every page of the New Testament, of the mystical union between Christ
and His people. By virtue of this union His acts are ascribed to us;
and thus, according to S. Paul, we died in Him, we are raised in Him,
and the sacrifice which He offered, we have also offered, as in Him.
The doctrine of the Second Adam, of the spiritual headship of Christ,
would not indeed if it stood alone satisfy the demands of the
conscience; but when taken in connection with the practical
sacramental teaching which is based upon it, it points to the solution
of the problem. By the Incarnation we are taken up into Him, and
therefore the acts that in His human nature He performed are our acts,
by virtue of that union which is described by Him as the union of a
vine with its branches, by S. Paul as that of the head with the
members of a body. But in considering the results of this union, the
reciprocal communication of the weakness of our bodily nature to Him,
of His victorious deeds in the body to us a distinction must be drawn
between that part of His work which can, and that which cannot be
shared by us. Of one part of His work, of the sacrifice which He
offered for man's guilt, the essence was its vicariousness. Man could
not and never can offer a sacrifice which can avail to propitiate for
the sins of the past. It is only in virtue of that one final and
perfect propitiation that we can draw nigh to God, can accomplish
anything good, can recognise that we are delivered from wrath. The
sins of the past are cancelled, the guilt is wiped out: in this
respect all was accomplished by Him for us who are in Him, and nothing
remains for us to do. He as our Representative, because He shares our
nature, can offer for us a prevailing sacrifice; only as His brethren,
because He has united us to Him, are we enabled to plead the sacrifice
which He offered. It is indeed offered for us, for it was utterly
impossible that we could offer it for ourselves; it was the necessary
initial step, which man could not take, towards union with the
righteous Father. As our spiritual head, the second Adam, the captain
of our salvation, He had the right of offering on our behalf; as in
Him by virtue of the Incarnation we are empowered to claim the
infinite blessings of the redemption so obtained[236]. If this is
mysterious, irrational, transcendental, so is all morality; for at the
root of all morality lies the power of self-sacrifice, which is
nothing but the impulse of love to make a vicarious offering for its
fellows, and the virtue of such an offering to restore and to
quicken[237]. The righteousness of God required from the human nature
which had sinned the sacrifice of a perfect obedience manifested in
and through death: that is the unique and unapproachable mystery of
the Atonement; but that the sacrifice should be offered by a sinless
Man, and that we should be accepted by God in virtue of His
propitiation and because of our union with Him, that, though
mysterious enough, as human reason counts mystery, is prefigured and
illustrated and explained by all the deepest experiences of the race,
by all that is most human, though it most evades logical analysis, in
our moral consciousness[238].
There is then no additional propitiation demanded from us. The
Atonement, in this aspect, requires nothing from us, for the
forgiveness is there, bestowed upon us by God in consequence of the
sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But like the gifts of grace which come
after forgiveness, the forgiveness itself has to be personally
accepted by us; it must be brought into contact with each man's will.
So regarded, the Atonement, though the great gift of reconciliation is
absolutely free, the product of the spontaneous love of God, does lay
upon us an obligation. On our part faith is demanded that we may
realize, and appropriate, and associate ourselves with the pardon
which is ours in Christ. This is not the place for a full discussion
of justifying faith: it is enough to indicate what seems to be its
relation to the Atonement, as being man's share in the propitiatory
work of Christ. It is often said that the faith which justifies is
simply trust[239], but it must surely be a more complex moral act than
this. If faith is the acceptance of Christ's propitiation, it must
contain, in the first place, that longing for reconciliation which
springs from the personal consciousness of sin as alienation from God,
and from horror of its guilt and power. There must then ensue the
recognition of man's complete powerlessness to free himself from sin,
and a deeply humble sense of dependence on God's mercy; but this mere
trust in His mercy is not enough, for it would not satisfy the sense
of sin. The sinner has to own that God is not merely benevolent, and
that sin must be punished. Therefore faith must contain the
recognition of the justice of the Divine law against sin, manifested
in the death of Christ. Faith, in short, starts from the longing for a
representative to atone for us, and it ends with the recognition of
Christ as our representative, of His Atonement as sufficient, and of
His death as displaying the due reward of sin. For the Atonement
cannot be a mere external act. If Christ is our representative, He
must be acknowledged by those whom He represents: otherwise His
endurance of suffering would avail nothing for them, for God will not
be satisfied with the mere infliction of punishment. But if the result
of His death is that men are brought, one by one, age after age, to
acknowledge the righteousness of the law for which He suffered, to
recognise the result of sin to which sin has blinded them, then there
has been made on their part the first step towards the great
reconciliation. Faith identifies the individual with the sacrifice
which has been offered for him, and therefore with Christ's attitude
towards God and towards sin, and though it is but the first step, yet
it is emphatically that by reason of which we are justified. For since
we are thus identified with the sacrifice, God accepts the first step
for the whole course, of which it is the pledge and anticipation. We
are justified because we believe in God, but also because God believes
in us[240]. Faith, being what it is, a complex moral act whereby
Christ's propitiation is accepted by man, implies an attitude of mind
towards sin so right that, though it is but the first movement of the
soul in Christ, God takes it for the whole, sees us as wholly in Him,
reckons it to us as righteousness. But only because it is as a matter
of fact the first, the hardest, perhaps, and the most necessary, but
still only the first step towards complete sanctification. And, if we
now ask what is the further course of sanctification, the answer will
shew the full relation of the sacrifice of Christ to man's will and
conscience. For the life of sanctification is nothing else but the
'imitation of Christ' in that task of 'learning obedience' to which
His life was devoted, and which His death completed. In us, too, as in
Him, that task has to be accomplished by suffering. 'He learnt
obedience by the things which He suffered.' 'It became Him ... in
bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation
perfect through sufferings.' That same path towards perfection lies
before all who are justified by faith in His atoning sacrifice. For
justification is a spiritual act answering to the spiritual act of
faith. The spiritual germ of vitality thus implanted in us has to be
developed in the sphere in which the consequences of sin naturally and
inevitably work themselves out, in the bodily nature of man. 'Even
we,' says S. Paul, 'which have the first fruits of the Spirit,' even
we are waiting for the further process, for 'the adoption, to wit, the
redemption of our body.' And the process consists in so following 'the
Captain of our salvation' that, like Him, we accept every one of those
sufferings which are the consequences of sin, but accept them not as
punishment imposed from without upon unwilling offenders, but as the
material of our freewill sacrifice. From no one pang or trial of our
nature has He delivered us, indeed, He has rather laid them upon us
more unsparingly, more inevitably. But the sufferings from which He
would not deliver us He has transformed for us. They are no longer
penal, but remedial and penitential. Pain has become the chastisement
of a Father who loves us, and death the passage into His very
presence. And this He has done for us by the bestowal upon us of
spiritual vitality. The germ is implanted by the act of forgiveness
which removes the wrath and the impending death, and this germ of
life, cherished and developed by the gifts which flow from His
mediation and intercession, by the Holy Spirit Whom He sends to dwell
in us, works on all the penalties of sin, and makes them the sacrifice
which we offer in Him. This is the 'law of the Spirit of life.' 'If
Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is
life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up
Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the
dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth
in you.'
Our personal share then in the Atonement is not mere passivity. It
consists, first, in the acceptance of God's forgiveness in Christ, our
self-identification with Christ's atoning attitude, and then in
working out, by the power of the life bestowed upon us, all the
consequences of forgiveness, the transformation of punishment into
sacrifice, the imitation of Christ in His perfect obedience to the law
of righteousness, the gradual sanctification of body, soul and spirit
by the grace which enables us to 'suffer with Him.'
III. The doctrine of Atonement, more than any of the great truths of
Christianity, has been misconceived and misrepresented, and has
therefore not only been rejected itself, but has sometimes been the
cause of the rejection of the whole Christian system. The truth of the
vicarious sacrifice has been isolated till it has almost become
untrue, and, mysterious as it undoubtedly is, it has been so stated as
to be not only mysterious, but contrary to reason and even to
conscience. One most terrible misconception it is hardly necessary to
do more than mention. The truth of the wrath of God against sin and of
the love of Christ by which that wrath was removed, has been perverted
into a belief in a divergence of will between God the Father and God
the Son, as if it was the Father's will that sinners should perish,
the Son's will that they should be saved; as if the Atonement
consisted in the propitiation of the wrathful God by the substituted
punishment of the innocent for the guilty. It will be seen that while
this statement seems to represent the Catholic doctrine, in reality it
introduces a most vital difference. There can be no divergence of will
between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity; and, in regard to this
special dealing with man, we have the clearest testimony of Revelation
that the whole Godhead shared in the work. Here, as always, God the
Father is revealed as the source and origin of all good. 'God so loved
the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' 'God was in
Christ reconciling the world to Himself.' The beginning and the end of
the Atonement is the love of God: the death of Christ was not the
cause, but the revelation of that love[241]. That it was the second
Person of the Trinity who was actually the means of our redemption may
be ascribed to that original relation of the Logos to the human race,
by which He was both its Creator and its perfect exemplar[242]. But
nothing can be further from the truth than to imagine that His was all
the love which saved us, the Father's all the wrath which condemned
us. If the death of Christ was necessary to propitiate the wrath of
the Father, it was necessary to propitiate His own wrath also; if it
manifested His love, it manifested the Father's love also. The
absolute, unbroken, unity of will between the Father and the Son is
the secret of the atoning sacrifice.
Again, the isolation of the truth of the Atonement from other parts of
Christian doctrine has led to a mode of stating it which deprives us
of all motive to action, of all responsibility for our own salvation.
Just as the misconception noticed above arose from a failure to grasp
the whole truth of our Lord's Divinity, so this error springs from
ignoring His perfect Humanity. Christ is regarded as having no vital
or real relation to us, and His work is therefore wholly external, a
mere gift from above. But what has already been said will shew that
from the first the Atonement has been taught as the offering of our
spiritual Head, in Whom we are redeemed, and whose example we are able
to follow as having Him in us. Salvation is thus given to us indeed,
but it is given to us because we are in Christ, and we have to work
out our share in it because of the responsibility, the call to
sacrifice which that union with Him lays upon us. 'Work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you
both to will and to do.' It is all from God and of God; but God has
come into our life, and taken us up into Him, and called upon us to
follow Him in the way of the cross.
And this leads us to consider another error, or rather another form of
the same error. Nothing is more common than to hear the doctrine of
Atonement stated as if the work of Christ consisted in His endurance
of our punishment in order that we might not endure it. This view of
the doctrine leads to the objections--perhaps the commonest of all the
difficulties found in what men take for Christianity--that the
punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty is unjust, and that
punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner. We have seen that
the real vicariousness of our Lord's work lay in the offering of the
perfect sacrifice: the theory we are now considering holds, on the
contrary, that it lay in the substitution of His punishment for ours.
A partial truth is contained in this theory; for our Lord did endure
sufferings, and, as has been already said, they were the very
sufferings which are, in sinners, the penalties of sin. But as a
simple matter of fact and experience, the sufferings and the pains of
death which He endured have not been remitted to us; and that which is
remitted, the eternal penalty of alienation from God, was not, could
not be endured by Him. For alienation from God is, essentially, a
state of sin; it is sin, regarded both in its origin and in its
necessary result. It could not, therefore, be borne by Christ, 'in
Whom was no sin,' between Whom and the Father was no alienation.
Attempts have been made to establish a quantitative relation between
our Lord's sufferings and the punishment which is thereby remitted to
us, to prove that the eternal nature of the Sufferer made His death
equivalent to eternal punishment. But even if such attempts, in so
mysterious a region, could succeed, it would be vain to establish a
quantitative equivalence where there is no qualitative relation.
Eternal punishment is 'eternal sin[243],' and as such could never be
endured by the sinless Son of God.
But we have to face the question which naturally follows. What, then,
did His sufferings and death mean? Why did He endure what are to us
the temporal penalties, the diverse consequences of sin? And if He
endured them, why are they not remitted to us? It is true, as has been
shewn, that He bore just those sufferings which are the results and
penalties of sin, even to that tremendous final experience in which
man loses sight of God as he enters the valley of the shadow of death;
but He bore them, not that we might be freed from them, for we have
deserved them, but that we might be enabled to bear them, as He did,
victoriously and in unbroken union with God. He, the Innocent,
suffered, but the guilty do not 'go free;' for the very end and object
of all the obedience that He learnt was, that He might lead man along
the same path of suffering, not 'free,' but gladly submissive to the
pains, which, but for Him, would be the overwhelming penalties of our
sins. It may be true that 'punishment cannot be borne by anyone but
the sinner[244],' and therefore it may be right not to call Christ's
sufferings punishment, especially as the expression is significantly
avoided in the New Testament. But it is certainly not true that the
sufferings which result from sin cannot be borne by anyone but the
sinner: every day demonstrates the falsity of such an assertion.
Sufferings borne in the wrong spirit, unsubmissively or without
recognition of their justice, are penal; but the spirit of humility
and obedience makes them remedial and purgatorial. Christ, by so
bearing the pains which sin brought upon human nature, and which the
special sin of His enemies heaped upon Him, has not only offered the
one perfect sacrifice, but has also given us strength to make the same
submission, to learn the same obedience and to share the same
sacrifice.
IV. There are many topics connected with the Atonement which it is
impossible here to discuss, but which seem to fall into their right
place and proportion if those aspects of Christ's redeeming work which
have been dwelt upon are kept firmly in mind. The central mystery of
the cross, the forgiveness, the removal of wrath, thereby freely
bestowed upon us, remains a mystery, and must always be an insuperable
difficulty to those who depend wholly on reason, or who trust wholly
in man's power to extricate himself from the destruction wrought by
his sin, as it was an offence to the Jew, and foolishness to the
Greek. But mystery though it is to the intellect, there is a moral
fitness[245] in the bestowal of forgiveness because of the obedience
of Christ shewn in His sacrificial death, which appeals irresistibly
to the moral consciousness of mankind. The witness of this is the
trustful gratitude with which the doctrine of Christ crucified has
been accepted by Christians, learned and unlearned, from the age of
its first preaching. The human heart accepts it, and by the cross is
assured of forgiveness: 'to them which are called' it is 'Christ the
power of God, and the wisdom of God.'
But if we may appeal to experience in support of this mysterious
truth, much more may we claim the same support for the plainer, more
human aspect of the Atonement. As S. Athanasius in his day[246], so we
in ours may appeal for the practical and visible proof of the
Atonement, to the complete change in man's relation to sorrow and
suffering, and in the Christian view of death[247]. This is no small
matter. When we realize what suffering is in human life, the vast
place which it has in our experience, its power of absorbing the mind,
its culmination in the final pangs of death, and when we see the
transformation, however gradual and imperfect it may be, of all this
into the means and material of the sacrifice which the follower of
Christ is gladly willing to offer to the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, we realize the full force of the great words telling of the
destruction 'through death of him that _had the power of death_, that
is the devil,' and of the deliverance of 'them who through fear of
death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.' And the
transformation, the destruction, the deliverance, consist in this that
from these sufferings His sacrifice has removed the element of
rebellion, the hopelessness of alienation, the sting of sin. They are
ours, because they were His; but they are ours _as_ they were His,
purified and perfected by obedience, by the offering of a holy Will;
'by the which Will we are sanctified through the offering of the body
of Jesus Christ once for all.'
[217] Mill, _Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy_, p. 103. 'I
will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that
epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to
hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.'
[218] Cf. Holland, _Logic and Life_, pp. 107, 108.
[219] Milligan, _The Resurrection_, p. 278.
[220] Cf. Mozley, _University Sermons_, p. 177 (2nd ed.): 'Justice is
a fragment, mercy is a fragment, mediation is a fragment; justice,
mercy, mediation as a reason of mercy--all three; what indeed are they
but great vistas and openings into an invisible world in which is the
point of view which brings them all together?'
[221] Cf. _Ch. Quarterly Review_, xvi. p. 289 on 'Our Lord's Human
Example.' 'Christ, of course, had every faculty of human nature,
everything that man sins with, and therefore every instrument or
faculty of sin.'
[222] In the last two sentences a slight change has been made in
consequence of a criticism which showed that it was possible to
misunderstand the language originally employed, which however was
intended to convey precisely the same meaning, and which could be
amply justified by such a passage as e.g. S. Anselm, _Cur Deus Homo_,
ii. 10, 'Possumus igitur dicere de Christo quia potuit mentiri, si
subaudiatur, si vellet.' Cf. also [Boetius] _c. Eutychen et
Nestorium_, c. viii. (_Opuscula Sacra_, ed. Peiper, pp. 214 ff.)
[223] Cf. MᶜLeod Campbell, _The Nature of the Atonement_, pp. 117,
118, 119, 127, 347: 'That oneness of mind with the Father, which
towards man took the form of condemnation of sin, would in the Son's
dealing with the Father in relation to our sins, take the form of a
perfect confession of our sins. This confession, as to its own nature,
must have been _a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on
the sin of man_.' 'In Christ tasting death [as] the wages of sin ...
was a perfecting of the Divine response in humanity to the Divine
condemnation of sin.'
[224] See Dale, _Atonement_, pp. 49 ff.; Schmidt in Herzog's _Real.
Encykl._ xvi. 403.
[225] _De Incarn. Verbi_ 4, 'Man is by nature mortal.' S. Athanasius
held, however, that this 'natural corruption' would have been
suspended, but for the Fall, by the help of the Logos empowering man
to live the Divine life. See on the whole subject, _The Christian
Doctrine of Sin_, App. ii. p. 536.
[226] It should be remembered that the Church has always regarded the
Atonement as having a _retrospective_ effect, extending back to the
first representatives of the human race.
[227] Cf. Schmidt in Herzog's _Real. Encykl._, Art. Versönung, vol.
xvi. p. 403.
[228] Irenaeus is full of this thought, though it is not disentangled
from other explanations of the death of Christ. Cf. especially V.
xxiii. 2: 'Recapitulans enim universum hominem in se ab initio usque
ad finem, recapitulatus et mortem ejus.' Cf. also Athanasius, _de
Incarn. Verbi_ 9, in which he suggests that it was the Divine power of
the Logos in the bodily nature of Christ that made His sacrifice
representative, as well as His death victorious over death.
[229] See especially Heb. ix. 28, which is an echo of the LXX. of Is.
liii. 12.
[230] Athan. _c. Ar._ i. 43: 'He put on the flesh which was enslaved
to sin.' Cf. also Augustine, _de Musica_ VI. iv: 'Hominem sine
peccato, non sine peccatoris conditione suscepit. Nam et nasci
humanitus, et pati et mori voluit.' I owe this reference to Norris,
_Rudiments of Theology_, p. 61 _n._
[231] Heb. ii. 17; vii. 24, 26, 28: cf. ix. 13, 14, 24, 25, 26; x. 11,
12, 13, 14.
[232] Cf. Athan. _c. Ar._ ii. 69: 'He sends His own Son, and He
becomes Son of Man, by taking created flesh; that, since all were
under sentence of death, He, _being other than them all_, might
Himself for all offer to death His own body.'
[233] The two aspects of the Atonement are frequently presented by
S. Athanasius, _de Incarn. Verbi_. Thus (ch. 10) 'By the sacrifice of
His own Body He _both_ put an end to the law which was against us, and
gave us a fresh beginning of life, in that He bestowed on us the hope
of resurrection.' Cf. also chs. 8 and 9. Again (ch. 25), 'As He
offered His Body unto death for all; so by it He again threw open the
way to heaven.'
[234] Cf. Westcott, _Historic Faith_, p. 133.
[235] Cf. Magee, _The Gospel and the Age_, pp. 270 ff. Bishop Magee,
however, seems to exaggerate the certainty and relentlessness of the
temporal punishment of sin (cf. against this Dale, _The Atonement_,
Lect. viii) and to overlook the force of the analogy from human
experience of forgiveness.
[236] Cf. Ath. _c. Ar._ iii. 34. 'As the Lord in putting on the body,
became Man, so we men are made gods by the Word, being taken into Him
through His Flesh, and from henceforth inherit life eternal.'
[237] For this thought fully drawn out, see Holland, _Creed and
Character_, pp. 212 ff.
[238] On the truth of the solidarity of all men in Christ, see
Westcott, _The Victory of the Cross_, pp. 6-53.
[239] See e.g. Moule, _Outlines of Christian Doctrine_, p. 185.
[240] Cf. Aug. _de Trin._ i. 10: 'Tales nos amat Deus, quales futuri
sumus, non quales sumus.'
[241] This is well stated by MᶜLeod Campbell, l. c. p. 16.