ARTICLE XII.
ATONEMENT AND RECONCILIATION

§ 48. Unitarian Christians believe that atonement and reconciliation are the same thing. Both mean a state of union and peace between humanity and God, the harmony between the Divine justice and Divine mercy, and the substitution of trust in and dependence on God for fear and the dread of God’s displeasure.

§ 49. Unitarian Christians do not believe that Christ came to reconcile God to humanity, but to reconcile humanity to God, not to make God love us, but to reveal God’s love, not to harmonize God’s justice and mercy, but to show that they are always in harmony. Christ's death was not a sacrifice made to appease the Divine anger, but it was an expression of the Divine love. Paul says, “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). The idea that Christ's death has an influence in making God placable or merciful in awakening his kindness towards humans communicates very degrading views of God's character. It gives the impression that the death of Jesus produces a change in the mind of God towards humankind, and that in this its efficacy chiefly consists. Unitarian Christians earnestly maintain that Jesus, instead of calling forth in any way or degree the mercy of the Deity, was sent by that mercy to be our Savior, that he is nothing to the human race but what he is by God's appointment, that he communicates nothing but what God empowers him to bestow, that our Parent in heaven is originally, essentially, and eternally placable and disposed to forgive, and that God’s unborrowed, underived, and unchangeable love is the only fountain of what flows to us through Jesus.

§ 50. Unitarian Christians also agree in rejecting as both nonsensical and unscriptural the popular teaching that the human race, because it has sinned against an infinite Being, is infinitely guilty and is consequently subject to an infinite penalty. According to this view, sin, whatever the degree, exposes humanity to endless punishment, and, according to Divine justice, the whole human race, being sinful by nature, cannot escape this awful penalty unless a substitute is found to bear a penalty in its stead. It teaches also that, since the guilt is infinite, no substitute is sufficient except the infinite God himself; and accordingly, God, in his second person, became human in order to pay to his own system of justice the debt of punishment incurred by humans. As a result, humans may now be forgiven of their sins. Unitarians believe, however, that the guilt of any being, in all fairness, must be proportionate to that being’s nature and powers. Moreover, there is not one biblical text in which we are told that God took human form that he might make an infinite satisfaction to his own justice, nor one text which tells us that human guilt requires an infinite substitute, or that Christ’s death could have been effective only if he were an infinite being. In the mind of a Unitarian, God cannot, in any sense, be a sufferer or bear a penalty in the stead of his creatures (although some Unitarians hold that God may suffer along with us). How dishonorable to God is the supposition that the Divine justice is so extreme as to exact infinite punishment for the transgressions of weak and ailing humans, and yet so amenable as to accept the relatively brief pains of Jesus’ human soul as a full equivalent for sins of humans past, present, and future. According to this doctrine, God, instead of being inclined to forgive, requires for forgiveness something humans could never give. It seems absurd to speak of humans as forgiven, when their whole punishment, or an equivalent to it, is borne by a substitute. While Unitarian Christians gratefully acknowledge the importance of Jesus’ death, they believe that he was sent on a much nobler mission, namely, to deliver us from sin itself and to assist us in becoming a virtuous people. They regard him as a Savior in the sense that he is a guide through the darkness and a physician for the diseased mind. They believe that salvation comes, not from the supposed value of a human death in the eyes of God, but from the use of Jesus’ teachings, precepts, promises, and the example of his whole life, character, sufferings, and triumphs, as the means of purifying the mind and heart, and of transforming these into the likeness of the Divine.