every order of persons in turn, to whom he had any thing painful to say,
is known to every intelligent reader of his epistles. Hence, in _his_
writings too, we have often to consider _with whom_ it is that he is
holding his dialogue, and to make our interpretation dependent on the
answer. When, for example, he says, that Jesus “was delivered for _our_
offences, and was raised again for _our_ justification;” I ask, “for
whose?—was it for every body’s?—or for the Jews’, since Paul was a
Hebrew?” On looking closely into the argument, I find it beyond doubt
that neither of these answers is correct; and that the Apostle, in
conformity with his frequent practice, is certainly identifying himself,
Israelite though he was, with _the Gentiles_, to whom, at that moment,
his reasoning applies itself. The neighbouring verses have expressions
which clearly enough declare this; “when we were _yet without
strength_,” and “_while we were yet sinners_,” Christ died for us. It is
to the _Gentile Church_ at Corinth, and while expatiating on their
privileges and relations as such, that Paul speaks of the
disqualifications and legal unholiness of the Heathen, as vanishing in
the death of the Messiah; as the recovered leper’s uncleanness was
removed, and his banishment reversed, and his exclusion from the temple
ended, when the lamb without blemish, which the law prescribed as his
sin-offering, bled beneath the knife, so did God provide, in Jesus, a
lamb without blemish for the exiled and unsanctified Gentiles, to bring
them from their far dwelling in the leprous haunts of this world’s
wilderness, and admit them to the sanctuary of spiritual health and
worship: “He hath made him to be a sin-offering for us (Gentiles), who
knew no sin; that we might be made the justified of God in him;”[348]
entering, under the Messiah, the community of saints. That, in this
sacrificial allusion, the Gentile adoption is still the Apostle’s only
theme, is evident hence; that twice in this very passage, he declares
that he is speaking of that peculiar “reconciliation,” the word and
ministry of which have been committed to himself; he is dwelling on the
topic most natural to one who “magnified his office,” as “Apostle of the
Gentiles.”
To the same parties was Paul writing, when he said, “Christ, our
passover, is sacrificed for us.”[349] Frequently as this sentence is
cited in evidence of the doctrine of Atonement, there is hardly a verse
in Scripture more utterly inapplicable; nor, if the doctrine were true,
could anything be more inept than an allusion to it in this place. I do
not dwell on the fact that the paschal lamb was neither sin-offering nor
proper sacrifice at all: for the elucidation of the death of Jesus by
sacrificial analogies is as easy and welcome, as any other mode of
representing it. But I turn to the whole context, and seek for the
leading idea before multiplying inferences from a subordinate
illustration. I find the author treating, not of the _deliverance_ of
believers from curse or exclusion, but of their duty to keep the
churches cleansed, by the expulsion of notoriously profligate members.
Such persons they are to cast from them, as the Jews, at the passover,
swept from their houses all the leaven they contained; and as, for eight
days at that season, only pure unleavened bread was allowed for use, so
the church must keep the Gospel-festival, free from the ferment of
malice and wickedness, and tasting nothing but sincerity and truth. This
comparison is the primary sentiment of the whole passage; under cover of
which, the Apostle is urging the Corinthians to expel a certain
licentious offender: and only because the feast of unleavened bread, on
which his fancy has alighted, set in with the day of passover, does he
allude to this in completion of the figure. As his correspondents were
Gentiles, their Christianity first became possible with the death of
Christ; with him, as an immortal, their spiritual relations commenced;
when he rose, they rose with him, as by a divine attraction, from an
earthly to a heavenly state; their old and corrupt man had been buried
together with him, and, with the human infirmities of his person left
behind for ever in his sepulchre; and it became them, “to seek those
things which are above,” and to “yield themselves to God, as those that
are alive from the dead.” This period of the Lord’s sequestration in the
heavens, Paul represents as a festival of purity to the disciples on
earth, ushered in by the self-sacrifice of Christ. The time is come, he
says; cast away the leaven, for the passover is slain, blessed bread of
heaven to them that taste it! let nothing now be seen in all the
household of the church, but the unleavened cake of simplicity and love.
Paul again appears as the advocate of the Gentiles, when he protests
that now between them and the Jews “there is no difference; since all
have sinned and come short of the glory of God:” that the Hebrew has
lost all claim to the Messianic adoption, and can have no hope but in
that free grace of God, which has a sovereign right to embrace the
Heathen too; and which, in fact, has compassed the Gentiles within its
redemption, by causing Jesus the Messiah to die; “by whose blood God
hath set forth a propitiation, through faith; to evince his justice,
while overlooking, with the forbearance of God, transgressions past;—to
evince his justice in the arrangements of the present crisis; which
preserve his justice (to the Israelite), yet justify on mere
discipleship to Jesus.”[350] The great question which the Apostle
discusses throughout this epistle, is this: “on what terms is a man now
admitted as a subject to the Messiah, so as to be acknowledged by him,
when he comes to erect his kingdom?” “He must be one of the circumcised,
to whom alone the holy law and promises are given,” says the Jew. “That
is well,” replies Paul: “only the promises, you remember, are
conditional on obedience; and he who claims by the law must stand the
judgment of the law. Can your nation abide this test, and will you stake
your hopes upon the issue? Or is there on record against you a violation
of every condition of your boasted covenant; wholesale and national
transgression, which your favourite code itself menaces with ‘cutting
off?’ Have you even rejected and crucified the very Messiah, who was
tendered to you in due fulfilment of the promises? Take your trial by
the principles of your law, and you must be cast off, and perish, as
certainly as the Heathen whom you despise; and whose rebellion against
the natural law, gross as it is, does not surpass your own offences
against the tables of Moses. You must abandon the claim of right, the
high talk of God’s Justice and plighted faith;—which are alike
ill-suited to you both. The rules of law are out of the question, and
would admit nobody; and we must ascend again to the sovereign will and
free mercy of him, who is the source of law; and who, to bestow a
blessing which its resources cannot confer, may devise new methods of
beneficence. God has violated no pledge. Messiah came to Israel, and
never went beyond its bounds; the uncircumcised had no part in him; and
every Hebrew who desired it, was received as his subject. But when the
people would not have him, and threw away their ancient title, was God
either to abandon his vicegerent, or to force him on the unwilling? No:
rather did it befit him to say; ‘if they will reject and crucify my
servant,—why, let him die, and then he is Israelite no more; I will
raise him, and take him apart in his immortality; where his blood of
David is lost; and the holiness of his humanity is glorified; and all
shall be his, who will believe, and love him, as he there exists,
spiritually and truly.’” Thus, according to Paul, does God provide a new
method of adoption or justification, without violating any promises of
the old. Thus he makes Faith in Jesus,—a moral act instead of a
genealogical accident,—the single condition of reception into the Divine
kingdom upon earth. Thus, after the passage of Christ from this world to
another, Jew and Gentile are on an equality in relation to the Messiah;
the one gaining nothing by his past privileges; the other, not visited
with exclusion for past idolatry and sins; but assured, in Messiah’s
death, that these are to be overlooked, and treated as if cleansed away.
He finds himself invited into the very penetralia of that sanctuary of
pure faith and hope, from which before he had been repelled as an
unclean thing; as if its ark of mercy had been purified for ever from
his unworthy touch, or he himself had been sprinkled by some sudden
consecration. And all this was the inevitable and instant effect of that
death on Calvary; which took Messiah from the Jews, and gave him to the
world.
With emphasis, not less earnest than that of Paul, does the apostle John
repudiate the notion of any _claim_ on the Divine admission by law or
righteousness; and insist on humble and unqualified acceptance of God’s
free grace and remission for the past, as the sole avenue of entrance to
the kingdom. This avenue was open, however, to all “who confessed that
Jesus the Messiah had come in the flesh;”[351] in other words, that,
during his mortal life, Jesus had been indicated as this future Prince;
and that his ministry was the Messiah’s preliminary visit to that earth
on which shortly he would re-appear to reign. The great object of that
visit was to prepare the world for his real coming; for as yet it was
very unfit for so great a crisis; and especially to open, by his death,
a way of admission for the Gentiles, and frame, on their behalf, an act
of oblivion for the past. “If,” says the apostle to them, “we walk in
the light, _as he is in the light_” (of love and heaven), “we have
fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son
cleanseth us from all sin:”[352] the Israelite will embrace the Gentiles
in fraternal relations, knowing that the cross has removed their past
unholiness. Nor let the Hebrew rely on anything now but the divine
forbearance; to appeal to rights will serve no longer: “if we say we
have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”[353] Nor
let any one despair of a reception, or even a restoration, because he
has been an idolater and sinner: “Jesus Christ the righteous” is “an
advocate with the Father” for admitting all who are willing to be his;
“and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only (not
merely for our small portion of Gentiles, already converted); but also
for the _whole_ world,”[354] if they will but accept him. He died to
become universal; to make all his own; to spread an oblivion, wide as
the earth, over all that had embarrassed the relations to the Messiah,
and made men aliens, instead of Sons of God. Yet did no spontaneous
movement of their good affections solicit this change. It was “not that
we (Gentiles) loved God; but that he loved us, and sent his Son, the
propitiation for our sins;” “he sent his only-begotten Son into the
world, that we might live through him.”[355] That this epistle was
addressed to Gentiles, and is therefore occupied with the same leading
idea respecting the cross, which pervades the writings of Paul, is
rendered probable by its concluding words, which could hardly be
appropriate to Jews: “keep yourselves from idols.”[356] How little the
apostle associated any vicarious idea even with a form of phrase most
constantly employed by modern theology to express it, is evident from
the parallel which he draws, in the following words, between the death
of our Lord and that of the Christian martyrs; “hereby perceive we love,
because _Christ_ laid down his life _for us_; and we ought to lay down
our lives _for the brethren_.”[357]
Are then the _Gentiles alone_ beneficially affected by the death of
Christ; and is no wider efficacy _ever_ assigned to it in Scripture? The
great number of passages to which I have already applied this single
interpretation, will show that I consider it as comprising _the great
leading idea_ of the apostolic theology on this subject; nor do I think
that there is (out of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which I shall soon
notice) a single doctrinal allusion to the cross, from which this
conception is wholly absent. At the same time, I am not prepared to
maintain, that this is the _only_ view of the crucifixion and
resurrection ever present to the mind of the apostles. Jews themselves,
they naturally inquired, how _Israel_, in particular, stood affected by
the unanticipated death of its Messiah; in what way its relations were
changed, when the offered Prince became the executed victim; and how far
matters would have been different, if, as had been expected, the
Anointed had assumed his rights and taken his power at once; and,
instead of making his first advent a mere preliminary and warning visit
“in the flesh,” had set up the kingdom forthwith, and gathered with him
his few followers to “reign on the earth.” Had this—instead of
submission to death, removal, and delay—been his adopted course, what
would have become of his own nation, who had rejected him;—who must have
been tried by that law which was their boast, and under which he came;
who had long been notorious offenders against its conditions, and now
brought down its final curse by despising the claims of the accredited
Messiah? They must have been utterly “cut off,” and cast out among the
“aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,” “without Messiah,” “without
hope,” “without God;” for while “circumcision profiteth, _if thou keep
the law_; yet if thou be a _breaker of the law_, thy circumcision is
made uncircumcision.”[358] Had he come _then_ “to be glorified in his
saints, and to be admired in all them that believe;”—had he then been
“revealed with his mighty angels” (whom he might have summoned by
“legions”);—it must have been “in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them
that knew not God, nor obeyed the glad tidings of the Lord Jesus
Christ;” to “punish with everlasting destruction from the presence of
the Lord and the glory of his power.”[359] The sins and prospects of
Israel being thus terrible, and its rejection imminent (for Messiah was
already in the midst of them),—he withheld his hand; refused to
precipitate their just fate; and said, “Let us give them time and wait;
I will go apart into the heavens, and peradventure they will repent;
only they must receive me then spiritually, and by hearty faith, not by
carnal right, admitting thus the willing Gentile with themselves.” And
so he prepared to die and retire; he did not permit them to be cut off,
but was cut off himself instead; he restrained the curse of their own
law from falling on them, and rather perished himself by a foul and
accursed lot, which that same law pronounces to be the vilest and most
polluted of deaths. Thus says St. Paul to the Jews: “he hath redeemed us
from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; for it is written
‘cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’”[360] In this way, but for
the death of the Messiah, Israel too must have been lost; and by that
event they received time for repentance, and a way for remission of
sins; found a means of reconciliation still; saw their providence, which
had been lowering for judgment, opening over them in propitiation once
more; the just had died for the unjust, to bring them to God. What was
this delay,—this suspension of judgment,—this opportunity of return and
faith,—but an instance of “the long-suffering of God,” with which “he
endures the vessels of wrath (Jews) fitted to destruction; and makes
known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy; which he had
afore prepared unto glory?”[361] If Christ had not withdrawn awhile,—if
his power had been taken up at once, and wielded in stern and legal
justice, a deluge of judgment must have overwhelmed the earth, and swept
away both Jew and Gentile, leaving but a remnant safe. But in mercy was
the mortal life of Jesus turned into a preluding message of notice and
warning, like the tidings which Noah received of the flood; and as the
growing frame of the ark gave signal to the world of the coming
calamity, afforded an interval for repentance, and made the patriarch,
as he built, a constant “preacher of righteousness;”[362] so the
increasing body of the Church, since the warning retreat of Christ to
heaven, proclaims the approaching “day of the Lord,” admonishes that
“all should come to repentance,”[363] and fly betimes to that faith and
baptism which Messiah’s death and resurrection have left as an ark of
safety. “Once in the days of Noah, the long-suffering of God waited
while the ark was preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, were
saved by water: a representation, this, of the way in which baptism
(not, of course, carnal washing, but the engagement of a good conscience
with God,) saves us now, _by the resurrection of Jesus Christ_; who is
gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels, and
authorities, and powers, being made subject to him.”[364] Yet, “the time
is short,”[365] and must be “redeemed;”[366] “it is the last hour;”[367]
“the Lord,” “the coming of the Lord,” “the end of all things,” are “at
hand.”[368]
I have described _one_ aspect, which the death of the Messiah presented
to _the Jews_; and, in this, we have found another primary conception,
explanatory of the scriptural language respecting the cross. Of the two
relations in which this event appeared (the Gentile and the Israelitish)
I believe the former to be by far the most familiar to the New Testament
authors, and to furnish the true interpretation of almost all their
phraseology on the subject. But, as my readers may have noticed, many
passages receive illustration by reference to either notion; and some
may have a meaning compounded of both. I must not pause to make any
minute adjustment of these claims, on the part of the two interpreting
ideas: it is enough that, either separately or in union, they have now
been taken round the whole circle of apostolic language respecting the
cross, and detected in every difficult passage the presence of sense and
truth, and the absence of all hint of vicarious atonement.
It was on the _unbelieving_ portion of the Jewish people, that the death
of their Messiah conferred the national blessings and opportunities to
which I have adverted. But to _the converts_ who had been received by
him during his mortal life, and who would have been heirs of his glory,
had he assumed it at once, it was less easy to point out any personal
benefits from the cross. That the Christ had retired from this world was
but a disappointing postponement of their hopes: that he had perished as
a felon, was shocking to their pride, and turned their ancient boast
into a present scorn: that he had become spiritual and immortal made him
no longer theirs “as concerning the flesh,” and, by admitting Gentiles
with themselves, set aside their favourite law. So offensive to them was
this unexpected slight on the institutions of Moses, immemorially
reverenced as the ordinances of God, that it became important to give
some turn to the death of Jesus, by which that event might be harmonized
with the national system, and be shown to _effect the abrogation of the
Law, on principles strictly legal_. This was the object of the writer of
the Epistle to the Hebrews; who thus gives us a third idea of the
relations of the cross,—bearing, indeed, an essential resemblance to St.
Paul’s Gentile view, but illustrated in a manner altogether different.
No trace is to be observed here of Paul’s noble glorying in the Cross:
so studiously is every allusion to the crucifixion avoided, till all the
argumentative part of the epistle has been completed, that a reader
finds the conclusion already in sight, without having gained any notion
of _the mode_ of the Lord’s death, whether even it was natural or
violent,—a literal human sacrifice, or a voluntary self-immolation. Its
ignominy and its agonies are wholly unmentioned; and his mortal
infirmities and sufferings are explained, not as the spontaneous
adoptions of previous compassion in him, but as God’s fitting discipline
for rendering him “a merciful and faithful high priest.”[369] They are
referred to in the tone of apology, not of pride; as needing rather to
be reconciled with his office, than to be boldly expounded as its grand
essential. The object of the author clearly is, to find a place for the
death of Jesus among the Messianic functions; and he persuades the
Hebrew Christians that it is (not a satisfaction for moral guilt, but) a
commutation for the Mosaic Law. In order to understand his argument, we
must advert for a moment to the prejudices which it was designed to
conciliate and correct.
It is not easy for us to realize the feelings with which the Israelite,
in the yet palmy days of the Levitical worship, would hear of an
abrogation of the Law;—the anger and contempt with which the mere bigot
would repudiate the suggestion;—the terror with which the new convert
would make trial of his freedom;—the blank and infidel feeling with
which he would look round, and find himself drifted away from his
anchorage of ceremony; the sinking heart, with which he would hear the
reproaches of his countrymen against his apostacy. Every authoritative
ritual draws towards itself an attachment too strong for reason and the
sense of right; and transfers the feeling of obligation from realities
to symbols. Among the Hebrews, this effect was the more marked and the
more pernicious, because their ceremonies were, in many instances, only
remotely connected with any important truth or excellent end; they were
separated by several removes from any spiritual utility. Rites were
enacted to sustain other rites; institution lay beneath institution,
through so many successive steps, that the crowning principle at the
summit easily passed out of sight. To keep alive the grand truth of the
Divine Unity, there was a gorgeous temple worship: to perform this
worship there was a priesthood: to support the priesthood, there were
(among other sources of income) dues paid in the form of sacrifice: to
provide against the non-payment of dues there were penalties: to prevent
an injurious pressure of these penalties, there were exemptions, as in
cases of sickness: and to put a check on trivial claims of exemption, it
must be purchased by submission to a fee, under name of an atonement.
Wherever such a system is received as divine, and based on the same
authority with the great law of duty, it will always, by its
definiteness and precision, attract attention from graver moral
obligations. Its materiality renders it calculable: its account with the
conscience can be exactly ascertained: as it has little obvious utility
to men, it appears the more directly paid to God; it is regarded as the
special means of pleasing him, of placating his anger, and purchasing
his promises. Hence it may often happen, that the more the offences
against the spirit of duty, the more are rites multiplied in
propitiation; and the harvest of ceremonies and that of crimes ripen
together.
At a state not far from this, had the Jews arrived, when Christianity
was preached. Their moral sentiments were so far perverted, that they
valued nothing in themselves, in comparison with their legal exactitude,
and hated all beyond themselves for the want of this. They were eagerly
expecting the Deliverer’s kingdom, nursing up their ambition for his
triumphs: curling the lip, as the lash of oppression fell upon them, in
suppressed anticipation of vengeance; satiating a temper, at once fierce
and servile, with dreams of Messiah’s coming judgment, when the blood of
the Patriarchs should be the title of the world’s nobles, and the
everlasting reign should begin in Jerusalem. Why was the hour delayed,
they impatiently asked themselves? Was it that they had offended
Jehovah, and secretly sinned against some requirement of his law? And
then they set themselves to a renewed precision, a more slavish
punctiliousness than before. Ascribing their continued depression to
their imperfect legal obedience, they strained their ceremonialism
tighter than ever: and hoped to be soon justified from their past sins,
and ready for the mighty prince and the latter days.