Agonizomai: The Doctrine Satisfaction<br>(The Active and Passive Obedience of Christ)<br>B.B. Warfield

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

The Doctrine Satisfaction
(The Active and Passive Obedience of Christ)
B.B. Warfield

"The Biblical doctrine of the sacrifice of Christ finds full recognition in no other construction than that of the established church-doctrine of satisfaction. According to it, our Lord's redeeming work is at its core a true and perfect sacrifice offered to God, of intrinsic value ample for the expiation of our guilt; and at the same time is a true and perfect righteousness offered to God in fulfillment of the demands of His law; both the one and the other being offered in behalf of His people, and, on being accepted by God, accruing to their benefit; so that by this satisfaction they are relieved at once from the curse of their guilt as breakers of the law, and from the burden of the law as a condition of life; and this by a work of such kind and performed in such manner, as to carry home to the hearts of man a profound sense of the indefectible righteousness of God and to make them a perfect revelation of His love; so that, by this one indivisible work, both God is reconciled to us, and we, under the quickening influence of the Spirit bought for us by it, are reconciled to God, so making peace - external peace between an angry God and sinful men, and internal peace in the response of the human conscience to the restored smile of God.

This doctrine, which has been incorporated in more or less fullness of statement in the creedal declarations of all the great branches of the Church, Greek, Latin, Lutheran, and Reformed, and which has been expounded with more or less insight and power by the leading doctors of the churches for the last eight hundred years, was first given scientific statement by Anselm in his "Cur Deus Homo" (1098); but it reached its complete development only at the hands of the so-called Protestant Scholastics of the seventeenth century."

[Warfield then goes on to reference works by Francis Turretin and John Owen, as well as numerous more modern writers such as H. Bavinck, W.G.T. Shedd, R.L. Dabney and A.A. Hodge.]

B. B Warfield - "The Person and Work of Christ" (p368) Chapter X, "The Chief Theories of the Atonement". The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Philadelphia, PA., 1950


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