John McLeod Campbell - Works

Works

Jonathan Edward's question regarding the atonement, one of the prompts for Campbell's work, was: "Could God be satisfied by Christ's earnest and honest repentance on behalf of humanity, or was his death necessary for satisfaction, forgiveness, and atonement to occur?" Asked in another way, did Christ have to die to effect atonement, or was there another way for atonement to take place? Campbell also was pastorally sensitive to the attitude of his parishioners in living as Christians. He discovered that their Christianity was essentially joyless and depressing.

Campbell's influence may be seen particularly in the work of Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Donald Baillie, and most notably in Thomas F. Torrance and James B. Torrance. Later Scottish theology affirmed Campbell's influence in its departure from the strict reading of Westminster's Standards. Campbell, through the influence of the Torrance brothers, has begun to be appreciated as a pastoral theologian.

In 1856 Campbell published The Nature of the Atonement, which profoundly influenced Scottish theology. Campbell's theological aim was to view the Atonement in the light of the Incarnation. In the Atonement, one may not separate the birth, person, work, and death of Jesus Christ. As one looks more closely at Christ, one may discover that the divine mind in Christ is the mind of perfect obedient sonship towards God and perfect brotherhood towards men. Jesus Christ in his person fulfills the law to love God wholeheartedly and to love neighbor selflessly. By the light of this divine fact of the Incarnation, Christ's life as atonement, vicariously lived in humanity's place, is seen to develop itself naturally and necessarily as a perfect and complete reconciliation; the penal element in the sufferings of Christ is but one aspect or facet of the atonement.

Campbell has been wrongly accused of minimizing the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement (Anselm's view) with his alternate view, but Campbell never denied its theological veracity. He merely expanded on what was the case in Christ, in light of the atonement. Campbell was interested in penetrating into the "nature" of Christ's atonement. Subsequent critics have argued that Campbell's position was not self-consistent in the place assigned to the penal and expiatory element in the sufferings of Christ, nor adequate in its recognition of the principle that the obedience of Christ perfectly affirms all righteousness and so satisfies the holiness of God, thus effecting a peace and reconciliation between God and humanity—a true atonement. Such criticisms, however, ignore Campbell's theological reading of Numbers 25. Campbell was clear that one could not separate the Cross from the incarnation.

In 1862 Campbell published Thoughts on Revelation and a few years later (1869) he published a revised version of his 1851 book: Christ the Bread of Life.