, the doctrine of atonement was under heavy construction in the broader Reformed community. Rejecting the traditional penal substitutionary view of the atonement and other Arminian and universalist schemes, the early proponents of MGT remained carefully within the bounds of the Reformed tradition and thus continue to offer valuable conceptual tools in contemporary theological discourse. By endowing new meaning to old theological terms like imputation, substitution, punishment, and even atonement, MGT represents a theological watermark of sorts in Reformed dogmatics, defining its limits, testing its boundaries, and demanding even more theological precision from modern theologians. In order to elucidate the view, to gather a better sense of the nucleus and circumference of Reformed theology, and to consider how to effectively re-envision the atonement for today’s religious context, it is first important to understand why and how MGT flourished in early America, beginning with the central figure to whom Griffin, Taylor, Johnson, Finney, and Fuller directly or indirectly traced their views: Jonathan Edwards.

²³

Edwards and the Edwardseans

The authors of the moral governmental theory of atonement have gone by many names over the years. To Old Light (anti-revivalism) Congregationalists, they were known pejoratively as the New Divinity. According to Oliver Crisp and Douglas Sweeney, the doctrine of atonement became a hallmark of this emerging ‘New Divinity’ as the first phase of the New England Theology became known. The result was the New England version of the governmental account of the atonement.

²⁴

These revival-minded Congregationalists were also known as Hopkinsians or Hopkintonians after one of their chief leaders, Samuel Hopkins, whose System of Doctrines essentially codified their beliefs.

²⁵

New Divinity men like Hopkins called themselves Consistent Calvinists in contrast with the conditional Calvinism of Old Lights and the theological liberals of Eastern Massachusetts. By 1852, Edwards Amasa Park had recorded an entire litany of nicknames for the New England–born theology and its purveyors.

²⁶

Ultimately, scholars today have recognized this group as the Edwardseans, theologians who identified themselves as the true theological successors of Jonathan Edwards.

Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, the two primary architects of the New Divinity movement, studied under Edwards in his Northampton home. Consequently, Jonathan Edwards’s spirit hovers over their writings.

²⁷

Bellamy’s True Religion Delineated (1750), the first complete exposition of the moral governmental theory of the atonement, was prefaced by Edwards himself, who insisted that the matter or substance that is to be found in this discourse, is what, I trust, will be very entertaining and profitable to every serious and impartial reader, whether learned or unlearned.

²⁸

Samuel Hopkins even penned Edwards’s first biography, wherein he detailed some of the most intimate accounts of Edwards’s family life.

²⁹

Both Bellamy and Hopkins also mentored Edwards’s son, Jonathan Edwards Jr., whom many have identified as the primary architect of the American moral governmental theory of the atonement.

³⁰

In many ways, standing in the shadow of Edwards, these three men formed the triumvirate of the MGT system.

³¹

If the American milieu provided the tools which shaped the moral governmental view of atonement, America’s theologian supplied its ideological raw materials. Pushing back against Joseph Haroutunian’s famously severe critique of the New Divinity, William Breitenbach insists, The so-called peculiarities and innovations of the New Divinity reveal Edwards’s most creative and important contributions to New England theology. Admittedly there were differences between the master and his disciples, but it is evident nonetheless that the leading tendencies of Edwards’s system can be discovered by tracing the trajectory of his ideas in the theology of his New Divinity successors.

³²

While exhibiting similarities with the system of Hugo Grotius (i.e., the primacy of rectoral justice over retributive justice), the American moral governmental theory of atonement was a species all its own, with a Calvinistic emphasis upon divine sovereignty and an insistence that punishment of sin was a matter of divine obligation.

³³

Therefore, MGT can be appropriately labeled the Edwardsean, not the Grotian, view of the atonement.

³⁴

As Oliver Crisp has demonstrated, The seeds of the New England governmental view of the atonement were sown by Edwards himself.

³⁵

In this sense, if Edwards planted, the Edwardseans watered and gave the growth.

³⁶

In fact, according to Jonathan Edwards Jr., it was the latter who have thrown new and important light upon The Doctrine of the Atonement.

³⁷

As will be shown, the idea of moral government itself did not begin with Edwards. Nor was moral government the most fundamental theme in his writings on the atonement. As Brandon James Crawford has shown, The basic framework of Edwards’s doctrine of atonement follows the same contours as that of his Reformed orthodox predecessors.

³⁸

However, Edwards’s emphasis on God as Rector and his concern for God’s glory and goodness laid the foundation for the Edwardsean view. In his dissertation entitled The New England Theology and the Atonement: Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park, Daniel W. Cooley traces the genetic link between Edwards and the moral governmental view of atonement. Cooley insists, The divine moral government is a recurring concept in Edwards’s thought. To be sure, Edwards was not unique in this respect. Reformed theologians of the previous two centuries believed that God was the supreme moral being in the universe and had unequaled moral responsibility and legal authority in the universe. . . . Edwards’s concept lays stress on God’s regulation of spiritual, moral, and ethical matters rather than his oversight of the physical realm.

³⁹

Indeed, Edwards’s version of moral government was marked by a heavy ethical bent, a tendency he