Christ our Example: The ‘Moral Influence’ Corrective

There’s an old saying that history is written by the victors. And this is true in theology no less than in the world of geopolitics. Controversies are all too often defined by the winning side, leaving the losing side not only voiceless but misrepresented and misunderstood. I say all this to start today’s post because the atonement ‘theory’ we’ll be discussing today has not only never been a theory (except perhaps among a small group of people in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century), but also does not actually reflect the beliefs of those who have been historically used as its representatives. I’m talking about what has been called the ‘moral influence’ perspective. Today I’d like to discuss what it is, what it never was, and what the major players assigned to it really cared about. I hope to show that while it has never been understood to fully explain the meaning of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, a ‘moral influence’ focus has historically emerged whenever the ethical consequences of Christian faith have been downplayed in the dominant streams of theology. This is to say, it is not — and has never really been — a ‘theory’, but is rather a corrective, and one we would do well not to dismiss.

At their most general level, moral influence perspectives on the atonement focus on Christ’s life and death as the exemplar of what a life dedicated to God looks like. (Note: Some theologians and historians differentiate between ‘exemplar’ and ‘moral influence’ ideas, but I think that is splitting hairs too finely, particularly since these were never full-fledged ‘theories’.) On the surface, there is nothing wrong or controversial about this. From the very earliest days, Christians have insisted that Christ reveals the way we should live and that the way of holiness lies in the imitation of Christ. In the Gospels, we see this idea reflected in Jesus’ call for his disciples to “take up their cross and follow” him (Matthew 10.38, cf 16.24 and Luke 14.27). This theme comes into sharper focus in the Epistles, where Paul refers to the Thessalonians as having become “imitators … of the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 1.6) and Peter exhorts his readers to “follow in his [Christ’s] steps” (1 Peter 2.21). But nowhere is it described more thoroughly than in the Philippians hymn, which is worth quoting in full once again:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus:
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form, he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2.5-11)

Perhaps unsurprisingly considering their increased concern for ‘good order’ within the Church, following Jesus’ example was a major theme in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers (the generation that followed the writing of the New Testament), as the following quotes suggest:

• “…our salvation [is] Jesus Christ … the benefactor and helper of our weakness. … Through him we see as in a mirror his faultless and transcendent face…” (1 Clement 36.1-2)
• “Allow me to be an imitator of the suffering of my God” (Ignatius to the Romans 6-7)
• “Only let it be in the name of Jesus Christ [that I am martyred], so that I may suffer together with him!” (Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans 4.2)
• “Stand fast, therefore … and follow the example of the Lord” (Polycarp to the Philippians 10.1)
• “As for all your prayers and acts of charity and all your actions, do them all just as you find it in the Gospel of our Lord” (Didache 15.4)
• “By loving [Christ] you will be an imitator of his goodness.” (Diognetus 10.4)

So, it was never the imitation of Jesus that was controversial. This was always understood to be a necessary part of Christian life. What did become controversial starting in the fifth century was the identification — whether real or perceived — of Christ’s example with his atoning work, any suggestion that Christ lived and died to save us by being an example to imitate.

This issue first arose with the Pelagian controversy, named after a British theologian Pelagius, who was active around the turn of the fifth century. This timing is important context, for the controversy was one of the consequences of the rapid transition of Christianity from being an illegal religion to being a preferred and then official religion of the Roman Empire. This saw a massive influx of people into the Church, of varying degrees of interest and commitment. The Church recognized the challenge that this represented, as we can see with the sudden increased focus on catechism (basic instruction given to converts) and the rapid rise of monasticism in the late fourth and fifth centuries. Pelagius responded to this challenge by pushing back against increased ‘professionalism’ of Christianity in terms of the ‘real work’ being done by clergy and monastics, and insisting on a faith that was lived out, by everyone, including and especially the laity. In one of the few surviving texts written by him, Pelagius defines a Christian as follows:

He is a Christian: who shows compassion to all, who is not at all provoked by wrong done to him, who does not allow the poor to be oppressed in his presence, who helps the wretched, who succors the needy, who mourns with the mourners, who feels another’s pain as if it were his own, who is moved to tears by the tears of others, whose house is common to all, whose door is closed to no one, whose table no poor man does not know, whose food is offered to all, whose goodness all know and at whose hands no one experiences injury, who serves God all day and night, who ponders and meditates upon his commandments unceasingly, who is made poor in the eyes of the world so that he may become rich before God. (On the Christian Life)

What got Pelagius into trouble, especially with Augustine, was that he was convinced that not only it was possible to live up to these standards, but also that it was possible for anyone, Christian or otherwise, to do so. Contrary to Augustine, who was at this same time developing his doctrine of Original Sin, Pelagius taught that God would not command us to live in ways we were fundamentally unable to live, so it must in fact be possible for us to fulfill the commandments. He also rejected Augustine’s formulation of Original Sin on the grounds that it would be inherently unjust for all of humanity to be punished for Adam’s sin. Rather, he held that Adam’s sin rendered humanity mortal and set a bad example for us, but we did not have to be afraid of death or follow Adam’s bad example. We are still free to live and act as we choose. Jesus, according to Pelagius, was sinless, but not uniquely so. He did die for humanity’s sins, but Pelagius downplays this, emphasizing instead Jesus’ role as a moral and ethical teacher, teaching which he lived out, even unto death.

At this point it’s easy to jump in and cheer on one side or the other depending on our own proclivities, but it’s really hard to know who is on the side of grace here: On the one hand, Augustine has all of humanity inherently stained from birth, unable to do the right thing, and deserving of eternal damnation. But on the other hand, Pelagius’s perspective means that we have no excuse before God when it comes to our sinfulness. We were created to be holy and if we’re not, that’s entirely on us. (It’s unfortunate that in the West the debate about sin and freedom ended up being limited to these two options, both of which are extreme! It took a very different form in the East.) At any rate, ‘Pelagianism’ was officially condemned at the Council of Carthage in 418; but it remains difficult to this day to know whether most people accused of being Pelagians — including Pelagius himself — actually held the beliefs Augustine and his allies rejected.

Far from the caricatures, it’s clear that Pelagius did not reject the idea of sin, only the doctrine of Original Sin as articulated by Augustine; instead, he insisted that there is nothing in human nature preventing us from not sinning, so the responsibility for our sins is ours and ours alone. Neither did he reject the doctrine of grace, insisting that God’s grace helps us to choose well in the face of temptation. (For more on this, see John Ferguson’s excellent and cautious “In Defense of Pelagius”, in Theology 1980: 83:114.) In the face of a Christian church increasingly filled with people joining primarily for political and social reasons, Pelagius simply insisted that Christianity retain its high moral and ethical standards, that faith should matter and be reflected in how we live our lives. We may rightly think he went too far in his opposition to Augustine’s formulation of Original Sin and thereby downplayed the divine initiative and role in our salvation, but he was far from the ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ caricature, and it’s far from the case that Pelagius and Augustine’s formulations are the only ones available to us.

The next time a purported ‘moral influence’ understanding of the atonement came into prominence was in the first half of the twelfth century, in the controversy surrounding the thought of Peter Abelard.* There are striking similarities between this controversy and that surrounding Pelagius seven hundred years earlier. Like Pelagius, Abelard did not hold the views so strongly associated with him in the dominant narrative of Christian history. Like Pelagius, Abelard wanted to address a perceived lack of sanctity among Christians. And like Pelagius, the controversial aspects of Abelard’s thought emerged as a corrective to a radical new theological perspective that he believed did not do justice to the Scriptures and Tradition’s teaching about the work of Jesus, namely Anselm’s revolutionary ‘satisfaction’ theory of the atonement.

Peter Abelard was without doubt a brilliant and charismatic man; he was also without doubt a combative, petulant, and problematic man. And it certainly seems his personal unpopularity among the Church’s leadership had no small part in his downfall. As noted above, his writings on the atonement were largely in response to Anselm’s ideas. While Anselm will be the focus of the next post, for today all that’s important is that he believed that sin left humanity in a state of debt before God, a debt which Jesus’s death paid to satisfy God’s honour. Abelard was not comfortable with such a formulation. He (rightly) believed that the focus in the Augustinian tradition, which Anselm inherited and developed further, on God’s judgment did not capture the spirit of the Scriptural witness, which focused on God’s love and faithfulness. God’s judgment, he believed, needed to be rooted in God’s justice, and he questioned how it would be ‘just’ for the debt of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to be paid off by the murder of the Son of God. Abelard believed instead that Jesus’ death was a demonstration of God’s love; Christians witness this demonstration and are thereby moved to set aside sin and follow his example. Abelard’s opponents immediately accused him of rejecting the necessity of Jesus’ death as an atonement for human sin, but this is misrepresents what he was saying. Abelard was working within a ‘both-and’, not ‘either-or’ framework. For him, Jesus’ death was a necessary atoning sacrifice, but at the same time was also the supreme example of a life wholly oriented to God. If the latter was a stronger emphasis, this was because he was trying to correct what he believed to be Anselm’s negligence on this second, more subjective, aspect of Christ’s atoning work. As he wrote in his commentary on Romans:

[I]n this we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God, that it was through this matchless grace shown to us that his Son received our nature, and in that nature, teaching us both by word and example, persevered to death and bound us to himself even more through love, so that when we have been kindled by so great a benefit of divine grace, true charity might fear to endure nothing for his sake.

Abelard has, like Pelagius, been accused of minimizing the teaching of divine grace. But this is by no means justified. At this point, it might be helpful to introduce the concept of ‘objective’ vs. ‘subjective’ aspects of the atonement. In this context, objective refers to the atonement as an act within history by which God effected an essential change in humanity; subjective refers to the ways we appropriate and take up Christ’s atoning work in our lives. Both Pelagius and Abelard, in their different ways, emphasized the subjective aspects of the atonement; while Pelagius may or may not have denied the objective side (it’s hard to tell from what what remains of his writings), it’s very clear that Abelard did not: he accepted the objective aspect, but thought that Anselm’s approach minimized the subjective aspect completely and so emphasized this as a corrective. Abelard sets himself apart from the Augustinian tradition not by rejecting the objective atonement, but by broadening its scope to include all of Christ’s life. He viewed the incarnation rather than the Cross as the primary demonstration of God’s grace: “it was through this matchless shown to us that his Son received our nature.” This grace is demonstrated in Christ’s “teaching us both by word and example,” up to, including, and foremost, his death, which “bound us to himself even more through love.” In other words, Jesus’ death on the cross is the culmination of God’s gracious atoning work that began in the incarnation; it doesn’t stand apart from it. Far from a low theology of grace, in Abelard’s thought, grace originates from God, is entirely of divine initiative, and is effectual for our salvation: it justifies, reconciles, and binds us to God. This is objective atonement through and through! The only real thing that differentiates him from the dominant Western tradition is his insistence that all this was done out of God’s love, rather than out of a need to balance the scales of justice.

So then, neither of history’s purported great advocates of a ‘moral influence theory’ of atonement seem actually to have believed what their detractors said they believed. While they certainly emphasized the exemplary nature of the atonement, neither Abelard, nor even Pelagius, believed this was the entire meaning of Christ’s death. It is not until we get into the Modern period that we start to see figures who may accurately be described as having a moral influence theory of the atonement. The sixteenth-century radical Reformer Faustus Socinus, for example, held that Jesus’ death atones by being the perfect example of humility, self-denial, and dedication to God. During the Enlightenment period, rationalists and Deists popularized ideas such as the ‘Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of Man’ and held up Jesus purely as a teacher and example. From a different angle, the nineteenth-century movement known as Liberalism, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher, emphasized the subjective aspects of all theology to the exclusion of the objective. Later, early twentieth-century Liberalism combined these two strands, producing a subjective and sentimental faith focused on Christ’s moral and ethical teachings that fit easily into a rationalist and scientific worldview. For example, on the Cross, Hastings Rashdall said: “We get rid altogether of the notion of a mysterious guilt which, by an abstract necessity of things, required to be extinguished by death or suffering … The efficacy of Christ’s death is now quite definitely and explicitly explained by its subjective influence upon the mind of the sinner.” (Brampton Lectures 1915)

Here at last in the Modern period, then, we have what might legitimately be called a Moral Influence theory of the atonement, something which is actually guilty of the rejection of objective atonement and effective grace of which Pelagius and Abelard were accused!

But it remains that, more generally, perspectives on the atonement that emphasize the subjective aspects of the atonement are worth some consideration when thinking about the meaning of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. An idea would not have popped up independently so many times throughout history without having some legitimate impulse. So let’s see how they fare in our summary chart:

What does it say about God?	God is good and loving.
What does it say about humanity?	Humanity was created to be good and loving like God, but has fallen into sin.
How does it define sin?	Sin is a lack of godliness (god-like-ness)
How does it define the problem?	Humanity is not like God.
What does it say about Christ?	Christ is perfectly good and loving.
What does it say about the cross?	The Cross is a demonstration of God’s love and example of the love to which we are called.
What does it say about the resurrection?	(The Resurrection vindicates the goodness and rightness of Jesus’ way.)
How does Jesus remedy the problem?	Jesus shows us what a life wholly oriented towards God looks like.
What is the result of this for us?	We become bound to God in love by imitating Christ empowered by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

So what can we say by way of assessment? This perspective has answers to most, if not all of the questions. But it doesn’t answer all of them in a satisfying way. It answers the question of why God became human satisfactorily, but marginalizes both Jesus’ death and Resurrection. We can say that Jesus’ death perfectly revealed God’s love, but any number of alternative deaths could have fit the bill. And once again, the Resurrection is such an afterthought that I had to put its statement in parentheses. Moreover, on its own, its explanations for the remedy and result are also pretty weak: The ‘Christ event’ loses the apocalyptic sense of the New Testament.

But, as we’ve seen, until recent centuries, no one actually held a ‘pure’ Moral Influence perspective. In its most famous versions, it was not intended to fully explain the work of Christ, but only to restore some balance its proponents felt had been lost. There’s no mystery as to why it independently appeared in history directly after the development of Augustine’s concept of Original Sin, Anselm’s reframing the problem as a debt against God, and the Reformation’s core doctrine of penal substitution. All of these concepts pushed the understanding of the atonement to the extreme of the ‘objective’ end of the spectrum. In these contexts, it makes sense that some theologians would want to help reel it back towards the middle and insist that we take up Christ’s work in our own lives.

So I think we can say a few things in conclusion: First, historically speaking, there really was no such thing as a Moral Influence theory of the atonement. Rather, Moral Influence ideas were introduced at various times in Church history to try to balance out more extreme beliefs. So, if we find them to not be enough, that’s because they were never intended to be enough. Even if we share the official concern about stressing the subjective aspects of the atonement at the expense of the objective ones, we would all do well to remember that faith in Jesus is not magic, but needs to be embodied, lived out, and expressed, by following him and his ways.

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* For more on this, see the helpful chapter in William G. Witt’s Mapping Atonement.