CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT
What has now been said about the relations subsisting between God and
man, about the manner in which these relations are affected by sin, and
particularly about the Scripture doctrine of the connection between sin
and death, must determine, to a great extent, our attitude to the
Atonement. The Atonement, as the New Testament presents it, assumes
the connection of sin and death. Apart from some sense and recognition
of such connection, the mediation of forgiveness through the death of
Christ can only appear an arbitrary, irrational, unacceptable idea.
But leaving the Atonement meanwhile out of sight, and looking only at
the situation created by sin, the question inevitably arises, What can
be done with it? Is it possible to remedy or to reverse it? It is an
abnormal and unnatural situation; can it be annulled, and the relations
of God and man put upon an ideal footing? Can God forgive sin and
restore the soul? Can we claim that He shall? And if it is possible
for Him to do so, can we tell how or on what conditions it is possible?
When the human mind is left to itself, there are only two answers which
it can give to these questions. Perhaps they are not specially
characteristic of the modern mind, but the modern mind in various moods
has given passionate expression to both of them. The first says
roundly that forgiveness is impossible. Sin is, and it abides. The
sinner can never escape from the past. His future is mortgaged to it,
and it cannot be redeemed. He can never get back the years which the
locust has eaten. His leprous flesh can never come again like the
flesh of a little child. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap, and reap for ever and ever. It is not eternal punishment which
is incredible; nothing else has credibility. Let there be no illusion
about this: forgiveness is a violation, a reversal, of law, and no such
thing is conceivable in a world in which law reigns.
The answer to this is, that sin and its consequences are here conceived
as though they belonged to a purely physical world, whereas, if the
world were only physical, there could be no such thing as sin. As soon
as we realise that sin belongs to a world in which freedom is real--a
world in which reality means the personal relations subsisting between
man and God, and the experiences realised in these relations--the
question assumes a different aspect. It is not one of logic or of
physical law, but of personality, of character, of freedom. There is
at least a possibility that the sinner's relation to his sin and God's
relation to the sinner should change, and that out of these changed
relations a regenerative power should spring, making the sinner, after
all, a new creature. The question, of course, is not decided in this
sense, but it is not foreclosed.
At the opposite extreme from those who pronounce forgiveness impossible
stand those who give the second answer to the great question, and
calmly assure us that forgiveness may be taken for granted. They
emphasise what the others overlooked--the personal character of the
relations of God and man. God is a loving Father; man is His weak and
unhappy child; and of course God forgives. As Heine put it, _c'est mon
métier_, it is what He is for. But the conscience which is really
burdened by sin does not easily find satisfaction in this cheap pardon.
There is something in conscience which will not allow it to believe
that God can simply condone sin: to take forgiveness for granted, when
you realise what you are doing, seems to a live conscience impious and
profane. In reality, the tendency to take forgiveness for granted is
the tendency of those who, while they properly emphasise the personal
character of the relations of God and man, overlook their universal
character--that is, exclude from them that element of law without which
personal relations cease to be ethical. But a forgiveness which
ignores this stands in no relation to the needs of the soul or the
character of God.
What the Christian religion holds to be the truth about forgiveness--a
truth embodied in the Atonement--is something quite distinct from both
the propositions which have just been considered. The New Testament
does not teach, with the naturalistic or the legal mind, that
forgiveness is impossible; neither does it teach, with the sentimental
or lawless mind, that it may be taken for granted. It teaches that
forgiveness is mediated to sinners through Christ, and specifically
through His death: in other words, that it is possible for God to
forgive, but possible for God only through a supreme revelation of His
love, made at infinite cost, and doing justice to the uttermost to
those inviolable relations in which alone, as I have already said, man
can participate in eternal life, the life of God Himself--doing justice
to them as relations in which there is an inexorable divine reaction
against sin, finally expressing itself in death. It is possible on
these terms, and it becomes actual as sinful men open their hearts in
penitence and faith to this marvellous revelation, and abandon their
sinful life unreservedly to the love of God in Christ who died for them.
From this point of view it seems to me possible to present in a
convincing and persuasive light some of the truths involved in the
Atonement to which the modern mind is supposed to be specially averse.
Thus it becomes credible--we say so not _à priori_, but after
experience--that there is a _divine necessity_ for it; in other words,
there is no forgiveness possible to God without it: if He forgives at
all, it must be in this way and in no other. To say so beforehand
would be inconceivably presumptuous, but it is quite another thing to
say so after the event. What it really means is that in the very act
of forgiving sin--or, to use the daring word of St. Paul, in the very
act of justifying the ungodly--God must act in consistency with His
whole character. He must demonstrate Himself to be what He is in
relation to sin, a God with whom evil cannot dwell, a God who maintains
inviolate the moral constitution of the world, taking sin as all that
it is in the very process through which He mediates His forgiveness to
men.
It is the recognition of this divine necessity--not to forgive, but to
forgive in a way which shows that God is irreconcilable to evil, and
can never treat it as other or less than it is--it is the recognition
of this divine necessity, or the failure to recognise it, which
ultimately divides interpreters of Christianity into evangelical and
non-evangelical, those who are true to the New Testament and those who
cannot digest it.
No doubt the forms in which this truth is expressed are not always
adequate to the idea they are meant to convey, and if we are only
acquainted with them at second hand they will probably appear even less
adequate than they are. When Athanasius, _e.g._, speaks of God's
_truth_ in this connection, and then reduces God's truth to the idea
that God must keep His word--the word which made death the penalty of
sin--we may feel that the form only too easily loses contact with the
substance. Yet Athanasius is dealing with the essential fact of the
case, that God must be true to Himself, and to the moral order in which
men live, in all His dealings with sin for man's deliverance from it;
and that He has been thus true to Himself in sending His Son to live
our life and to die our death for our salvation. Or again, when Anselm
in the _Cur Deus Homo_ speaks of the satisfaction which is rendered to
God for the infringement of His honour by sin--a satisfaction apart
from which there can be no forgiveness--we may feel again, and even
more strongly, that the form of the thought is inadequate to the
substance. But what Anselm means is that sin makes a real difference
to God, and that even in forgiving God treats that difference _as_
real, and cannot do otherwise. He cannot ignore it, or regard it as
other or less than it is; if He did so, He would not be more gracious
than He is in the Atonement, He would cease to be God. It is Anselm's
profound grasp of this truth which, in spite of all its inadequacy in
form, and of all the criticism to which its inadequacy has exposed it,
makes the _Cur Deus Homo_ the truest and greatest book on the Atonement
that has ever been written. It is the same truth of a divine necessity
for the Atonement which is emphasised by St. Paul in the third chapter
of Romans, where he speaks of Christ's death as a demonstration of
God's righteousness. Christ's death, we may paraphrase his meaning, is
an act in which (so far as it is ordered in God's providence) God does
justice to Himself. He does justice to His character as a gracious
God, undoubtedly, who is moved with compassion for sinners: if He did
not act in a way which displayed His compassion for sinners, He would
_not_ do justice to Himself; there would be no [Greek] _endeixis_ of
His [Greek] _dikaiosune_: it would be in abeyance: He would do Himself
an injustice, or be untrue to Himself. It is with this in view that we
can appreciate the arguments of writers like Diestel and Ritschl, that
God's righteousness is synonymous with His grace. Such arguments are
true to this extent, that God's righteousness includes His grace. He
could not demonstrate it, He could not be true to Himself, if His grace
remained hidden. We must not, however, conceive of this as if it
constituted on our side a claim upon grace or upon forgiveness: such a
claim would be a contradiction in terms. All that God does in Christ
He does in free love, moved with compassion for the misery and doom of
men. But though God's righteousness as demonstrated in Christ's
death--in other words, His action in consistency with His
character--includes, and, if we choose to interpret the term properly,
even necessitates, the revelation of His grace, it is not this only--I
do not believe it is this primarily--which St. Paul has here in mind.
God, no doubt, would not do justice to Himself if He did not show His
compassion for sinners; but, on the other hand--and here is what the
apostle is emphasising--He would not do justice to Himself if He
displayed His compassion for sinners in a way which made light of sin,
which ignored its tragic reality, or took it for less than it is. In
this case He would again be doing Himself injustice; there would be no
demonstration that He was true to Himself as the author and guardian of
the moral constitution under which men live; as Anselm put it, He would
have ceased to be God. The apostle combines the two sides. In Christ
set forth a propitiation in His blood--in other words, in the Atonement
in which the sinless Son of God enters into the bitter realisation of
all that sin means for man, yet loves man under and through it all with
an everlasting love--there is an [Greek] _endeixis_ of God's
righteousness, a demonstration of His self-consistency, in virtue of
which we can see how He is at the same time just Himself and the
justifier of him who believes on Jesus, a God who is irreconcilable to
sin, yet devises means that His banished be not expelled from Him. We
may say reverently that this was the only way in which God could
forgive. He cannot deny Himself, means at the same time He cannot deny
His grace to the sinful, and He cannot deny the moral order in which
alone He can live in fellowship with men; and we see the inviolableness
of both asserted in the death of Jesus. Nothing else in the world
demonstrates how real is God's love to the sinful, and how real the sin
of the world is to God. And the love which comes to us through such an
expression, bearing sin in all its reality, yet loving us through and
beyond it, is the only love which at once forgives and regenerates the
soul.
It becomes credible also that there is a _human necessity_ for the
Atonement: in other words, that apart from it the conditions of being
forgiven could no more be fulfilled by man than forgiveness could be
bestowed by God.
There are different tendencies in the modern mind with regard to this
point. On the one hand, there are those who frankly admit the truth
here asserted. Yes, they say, the Atonement is necessary for us. If
we are to be saved from our sins, if our hearts are to be touched and
won by the love of God, if we are to be emancipated from distrust and
reconciled to the Father whose love we have injured, there must be a
demonstration of that love so wonderful and overpowering that all
pride, alienation and fear shall be overcome by it; and this is what we
have in the death of Christ. It is a demonstration of love powerful
enough to evoke penitence and faith in man, and it is through penitence
and faith alone that man is separated from his sins and reconciled to
God. A demonstration of love, too, must be given in act; it is not
enough to be told that God loves: the reality of love lies in another
region than that of words. In Christ on His cross the very thing
itself is present, beyond all hope of telling wonderful, and without
its irresistible appeal our hearts could never have been melted to
penitence, and won for God. On the other hand, there are those who
reject the Atonement on the very ground that for pardon and
reconciliation nothing is required but repentance, the assumption being
that repentance is something which man can and must produce out of his
own resources.
On these divergent tendencies in the modern mind I should wish to make
the following remarks.
First, the idea that man can repent as he ought, and whenever he will,
without coming under any obligation to God for his repentance, but
rather (it might almost be imagined) putting God under obligation by
it, is one to which experience lends no support. Repentance is an
adequate sense not of our folly, nor of our misery, but of our sin: as
the New Testament puts it, it is repentance _toward God_. It is the
consciousness of what our sin is to Him: of the wrong it does to His
holiness, of the wound which it inflicts on His love. Now such a
consciousness it is not in the power of the sinner to produce at will.
The more deeply he has sinned, the more (so to speak) repentance is
needed, the less is it in his power. It is the very nature of sin to
darken the mind and harden the heart, to take away the knowledge of God
alike in His holiness and in His love. Hence it is only through a
revelation of God, and especially of what God is in relation to sin,
that repentance can be evoked in the soul. Of all terms in the
vocabulary of religion, repentance is probably the one which is most
frequently misused. It is habitually applied to experiences which are
not even remotely akin to true penitence. The self-centred regret
which a man feels when his sin has found him out--the wish, compounded
of pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable folly, that he had
not done it: these are spoken of as repentance. But they are not
repentance at all. They have no relation to God. They constitute no
fitness for a new relation to Him. They are no opening of the heart in
the direction of His reconciling love. It is the simple truth that
that sorrow of heart, that healing and sanctifying pain in which sin is
really put away, is not ours in independence of God; it is a saving
grace which is begotten in the soul under that impression of sin which
it owes to the revelation of God in Christ. A man can no more repent
than he can do anything else without a motive, and the motive which
makes evangelic repentance possible does not enter into his world till
he sees God as God makes Himself known in the death of Christ. All
true penitents are children of the Cross. Their penitence is not their
own creation: it is the reaction towards God produced in their souls by
this demonstration of what sin is to Him, and of what His love does to
reach and win the sinful.
The other remark I wish to make refers to those who admit the death of
Christ to be necessary _for us_--necessary, in the way I have just
described, to evoke penitence and trust in God--but who on this very
ground deny it to be _divinely_ necessary. It had to be, because the
hard hearts of men could not be touched by anything less moving: but
that is all. This, I feel sure, is another instance of those false
abstractions to which reference has already been made. There is no
incompatibility between a _divine_ necessity and a necessity _for us_.
It may very well be the case that nothing less than the death of Christ
could win the trust of sinful men for God, and at the same time that
nothing else than the death of Christ could fully reveal the character
of God in relation at once to sinners and to sin. For my own part I am
persuaded, not only that there is no incompatibility between the two
things, but that they are essentially related, and that only the
acknowledgment of the divine necessity in Christ's death enables us to
conceive in any rational way the power which it exercises over sinners
in inducing repentance and faith. It would not evoke a reaction
Godward unless God were really present in it, that is, unless it were a
real revelation of His being and will: but in a real revelation of
God's being and will there can be nothing arbitrary, nothing which is
determined only from without, nothing, in other words, that is not
divinely necessary. The demonstration of what God is, which is made in
the death of Christ, is no doubt a demonstration singularly suited to
call forth penitence and faith in man, but the necessity of it does not
lie simply in the desire to call forth penitence and faith. It lies in
the divine nature itself. God could not do justice to Himself, in
relation to man and sin, in any way less awful than this; and it is the
fact that He does not shrink even from this--that in the Person of His
Son He enters, if we may say so, into the whole responsibility of the
situation created by sin--which constitutes the death of Jesus a
demonstration of divine love, compelling penitence and faith. Nothing
less would have been sufficient to touch sinful hearts to their
depths--in that sense the Atonement is humanly necessary; but neither
would anything else be a sufficient revelation of what God is in
relation to sin and to sinful men--in that sense it is divinely
necessary. And the divine necessity is the fundamental one. The power
exercised over us by the revelation of God at the Cross is dependent on
the fact that the revelation is true--in other words, that it exhibits
the real relation of God to sinners and to sin. It is not by
calculating what will win us, but by acting in consistency with
Himself, that God irresistibly appeals to men. We dare not say that He
must be gracious, as though grace could cease to be free: but we may
say that He must be Himself, and that it is because He is what we see
Him to be in the death of Christ, understood as the New Testament
understands it, that sinners are moved to repentance and to trust in
Him. That which the eternal being of God made necessary to Him in the
presence of sin is the very thing which is necessary also to win the
hearts of sinners. Nothing but what is divinely necessary could have
met the necessities of sinful men.
When we admit this twofold necessity for the Atonement, we can tell
ourselves more clearly how we are to conceive Christ in it, in relation
to God on the one hand and to man on the other. The Atonement is God's
work. It is God who makes the Atonement in Christ. It is God who
mediates His forgiveness of sins to us in this way. This is one aspect
of the matter, and probably the one about which there is least dispute
among Christians. But there is another aspect of it. The Mediator
between God and man is Himself man, Christ Jesus. What is the relation
of the man Christ Jesus to those for whom the Atonement is made? What
is the proper term to designate, in this atoning work, what He is in
relation to them? The doctrine of Atonement current in the Church in
the generation preceding our own answered frankly that in His atoning
work Christ is our substitute. He comes in our nature, and He comes
into our place. He enters into all the responsibilities that sin has
created for us, and He does justice to them in His death. He does not
deny any of them: He does not take sin as anything less or else than it
is to God; in perfect sinlessness He consents even to die, to submit to
that awful experience in which the final reaction of God's holiness
against sin is expressed. Death was not _His_ due: it was something
alien to One Who had nothing amiss; but it was our due, and because it
was ours He made it His. It was thus that He made Atonement. _He_
bore _our_ sins. He took to Himself all that they meant, all in which
they had involved the world. He died for them, and in so doing
acknowledged the sanctity of that order in which sin and death arc
indissolubly united. In other words, He did what the human race could
not do for itself, yet what had to be done if sinners were to be saved:
for how could men be saved if there were not made in humanity an
acknowledgment of all that sin is to God, and of the justice of all
that is entailed by sin under God's constitution of the world? Such an
acknowledgment, as we have just seen, is divinely necessary, and
necessary, too, for man, if sin is to be forgiven.
This was the basis of fact on which the substitutionary character of
Christ's sufferings and death in the Atonement was asserted. It may be
admitted at once that when the term substitute is interpreted without
reference to this basis of fact it lends itself very easily to
misconstruction. It falls in with, if it does not suggest, the idea of
a transference of merit and demerit, the sin of the world being carried
over to Christ's account, and the merit of Christ to the world's
account, as if the reconciliation of God and man, or the forgiveness of
sins and the regeneration of souls, could be explained without the use
of higher categories than are employed in bookkeeping. It is surely
not necessary at this time of day to disclaim an interpretation of
personal relations which makes use only of sub-personal categories.
Merit and demerit cannot be mechanically transferred like sums in an
account. The credit, so to speak, of one person in the moral sphere
cannot become that of another, apart from moral conditions. It is the
same truth, in other words, if we say that the figure of paying a debt
is not in every respect adequate to describe what Christ does in making
the Atonement. The figure, I believe, covers the truth; if it did not,
we should not have the kind of language which frequently occurs in
Scripture; but it is misread into falsehood and immorality whenever it
is pressed as if it were exactly equivalent to the truth. But granting
these drawbacks which attach to the word, is there not something in the
work of Christ, as mediating the forgiveness of sins, which no other
word can express? No matter on what subsequent conditions its virtue
for us depends, what Christ did had to be done, or we should never have
had forgiveness; we should never have known God, and His nature and
will in relation to sin; we should never have had the motive which
alone could beget real repentance; we should never have had the spirit
which welcomes pardon and is capable of receiving it. We could not
procure these things for ourselves, we could not produce them out of
our own resources: but He by entering into our nature and lot, by
taking on Him our responsibilities and dying our death, has so revealed
God to us as to put them within our reach. We owe them to Him; in
particular, and in the last resort, we owe them to the fact that He
bore our sins in His own body to the tree. If we are not to say that
the Atonement, as a work carried through in the sufferings and death of
Christ, sufferings and death determined by our sin, is vicarious or
substitutionary, what are we to call it?
The only answer which has been given to this question, by those who
continue to speak of Atonement at all, is that we must conceive Christ
not as the substitute but as the representative of sinners. I venture
to think that, with some advantages, the drawbacks of this word are
quite as serious as those which attach to substitute. It makes it less
easy, indeed, to think of the work of Christ as a finished work which
benefits the sinner _ipso facto_, and apart from any relation between
him and the Saviour: but of what sort is the relation which it does
suggest? It suggests that the sinners who are to be saved by Christ
can put Christ forward in their name: they are not in the utterly
hopeless case that has hitherto been supposed; they can present
themselves to God in the person and work of One on whom God cannot but
look with approval. The boldest expression of this I have ever seen
occurs in some remarks in the _Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review_ on
the doctrine of St. Paul. The reviewer is far from saying that a
writer who finds a substitutionary doctrine throughout the New
Testament is altogether wrong. He goes so far as to admit that 'if we
look at the matter from what may be called an external point of view,
no doubt we may speak of the death of Christ as in a certain sense
substitutionary.' What this 'certain sense' is, he does not define.
But no one, he tells us, can do justice to Paul who fails to recognise
that the death of Christ was a racial act; and 'if we place ourselves
at Paul's point of view, we shall see that to the eye of God the death
of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race
than as an act which the race does in Christ.' In plain English, Paul
teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly, than that the ungodly in
Christ died for themselves. This is presented to us as something
profound, a recognition of the mystical depths in Paul's teaching: I
own I can see nothing profound in it except a profound misapprehension
of the apostle. Nevertheless, it brings out the logic of what
representative means when representative is opposed to substitute. The
representative is ours, we are in Him, and we are supposed to get over
all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just
because He is ours, and because we are one with Him. But the
fundamental fact of the situation is that, to begin with, Christ is
_not_ ours, and we are _not_ one with Him. In the apostle's view, and
in point of fact, we are 'without Christ' ([Greek] _chôris Christou_).
It is not we who have put Him there. It is not to us that His presence
and His work in the world are due. If we had produced Him and put Him
forward, we might call Him our representative in the sense suggested by
the sentences just quoted; we might say it is not so much He who dies
for us, as we who die in Him; but a representative not produced by us,
but given to us--not chosen by us, but the elect of God--is not a
representative at all, but in that place a substitute. He stands in
our stead, facing all our responsibilities for us as God would have
them faced; and it is what He does for us, and not the effect which
this produces in us, still less the fantastic abstraction of a 'racial
act,' which is the Atonement in the sense of the New Testament. To
speak of Christ as our representative, in the sense that His death is
to God less an act which He does for the race than an act which the
race does in Him, is in principle to deny the whole grace of the
gospel, and to rob it of every particle of its motive power.
To do justice to the truth here, both on its religious and its ethical
side, it is necessary to put in their proper relation to one another
the aspects of reality which the terms substitute and representative
respectively suggest. The first is fundamental. Christ is God's gift
to humanity. He stands in the midst of us, the pledge of God's love,
accepting our responsibilities as God would have them accepted,
offering to God, under the pressure of the world's sin and all its
consequences, that perfect recognition of God's holiness in so visiting
sin which men should have offered but could not; and in so doing He
makes Atonement for us. In so doing, also, He is our substitute, not
yet our representative. But the Atonement thus made is not a
spectacle, it is a motive. It is not a transaction in business, or in
book-keeping, which is complete in itself; in view of the relations of
God and man it belongs to its very nature to be a moral appeal. It is
a divine challenge to men, which is designed to win their hearts. And
when men are won--when that which Christ in His love has done for them
comes home to their souls--when they are constrained by His infinite
grace to the self-surrender of faith, then we may say He becomes their
representative. They begin to feel that what He has done for them must
not remain outside of them, but be reproduced somehow in their own
life. The mind of Christ in relation to God and sin, as He bore their
sins in His own body to the tree, must become their mind; this and
nothing else is the Christian salvation. The power to work this change
in them is found in the death of Christ itself; the more its meaning is
realised as something there, in the world, outside of us, the more
completely does it take effect within us. In proportion as we see and
feel that out of pure love to us He stands in our place--our
substitute--bearing our burden--in that same proportion are we drawn
into the relation to Him that makes Him our representative. But we
should be careful here not to lose ourselves in soaring words. The New
Testament has much to say about union with Christ, but I could almost
be thankful that it has no such expression as mystical union. The only
union it knows is a moral one--a union due to the moral power of
Christ's death, operating morally as a constraining motive on the human
will, and begetting in believers the mind of Christ in relation to sin;
but this moral union remains the problem and the task, as well as the
reality and the truth, of the Christian life. Even when we think of
Christ as our representative, and have the courage to say we died with
Him, we have still to _reckon_ ourselves to be dead to sin, and to _put
to death_ our members which are upon the earth; and to go past this,
and speak of a mystical union with Christ in which we are lifted above
the region of reflection and motive, of gratitude and moral
responsibility, into some kind of metaphysical identity with the Lord,
does not promote intelligibility, to say the least. If the Atonement
were not, to begin with, outside of us--if it were not in that sense
objective, a finished work in which God in Christ makes a final
revelation of Himself in relation to sinners and sin--in other words,
if Christ could not be conceived in it as our substitute, given by God
to do in our place what we could not do for ourselves, there would be
no way of recognising or preaching or receiving it as a motive; while,
on the other hand, if it did not operate as a motive, if it did not
appeal to sinful men in such a way as to draw them into a moral
fellowship with Christ--in other words, if Christ did not under it
become representative of us, our surety to God that we should yet be
even as He in relation to God and to sin, we could only say that it had
all been vain. Union with Christ, in short, is not a presupposition of
Christ's work, which enables us to escape all the moral problems raised
by the idea of a substitutionary Atonement; it is not a presupposition
of Christ's work, it is its fruit. To see that it is its fruit is to
have the final answer to the objection that substitution is immoral.
If substitution, in the sense in which we must assert it of Christ, is
the greatest moral force in the world--if the truth which it covers,
when it enters into the mind of man, enters with divine power to
assimilate him to the Saviour, uniting him to the Lord in a death to
sin and a life to God--obviously, to call it immoral is an abuse of
language. The love which can literally go out of itself and make the
burden of others its own is the radical principle of all the genuine
and victorious morality in the world. And to say that love cannot do
any such thing, that the whole formula of morality is, every man shall
bear his own burden, is to deny the plainest facts of the moral life.
Yet this is a point at which difficulty is felt by many in trying to
grasp the Atonement. On the one hand, there do seem to be analogies to
it, and points of attachment for it, in experience. No sin that has
become real to conscience is ever outlived and overcome without
expiation. There are consequences involved in it that go far beyond
our perception at the moment, but they work themselves inexorably out,
and our sin ceases to be a burden on conscience, and a fetter on will,
only as we 'accept the punishment of our iniquity,' and become
conscious of the holy love of God behind it. But the consequences of
sin are never limited to the sinner. They spread beyond him in the
organism of humanity, and when they strike visibly upon the innocent,
the sense of guilt is deepened. We see that we have done we know not
what, something deeply and mysteriously bad beyond all our reckoning,
something that only a power and goodness transcending our own avail to
check. It is one of the startling truths of the moral life that such
consequences of sin, striking visibly upon the innocent, have in
certain circumstances a peculiar power to redeem the sinful. When they
are accepted, as they sometimes are accepted, without repining or
complaint--when they are borne, as they sometimes are borne, freely and
lovingly by the innocent, because to the innocent the guilty are
dear--then something is appealed to in the guilty which is deeper than
guilt, something may be touched which is deeper than sin, a new hope
and faith may be born in them, to take hold of love so wonderful, and
by attaching themselves to it to transcend the evil past. The
suffering of such love (they are dimly aware), or rather the power of
such love persisting through all the suffering brought on it by sin,
opens the gate of righteousness to the sinful in spite of all that has
been; sin is outweighed by it, it is annulled, exhausted, transcended
in it. The great Atonement of Christ is somehow in line with this, and
we do not need to shrink from the analogy. 'If there were no witness,'
as Dr. Robertson Nicoll puts it, 'in the world's deeper literature'--if
there were no witness, that is, in the universal experience of man--'to
the fact of an Atonement, the Atonement would be useless, since the
formula expressing it would be unintelligible.' It is the analogy of
such experiences which makes the Atonement credible, yet it must always
in some way transcend them. There is something in it which is
ultimately incomparable. When we speak of others as innocent, the term
is used only in a relative sense; there is no human conscience pure to
God. When we speak of the sin of others coming in its consequences on
the innocent, we speak of something in which the innocent are purely
passive; if there is moral response on their part, the situation is not
due to moral initiative of theirs. But with Christ it is different.
He knew _no_ sin, and He entered _freely_, deliberately, and as the
very work of His calling, into all that sin meant for God and brought
on man. Something that I experience in a particular relation, in which
another has borne my sin and loved me through it, may help to open my
eyes to the meaning of Christ's love; but when they are opened, what I
see is the propitiation for the whole world. There is no guilt of the
human race, there is no consequence in which sin has involved it, to
which the holiness and love made manifest in Christ are unequal. He
reveals to all sinful men the whole relation of God to them and to
their sins--a sanctity which is inexorable to sin, and cannot take it
as other than it is in all its consequences, and a love which through
all these consequences and under the weight of them all, will not let
the sinful go. It is in this revelation of the character of God and of
His relation to the sin of the world that the forgiveness of sins is
revealed. It is not intimated in the air; it is preached, as St. Paul
says, 'in this man'; it is mediated to the world through Him and
specifically through His death, because it is through Him, and
specifically through His death, that we get the knowledge of God's
character which evokes penitence and faith, and brings the assurance of
His pardon to the heart.
From this point of view we may see how to answer the question that is
sometimes asked about the relation of Christ's life to His death, or
about the relation of both to the Atonement. If we say that what we
have in the Atonement is an assurance of God's character, does it not
follow at once that Christ's teaching and His life contribute to it as
directly as His death? Is it not a signal illustration of the false
abstractions which we have so often had cause to censure, when the
death of Christ is taken as if it had an existence or a significance
apart from His life, or could be identified with the Atonement in a way
in which His life could not? I do not think this is so clear. Of
course it is Christ Himself who is the Atonement or propitiation--He
Himself, as St. John puts it, and not anything, not even His death,
into which He does not enter. But it is He Himself, as making to us
the revelation of God in relation to sin and to sinners; and apart from
death, as that in which the conscience of the race sees the final
reaction of God against evil, this revelation is not fully made. If
Christ had done less than die for us, therefore--if He had separated
Himself from us, or declined to be one with us, in the solemn
experience in which the darkness of sin is sounded and all its
bitterness tasted,--there would have been no Atonement. It is
impossible to say this of any particular incident in His life, and in
so far the unique emphasis laid on His death in the New Testament is
justified. But I should go further than this, and say that even
Christ's life, taking it as it stands in the Gospels, only enters into
the Atonement, and has reconciling power, because it is pervaded from
beginning to end by the consciousness of His death. Instead of
depriving His death of the peculiar significance Scripture assigns to
it, and making it no more than the termination, or at least the
consummation, of His life, I should rather argue that the Scriptural
emphasis is right, and that His life attains its true interpretation
only as we find in it everywhere the power and purpose of His death.
There is nothing artificial or unnatural in this. There are plenty of
people who never have death out of their minds an hour at a time. They
are not cowards, nor mad, nor even sombre: they may have purposes and
hopes and gaieties as well as others; but they see life steadily and
see it whole, and of all their thoughts the one which has most
determining and omnipresent power is the thought of the inevitable end.
There is death in all their life. It was not, certainly, as the
inevitable end, the inevitable 'debt of nature,' that death was present
to the mind of Christ; but if we can trust the Evangelists at all, from
the hour of His baptism it was present to His mind as something
involved in His vocation; and it was a presence so tremendous that it
absorbed everything into itself. 'I have a baptism to be baptized
with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.' Instead of
saying that Christ's life as well as His death contributed to the
Atonement--that His active obedience (to use the theological formula)
as well as His passive obedience was essential to His propitiation--we
should rather say that His life is part of His death: a deliberate and
conscious descent, ever deeper and deeper, into the dark valley where
at the last hour the last reality of sin was to be met and borne. And
if the objection is made that after all this only means that death is
the most vital point of life, its intensest focus, I should not wish to
make any reply. Our Lord's Passion _is_ His sublimest action--an
action so potent that all His other actions are sublated in it, and we
know everything when we know that He _died_ for our sins.
The desire to bring the life of Christ as well as His death into the
Atonement has probably part of its motive in the feeling that when the
death is separated from the life it loses moral character: it is
reduced to a merely physical incident, which cannot carry such vast
significance as the Atonement. Such a feeling certainly exists, and
finds expression in many forms. How often, for example, we hear it
said that it is not the death which atones, but the spirit in which the
Saviour died--not His sufferings which expiate sin, but the innocence,
the meekness, the love to man and obedience to God in which they were
borne. The Atonement, in short, was a moral achievement, to which
physical suffering and death are essentially irrelevant. This is our
old enemy, the false abstraction, once more, and that in the most
aggressive form. The contrast of physical and moral is made absolute
at the very point at which it ceases to exist. As against such
absolute distinctions we must hold that if Christ had not really died
for us, there would have been no Atonement at all, and on the other
hand that what are called His physical sufferings and death have no
existence simply as physical: they are essential elements in the moral
achievement of the passion. It leads to no truth to say that it is not
His death, but the spirit in which He died, that atones for sin: the
spirit in which He died has its being in His death, and in nothing else
in the world.
It seems to me that what is really wanted here, both by those who seek
to co-ordinate Christ's life with His death in the Atonement, and by
those who distinguish between His death and the spirit in which He
died, is some means of keeping hold of the Person of Christ in His
work, and that this is not effectively done apart from the New
Testament belief in the Resurrection. There is no doubt that in
speaking of the death of Christ as that through which the forgiveness
of sins is mediated to us we are liable to think of it as if it were
only an event in the past. We take the representation of it in the
Gospel and say, "Such and such is the impression which this event
produces upon me; I feel in it how God is opposed to sin, and how I
ought to be opposed to it; I feel in it how God's love appeals to me to
share His mind about sin; and as I yield to this appeal I am at once
set free from sin and assured of pardon; this is the only ethical
forgiveness; to know this experimentally is to know the Gospel." No
one can have any interest in disputing another's obligation to Christ,
but it may fairly be questioned whether this kind of obligation to
Christ amounts to Christianity in the sense of the New Testament.
There is no living Christ here, no coming of the living Christ to the
soul, in the power of the Atonement, to bring it to God. But this is
what the New Testament shows us. It is _He_ who is the propitiation
for our sins--He who died for them and rose again. The New Testament
preaches a Christ who was dead and is alive, not a Christ who was alive
and is dead. It is a mistake to suppose that the New Testament
conception of the Gospel, involving as it does the spiritual presence
and action of Christ, in the power of the Atonement, is a matter of
indifference to us, and that in all our thinking and preaching we must
remain within purely historical limits, if by purely historical limits
is meant that our creed must end with the words "crucified, dead, and
buried." To preach the Atonement means not only to preach One who bore
our sins in death, but One who by rising again from the dead
demonstrated the final defeat of sin, and One who comes in the power of
His risen life--which means, in the power of the Atonement accepted by
God--to make all who commit themselves to Him in faith partakers in His
victory. It is not His death, as an incident in the remote past,
however significant it may be; it is the Lord Himself, appealing to us
in the virtue of His death, who assures us of pardon and restores our
souls.
One of the most singular phenomena in the attitude of many modern minds
to the Atonement is the disposition to plead against the Atonement what
the New Testament represents as its fruits. It is as though it had
done its work so thoroughly that people could not believe that it ever
needed to be done at all. The idea of fellowship with Christ, for
example, is constantly urged against the idea that Christ died for us,
and by His death made all mankind His debtors in a way in which we
cannot make debtors of each other. The New Testament itself is pressed
into the service. It is pointed out that our Lord called His disciples
to drink of His cup and to be baptized with His baptism, where the
baptism and the cup are figures of His passion; and it is argued that
there cannot be anything unique in His experience or service, anything
which He does for men which it is beyond the power of His disciples to
do also. Or again, reference is made to St. Paul's words to the
Colossians: 'Now I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf, and fill up
on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my
flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church'; and it is argued that
St. Paul here represents himself as doing exactly what Christ did, or
even as supplementing a work which Christ admittedly left imperfect.
The same idea is traced where the Christian is represented as called
into the fellowship of the Son of God, or more specifically as called
to know the fellowship of His sufferings by becoming conformed to His
death. It is seen pervading the New Testament in the conception of the
Christian as a man _in Christ_. And to descend from the apostolic age
to our own, it has been put by an American theologian into the
epigrammatic form that Christ redeems us by making us redeemers. What,
it may be asked, is the truth in all this? and how is it related to
what we have already seen cause to assert about the uniqueness of
Christ's work in making atonement for sin, or mediating the divine
forgiveness to man?
I do not think it is impossible or even difficult to reconcile the two:
it is done, indeed, whenever we see that the life to which we are
summoned, in the fellowship of Christ, is a life which we owe
altogether to Him, and which He does not in the least owe to us. The
question really raised is this: Has Jesus Christ a place of His own in
the Christian religion? Is it true that there is one Mediator between
God and man, Himself man, this man, Christ Jesus? In spite of the
paradoxical assertion of Harnack to the contrary, it is not possible to
deny, with any plausibility, that this was the mind of Christ Himself,
and that it has been the mind of all who call Him Lord. He knew and
taught, what they have learned by experience as well as by His word,
that all men must owe to Him their knowledge of the Father, their place
in the Kingdom of God, and their part in all its blessings. He could
not have taught this of any but Himself, nor is it the experience of
the Church that such blessings come through any other. Accordingly,
when Christ calls on men to drink His cup and to be baptized with His
baptism, while He may quite well mean, and does mean, that His life and
death are to be the inspiration of theirs, and while He may quite well
encourage them to believe that sacrifice on their part, as on His, will
contribute to bless the world, He need not mean, and we may be sure He
does not mean, that their blood is, like His, the blood of the
covenant, or that their sinful lives, even when purged and quickened by
His Spirit, could be, like His sinless life, described as the world's
ransom. The same considerations apply to the passages quoted from St.
Paul, and especially to the words in Colossians i. 24. The very
purpose of the Epistle to the Colossians is to assert the exclusive and
perfect mediatorship of Christ, alike in creation and redemption; all
that we call being, and all that we call reconciliation, has to be
defined by relation to Him, and not by relation to any other persons or
powers, visible or invisible; and however gladly Paul might reflect
that in his enthusiasm for suffering he was continuing Christ's work,
and exhausting some of the afflictions--they were Christ's own
afflictions--which had yet to be endured ere the Church could be made
perfect, it is nothing short of grotesque to suppose that in this
connection he conceived of himself as doing what Christ did, atoning
for sin, and reconciling the world to God. All this was done already,
perfectly done, done for the whole world; and it was on the basis of
it, and under the inspiration of it, that the apostle sustained his
enthusiasm for a life of toil and pain in the service of men. Always,
where we have Christian experience to deal with, it is the Christ
through whom the divine forgiveness comes to us at the Cross--the
Christ of the substitutionary Atonement, who bore all our burden alone,
and did a work to which we can for ever recur, but to which we did not
and do not and never can contribute at all--it is this Christ who
constrains us to find our representative with God in Himself, and to
become ourselves His representatives to men. It is as we truly
represent Him that we can expect our testimony to Him to find
acceptance, but that testimony far transcends everything that our
service enables men to measure. What is anything that a sinful man,
saved by grace, can do for his Lord or for his kind, compared with what
the sinless Lord has done for the sinful race? It is true that He
calls us to drink of His cup, to learn the fellowship of His
sufferings, even to be conformed to His death; but under all the
intimate relationship the eternal difference remains which makes Him
_Lord_--He knew no sin, and we could make no atonement. It is the goal
of our life to be found in Him; but I cannot understand the man who
thinks it more profound to identify himself with Christ and share in
the work of redeeming the world, than to abandon himself to Christ and
share in the world's experience of being redeemed. And I am very sure
that in the New Testament the last is first and fundamental.
THE EXPOSITOR'S GREEK TESTAMENT.
Edited by the
Rev. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
ALREADY PUBLISHED.
Volume I., 880 pages, containing--
St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke.
By the Rev. Prof. A. B. BRUCE, D.D.
St. John.
By the Rev. Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
Volume II., 934 pages, containing--
The Acts of the Apostles.
By the Rev. R. J. KNOWLING, D.D.
The Epistle to the Romans.
By the Rev. Prof. JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
The First Epistle to the Corinthians.
By the Rev. Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, D.D.
Volume III., _ready shortly_, containing--
The Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
By the Very Rev. Dean BERNARD, D.D.
The Epistle to the Galatians.
By the Rev. FREDERICK RENDALL, M.A.
The Epistle to the Ephesians.
By the Rev. Principal SALMOND, D.D.
The Epistle to the Philippians.
By the Rev. H. A. A. KENNEDY, D.Sc.
The Epistle to the Colossians.
By Professor A. S. PEAKE, M.A.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Atonement and the Modern Mind, by James Denney