Blackwell Reference Online

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Scottish minister and theologian. Educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh, and ordained into the Church of Scotland, he was removed from his ministerial post in 1831 by the General Assembly for departing from orthodoxy, and he became pastor to an independent congregation in Glasgow (1833–59). In opposition to the Westminster Confession of Faith and some interpreters of Calvin, he held that Christ's death was not only for the elect but for the whole world (though he was not a universalist); that ‘assurance of faith’ was a condition of salvation; and that Christ's death was not a penal substitution averting the wrath of God, but an atonement for sin effected through Christ's perfect confession and repentance of sin. He also held that the incarnation, not the atonement, is the chief event of salvation. His ideas are set out in The Nature of the Atonement (1856), and they influenced Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance and J.B. Torrance, among others. 1960 : Fathers of the Kirk , article on Campbell . 1986 : So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement . Edinburgh . ... log in or subscribe to read full text