John McLeod Campbell
Replaces penalty with vicarious repentance
The problem it faces
Grant (rightly) that punishment can't be transferred and penal substitution collapses — yet simply dropping objectivity, the Socinian route, throws away the real God-ward reality of the cross.
The move it makes
He relocates Christ's offering from penalty to confession: a perfect vicarious 'Amen' to the Father's judgment on sin, an adequate repentance humanity couldn't make — keeping atonement objective without transferring guilt.
The new problem it opens
It's unclear whether confession and repentance can bear the objective, Godward weight that penalty carried — either an adequate answer to condemnation quietly smuggles the penal element back in, or it leaves the wrath data unaddressed.
My notes
Campbell identifies the core problem with the Puritans in the very question they were trying to answer. He claims that their question, "what must be done to make God able to forgive?", is already off to a bad start because it treats the atonement as the cause of God's love and not the form of God's love.
So for him, the atonement is the manifestation of a loving forgiveness that already exists, not a method of acquisition thereof.
So he denies that the atonement is a mechanism at all. Instead, it's the person of Christ being who he now eternally is--God and man in one person. He is in the condition of God, and he is also in the condition of man, and it's this link, like the link of a chain, that binds men to God.
This is why he's considered in the ontological camp. The atonement *is* Jesus Christ, son of God and son of man. It's not merely the act on the cross bolted onto a life of teaching. Campbell therefore holds an Athanasian view of the incarnation.
Where this sits
Upstream
- Faustus Socinus grants it, relocates objectivity
- Athanasius ontological frame
Downstream
- T. F. Torrance carries forward