I
THE GLORY OF THE CROSS
"God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ."--GAL. VI. 14.
There are at least two reasons, unconnected with Holy Week, why the
subject of the Cross of Christ should occupy our attention.
1. The first reason is, that the Cross is commonly recognised as the
weak point in our Christianity. It is the object of constant attack on
the part of its assailants: and believers are content too often to accept
it "on faith," which means that they despair of giving a rational
explanation of it. Too often, indeed, Christians have proclaimed and
have gloried in its supposed irrationality. To this latter point we
shall return. But in the meanwhile it is necessary to say this: all
language of harshness towards those who attack the doctrine of the
Atonement is completely out of place. For the justification of their
attacks has very often come from the Christian side. In former times,
far more commonly than now, the sacrifice of Christ has been represented
as a substitutory offering, necessary to appease the wrath of an offended
God. It used to be said, and in some quarters it is said to-day, that
the sins of the human race had so provoked the Divine anger that it could
be appeased by nothing short of the destruction of mankind. In these
dire straits of mankind, the Sinless Son of God presented Himself as the
object on which the full vials of the Father's wrath should be outpoured.
God having been thus placated, and His wrath satisfied, such as believe
in this transaction, and rest themselves in confidence upon it, are
enabled in such wise to reap its benefits that they escape the penalty
due to their transgression, and are restored to the Divine favour.
Now this is the crudest representation of a certain popular theology of
the Atonement. With some of its features softened down, it is by no
means without its adherents and exponents at the present day. But when
its drift is clearly understood, it is seen to be a doctrine which no
educated man of our time can accept. We may consider four fatal
objections to it.
(_a_) It is true that there is such a thing as "the wrath of God." It is
not only a fact, but one of the most tremendous facts in the universe. It
is a fact as high as the Divine purity, as deep as the malignity and
foulness of sin, as broad as all human experience. It is impossible to
construct a theistic theory of the world which shall leave it out. The
nature of the fact we shall investigate at a later point. But we can say
this at once. It cannot be such a fact as is represented by the theory
under review. For that represents the wrath of God as a mere thirst for
vengeance, a burning desire to inflict punishment, a rage that can only
be satisfied by pain, and blood, and death. In other words, we are
driven to a conception of God which is profoundly immoral, and
revoltingly pagan. If we are rightly interested in missions to the
heathen, are there to be no attempts to convert our fellow-Christians
whose conception of God scarcely rises above the heathen one of a cruel
and sanguinary deity? Not such, at least, is the New Testament doctrine
of Him Who is God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
(_b_) There is no moral quality which we esteem higher than justice.
Fairness, equity, straight dealing are attributes for which all men
entertain a hearty and unfeigned respect. There is no flame of
indignation which burns fiercer within us than when we conceive
ourselves, or others, to be the victims of injustice. But what are we to
say of a view of the Atonement which represents God Himself as being
guilty of the most flagrant act of injustice that the mind of man has
ever conceived, the infliction of condign punishment upon a perfectly
innocent Person, and that for the offences committed by others? It is a
further wrong, and that a wrong done to the offenders themselves, that
they are, in consideration of the sufferings of the righteous One,
relieved of the merited and healthful punishment of ill-doing.
(_c_) A third defect of this theory of the Atonement is, that it is
profoundly unethical. The need of man is represented as being, above
all, escape from penalty. Whereas, at least, the conscience of the
sinner himself is bearing at all times witness to the truth that his real
necessity is escape from his sin, from the weakness and the defilement of
his moral nature, which are of the very essence of moral transgression.
We are now dealing with the matter from the moral standpoint; but we have
to support us the authority of the earliest proclamation of the work of
the Christ: "He shall save His people from their sins," not from any
pains or penalties attached to their sins. Relief from punishment is not
the Gospel of the New Testament, it is not a gospel at all.
(_d_) Finally, the idea of a transaction between the Father and the Son
is clean contrary to the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Unity of
God. Once locate justice in the Father, and love in the Son, and view
the Atonement as the result of a bargain, or transaction between the Two,
and once more we are left with a doctrine not Christian, but heathen and
polytheistic. There is unhappily little doubt, that the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity suffers, just as that of the Atonement, even more from its
defenders than from its assailants. Properly understood, that doctrine
is the vindication of the complete fulness of the personal life of the
One God. Too often it is so held, and so preached and represented, as in
this case, that monotheism is tacitly abandoned in favour of ditheism or
tritheism. It needs to be plainly said, that the transaction theory is
inconsistent with the trinitarian doctrine. The Three Persons are so
called in our Western theology owing to defects inherent in human thought
and speech. To set one over against the other as two parties to a
contract, is to found a theory upon those very defects. The Miltonic
representation of the Father and the Son is Arian; the popular view is,
more often than not, a belief either in two gods, or in a logical
contradiction.
To sum up, the view of the Atonement with which we have been occupying
ourselves, is opposed to the fundamental moral instincts, and to the
Christian consciousness, both as it finds expression in the New
Testament, and as it reveals itself in the best minds of to-day. And
this type of theory, although without some of its coarser features, is by
no means extinct. There is all the more need then, in spite of all that
has been so well done in this direction, to exhibit the Atonement as the
supreme vindication of those instincts which are the witness of the
Divine in man. There is laid on all who would preach or teach
Christianity to-day to show that Calvinism, and all that is touched with
the taint of Calvinism, is not the doctrine of the Atonement which is
taught in the Bible or held by the Church. But, as nothing can be built
on negations, there is an even greater and more imperative need to
exhibit the truth of the Atonement in its beauty and majesty and
transcendent moral power.
2. The second of our two reasons for the choice of the Cross of Christ
as our subject, is the failure on the part of those who believe in it,
trust in it, and even build their lives upon it, to realise the true
vastness of its meaning. We are too apt to regard the Cross as one of
the doctrines of our religion, or as supplying a motive to penitence, or
to Christian conduct. Our view, when we are most in earnest, is
one-sided, limited, parochial. We must rise, if we would really
understand the Cross, to the height of this conception: that it contains
in itself the answer to the problem of human existence, and of our
individual lives. The secret of the universe, of our part of it at
least, that tiny corner which is occupied by the human race, was revealed
in that supreme disclosure of the Divine Mind which was made on Calvary.
It was a disclosure necessarily given under the forms of time and space,
else it could not have been given to us at all. But it transcends all
forms and limitations, and belongs to the spiritual and timeless order,
which is also the Real. But it is a disclosure which requires the
thought and study, not of one generation only, but of all. It can never
be exhausted. There is no view of it (including even that miserable
caricature which we have just considered) that is altogether without some
elements of truth. There is no view which embodies the whole of the
truth. Each generation is meant to read that secret of God, which was
uttered to mankind from the Cross of the Christ, a little more clearly
than its predecessors. No theology of the Atonement which is not both
new and old, can be a true theology. It must be old, because the
disclosure was made under the form of historic facts which belong to the
past. It must be new, because each age, in the light of the progressive
revelation of God, interprets the disclosure under the forms of its own
experience, scientific, moral, spiritual, which belongs to the present.
"Therefore is every scribe that is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven,
like unto a householder which bringeth forth out of his treasures things
both new and old."
But the present point is, that we should realise the far-reaching
significance of the disclosure of God made on and from the Cross. Human
history is like a long-drawn-out drama, in which we are actors. How long
is that drama, stretching back beyond the long years of recorded history
to our dim forefathers, who have left their rude stone implements on the
floors of caves or bedded in the river drift, the silent witnesses of a
vanished race. And how short is that little scene in which we ourselves
appear, while, insignificant as it is, it is yet our all. And we ask, we
are impelled to ask, what is the meaning of the whole vast drama? What
is the meaning of our own little scene in it? No questions can be
compared in interest and importance to these two. And the answer to them
both, so we shall try to see, was given once in time from the Cross. That
is one of the chief aspects under which we shall regard the Cross of
Christ, as the key which unlocks the mystery of human existence, and of
my existence. There is no more majestic or pathetic conception than that
of the veiled Isis. But the Cross is the removal of the veil, the
discovery of the Divine Secret.
* * * * *
Before, however, we proceed to our main subject, it will be well to set
first before our minds a few elementary considerations.
The existence of God appears to be necessitated in order to account for
two things: (i) the appearance of control in the universe; (ii) the facts
of moral consciousness.
(i) It seems impossible to get rid of the ideas of direction and
control. If we regard the world as it exists at the present moment, as
one stage in an age-long process, then at least [Greek text] the facts
which now appear were contained in the earliest stage of all. Man
appears with his moral and spiritual nature. Then already the moral and
the spiritual were somehow present when the first living cell began its
wonderful course. [Greek text]. All movements have converged towards
this end, and the co-ordination of movements implies control.
This then is our first reason for our belief in God. We live in a
universe which seems throughout to manifest evidence of direction and
control.
(ii) But I have much surer and more cogent evidence within myself.
Whence comes that ineradicable conviction of the supremacy of
righteousness, of the utter loveliness of the good, and utter hatefulness
of the evil? I am not concerned with the steps of the process by which
the moral sense may have developed. The majesty of goodness, before
which I bow, really, sincerely, even when by my acts I give the lie to my
own innermost convictions, that is no creation of my consciousness. Nor
do I see good reason to believe that it has been an invention of, or
growth in, human consciousness during the slow development of past ages.
There is something deeper in my moral convictions than an outward
sanction wondrously transmuted into an internal one. Moreover, in the
best men, those who have really developed that moral faculty which I
detect, in beginning and germ, as it were, in myself, I see no abatement
in reverence for the ideal. Rather, the better and saintlier that they
are, the keener do they feel their fallings off from it. A moral lapse,
which would give me hardly a moment's uneasy thought, is capable of
causing in them acute and prolonged sorrow. The nearer they draw to the
moral ideal, strange paradox, the farther off from them does it ever
appear, and they from it. It is an apostle who writes, "Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief." Nor can I
discover any tolerable explanation of all this, except that the guiding
and directive power in the world, reveals itself in the moral
consciousness of men, and with growing clearness in proportion as that
consciousness has been trained and educated, as the moral ideal.
I find myself then, when my eyes are opened to the realities of the world
in which I live, confronted with the facts of directive control and of
the moral ideal. If I seek for some interpretation and coordination of
the facts, I am compelled, judging of them on the analogy of my own
experience (which, being the ultimate reality I know, is my only clue to
the interpretation of the ultimate reality of the universe) to regard
them as the activities of a Person, Whom we call God. Certainly to call
the Ultimate Reality a Person, must be an inadequate expression of the
truth, for it is the expression of the highest form of being in the terms
of the lower. But it is an infinitely more adequate presentation, than
to represent that Reality as impersonal. For personality being the
highest category of my thought, I am bound to think of God as being
Personal, if I would think of Him at all. I can be confident that though
my view must fall far short of the truth, it is at least nearer to the
truth and heart of things than any other view I can form. It is in fact
the truth so far as I can apprehend it: the truth by which I was meant to
live, and on which I was made to act.
But the question of questions remains--What is the relation of the Person
Whom I call God to my own personal being, to my spirit? And, in
answering this question, popular theology makes a grave and disastrous
mistake. It regards that Person as being isolated from all other
persons, in the same way as each of us is isolated from all other
persons. God, that is, is viewed as but One Person among many. Now,
without inquiring as to the truth of this conception of personality, as
being essentially an exclusive thing, we may at least say this, following
the teaching of our best modern thinkers, as they have followed that of
St. John and the Greek Fathers, that God is as truly conceived of as
being within us, as external to us. His Throne is in the heart of man,
as truly as it is at the centre of the universe. No view of God is
tenable at the present day which regards Him as outside His own creation.
His Personality is not exclusive, but inclusive of all things and all
persons, while yet it transcends them. And as He includes us within
Himself, as in God "we live and move and have our being," so also He
interpenetrates us with His indwelling Presence as the life of our life.
To this point we shall presently return, for it is the keynote of all
modern advance in theological knowledge, so far as that is not concerned
with questions of literature, history, archaeology, and textual
criticism. But we are concerned to notice now, that this recovered truth
of the immanence of God in our humanity, affords the full and sufficient
explanation of that dark shadow which lies athwart all human lives. That
shadow has loomed large in the minds of poets, thinkers, and theologians.
The latter know it by the name of sin. But what is sin save the
conscious alienation and estrangement of man from the Divine Life which
is in him? And if this be true, we can now see clearly why sin, moral
transgression, always makes itself felt as a disintegrating force both
without and within the individual life. Without, it is for ever
separating nation from nation, class from class, man from man. Within,
it produces discord and confusion in our nature. And both results
follow, because sin is the alienation from the Divine Life, which is both
the common element in human nature which binds man to man by the tie of
spiritual kinship; and also the central point of the individual life, the
hidden and sacred source and fountain of our being, which unites all the
faculties and powers of our manhood in one harmonious whole.
Now the Cross of Jesus Christ is the overcoming of this disastrous
estrangement and alienation. It is the victory of the Divine life in
man. That is the most fruitful way in which we can regard it. The Cross
stands for conquest--the triumph of the Divine Life in us over all the
forces which are opposed to it. And in this lies the glory of the Cross;
that which made the symbol of the most degrading form of punishment--that
punishment which to the Jewish mind made him who suffered under it the
"accursed of God," and which to the Roman was the ignominious penalty
which the law inflicted on the slave--the subject of boasting to that
apostle who was both, to the very heart of him, a Jew and also a citizen
of the empire.
The object of these lectures is to show how this is indeed the meaning of
the Cross. There, in Him Who was the Son of man, the Representative and
the Ideal of the race, the Divine Life triumphed, in order that in us,
who are not separate from, but one with Him, it may win the like victory.
We fight against sin, and again and again succumb in the struggle. But
as often as with the opened eye of the soul we turn to the Cross of
Jesus, we behold there the victory, our victory, already won. Already,
indeed, it is ours, by the communication to us of the Spirit of Him Who
triumphed on the Cross. It only remains for us, by the deliberate act of
our whole personal being, our will, our reason, our affections, to
appropriate and make our own the deathless conquest won in and for our
humanity on the Cross.
II
THE HISTORICAL AND SPIRITUAL CAUSES OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST
"Him, being by the determined will and foreknowledge of God given up,
through the hand of lawless men, ye affixed to a cross and slew."--ACTS
II. 23.
St. Paul places this in the very forefront of that gospel which, as it
had been delivered to him, so he in his turn had delivered to the
Corinthians, that "Christ died for our sins." Neglecting all, deeper
interpretations of this, it is at least clear that in the apostle's mind
there was the closest and most intimate connexion between the death of
Christ and the fact of human sin.
Now it is important to remember that that connexion was, in the first
place, an historical one.
Christianity is a religion founded upon facts. In this is seen at once a
sharp distinction between our religion and that which claims the
allegiance of so many millions of our race--the religion, or better,
perhaps, the philosophy of the Buddha. Certainly there is such a thing
as a Christian philosophy. For we cannot handle facts without at the
same time seeking for some rational explanation of them. The plain man
becomes a philosopher against his will. In its origin our Christian
theology is no artificial, manufactured product. It is rather an
inevitable, natural growth. Neither the minds of the earliest Christian
thinkers, nor our own minds, are just sheets of blank paper on which
facts may impress themselves. Scientists, some of them at least, while
repudiating philosophy put forth metaphysical theories of the universe.
Theology is simply the necessary result of human minds turned to the
consideration of the Christian facts. But it makes all the difference
which end you start from, the facts or the theory: whether your method is
a posteriori or a priori; inductive or deductive; scientific or
obscurantist. And Christianity follows the scientific method of starting
with the facts. In this lies the justification of its claim to be a
religion at once universal and life-giving. It is universal because
facts are the common property of all, although the interpretation placed
on those facts by individuals may be more or less adequate. It is life-
giving, because men live by facts, not by theories about them; by the
assimilation of food, not by the knowledge how food nourishes our bodies.
Following, then, the Christian, which is also the scientific method, we
now set out in search of the facts, the historical causes which brought
about the death of Christ.
Now these causes appear to have been, mainly, these three: prejudice, a
dead religion, and the love of gain and political ambition.
1. Prejudice may, perhaps, be best defined as the resolution to hold
fast to our belief, just because it is our belief; to adhere to an
opinion, and close our eyes to all that has been said on the opposite
side. Now nowhere and at no time has prejudice exerted a more absolute
dominion over the minds of men, than it did in Judaea in the first
century of our era. The people had inherited a traditional conception of
the Messiah, from which they could not imagine any deviation possible. He
was the Deliverer and the Restorer predestined of God. He would throw
off the hated foreign yoke, and make the people of God supreme over all
the nations of the earth. It was for a long time doubtful whether Jesus
of Nazareth intended to claim the position, and to enact the part of the
Messiah. "How long keepest thou our soul in suspense?" was the question
put to Him as late as the Feast of Dedication, 28 A.D., the year before
He suffered. But, finally, the people found themselves confronted with a
type of Messiah differing _toto caelo_ from the accepted traditional
type. The kingdom of God, which meant the Divine rule over the souls of
men, was at least not such a kingdom as they were looking for, as they
had been taught to expect. There is a long history in the gospels of the
gradual rise of a popular hope, more than once seeming to have attained
its eagerly longed-for goal; but at last doomed, and conscious that it
was doomed, to bitter and final disappointment. And it turned to hatred
of Him Who had aroused it from a long and fitful sleep of centuries.
"Crucify Him" was now their cry. Jesus was put to death on the legal
charge of being "Christ, a King," a provincial rebel. He really died
because He was not "Christ, a King," in such sense as He had been
expected to be. Thus the first historical cause of the death of our Lord
was prejudice, inveterate and ingrained, in the minds of the people.
2. The second historical cause of the death of our Lord was the
existence in His day and place of a dead religion. This is, when we
consider the meaning of the phrase, the strangest of paradoxes, the
existence in fact of a logical contradiction. For religion is in its
essential nature a living thing, for the very reason that it is part of
the experience of a living person. As experience is not merely alive,
but the sum of all our vital powers, it is ever growing, both in breadth
and in intensity. So far then as we are in any true sense religious men,
our religion, as part and parcel of our experience, must be alive with an
intense and vigorous activity, growing in the direction in which our
experience grows. Hence a dead religion is a logical contradiction, as
we have said. But, as truth is stranger than fiction, so life contains
anomalies and monstrosities which simply set logic at defiance. A dead
religion is indeed a monstrum, something portentous, which refuses to be
reconciled with any canons of rationality. But it exists--that is the
astonishing fact about it; and it found its almost perfect expression and
embodiment in the normal and average Pharisee of our Lord's time. There
are three characteristic features about a dead religion, and all of them
receive a perfect illustration in the well-known picture in the gospels
of Pharisaic religion.
(_a_) It tends less and less to rest on experience, and more and more to
repose upon tradition. It is academic, a thing on which scribes may
lecture, while the voice of the scholastic pedant with blatant
repetitions overpowers the living, authoritative voice within the soul.
"They marvelled, because He taught with authority, and not as the
scribes. A fresh (not new) teaching, with authority!"
(_b_) It removes the living God to an infinite distance from human life.
Religion is a matter of rules, of minute obedience to a code of morals
and of ceremonial imposed from without, not of a fellowship of the human
with the Divine. In fact, God is banished to a point on the far
circumference, and the centre is occupied by the Law. He is retained in
order to give authority to that Law, as the source of sanctions in the
way of rewards and punishments. In short, the idea of the living God
degenerates into the necessary convention of an ecclesiastical tradition.
(_c_) Closely connected with this second feature is the third
characteristic of a dead religion--its inhumanity. When men substitute
obedience to a code for service of the living God, it is no wonder that
the truth--the central truth of religion--fades rapidly from their minds,
that the service of God is identical with the highest service rendered to
our fellow-men. "This commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth
God, love his brother also." This explains why the Pharisee held aloof
from the outcast and the sinner. They might be left to perish--it
mattered not to him.
Now, all through the Gospel history our Lord appears as standing in
absolute and sternest opposition to the dead religion of the Pharisees.
He could make no manner of terms with it. He acted against it. He
denounced it at every point. He rebuked them for "making the commandment
of God of none effect" by that tradition which they loved so dearly. He
brought the idea of a living God into closest touch with the actual lives
of men. He deliberately consorted with publicans and sinners. And,
finally, He condemned, in set discourse, the whole system, traditional,
Godless, inhuman, with scathing emphasis. Christ died, not only because
His words and acts ran counter to the prejudice of the people, but
because He spoke and acted in opposition to the dead religion of the
Pharisees.
3. The third historical cause of the death of Christ was the love of
gain and the political ambition of the Sadducees. Their hatred, indeed,
would have been powerless if our Lord had not already provoked the enmity
of the people and of the Pharisees; but that enmity, in turn, without the
unscrupulous intrigues of the Sadducees, a small but most influential
section, would never have proceeded to its fatal and murderous issue. The
Pharisees gave up the conflict in despair: "Perceive ye that ye prevail
nothing? Behold, the whole world is gone after Him." It was the
Sadducean High Priest who gave the counsel of death. "It is expedient
that one man should die for the people."
We must remember that the Sadducees represented the aristocracy of Judaea,
and that, as resulted necessarily from the nature and constitution of the
Jewish state, was an ecclesiastical aristocracy, an hierarchy. They are
the party denoted several times in the New Testament by the term "the
High Priests." The nearest analogy to their position is supplied by the
political popes and bishops of the Middle Ages. Their interests were
political rather than spiritual. A considerable amount of independence
had been left to the Jews in their own land. The Sanhedrin, the native
court, exercised still very considerable power. And the Sadducean
minority possessed a predominating influence in its consultations. What
political power could be wielded in a subject state of the Empire was in
their hands. Incidentally, a large and flourishing business was
conducted under their control and management in the very Temple Courts,
in "the booths of the sons of Hanan." Our Lord struck a blow at their
financial interests when He drove out these traders in sacrificial
victims and other requisites. But, much more, and this was the head and
front of His offence, by His influence with certain classes of the
people, and by the danger thus presented of a popular movement which
might arouse the suspicion of the imperial authorities, and lead to very
decisive action on their part, He threatened the political position of
the Sadducean aristocracy. So with complete absence of scruples, but
with great political sagacity, Caiaphas uttered the momentous words, an
unconscious prophecy, as St. John points out, at that meeting of the
Sanhedrin when the death of Jesus was finally resolved upon.
Thus the main historical causes of the Crucifixion were these three,
prejudice on the part of the people, a dead religion on the part of the
Pharisees, love of gain and political ambition on the part of the
Sadducees.
We may see then how absolutely true St. Peter was to the facts of the
case. "Him . . . through the hand of lawless men, ye affixed to a cross
and slew." God was not the cause of the death of Jesus Christ, as in
popular and ditheistic theory, forgetting "I am in the Father, and the
Father in Me." The real causes of His Death were the definite sins of
lawless, of wicked men. God's part was a purely negative one. He held
His hand, and allowed sin to work out to its fatal issue. The
Resurrection, indeed, is the sublime act of God's interference, at the
most critical point in all human history, at the one point supremely
worthy of such Divine interposition, in order to finally and completely
vindicate the cause of moral goodness. But up till then, sin was allowed
to have its own way, to display fully its malign character, to reach its
ultimate result in the Death of the Sinless One.
But behind the historical causes of our Lord's death, were deeper and
spiritual causes. "Him being by the determined counsel and foreknowledge
of God delivered up. . . ." God foreknew the result. There is no
difficulty here. But in what sense can He be said to have "determined"
it?
The answer leads us to a consideration of decisive importance. God works
by law, in the spiritual, no less than in the physical region. The Death
of the Christ, at the hand of lawless men, came about in virtue of the
working of those laws. As we have said, sin is the alienation and
estrangement of man from the Divine life which is in him, and by virtue
of which he is man. Now, in the human character of Jesus Christ, we see,
for the first time, the perfect, genuine, uncaricatured humanity, in
which the human will is at every point in absolute agreement and
fellowship with the Divine Will. Shortly, He represents the complete and
absolute contradiction and antithesis of sin. It could not have been,
that that Life should have been realised in a world of alienation from
the Divine, without the result, which followed as necessarily and
inevitably as any of the physical happenings of nature, of the death of
the Sinless. "He became obedient unto death." A deeper meaning lies in
these words of St. Paul, which contain the whole secret of the Atonement.
But, for the present, we may understand them to mean, that death was the
natural issue of the Life of perfect obedience lived in a world permeated
by the spirit of disobedience. Thus we gain a clear knowledge of the
manner in which the death of Jesus Christ happened in accordance with the
determined counsel of God. That which takes place, in the spiritual or
in the physical world, as the result of the working of those laws of God
which are the constant expression of His will, may be said to have been
determined by Him.
There is a yet more profound meaning in the Death of Christ as the result
of sin, than any which we have as yet considered: that Death is the
outward sign and sacrament of an inward and spiritual fact. When we sin
we are, in a measure proportioned to the deliberateness and heinousness
of our sin, doing to death the Divine life, the Christ within us. That
which happened once on Calvary is renewed time after time in the inward
experience of men. The outward fact is an historical drama representing
an ever-repeated spiritual tragedy. Daily, by the hands of lawless men,
by ourselves in our moments of wilfulness and disobedience, Christ is
being put to death. There is no sin which, in its measure and degree, is
not a rejection and crucifixion of the Christ.
The Cross of Christ, viewed in the light of its historical and spiritual
causes, is (i) the revelation of the malignity of sin. There we see our
favourite sins stripped of all pleasing disguise, and revealed in their
true horror, and cruelty, and selfishness. The Incarnate Son of God put
Himself at the disposal of sinful men, and His violent and shameful death
was the result. There is the true meaning of the sins in which we
delight. (ii) It reveals the disastrous result of sin, the death of the
Divine Man within each one of us. There is no sin which is not an act of
spiritual suicide.
It will not then be altogether in vain, that we have now considered the
causes of the Death of Christ if, in the "solemn hour of temptation," we,
remembering the Cross, and Him Who died thereon, and why He died, "stand
in awe, and sin not."
III
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE OF SIN
"Christ died for our sins."--I COR. XV. 3.
Nothing is more characteristic of Christianity than its estimate of human
sin. Historically, no doubt, this is due to the fact that the Lord and
Master of Christians died "on account of sins." His death was due, as we
have seen, both to the actual, definite sins of His contemporaries, and
also to the irreconcilable opposition between His sinless life and the
universal presence of sin in the world into which He came. But it is
with the Christian estimate of sin, and with the facts which justify it,
that we are now concerned.
Briefly put, Christianity regards sin as the one thing in the world which
is radically and hopelessly evil. Pain, physical and mental, is evil no
doubt, but in a different sense. Without going deeply into the intensely
difficult problem of animal and human suffering, we may at least say
this: that he would be a bold man who would undertake to say, viewing the
moral results of suffering in human lives, that all, or the majority of
the instances of pain which we observe, come under the head of those
things "which ought not to be," that is, are, without qualification or
extenuation, evil. But this is precisely the statement which
Christianity makes with regard to sin. Of one thing only in the universe
can we say that it "ought not to be," and that one thing is moral evil.
Perhaps then, broadly and roughly, the Christian standpoint may be summed
up in four words, "sin worse than pain."
Of old, St. John wrote that "if any man love the world, the love of the
Father is not in him." In its outward aspect, the world has greatly
changed since these words were written. And yet they are as true in the
twentieth century as they were in the first. The world has adopted
Christian language and manners and modes of thought. But always and
everywhere it is to be detected by its antagonism to the Christian
estimate of sin. The spirit which accuses Christianity of gross
exaggeration in this respect, is the very spirit of the world. Now, as
in days of long ago, when torture and death hung on the refusal to
scatter a few grains of incense before the statue of Caesar, the same
eternal choice is presented to a man, Christ or the world? Which
estimate of sin are you going to make your own, the world's, as a
lamentable mistake, or failure, or necessity; or the Christian, "worse
than any conceivable pain"? It is not a matter of academic interest, but
an intensely vital and practical one, affecting a man's whole outlook
upon life. Which is right--there is the clear and definite issue
raised--the Christian estimate, or the world's estimate of sin? Is it
worse than a blunder, a misfortune, a fault? Is it something interwoven
into the very structure of our present stage of existence? Or, is it an
alien and flagrant intruder into a world where it has no business, which
is so constructed that, sooner or later, wilful transgression meets with
the direst penalties? There is no question as to what is the Christian
estimate of sin. Christ or Caesar? is the issue still presented. But,
we wish to ask, is there any reason for believing that the Christian
estimate is true? I bring forward three reasons, based respectively on
experience, on conscience, on the ultimately similar views of the origin
and nature of sin given by science and in the Bible.
1. First, then, consider the argument from experience. It is very easy
and tempting to use the language of exaggeration. But probably we are
not saying more than would be admitted by nearly every one, when we make
the assertion that a very large part of the misery and suffering which
exists in the world is traceable, directly or indirectly, to human sin.
We are not dealing with the results of their own sins upon offenders,
though these are in some cases conspicuous enough. But that the world is
full of human lives, often wrecked, more often partially stunted and
spoiled, in most cases falling short of the full measure of vitality and
happiness to which they might have attained, is a statement not admitting
of denial. And I think we are still on secure ground when we say that at
the root of a very large proportion of these failures is some one of the
myriad forms of sin and selfishness. The strange thing, the bewildering
and baffling, although, as I believe, not wholly inexplicable thing, is
that men in a very large number of cases suffer on account of sins for
which they are in no sense responsible. But the fact remains of the
close connexion which experience shows to exist between human sin and
human suffering. It is impossible to prove wide assertions, but a strong
case could undoubtedly be made out for the statement that sin is a more
prolific source of misery and failure in human life than all other
factors put together.
2. Next, we turn to the witness of conscience, of our moral reason. The
main point here is that so often brought forward, of the uniqueness of
remorse. I may make a foolish blunder. I may do some hasty and
ill-considered act, and in consequence suffer some measure of
inconvenience, or perhaps experience a veritable disaster and overthrow
of my hopes. But in either case, though I may feel poignant regret, I am
as far as possible from the experience of remorse, save in so far as my
blunder may have involved neglect of some duty, or a carelessness morally
culpable. But when I have committed a sin, then it would be a most
inadequate description of my state of mind to call it regret. I suffer
from that intense mental pain which we have learnt to call remorse, the
constant and relentless avenger which waits upon every transgression of
the moral law. And when, leaving my own experience, I interrogate the
experience of men better than myself, above all, that of the saints of
God, I meet with the same phenomenon a thousandfold intensified. And I
have a right in such a matter to accept the witness of the experts. A
saint is an expert in spiritual things, and his evidence in spiritual
matters is as cogent and trustworthy as that of the biologist or
geologist in his special field of experience.
So far, then, as the witness of the moral consciousness goes, both in
myself and in those who have in an especial degree cultivated their moral
faculties, it bears out the contention that sin is the only thing which
can be described as absolutely, without qualification, evil.
3. The same result follows from the consideration of the origin and
nature of sin.
Here we have two sources of information--modern science, and the account
given in the Book of Genesis. To my mind, the enormously impressive
thing is that these two sources, approaching the same subject from
entirely different points of view, find themselves at last in agreement
on the main issue.
(_a_) According to the teaching of science, then, man is the result, the
finished product, of aeons of animal development. He is, in fact, the
crown and so far ultimate achievement of an age-long evolution. He falls
into his natural place in zoological classification as the highest of the
vertebrates. But also, in man we find moral faculties developed to an
immeasurably greater extent than in those animals which stand nearest to
him in physical development. It is the possession of these, above all,
which constitutes the differentia of man. And it is this possession
which makes man, alone of all animals, capable of sin. For sin is simply
the following out of the instincts and desires of the animal, when these
are felt to be in opposition to the dictates of the peculiarly human, the
moral nature. Men have said that the only Fall of Man was a fall
upwards. They have given an entirely new meaning to the medieval
description of the first transgression as the "felix culpa." But this
would seem to involve confusion of thought. The first emergence of man
as man, the appearance on this planet of a moral being, at once involved
the possibility of sin. That, the rise of man did necessarily include.
An animal follows the bent and inclination of its own nature. For it,
sin is for ever impossible. For it, there can be no defeat, no fall, for
the conditions of conflict are absent. But the actual occurrence of sin
is quite a different thing from the appearance of a being so highly
exalted as to be capable of sinning; so constituted as to experience the
dread reality of the internal strife between flesh and spirit, the battle
between the lower and the higher within the same personal experience. I
can never act as the animal does, because I possess what the animal does
not--a moral nature, which I can, if I will, outrage and defy. No animal
can be either innocent or guilty. Moral attributes cannot be assigned to
it.
This result follows. When I sin, I am indeed doing what I alone can do,
because I am a man. But also, I am, by that very act, contradicting my
nature, violating the law of my well-being. The possession of a moral
nature makes me man. Sin is just to act in defiance of and in opposition
to that nature. Sin, then, is the only possible case in the universe,
falling under our observation, in which a creature _can_ contradict the
law of its being. Science has at least given the final refutation of the
devil's lie that sin is natural to man. It is the only unnatural thing
in the world. It is not non-human, like the actions of animals. The age-
long history of the race can never be reversed. I cannot undo the
process which has made me man, and act as the non-moral animal. My
sinful actions, my transgressions, are just because they are, and just in
proportion as they are, immoral, for that very reason, and in that very
measure, inhuman, not non-human.
Much more might be shown to follow from this most important
consideration. But here we adduce it for this sole reason, that science
may be allowed to bear its witness, a most just and passionless, and an
unconscious and tacit witness, to the truth of the Christian estimate of
sin.
(_b_) Nothing, at first sight, could be more different from the
scientific account of the origin of sin, than that account of it which is
given in the third chapter of the Book of Genesis.
There we have, to put it shortly, the most profound spiritual teaching in
the form of a story, a piece of primitive Hebrew folk-lore. The Divine
Wisdom made choice of this channel to communicate to man certain great
truths about his nature, realities of the highest plane of his
experience, where he moves in the presence of God and realities unseen,
unheard. And we can discern at least some of the reasons for the choice
of these methods.
The most adequate revelation of the origin of sin which has ever been
made to man, must (we are almost justified in saying) have been made to
us in some such form as this for the following reasons.
(i) Truth expressed in the form of a story is thereby made
comprehensible to men of every stage of culture. "Truth embodied in a
tale, shall enter in at lowly doors." At the door of no man's mind, who
is spiritually receptive, will it knock in vain. To simple and to wise,
to the unlearned and the learned, to the young and to the old, it appeals
alike. This form of instruction alone is of universal application.
(ii) Truth thus conveyed can never become obsolete. Scientific treatises
in the course of a few years become out of date, left far behind by the
rapidly advancing tide of knowledge. Moreover, if we can imagine it
possible that in the ninth century B.C., an account could have been
composed, under some supernatural influence, in the terms of modern
thought, it would have had to wait nearly three thousand years before it
became intelligible, and then, in a few decades, or centuries at most, it
would in all probability have become once more incomprehensible or, if
not that, then at least hopelessly behind the times.
The form of a story, as in the case of our Lord's parables, alone ensures
that truth thus conveyed shall be intelligible to all men at all times.
To object to the form, to scoff at or deride it, is as unintelligent as
it would be, for example, to disparage the sublime teaching of the
parable of the Prodigal Son on the ground that we have no evidence for
the historical truth of the incidents.
Moreover, when we place this and the similar stories we find in the early
chapters of Genesis side by side with the Babylonian myths with which
they stand in some sort of historical relationship, we can trace in the
lofty moral and spiritual teachings of the former, as contrasted with the
grotesque and polytheistic representations of the latter, the veritable
action of the Spirit of God upon the minds of men. Modern research has,
in fact, raised the doctrine of inspiration from a vague and conventional
belief to the level of an ascertained fact, evidenced by observation.
Just as a scientific man can watch his facts under his microscope or in
his test tubes, so such comparison as has been suggested, between Genesis
and the cuneiform tablets, enables us to watch the very fact, to detect
the Divine Spirit at work, not superseding, but illuminating and
uplifting the natural faculties of the sacred writers. But we now turn
to the spiritual teaching enshrined in this particular story.
(i) First, we have the fundamental truth that man is made capable of
hearing the Divine Voice. Not once in the distant past, but to-day, and
day by day, the Voice of God is heard speaking within the depths of
consciousness as clearly and as decisively as of old it sounded among the
trees of the garden.
(ii) But, secondly, other voices make themselves heard by us, and woe to
us if we listen to them.
There is the voice which bids us gratify our animal appetite. The woman
"saw that the tree was good for food." I am conscious of the strength of
bodily desires. Let me seek nothing, from moment to moment, but the
satisfaction of my inclinations. There is the voice which bids us
gratify the desire of the eyes. She "saw that the tree was pleasant to
the eyes." The world is full of beauty. Let me make that my end, the
satisfaction of the aesthetic sense; let me rest in the contemplation of
that beauty, which was made for me, and I for it, precisely in order that
I might not find repose there, but might be led thereby to Him Who made
this scene so fair that His dear children might be drawn to Himself, Who
is the eternal and uncreated loveliness.
There is, lastly, the voice which bids us gratify the desire of the mind.
Eve "saw that the tree was to be desired to make one wise." I desire to
know. Let me indulge this desire at any cost, even if it mean the
filling of my mind with all manner of foul and loathsome images. It is
all "knowing the world." We forget, poor fools, that mere knowledge is
not wisdom, and that there is a knowledge which brings death.
The desires of the body, the eyes, the mind, are good and healthful and
holy in their proper place and sphere. Through these we reach out to the
life and love and knowledge of God. And yet, if gratified against the
dictates of that clear-sounding, inner, Divine Voice, they are precisely
the materials of sin and death. To gratify them against the dictates of
the moral and spiritual nature is to exclude oneself from the garden of
God's delight, from the health and joy of the Divine Presence. We know
it. We have learnt it by saddest experience of our own. To sin against
the voice within is to find oneself separated from God; the ears of the
soul have become deaf to the warnings of conscience, the eyes of the soul
blind to the vision of the glory and holiness of God.
Is it wrong to say that such teaching as this can never be outgrown?
That, as time goes on, as the spiritual experience of the race and of the
individual grows and broadens, still new lessons may be found to be
contained in it?
The Bible adds to the teaching of science that without which that
teaching is incomplete. It bids us know and feel and recognise the
Divine Presence within us and, in the light of that ultimate truth of
ourselves, realise something of the appalling grandeur of the issues of
common life. But, different as are the forms in which their respective
lessons are conveyed, science and the Bible unite their testimony to that
of experience and conscience, that the Christian estimate of sin, and not
the world's estimate of it, is the right one.
And the teaching of experience, conscience, science, and the Bible
receives its final confirmation in the Cross of Jesus Christ. Henceforth
sin, all sins, our sins, are to be estimated and measured in the light of
the fact that sin brought about the death of the sinless Son of Man. Sin
is the real enemy of ourselves and of the race. It is the destruction of
the true self, the Divine Man in every son of man.
We need, for ourselves, to strive to attain to the genuinely Christian
estimate of sin. "Had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord
of Glory." But we have the Cross lifted up before our eyes and when, in
the light of that, we begin to hate and dread sin worse than pain, then
we shall have begun to make some real advance towards becoming that which
we long to be, and all the time mean and aspire to be--Christians,
disciples of the Crucified.
IV
THE MEANING OF SIN, AND THE REVELATION OF THE TRUE SELF
"In this we have come to know what love is, because He laid down His
life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."--1
JOHN III. 16.
It is important that we should arrive at some clearer understanding of
the nature of sin. Let us approach the question from the side of the
Divine Indwelling. The doctrine of the Divine Immanence, in things and
in persons, that doctrine which we are to-day slowly recovering, is
rescued from pantheism by holding fast at the same time to the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity. God the Transcendent dwells in "all thinking
things, all objects of all thoughts" by His Word and Spirit. The Word,
the Logos, of which St. John speaks, is the Eternal Self-Expression of
God, standing as it were face to face with Him in the depths of His
eternal life. "In the beginning the Word was with God." He is the
Eternal Thought of God, Who includes within Himself this and all possible
universes. And the Spirit, One with the Father and the Word, gives to
the Thought of God its realisation and embodiment in what we call things.
And that realisation of the Thought of God by the Spirit of God is a
progressive realisation--