hot is God's displeasure against sin, Christ comes into the world and
suffers the consequences of the transgressions of the race. The cross
is an exhibition of what God thinks of sin." That governmental theory
was carried into England and became the established doctrine of the
English Church for almost three hundred years. It was carried across
the ocean and became the dominant theory in the New Haven school of
theologians, as represented by Jonathan Edwards, Dwight, and Taylor.
The Princeton school of theology still clung to the penal substitution
theory, and it was the clashing of the New Haven school and the
Princeton school which caused such a commotion in the Presbyterian
Church of sixty years ago. They are antiquated. They are too little.
They seem mechanical, artificial, trivial. We can say of the
governmental theory what Dr. Hodge said, "It degrades the work of
Christ to the level of a governmental contrivance." If I should
attempt to preach to you the governmental theory as it was preached by
theologians fifty years ago, you would not be interested in it There
is nothing in you that would respond to it. You would simply say, "I
do not like doctrinal preaching." Or if I should go back and take up
the penal substitution theory in all its nakedness and hideousness,
and attempt to give it to you as the correct interpretation of the
gospel, you would rise up in open rebellion and say, "We will not
listen to such preaching." If I should go back and take up the
Anselmic theory and attempt to show how an infinite debt must be paid
by infinite suffering, you would say: "Stop, you are converting God
into a Shylock, who is demanding His pound of flesh. We prefer to
think of Him as our heavenly Father." If I should go further back and
take up the old ransom theory of Origen and Gregory, I suspect
that some of you would want to laugh. You could not accept an
interpretation which represents God as playing a trick upon Satan in
order to get humanity out of his grasp. No, those theories have all