Forgiveness and Law Author:Horace Bushnell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. FOEGIVENESS AND PROPITIATION, WITHOUT EXPIATION. The argument of my former treatise was concerned in exhibiting the work of Christ as a reconcil... more »ing power on men. This was conceived to be the whole import and effect of it; just as, in our current theology, it is conceived to be a work that reconciles God—sometimes a propitiation, such as mitigates or conciliates the dispositions of God in the forgiveness of sins; and sometimes, with far less appearance of possibility, an expiation that satisfies the justice of God, and allows him to yield the forgiveness legally. I now propose to substitute, for the latter half of my former treatise, a different ex- Proposed reposition; composing thus a whole of vision, doctrine that comprises both the reconciliation of men to God, and of God to men. I have still as little question now as before, that the main significance of the gospel is in what it does, or undertakes to do, for the reconciliation of men. Indeed, a great part of the texts cited for atonement, so called, conceiving it as a conciliation of God, have their whole meaning, if rightly understood, at the other pole of thesubject. And nothing is now so much wanted, to set the gospel in its true proportion, as a just reclamation of these texts in the meaning they have lost. When we speak, as I am now to speak, of the propitiation of God, having it as our assumed undertaking to show the fact of such a propitiation antecedently related to the forgiveness of sins, we seem to be thrusting ourselves on a matter high above our reach, and in its own nature altogether improbable. There is even a look of offense and mortal presumption in the proposal itself. I am also pressed with the conviction that my single arguments first named will seem inconclusive, or even weak ; for ...« less