Produced by Al Haines
THE ATONEMENT
AND
THE MODERN MIND
BY
JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY
UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW
_WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE DEATH OF CHRIST
STUDIES IN THEOLOGY
THE EPISTLES TO THE THESSALONIANS
THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS
GOSPEL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27 PATERNOSTER ROW
MCMIII
PREFACE
The three chapters which follow have already appeared in _The
Expositor_, and may be regarded as a supplement to the writer's work on
_The Death of Christ: its place and interpretation in the New
Testament_. It was no part of his intention in that study to ask or to
answer all the questions raised by New Testament teaching on the
subject; but, partly from reviews of _The Death of Christ_, and still
more from a considerable private correspondence to which the book gave
rise, he became convinced that something further should be attempted to
commend the truth to the mind and conscience of the time. The
difficulties and misunderstandings connected with it spring, as far as
they can be considered intellectual, mainly from two sources. Either
the mind is preoccupied with a conception of the world which, whether
men are conscious of it or not, forecloses all the questions which are
raised by any doctrine of atonement, and makes them unmeaning; or it
labours under some misconception as to what the New Testament actually
teaches. Broadly speaking, the first of these conditions is considered
in the first two chapters, and the second in the last. The title--_The
Atonement and the Modern Mind_--might seem to promise a treatise, or
even an elaborate system of theology; but though it would cover a work
of vastly larger scope than the present, it is not inappropriate to any
attempt, however humble, to help the mind in which we all live and move
to reach a sympathetic comprehension of the central truth in the
Christian religion. The purpose of the writer is evangelic, whatever
may be said of his method; it is to commend the Atonement to the human
mind, as that mind has been determined by the influences and
experiences of modern times, and to win the mind for the truth of the
Atonement.
With the exception of a few paragraphs, these pages were delivered as
lectures to a summer school of Theology which met in Aberdeen, in June
of this year. The school was organised by a committee of the
Association of Former Students of the United Free Church College,
Glasgow; and the writer, as a member and former President of the
Association, desires to take the liberty of inscribing his work to his
fellow-students.
GLASGOW, _September_ 1903.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT
CHAPTER II
SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT
CHAPTER III
CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT
It will be admitted by most Christians that if the Atonement, quite
apart from precise definitions of it, is anything to the mind, it is
everything. It is the most profound of all truths, and the most
recreative. It determines more than anything else our conceptions of
God, of man, of history, and even of nature; it determines them, for we
must bring them all in some way into accord with it. It is the
inspiration of all thought, the impulse and the law of all action, the
key, in the last resort, to all suffering. Whether we call it a fact
or a truth, a power or a doctrine, it is that in which the
_differentia_ of Christianity, its peculiar and exclusive character, is
specifically shown; it is the focus of revelation, the point at which
we see deepest into the truth of God, and come most completely under
its power. For those who recognise it at all it is Christianity in
brief; it concentrates in itself, as in a germ of infinite potency, all
that the wisdom, power and love of God mean in relation to sinful men.
Accordingly, when we speak of the Atonement and the modern mind, we are
really speaking of the modern mind and the Christian religion. The
relation between these two magnitudes may vary. The modern mind is no
more than a modification of the human mind as it exists in all ages,
and the relation of the modern mind to the Atonement is one phase--it
may be a specially interesting or a specially well-defined phase--of
the perennial relation of the mind of man to the truth of God. There
is always an affinity between the two, for God made man in His own
image, and the mind can only rest in truth; but there is always at the
same time an antipathy, for man is somehow estranged from God, and
resents Divine intrusion into his life. This is the situation at all
times, and therefore in modern times; we only need to remark that when
the Atonement is in question, the situation, so to speak, becomes
acute. All the elements in it define themselves more sharply. If
there is sympathy between the mind and the truth, it is a profound
sympathy, which will carry the mind far; if there are lines of
approach, through which the truth can find access to the mind, they are
lines laid deep in the nature of things and of men, and the access
which the truth finds by them is one from which it will not easily be
dislodged. On the other hand, if it is antagonism which is roused in
the mind by the Atonement, it is an antagonism which feels that
everything is at stake. The Atonement is a reality of such a sort that
it can make no compromise. The man who fights it knows that he is
fighting for his life, and puts all his strength into the battle. To
surrender is literally to give up himself, to cease to be the man he
is, and to become another man. For the modern mind, therefore, as for
the ancient, the attraction and the repulsion of Christianity are
concentrated at the same point; the cross of Christ is man's only
glory, or it is his final stumbling-block.
What I wish to do in these papers is so to present the facts as to
mediate, if possible, between the mind of our time and the
Atonement--so to exhibit the specific truth of Christianity as to bring
out its affinity for what is deepest in the nature of man and in human
experience--so to appreciate the modern mind itself, and the influences
which have given it its constitution and temper, as to discredit what
is false in it, and enlist on the side of the Atonement that which is
profound and true. And if any one is disposed to marvel at the
ambition or the conceit of such a programme, I would ask him to
consider if it is not the programme prescribed to every Christian, or
at least to every Christian minister, who would do the work of an
evangelist. To commend the eternal truth of God, as it is finally
revealed in the Atonement, to the mind in which men around us live and
move and have their being, is no doubt a difficult and perilous task;
but if we approach it in a right spirit, it need not tempt us to any
presumption; it cannot tempt us, as long as we feel that it is our
duty. '_Who is sufficient for these things! . . . Our sufficiency is
of God._'
The Christian religion is a historical religion, and whatever we say
about it must rest upon historical ground. We cannot define it from
within, by reference merely to our individual experience. Of course it
is equally impossible to define it apart from experience; the point is
that such experience itself must be historically derived; it must come
through something outside of our individual selves. What is true of
the Christian religion as a whole is pre-eminently true of the
Atonement in which it is concentrated. The experience which it brings
to us, and the truth which we teach on the basis of it, are
historically mediated. They rest ultimately on that testimony to
Christ which we find in the Scriptures and especially in the New
Testament. No one can tell what the Atonement is except on this basis.
No one can consciously approach it--no one can be influenced by it to
the full extent to which it is capable of influencing human
nature--except through this medium. We may hold that just because it
is Divine, it must be eternally true, omnipresent in its gracious
power; but even granting this, it is not known as an abstract or
eternal somewhat; it is historically, and not otherwise than
historically, revealed. It is achieved by Christ, and the testimony to
Christ, on the strength of which we accept it, is in the last resort
the testimony of Scripture.
In saying so, I do not mean that the Atonement is merely a problem of
exegesis, or that we have simply to accept as authoritative the
conclusions of scholars as to the meaning of New Testament texts. The
modern mind here is ready with a radical objection. The writers of the
New Testament, it argues, were men like ourselves; they had personal
limitations and historical limitations; their forms of thought were
those of a particular age and upbringing; the doctrines they preached
may have had a relative validity, but we cannot benumb our minds to
accept them without question. The intelligence which has learned to be
a law to itself, criticising, rejecting, appropriating, assimilating,
cannot deny its nature and suspend its functions when it opens the New
Testament. It cannot make itself the slave of men, not even though the
men are Peter and Paul and John; no, not even though it were the Son of
Man Himself. It resents dictation, not wilfully nor wantonly, but
because it must; and it resents it all the more when it claims to be
inspired. If, therefore, the Atonement can only be received by those
who are prepared from the threshold to acknowledge the inspiration and
the consequent authority of Scripture, it can never be received by
modern men at all.
This line of remark is familiar inside the Church as well as outside.
Often it is expressed in the demand for a historical as opposed to a
dogmatic interpretation of the New Testament, a historical
interpretation being one to which we can sit freely, because the result
to which it leads us is the mind of a time which we have survived and
presumably transcended; a dogmatic interpretation, on the other hand,
being one which claims to reach an abiding truth, and therefore to have
a present authority. A more popular and inconsistent expression of the
same mood may be found among those who say petulant things about the
rabbinising of Paul, but profess the utmost devotion to the words of
Jesus. Even in a day of overdone distinctions, one might point out
that interpretations are not properly to be classified as historical or
dogmatic, but as true or false. If they are false, it does not matter
whether they are called dogmatic or historical; and if they are true,
they may quite well be both. But this by the way. For my own part, I
prefer the objection in its most radical form, and indeed find nothing
in it to which any Christian, however sincere or profound his reverence
for the Bible, should hesitate to assent. Once the mind has come to
know itself, there can be no such thing for it as blank authority. It
cannot believe things--the things by which it has to live--simply on
the word of Paul or John. It is not irreverent, it is simply the
recognition of a fact, if we add that it can just as little believe
them simply on the word of Jesus.[1] This is not the sin of the mind,
but the nature and essence of mind, the being which it owes to God. If
we are to speak of authority at all in this connection, the authority
must be conceived as belonging not to the speaker but to that which he
says, not to the witness but to the truth. Truth, in short, is the
only thing which has authority for the mind, and the only way in which
truth finally evinces its authority is by taking possession of the mind
for itself. It may be that any given truth can only be reached by
testimony--that is, can only come to us by some historical channel; but
if it is a truth of eternal import, if it is part of a revelation of
God the reception of which is eternal life, then its authority lies in
itself and in its power to win the mind, and not in any witness however
trustworthy.
Hence in speaking of the Atonement, whether in preaching or in
theologising, it is quite unnecessary to raise any question about the
inspiration of Scripture, or to make any claim of 'authority' either
for the Apostles or for the Lord. Belief in the inspiration of
Scripture is neither the beginning of the Christian life nor the
foundation of Christian theology; it is the last conclusion--a
conclusion which becomes every day more sure--to which experience of
the truth of Scripture leads. When we tell, therefore, what the
Atonement is, we are telling it not on the authority of any person or
persons whatever, but on the authority of the truth in it by which it
has won its place in our minds and hearts. We find this truth in the
Christian Scriptures undoubtedly, and therefore we prize them; but the
truth does not derive its authority from the Scriptures, or from those
who penned them. On the contrary, the Scriptures are prized by the
Church because through them the soul is brought into contact with this
truth. No doubt this leaves it open to any one who does not see in
Scripture what we see, or who is not convinced as we are of its truth,
to accuse us here of subjectivity, of having no standard of truth but
what appeals to us individually, but I could never feel the charge a
serious one. It is like urging that a man does not see at all, or does
not see truly, because he only sees with his own eyes. This is the
only authentic kind of seeing yet known to mankind. We do not judge at
all those who do not see what we do. We do not know what hinders them,
or whether they are at all to blame for it; we do not know how soon the
hindrance is going to be put out of the way. To-day, as at the
beginning, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
comprehends it not. But that is the situation which calls for
evangelists; not a situation in which the evangelist is called to
renounce his experience and his vocation.
What, then, is the Atonement, as it is presented to us in the
Scriptures, and vindicates for itself in our minds the character of
truth, and indeed, as I have said already, the character of the
ultimate truth of God?
The simplest expression that can be given to it in words is: Christ
died for our sins. Taken by itself, this is too brief to be
intelligible; it implies many things which need to be made explicit
both about Christ's relation to us and about the relation of sin and
death. But the important thing, to begin with, is not to define these
relations, but to look through the words to the broad reality which is
interpreted in them. What they tell us, and tell us on the basis of an
incontrovertible experience, is that the forgiveness of sins is for the
Christian mediated through the death of Christ. In one respect,
therefore, there is nothing singular in the forgiveness of sins: it is
in the same position as every other blessing of which the New Testament
speaks. It is the presence of a Mediator, as Westcott says in one of
his letters, which makes the Christian religion what it is; and the
forgiveness of sins is mediated to us through Christ, just as the
knowledge of God as the Father is mediated, or the assurance of a life
beyond death. But there is something _specific_ about the mediation of
forgiveness; the gift and the certainty of it come to us, not simply
through Christ, but through the blood of His Cross. The sum of His
relation to sin is that He died for it. God forgives, but this is the
way in which His forgiveness comes. He forgives freely, but it is at
this cost to Himself and to the Son of His love.
This, it seems to me, is the simplest possible statement of what the
New Testament means by the Atonement, and probably there are few who
would dispute its correctness. But it is possible to argue that there
is a deep cleft in the New Testament itself, and that the teaching of
Jesus on the subject of forgiveness is completely at variance with that
which we find in the Epistles, and which is implied in this description
of the Atonement. Indeed there are many who do so argue. But to
follow them would be to forget the place which Jesus has in His own
teaching. Even if we grant that the main subject of that teaching is
the Kingdom of God, it is as clear as anything can be that the Kingdom
depends for its establishment on Jesus, or rather that in Him it is
already established in principle; and that all participation in its
blessings depends on some kind of relation to Him. All things have
been delivered to Him by the Father, and it is by coming under
obligation to Him, and by that alone, that men know the Father. It is
by coming under obligation to Him that they know the pardoning love of
the Father, as well as everything else that enters into Christian
experience and constitutes the blessedness of life in the Kingdom of
God. Nor is it open to any one to say that he knows this simply
because Christ has told it. We are dealing here with things too great
to be simply told. If they are ever to be known in their reality, they
must be revealed by God, they must rise upon the mind of man
experimentally, in their awful and glorious truth, in ways more
wonderful than words. They can be spoken about afterwards, but hardly
beforehand. They can be celebrated and preached--that is, declared as
the speaker's experience, delivered as his testimony--but not simply
told. It was enough if Jesus made His disciples feel, as surely He did
make them feel, not only in every word He spoke, but more emphatically
still in His whole attitude toward them, that He was Himself the
Mediator of the new covenant, and that all the blessings of the
relation between God and man which we call Christianity were blessings
due to Him. If men knew the Father, it was through Him. If they knew
the Father's heart to the lost, it was through Him. Through Him, be it
remembered, not merely through the words that He spoke. There was more
in Christ than even His own wonderful words expressed, and all that He
was and did and suffered, as well as what He said, entered into the
convictions He inspired. But He knew this as well as His disciples,
and for this very reason it is beside the mark to point to what He
said, or rather to what He did not say, in confutation of their
experience. For it is their experience--the experience that the
forgiveness of sins was mediated to them through His cross--that is
expressed in the doctrine of Atonement: He died for our sins.
The objection which is here in view is most frequently pointed by
reference to the parable of the prodigal son. There is no Atonement
here, we are told, no mediation of forgiveness at all. There is love
on the one side and penitence on the other, and it is treason to the
pure truth of this teaching to cloud and confuse it with the thoughts
of men whose Master was over their heads often, but most of all here.
Such a statement of the case is plausible, and judging from the
frequency with which it occurs must to some minds be very convincing,
but nothing could be more superficial, or more unjust both to Jesus and
the apostles. A parable is a comparison, and there is a point of
comparison in it on which everything turns. The more perfect the
parable is, the more conspicuous and dominating will the point of
comparison be. The parable of the prodigal illustrates this. It
brings out, through a human parallel, with incomparable force and
beauty, the one truth of the freeness of forgiveness. God waits to be
gracious. His pardoning love rushes out to welcome the penitent. But
no one who speaks of the Atonement ever dreams of questioning this.
The Atonement is concerned with a different point--not the freeness of
pardon, about which all are agreed, but the cost of it; not the
spontaneity of God's love, which no one questions, but the necessity
under which it lay to manifest itself in a particular way if God was to
be true to Himself, and to win the heart of sinners for the holiness
which they had offended. The Atonement is not the denial that God's
love is free; it is that specific manifestation or demonstration of
God's free love which is demanded by the situation of men. One can
hardly help wondering whether those who tell us so confidently that
there is no Atonement in the parable of the prodigal have ever noticed
that there is no Christ in it either--no elder brother who goes out to
seek and to save the lost son, and to give his life a ransom for him.
Surely we are not to put the Good Shepherd out of the Christian
religion. Yet if we leave Him His place, we cannot make the parable of
the prodigal the measure of Christ's mind about the forgiveness of
sins. One part of His teaching it certainly contains--one part of the
truth about the relation of God the Father to His sinful children; but
another part of the truth was present, though not on that occasion
rendered in words, in the presence of the Speaker, when 'all the
publicans and sinners drew near to Him for to hear Him.' The love of
God to the sinful was apprehended in Christ Himself, and not in what He
said as something apart from Himself; on the contrary, it was in the
identity of the speaker and the word that the power of the word lay;
God's love evinced itself to men as a reality in Him, in His presence
in the world, and in His attitude to its sin; it so evinced itself,
finally and supremely, in His death. It is not the idiosyncrasy of one
apostle, it is the testimony of the Church, a testimony in keeping with
the whole claim made by Christ in His teaching and life and death: '_in
Him_ we have our redemption, _through His blood_, even the forgiveness
of our trespasses.' And this is what the Atonement means: it means the
mediation of forgiveness through Christ, and specifically through His
death. Forgiveness, in the Christian sense of the term, is only
realised as we believe in the Atonement: in other words, as we come to
feel the cost at which alone the love of God could assert itself as
Divine and holy love in the souls of sinful men. We may say, if we
please, that forgiveness is bestowed freely upon repentance; but we
must add, if we would do justice to the Christian position, that
repentance in its ultimate character is the fruit of the Atonement.
Repentance is not possible apart from the apprehension of the mercy of
God _in Christ_. It is the experience of the regenerate--_poenitentiam
interpretor regenerationem_, as Calvin says--and it is the Atonement
which regenerates.
This, then, in the broadest sense, is the truth which we wish to
commend to the modern mind: the truth that there is forgiveness with
God, and that this forgiveness comes to us only through Christ, and
signally or specifically through His death. Unless it becomes true to
us that _Christ died for our sins_ we cannot appreciate forgiveness at
its specifically Christian value. It cannot be for us that kind of
reality, it cannot have for us that kind of inspiration, which it
unquestionably is and has in the New Testament.
But what, we must now ask, is the modern mind to which this primary
truth of Christianity has to be commended? Can we diagnose it in any
general yet recognisable fashion, so as to find guidance in seeking
access to it for the gospel of the Atonement? There may seem to be
something presumptuous in the very idea, as though any one making the
attempt assumed a superiority to the mind of his time, an exemption
from its limitations and prejudices, a power to see over it and round
about it. All such presumption is of course disclaimed here; but even
while we disclaim it, the attempt to appreciate the mind of our time is
forced upon us. Whoever has tried to preach the gospel, and to
persuade men of truth as truth is in Jesus, and especially of the truth
of God's forgiveness as it is in the death of Jesus for sin, knows that
there is a state of mind which is somehow inaccessible to this truth,
and to which the truth consequently appeals in vain. I do not speak of
unambiguous moral antipathy to the ideas of forgiveness and atonement,
although antipathy to these ideas in general, as distinct from any
given presentation of them, cannot but have a moral character, just as
a moral character always attaches to the refusal to acknowledge Christ
or to become His debtor; but of something which, though vaguer and less
determinate, puts the mind wrong, so to speak, with Christianity from
the start. It is clear, for instance, in all that has been said about
forgiveness, that certain relations are presupposed as subsisting
between God and man, relations which make it possible for man to sin,
and possible for God, not indeed to ignore his sin, but in the very act
of recognising it as all that it is to forgive it, to liberate man from
it, and to restore him to Himself and righteousness. Now if the latent
presuppositions of the modern mind are to any extent inconsistent with
such relations, there will be something to overcome before the
conceptions of forgiveness or atonement can get a hearing. These
conceptions have their place in a certain view of the world as a whole,
and if the mind is preoccupied with a different view, it will have an
instinctive consciousness that it cannot accommodate them, and a
disposition therefore to reject them _ab initio_. This is, in point of
fact, the difficulty with which we have to deal. And let no one say
that it is transparently absurd to suggest that we must get men to
accept a true philosophy before we can begin to preach the gospel to
them, as though that settled the matter or got over the difficulty. We
have to take men as we find them; we have to preach the gospel to the
mind which is around us; and if that mind is rooted in a view of the
world which leaves no room for Christ and His work as Christian
experience has realised them, then that view of the world must be
appreciated by the evangelist, it must be undermined at its weak
places, its inadequacy to interpret all that is present even in the
mind which has accepted it--in other words, its inherent
inconsistency--must be demonstrated; the attempt must be made to
liberate the mind, so that it may be open to the impression of
realities which under the conditions supposed it could only encounter
with instinctive antipathy. It is necessary, therefore, at this point
to advert to the various influences which have contributed to form the
mind of our time, and to give it its instinctive bias in one direction
or another. Powerful and legitimate as these influences have been,
they have nevertheless been in various ways partial, and because of
their very partiality they have, when they absorbed the mind, as new
modes of thought are apt to do, prejudiced it against the consideration
of other, possibly of deeper and more far-reaching, truths.
First, there is the enormous development of physical science. This has
engrossed human intelligence in our own times to an extent which can
hardly be over-estimated. Far more mind has been employed in
constructing the great fabric of knowledge, which we call science, than
in any other pursuit of men. Far more mind has had its characteristic
qualities and temper imparted to it by scientific study than by study
in any other field. It is of science--which to all intents and
purposes means physical science--of science and its methods and results
that the modern mind is most confident, and speaks with the most
natural and legitimate pride. Now science, even in this restricted
sense, covers a great range of subjects; it may be physics in the
narrowest meaning of the word, or chemistry, or biological science.
The characteristic of our own age has been the development of the last,
and in particular its extension to man. It is impossible to dispute
the legitimacy of this extension. Man has his place in nature; the
phenomena of life have one of their signal illustrations in him, and he
is as proper a subject of biological study as any other living being.
But the intense preoccupation of much of the most vigorous intelligence
of our time with the biological study of man is not without effects
upon the mind itself, which we need to consider. It tends to produce a
habit of mind to which certain assumptions are natural and inevitable,
certain other assumptions incredible from the first. This habit of
mind is in some ways favourable to the acceptance of the Atonement.
For example, the biologist's invincible conviction of the unity of
life, and of the certainty and power with which whatever touches it at
one point touches it through and through, is in one way entirely
favourable. Many of the most telling popular objections to the idea of
Atonement rest on an atomic conception of personality--a conception
according to which every human being is a closed system, incapable in
the last resort of helping or being helped, of injuring or being
injured, by another. This conception has been finally discredited by
biology, and so far the evangelist must be grateful. The Atonement
presupposes the unity of human life, and its solidarity; it presupposes
a common and universal responsibility. I believe it presupposes also
such a conception of the unity of man and nature as biology proceeds
upon; and in all these respects its physical presuppositions, if we may
so express ourselves, are present to the mind of to-day, thanks to
biology, as they were not even so lately as a hundred years ago.
But this is not all that we have to consider. The mind has been
influenced by the movement of physical and even of biological science,
not only in a way which is favourable, but in ways which are
prejudicial to the acceptance of the Atonement. Every physical science
seems to have a boundless ambition; it wants to reduce everything to
its own level, to explain everything in the terms and by the categories
with which it itself works. The higher has always to fight for its
life against the lower. The physicist would like to reduce chemistry
to physics; the chemist has an ambition to simplify biology into
chemistry; the biologist in turn looks with suspicion on anything in
man which cannot be interpreted biologically. He would like to give,
and is sometimes ready to offer, a biological explanation of
self-consciousness, of freedom, of religion, morality, sin. Now a
biological explanation, when all is done, is a physical explanation,
and a physical explanation of self-consciousness or the moral life is
one in which the very essence of the thing to be explained is either
ignored or explained away. Man's life is certainly rooted in nature,
and therefore a proper subject for biological study; but unless it
somehow transcended nature, and so demanded other than physical
categories for its complete interpretation, there could not be any
study or any science at all. If there were nothing but matter, as M.
Naville has said, there would be no materialism; and if there were
nothing but life, there would be no biology. Now it is in the higher
region of human experience, to which all physical categories are
unequal, that we encounter those realities to which the Atonement is
related, and in relation to which it is real; and we must insist upon
these _higher_ realities, in their specific character, against a strong
tendency in the scientifically trained modern mind, and still more in
the general mind as influenced by it, to reduce them to the merely
physical level.
Take, for instance, the consciousness of sin. Evidently the Atonement
becomes incredible if the consciousness of sin is extinguished or
explained away. There is nothing for the Atonement to do; there is
nothing to relate it to; it is as unreal as a rock in the sky. But
many minds at the present time, under the influence of current
conceptions in biology, do explain it away. All life is one, they
argue. It rises from the same spring, it runs the same course, it
comes to the same end. The life of man is rooted in nature, and that
which beats in my veins is an inheritance from an immeasurable past.
It is absurd to speak of my responsibility for it, or of my guilt
because it manifests itself in me, as it inevitably does, in such and
such forms. There is no doubt that this mode of thought is widely
prevalent, and that it is one of the most serious hindrances to the
acceptance of the gospel, and especially of the Atonement. How are we
to appreciate it? We must point out, I think, the consequence to which
it leads. If a man denies that he is responsible for the nature which
he has inherited--denies responsibility for it on the ground that it
_is_ inherited--it is a fair question to ask him for what he _does_
accept responsibility. When he has divested himself of the inherited
nature, what is left? The real meaning of such disowning of
responsibility is that a man asserts that his life is a part of the
physical phenomena of the universe, and nothing else; and he forgets,
in the very act of making the assertion, that if it were true, it could
not be so much as made. The merely physical is transcended in every
such assertion; and the man who has transcended it, rooted though his
life be in nature, and one with the life of the whole and of all the
past, must take the responsibility of living that life out on the high
level of self-consciousness and morality which his very disclaimer
involves. The sense of sin which wakes spontaneously with the
perception that he is not what he ought to have been must not be
explained away; at the level which life has reached in him, this is
unscientific as well as immoral; his sin--for I do not know another
word for it--must be realised as all that it is in the moral world if
he is ever to be true to himself, not to say if he is ever to welcome
the Atonement, and leave his sin behind. We have no need of words like
sin and atonement--we could not have the experiences which they
designate--unless we had a higher than merely natural life; and one of
the tendencies of the modern mind which has to be counteracted by the
evangelist is the tendency induced by physical and especially by
biological science to explain the realities of personal experience by
sub-personal categories. In conscience, in the sense of personal
dignity, in the ultimate inability of man to deny the self which he is,
we have always an appeal against such tendencies, which cannot fail;
but it needs to be made resolutely when conscience is lethargic and the
whole bias of the mind is to the other side.
Passing from physical science, the modern mind has perhaps been
influenced most by the great idealist movement in philosophy--the
movement which in Germany began with Kant and culminated in Hegel.
This idealism, just like physical science, gives a certain stamp to the
mind; when it takes possession of intelligence it casts it, so to
speak, into a certain mould; even more than physical science it
dominates it so that it becomes incapable of self-criticism, and very
difficult to teach. Its importance to the preacher of Christianity is
that it assumes certain relations between the human and the divine,
relations which foreclose the very questions which the Atonement
compels us to raise. To be brief, it teaches the essential unity of
God and man. God and man, to speak of them as distinct, are necessary
to each other, but man is as necessary to God as God is to man. God is
the truth of man, but man is the reality of God. God comes to
consciousness of Himself in man, and man in being conscious of himself
is at the same time conscious of God. Though many writers of this
school make a copious use of Christian phraseology, it seems to me
obvious that it is not in an adequate Christian sense. Sin is not
regarded as that which ought not to be, it is that which is to be
transcended. It is as inevitable as anything in nature; and the sense
of it, the bad conscience which accompanies it, is no more than the
growing pains of the soul. On such a system there is no room for
atonement in the sense of the mediation of God's forgiveness through
Jesus Christ. We may consistently speak in it of a man being
reconciled to himself, or even reconciled to his sins, but not, so far
as I can understand, of his being reconciled to God, and still less,
reconciled to God through the death of His Son. The penetration of
Kant saw from the first all that could be made of atonement on the
basis of any such system. What it means to the speculative mind is
that the new man bears the sin of the old. When the sinner repents and
is converted, the weight of what he has done comes home to him; the new
man in him--the Son of God in him--accepts the responsibility of the
old man, and so he has peace with God. Many whose minds are under the
influence of this mode of thought do not see clearly to what it leads,
and resent criticism of it as if it were a sort of impiety. Their
philosophy is to them a surrogate for religion, but they should not be
allowed to suppose (if they do suppose) that it is the equivalent of
Christianity. There can be no Christianity without Christ; it is the
presence of the Mediator which makes Christianity what it is. But a
unique Christ, without Whom our religion disappears, is frankly
disavowed by the more candid and outspoken of our idealist
philosophers. Christ, they tell us, was certainly a man who had an
early and a magnificently strong faith in the unity of the human and
the Divine; but it was faith in a fact which enters into the
constitution of every human consciousness, and it is absurd to suppose
that the recognition of the fact, or the realisation of it, is
essentially dependent on Him. He was not sinless--which is an
expression without meaning, when we think of a human being which has to
rise by conflict and self-suppression out of nature into the world of
self-consciousness and right and wrong; He was not in any sense unique
or exceptional; He was only what we all are in our degree; at best, He
was only one among many great men who have contributed in their place
and time to the spiritual elevation of the race. Such, I say, is the
issue of this mode of thought as it is frankly avowed by some of its
representative men; but the peculiarity of it, when it is obscurely
fermenting as a leaven in the mind, is, that it appeals to men as
having special affinities to Christianity. In our own country it is
widely prevalent among those who have had a university education, and
indeed in a much wider circle, and it is a serious question how we are
to address our gospel to those who confront it in such a mental mood.
I have no wish to be unsympathetic, but I must frankly express my
conviction that this philosophy only lives by ignoring the greatest
reality of the spiritual world. There is something in that
world--something with which we can come into intelligible and vital
relations--something which can evince to our minds its truth and
reality, for which this philosophy can make no room: Christ's
consciousness of Himself. It is a theory of the universe which (on
principle) cannot allow Christ to be anything else than an additional
unit in the world's population; but if this were the truth about Him,
no language could be strong enough to express the self-delusion in
which He lived and died. That He was thus self-deluded is a hypothesis
I do not feel called to discuss. One may be accused of subjectivity
again, of course, though a subjective opinion which has the consent of
the Christian centuries behind it need not tremble at hard names; but I
venture to say that there is no reality in the world which more
inevitably and uncompromisingly takes hold of the mind as a reality
than our Lord's consciousness of Himself as it is attested to us in the
Gospels. But when we have taken this reality for all that it is worth,
the idealism just described is shaken to the foundation. What seemed
to us so profound a truth--the essential unity of the human and the
divine--may come to seem a formal and delusive platitude; in what we
once regarded as the formula of the perfect religion--the divinity of
man and the humanity of God--we may find quite as truly the formula of
the first, not to say the final, sin. To see Christ not in the light
of this speculative theorem, but in the light of His own consciousness
of Himself, is to realise not only our kinship to God, but our
remoteness from Him; it is to realise our incapacity for
self-realisation when we are left to ourselves; it is to realise the
need of the Mediator if we would come to the Father; it is to realise,
in principle, the need of the Atonement, the need, and eventually the
fact. When the modern mind therefore presents itself to us in this
mood of philosophical competence, judging Christ from the point of view
of the whole, and showing Him His place, we can only insist that the
place is unequal to His greatness, and that His greatness cannot be
explained away. The mind which is closed to the fact of His unique
claims, and the unique relation to God on which they rest, is closed
inevitably to the mediation of God's forgiveness through His death.
There is one other modification of mind, characteristic of modern
times, of which we have yet to take account--I mean that which is
produced by devotion to historical study. History is, as much as
science, one of the achievements of our age; and the historical temper
is as characteristic of the men we meet as the philosophical or the
scientific. The historical temper, too, is just as apt as these
others, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps quite consciously, but under the
engaging plea of modesty, to pronounce absolute sentences which strike
at the life of the Christian religion, and especially, therefore, at
the idea of the Atonement. Sometimes this is done broadly, so that
every one sees what it means. If we are told, for example, that
everything historical is relative, that it belongs of necessity to a
time, and is conditioned in ways so intricate that no knowledge can
ever completely trace them; if we are told, further, that for this very
reason nothing historical can have absolute significance, or can
condition the eternal life of man, it is obvious that the Christian
religion is being cut at the root. It is no use speaking about the
Atonement--about the mediation of God's forgiveness to the soul through
a historical person and work--if this is true. The only thing to be
done is to raise the question whether it _is_ true. It is no more for
historical than for physical science to exalt itself into a theory of
the universe, or to lay down the law with speculative absoluteness as
to the significance and value which shall attach to facts. When we
face the fact with which we are here concerned--the fact of Christ's
consciousness of Himself and His vocation, to which reference has
already been made--are we not forced to the conclusion that here a new
spiritual magnitude has appeared in history, the very _differentia_ of
which is that it _has_ eternal significance, and that it is eternal
life to know it? If we are to preach the Atonement, we cannot allow
either history or philosophy to proceed on assumptions which ignore or
degrade the fact of Christ. Only a person in whom the eternal has
become historical can be the bearer of the Atonement, and it must be
our first concern to show, against all assumptions whether made in the
name of history or of philosophy, that in point of fact there is such a
person here.
This consideration requires to be kept in view even when we are dealing
with the modern mind inside the Church. Nothing is commoner than to
hear those who dissent from any given construction of the Atonement
plead for a historical as opposed to a dogmatic interpretation of
Christ. It is not always clear what is meant by this distinction, nor
is it clear that those who use it are always conscious of what it would
lead to if it were made absolute. Sometimes a dogmatic interpretation
of the New Testament means an interpretation vitiated by dogmatic
prejudice, an interpretation in which the meaning of the writers is
missed because the mind is blinded by prepossessions of its own: in
this sense a dogmatic interpretation is a thing which no one would
defend. Sometimes, however, a dogmatic interpretation is one which
reveals or discovers in the New Testament truths of eternal and divine
significance, and to discredit such interpretation in the name of the
historical is another matter. The distinction in this case, as has
been already pointed out, is not absolute. It is analogous to the
distinction between fact and theory, or between thing and meaning, or
between efficient cause and final cause. None of these distinctions is
absolute, and no intelligent mind would urge either side in them to the
disparagement of the other. If we are to apprehend the whole reality
presented to us, we must apprehend the theory as well as the fact, the
meaning as well as the thing, the final as well as the efficient cause.
In the subject with which we are dealing, this truth is frequently
ignored. It is assumed, for example, that because Christ was put to
death by His enemies, or because He died in the faithful discharge of
His calling, therefore He did not die, in the sense of the Atonement,
for our sins: the historical causes which brought about His death are
supposed to preclude that interpretation of it according to which it
mediates to us the divine forgiveness. But there is no incompatibility
between the two things. To set aside an interpretation of Christ's
death as dogmatic, on the ground that there is another which is
historical, is like setting aside the idea that a watch is made to
measure time because you know it was made by a watchmaker. It was both
made by a watchmaker and made to measure time. Similarly it may be
quite true both that Christ was crucified and slain by wicked men, and
that He died for our sins. But without entering into the questions
which this raises as to the relation between the wisdom of God and the
course of human history, it is enough to be conscious of the prejudice
which the historical temper is apt to generate against the recognition
of the eternal in time. Surely it is a significant fact that the New
Testament contains a whole series of books--the Johannine books--which
have as their very burden the eternal significance of the historical:
eternal life in Jesus Christ, come in flesh, the propitiation for the
whole world. Surely also it is a significant fact of a different and
even an ominous kind that we have at present in the Church a whole
school of critics which is so far from appreciating the truth in this
that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it has devoted itself to
a paltry and peddling criticism of these books in which the impression
of the eternal is lost. But whether we are to be indebted to John's
eyes, or to none but our own, if the eternal is not to be seen in
Jesus, He can have no place in our religion; if the historical has no
dogmatic content, it cannot be essential to eternal life. Hence if we
believe and know that we have eternal life in Jesus, we must assert the
truth which is implied in this against any conception of history which
denies it. Nor is it really difficult to do so. With the experience
of nineteen centuries behind us, we have only to confront this
particular historical reality, Jesus Christ, without prejudice; in
evangelising, we have only to confront others with Him; and we shall
find it still possible to see God in Him, the Holy Father who through
the Passion of His Son ministers to sinners the forgiveness of their
sins.
In what has been said thus far by way of explaining the modern mind,
emphasis may seem to have fallen mainly on those characteristics which
make it less accessible than it might be to Christian truth, and
especially to the Atonement. I have tried to point out the assailable
side of its prepossessions, and to indicate the fundamental truths
which must be asserted if our intellectual world is to be one in which
the gospel may find room. But the modern mind has other
characteristics. Some of these may have been exhibited hitherto mainly
in criticising current representations of the Atonement; but in
themselves they are entirely legitimate, and the claims they put
forward are such as we cannot disown. Before proceeding to a further
statement of the Atonement, I shall briefly refer to one or two of
them: a doctrine of Atonement which did not satisfy them would
undoubtedly stand condemned.
(1) The modern mind requires that everything shall be based on
experience. Nothing is true or real to it which cannot be
experimentally verified. This we shall all concede. But there is an
inference sometimes drawn from it at which we may look with caution.
It is the inference that, because everything must be based on
experience, no appeal to Scripture has any authority. I have already
explained in what sense it is possible to speak of the authority of
Scripture, and here it is only necessary to make the simple remark that
there is no proper contrast between Scripture and experience.
Scripture, so far as it concerns us here, is a record of experience or
an interpretation of it. It was the Church's experience that it had
its redemption in Christ; it was the interpretation of that experience
that Christ died for our sins. Yet in emphasising experience the
modern mind is right, and Scripture would lose its authority if the
experience it describes were not perpetually verified anew.
(2) The modern mind desires to have everything in religion ethically
construed. As a general principle this must command our unreserved
assent. Anything which violates ethical standards, anything which is
immoral or less than moral, must be excluded from religion. It may be,
indeed, that ethical has sometimes been too narrowly defined. Ideas
have been objected to as unethical which are really at variance not
with a true perception of the constitution of humanity, and of the laws
which regulate moral life, but with an atomic theory of personality
under which moral life would be impossible. Persons are not atoms; in
a sense they interpenetrate, though individuality has been called the
true impenetrability. The world has been so constituted that we do not
stand absolutely outside of each other; we can do things for each
other. We can bear each other's burdens, and it is not unethical to
say so, but the reverse. And again, it need not be unethical, though
it transcends the ordinary sphere and range of ethical action, if we
say that God in Christ is able to do for us what we cannot do for one
another. With reference to the Atonement, the demand for ethical
treatment is usually expressed in two ways. (_a_) There is the demand
for analogies to it in human life. The demand is justifiable, in so
far as God has made man in His own image; but, as has been suggested
above, it has a limit, in so far as God is God and not man, and must
have relations to the human race which its members do not and cannot
have to each other. (_b_) There is the demand that the Atonement shall
be exhibited in vital relation to a new life in which sin is overcome.
This demand also is entirely legitimate, and it touches a weak point in
the traditional Protestant doctrine. Dr. Chalmers tells us that he was
brought up--such was the effect of the current orthodoxy upon him--in a
certain distrust of good works. Some were certainly wanted, but not as
being themselves salvation; only, as he puts it, as tokens of
justification. It was a distinct stage in his religious progress when
he realised that true justification sanctifies, and that the soul can
and ought to abandon itself spontaneously and joyfully to do the good
that it delights in. The modern mind assumes what Dr. Chalmers
painfully discovered. An atonement that does not regenerate, it truly
holds, is not an atonement in which men can be asked to believe. Such
then, in its prejudices good and bad, is the mind to which the great
truth of the Christian religion has to be presented.
[1] Of course this does not touch the fact that the whole 'authority'
of the Christian religion is in Jesus Himself--in His historical
presence in the world, His words and works, His life and death and
resurrection. He _is_ the truth, the acceptance of which by man is
life eternal.