explanations are not by themselves enough to account for the
scriptural facts which we call the Atonement. We cannot ignore that,
whether we consider the Old Testament anticipations, or the New
Testament narrative of our Lord's work, His death, apart from the
obedience manifested in it, occupies a unique place, and that stress
is laid on it which would be unaccountable were it _only_ the extreme
trial of His obedience. The frequent declaration that it was
necessary, that 'it behoved Christ to die,' seems to point to
something exceptional in it, something more than the mere close of His
spotless life. So again the mysterious dread and horror with which He
looked forward to it testify to something in it which goes far beyond
any human experience of death[224]. And what we gather from the New
Testament must be combined with the Old Testament premonitions of
Christ's death, as typified by the Mosaic sacrifices. There can be no
question that death was, speaking generally, an integral part of the
idea of sacrifice for sin, and that the distinguishing ceremonial of
the slaying of the victim points to a special significance in death as
connected with expiation and propitiation. Therefore, although we may
still recognise that it was the spirit of obedience and voluntary
submission which gave atoning value to the death of Christ, we cannot
ignore the necessity of death as the appointed form which the
obedience took. Had He not obeyed, He would not have atoned; but had
He not died, the obedience would have lacked just that element which
made it an atonement for sin. The obedience was intended to issue in
death. S. Bernard's saying, though true as he meant it, is, if taken
quite literally, too sharp an antithesis. There is nothing
well-pleasing to God in death alone, it is true; but there is, so He
has revealed it, something well-pleasing to His righteousness,
something propitiatory in death, if as a further condition the perfect
obedience of the victim is thereby displayed.
We are driven to the same conclusion by the second explanation of our
Lord's sacrifice given above. It is not enough to say that He died in
order to manifest God's righteous judgment against sin, for the
question remains, Why is death the requisite manifestation of
judgment? If He endured it because it is the only fitting punishment,
why is it in such a signal manner the penalty of sin? We can point
indeed to the Divine principle, 'The soul that sinneth, it shall die,'
as we can point to God's declared will that expiation shall be made by
means of death, but in neither case, whether death be looked upon as
the punishment or as the expiation of sin, is there any explanation of
its unique position. It may well be that here we are confronted by the
final mystery, and that the propitiatory virtue of Christ's death,
typified by the slaying of animal victims under the law, foreshadowed
by the almost universal belief in the expiation of blood, acknowledged
with wondering gratitude by the human heart, depends upon the
unsearchable will and hidden purposes of God, except in so far as we
can see in it the manifestation at once of Christ's perfect obedience
and of the righteousness of Divine judgment. If an attempt is made to
penetrate further into the mystery of Redemption, it can be but a
speculation, but it will be saved from overboldness if it follows the
general lines of God's action as revealed in His Word.
Some light may be thrown upon the mystery of Christ's death by
considering the scriptural view of death in general as the penalty of
sin. It is not the mere physical act of dying, for that, as
S. Athanasius says, is natural to man[225], and can be traced in the
animal world in the ages before man existed. Besides, our Lord is said
to have delivered us from death, and this clearly cannot mean physical
death, since to this all men are still subject, but rather spiritual
death; and the death which is spoken of as the penalty of sin must
therefore also be spiritual. In this sense death can be no other than
the final removal from us of God's presence, the completion of the
alienation from the Divine life which sin began. But, considering the
close connection, throughout the Bible, of physical and spiritual
death, may it not be that the former is more than the symbol and type
of the latter, that it is actually its consummation? If, again, death
be truly represented by the Christian consciousness as the close of
man's probation, does not this also point to its being the moment when
the light of God's presence, the strength of His life, is finally
withdrawn from the impenitent sinner, and the spiritual death, which
is the one essential punishment of sin, falls upon him? The sentence
of death, then, under which the whole world lay apart from the
Atonement[226], was the declaration that every man who by inheritance
and by his own act shared in Adam's sin, should at the moment of
physical death experience also the full measure of spiritual death.
The common lot of death thus involved the consciousness of separation
from the life of God, and when we so regard it, we can understand
something of the horror which its anticipation brought upon the soul
of the Son of God[227]. He must pass through this last and most awful
human experience; not only because it was human, but because by the
victorious endurance of it alone could the propitiation be
accomplished. The thought throws light upon the prominence given to
the death of Christ, upon His dread of it, upon His mysterious cry of
dereliction upon the cross. It shows us how, though the experience was
common to man, yet in Him it was in a twofold manner unique. The
withdrawal of God's presence, awful as it is to the sin-hardened
nature of man, must have been immeasurably more bitter to Him Who was
One with the Father, whose 'meat was to do the will of His Father.'
Just as we may believe the tortures of the cross to have been
specially grievous to the perfect body which was unstained by sin,
though other men have endured them, so, though all have to pass
through death with its accompanying terror of the loss of God's
presence, none can realize what that experience was to Him, because He
was the Son of God. The death of Christ was therefore unique because
of the nature of Him Who underwent it. But it was also unique in its
results. No other death had been a propitiation for sin, for in no
other death had this overwhelming consciousness of dereliction been
endured victoriously, with no failure of perfect obedience, no
shrinking of the will from the ordained task. In this final experience
the offering was complete, the essence of the propitiation was
secured, for the actual result of all human sin was herein made the
very revelation of holiness itself, the means whereby the union with
the will of God, so far from being finally broken, was finally
perfected. The propitiatory value, therefore, of the sacrifice of
Christ lay in His absolute obedience, in His willing acceptance of
suffering which was thereby acknowledged as the due reward of sin, and
in the death which was the essential form of both, for death is the
culminating point of the alienation from God, which is both sin and
its punishment. He alone endured it victoriously and without sin; He
alone, therefore, transformed it from the sign and occasion of God's
wrath into a well-pleasing offering; He took the punishment and made
it a propitiation. 'The chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and
with His stripes we are healed.'
(_c_) So far we have considered the sacrifice of Christ in its aspect
Godwards: we have tried to find an answer to the question, How did the
death of Christ propitiate the wrath of God? There remains the further
question, How was it a sacrifice for us? It was, we can see, a perfect
offering acceptable to God: but how has it availed 'for us men'? The
mind shrinks from a purely external Atonement, and part of the
imperfection of the Mosaic sacrifices consisted in the merely
artificial relation between the offender and the victim. In the
perfect sacrifice this relation must be real; and we are thus led to
the truth, so often overlooked, but impressed on every page of the New
Testament, that He who died for our sins was our true representative
in that He was truly man. Without for the present going into the more
mystical doctrine of Christ as the second Adam, the spiritual head of
our race, what is here emphasized is the reality and perfection of His
human nature, which gave Him the right to offer a representative
sacrifice[228]. 'For verily not of angels doth He take hold, but He
taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behoved Him in all
things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful
and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make
propitiation for the sins of the people.' Being thus 'taken from among
men,' He was 'appointed for--or, on behalf of--men' and the
justification of His Priesthood is the complete reality of His
humanity, which, if we may so speak, overlay and hid His Divinity, so
that 'though He was a Son,' unchangeably 'in the form of God,' 'yet
learnt He obedience by the things which He suffered,' and thus became
for us a perfect Priest. The sinless perfection of Christ, far from
removing Him out of the sphere of our sinful lives, made Him perfectly
representative; for He not only possessed in their greatest perfection
all the powers and capacities which are the instruments of sin, but in
the strength of His sinlessness and of His love He could feel for all
men and accept them as His brethren, though they were sinners. Our
High Priest 'hath been in all points like as we are, yet without sin.'
The holiest man has some part of his nature stunted and repressed by
sin, and is so far incomplete, unrepresentative: but He, unweakened
and unmarred in any point by sin, can without holding anything back
represent human nature in its perfection and entirety.
The representative character of Christ is manifested in a different
aspect, according as He is regarded as the victim or as the priest
offering the sacrifice. As the victim He must be the sin-bearer, for
the transfer of guilt--which under the Mosaic system was merely
symbolised by the act of laying hands on the victim's head--must for a
true propitiatory sacrifice be more than external and artificial. That
is to say, there must be a real meaning in S. Paul's tremendous words,
'Him Who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf,' in the passages
in which He is described as bearing our sins[229], in the great
prophecy which told that 'the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us
all.' How can we find an explanation of the paradox so boldly stated
by S. Paul, that He who knew no sin was yet made sin? We may not
surely take all these plain phrases to mean that He bore the
_punishment_ of our sins: it would have been easy to say that had it
been meant. No, the relation typified by the Mosaic offerings must be
real, and yet the expression 'He made Him to be sin' cannot without
blasphemy be understood to mean that God the Father actually made His
Son to sin. The solution of the difficulty can only be found in the
truth of the Incarnation. In order that the sacrifice might be
representative, He took upon Him the whole of our human nature, and
became flesh, conditioned though that fleshly nature was throughout by
sin[230]. It was not only in His death that we contemplate Him as the
sin-bearer, but throughout His life He was, as it were, conditioned by
the sinfulness of those with whom His human nature brought Him into
close and manifold relations. The Crucifixion does not come as the
unexpectedly shameful end of a glorious and untroubled life, though it
was undoubtedly in a special sense the manifestation of the 'curse'
under which He laid Himself. We cannot say that at a given moment in
His life, as when the sinner's hands were laid upon the victim's head
and his guilt was transferred, He began to bear our iniquity, for the
very nature which He took, freed though it was in Him from hereditary
guilt, was in itself, by its necessary human relations, sin-bearing.
Nor did His personal sinlessness make this impossible or unreal;
rather it intensified it. As S. Matthew tells us, even in relation to
bodily sickness and infirmity, that He bore what He took
away--'Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases'--so it was
with our redemption from sin. In taking it away, He had to bear its
weight, intensified by reason of that very self-sacrificing love which
made Him realize with more than human keenness the sinfulness of the
human nature into which He had come. There is thus nothing artificial
or external in His sin-bearing, for His human nature was so real and
so perfect that He was involved, so to speak, in all the consequences
of the sin which is so tremendous a factor in human life, even to the
enduring of the very sufferings and death which in us are the penal
results and final outcome of sin, but in Him were the means of His
free self-sacrifice.
Once more He was our representative as the Priest who offered the
sacrifice. The requisite conditions of such an office are stated, in
the Epistle to the Hebrews, to be complete human sympathy, and yet
such separateness from sin, and from all limitations of
incompleteness, as can only be Divine. 'It behoved Him in all things
to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and
faithful high priest;' 'but He, because He abideth for ever, hath His
priesthood unchangeable ... for such a high priest became us, holy,
harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the
heavens;' 'for the law appointeth men high priests, having infirmity;
but the word of the oath, which was after the law, appointeth a Son,
perfected for evermore[231].' In these and similar passages the
doctrine of the Priesthood of Christ is developed, and it is obvious
that quite as much stress is laid on His unlikeness, as on His
likeness to us[232]. He is our representative as Priest, because He is
both man and more than man, and can therefore perform for us what we
could not and cannot perform for ourselves, in offering the perfect
propitiatory sacrifice. Here is the true vicariousness of the
Atonement, which consisted, not, as we shall see later, in the
substitution of His punishment for ours, but in His offering the
sacrifice which man had neither purity nor power to offer. From out of
the very heart and centre of the human nature which was so enslaved
and corrupted by sin that no human offering was acceptable to God
there is raised the sinless sacrifice of perfect humanity by the
God-Man, our great High Priest: human in the completeness of His
sympathy, Divine in the unique power of His Priesthood. So is the
condition of the law of righteousness fulfilled, and the sacrifice of
obedience unto death is offered by His submission to all that
constitutes in sinners the consummation and the punishment of their
sin, which He transformed into the occasion and the manifestation of
His perfect holiness. And it is a representative sacrifice, for unique
though it is, it consists of no unheard-of experience, of no merely
symbolical ceremony, unrelated and unmeaning to us; but of just those
universal incidents of suffering which, though He must have felt them
with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely human--poverty,
misunderstanding, failure, treachery, rejection, bodily anguish,
spiritual desolation, death. 'Surely He hath borne our griefs, and
carried our sorrows.... The chastisement of our peace was upon Him,'
and therefore 'by His stripes we are healed.'
2. It is not enough to consider the death of Christ only as
propitiatory, or as standing alone in relation to our redemption. We
have seen how it secured our propitiation, and in what sense it has a
unique place in relation both to our Lord Himself and to man. There
remains the further aspect of His redemptive work, in which it is
regarded as effecting our reunion with God by delivering us from the
power of sin, and by filling us with the Divine gift of life. This, it
should be noticed, is the conception of our Lord's work which was
chiefly in the minds of the early Christian writers, though in almost
all it was combined with the acknowledgment of His deliverance of man
from guilt and from the wrath of God by His representative
propitiation[233]. But to their consciousness the power of sin and of
the spiritual forces with which man is surrounded was so continually
present, that they were naturally inclined to look mainly at that side
of the Atonement which represents it as the victory over sin and Satan
and the restoration of man to the life of God. And this view, though
by no means to the exclusion of the propitiatory aspect, is amply
justified by the Bible. Considered as restoration, there seem to be
three grades or stages of redemption indicated in the New Testament.
First, there is the unanimous declaration that the object of our
Lord's life and death was to free us from sin. In the most sacrificial
descriptions of His work this further result of the Atonement is
implied. The 'Lamb of God' is to 'take away the _sin_ of the world';
His Blood was to be 'shed for the remission of _sins_'; by 'the
precious Blood of Jesus Christ as of a Lamb without blemish' men were
'redeemed from their vain conversation'; He 'gave Himself for us, that
He might redeem us from all _iniquity_.' In the next place, this
deliverance from sin is identified with the gift of life, which is
repeatedly connected with our Lord's life and death. 'I am come that
they might have life'; for 'I will give My flesh for the life of the
world.' 'He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth
live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.'
He 'bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we being dead to
sins might live unto righteousness.' Lastly, this new life is to issue
in union with the life of God in Christ. 'Christ suffered for sins,
the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.' 'In Christ
Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the Blood of Christ.'
In such passages the Apostles are only drawing out the meaning of our
Lord's own declaration, 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto
Me.'
Our Lord's death is thus intimately connected by the New Testament
writers with the restoration of man to union with God by means of the
gift of life; but it should be noticed that, unique and necessary as
His death was, it is continually spoken of in close connection with
the Resurrection or the Ascension, for in these, as was foreshadowed
by the typical ceremonies of the Law, the sacrifice culminated by the
presentation of the 'life which had willingly passed through death'
before the altar of God's presence. The reason is clear. Pardon for
the past, deliverance from guilt, propitiation of the just wrath of
God, are necessary and all-important; but they cannot stand alone.
They must, for man is helpless and weak, be succeeded by the gift of
life, and for this we must look to those mighty acts in which the One
Sacrifice reached its full consummation. Thus our Lord Himself
declares that He died in order to rise again; 'I lay down My life that
[in order that] I may take it again.' So to S. Paul the Resurrection
is the necessary completion of the process which was begun by the
death. 'He was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for
our justification.' 'If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to
God through the death of His Son, much more being reconciled, shall we
be saved through [in] His life.' 'We were buried with Him through
baptism unto death; that [in order that] like as Christ was raised
from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk
in newness of life.' Even the passages which speak of our salvation as
effected by virtue of Christ's Blood, refer, according to the Jewish
conception of the 'blood which is the life,' not only, or even
chiefly, to the bloodshedding in death, but to the heavenly
'sprinkling' of the principle of life, its presentation in heaven by
means of the Resurrection and Ascension. The whole process is
described in what may be called the central core of S. Paul's
theology, the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. 'It is
Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who
is at the Right Hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.' It
has been the fault of much popular theology to think only of our
deliverance from wrath by the sacrificial death of Christ, and to
neglect the infinitely important continuation of the process thus
begun. The Gospel is a religion of life, the call to a life of union
with God by means of the grace which flows from the mediation of the
risen and ascended Saviour. We need not discuss the comparative
importance of the two aspects of the work of Atonement, for
propitiation and reunion, pardon and life are alike necessary elements
in salvation, and by the love of God in Christ are united in the
sacrifice which was begun on Calvary, and is for ever presented for
our redemption before the throne of God in heaven.
3. So far we have been considering the Atonement as our Lord's work on
behalf of men: we have now to consider it as meeting the inevitable
demand of the human conscience that this vicarious sacrifice shall in
some way satisfy man's sense of personal responsibility; that by means
of the Atonement man shall, so far as he can, make amends for his own
sin. The charge of injustice, as it is generally urged against the
doctrine of the Atonement, rests, as will be shewn, upon a fundamental
misconception as to the nature of Christ's work for us; but it is also
commonly assumed that by the death of Christ all was done for man, and
nothing in man, so that we are thereby relieved of all responsibility
for our own wilful acts. It is this notion that we have now to
investigate. First, however, we must acknowledge the truth contained
in it. The Atonement is, after all, God's forgiveness of us in Christ,
and no forgiveness is conceivable which does not in some degree
relieve the offender of the consequences of his offence. Human
forgiveness, though it may in some cases, perhaps, remit no part of
the external penalty due to wrong-doing, must, in the very act of
forgiving, put away and abolish the anger of the offended person, the
alienation which the offence has caused, and which is certainly part,
sometimes the greatest part, of the penal consequences of an offence.
Human forgiveness, therefore, necessarily transgresses the strict law
of retribution: yet no one can seriously contend that forgiveness is
either impossible or immoral. And more than this, there is even in our
imperfect forgiveness a power to blot out guilt, and to restore the
offender to new life. Inexplicable though the fact may be, experience
tells us that forgiveness avails to lift the load of guilt that
presses upon an offender. A change passes over him that can only be
described as regenerative, life-giving; and thus the assurance of
pardon, however conveyed, may be said to obliterate in some degree the
consequences of the past[234]. It is true that this result of
forgiveness cannot be explained logically so as to satisfy the reason,
but the possibility and the power of pardon are nevertheless facts of
human experience. The Atonement is undoubtedly a mystery, but all
forgiveness is a mystery. The Atonement undoubtedly transgresses the
strict law of exact retribution, but all forgiveness transgresses it.
And we may believe that human forgiveness is, in spite of all its
imperfection, like that of God, for this is surely the lesson of the
Lord's Prayer, 'Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that
trespass against us.' Experience and conscience, therefore, lead us to
expect that the Divine method of forgiveness will both disprove the
exaggerated idea of personal responsibility, which is based on a false
estimate of man's power, and will also transcend reason by rising into
a region of mystery and of miracle[235]. We have to deal in this
sphere of pardon with a God Who 'declares His almighty power most
chiefly in showing mercy and pity.'