most conspicuous fact is the death of Jesus. Take, for instance, the
gospels, and you will find that over one-quarter of their pages are
devoted to the story of His death. Very strange is this indeed, if
Jesus was nothing but an illustrious teacher. A thousand interesting
events of His career are passed over, a thousand discourses are never
mentioned, in order that there may be abundant room for the telling of
His death. Or take the letters which make up the last half of the New
Testament; in these letters there is scarcely a quotation from the
lips of Jesus. Strange indeed is this if Jesus is only the world's
greatest teacher. The letters seem to ignore that He was a teacher or
reformer, but every letter is soaked in the pathos of His death. There
must be a deep and providential reason for all this. The character of
the gospels and the letters must have been due to something that Jesus
said or that the Holy Spirit inbreathed. A study of the New Testament
will convince us that Jesus had trained His disciples to see in His
sufferings and death the climax of God's crowning revelation to the
world. The key-note of the whole gospel story is struck by John the
Baptist in his bold declaration, "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh
away the sin of the world." In that declaration there was a reference
to His death, for the "lamb" in Palestine lived only to be slain. As
soon as Jesus began His public career He began to refer in enigmatic
phrases to His death. He did not declare His death openly, but the
thought of it was wrapt up inside of all He said. Nicodemus comes to
Him at night to have a talk with Him about His work, and among other
things, Jesus says, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness
so shall the Son of man be lifted up." Nicodemus did not know what He
meant--we know. He goes into the temple and drives out the men who
have made it a den of thieves, and when an angry mob surrounds Him He
calmly says, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it
up." They did not know what He meant--we know. He goes into the city
of Capernaum, and is surrounded by a great crowd who seem to be eager
to know the way of life. He begins to talk to them about the bread
that comes down from heaven, and among other things He says, "The
bread which I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life
of the world." They did not understand what He said--we understand it
now. One day in the city of Jerusalem He utters a great discourse
upon the good shepherd. "I am the good shepherd," He says; "the good
shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." They did not understand
Him--we do. In the last week of His earthly life it was reported that
a company of Greeks had come to see Him. He falls at once into a
thoughtful mood, and when at last He speaks it is to say that "I, if I
be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." The men standing by did not
understand what He said--we understand. All along His journey, from
the Jordan to the cross, He dropt such expressions as this: "I have
a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be
accomplished." Men did not know what He was saying--it is all clear
now.
But while He did not talk openly to the world about His death, He did
not hesitate to speak about it to His nearest friends. As soon as He
found a man willing to confess that He was indeed the world's Messiah,
the Son of the living God, He began to initiate His disciples into the
deeper mysteries of His mission. "From that time," Matthew says, "he
began to show, to unfold, to set forth the fact that he must suffer
many things and be killed." Peter tried to check Him in this
disclosure, but Jesus could not be checked. It is surprising how many
times it is stated in the gospels that Jesus told His disciples
He must be killed. Matthew says that while they were traveling in
Galilee, on a certain day when the disciples were much elated over the
marvelous things which He was doing, He took them aside and said
"Let these words sink into your ears: I am going to Jerusalem to be
killed." Later on, when they were going through Perea, Jesus took them
aside and said, "The Son of man must suffer many things, and at last
be put to death." On nearing Jerusalem His disciples became impatient
for a disclosure of His power and glory. He began to tell them about
the grace of humility. "The Son of man," He said, "is come, not to be
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom
for many." On the last Tuesday of His earthly life He sat with His
disciples on the slope of the Mount of Olives, and in the midst of His
high and solemn teaching He said, "It is only two days now until I
shall be crucified." And on the last Thursday of His life, on the
evening of His betrayal, He took His disciples into an upper room, and
taking the bread and blessing it, He gave it to these men, saying,
"This is my body which is given for you." Likewise after supper He
took the cup, and when He had blest it gave it to them, saying, "This
is my blood of the covenant which is shed for you and for many for the
remission of sins. Do this in remembrance of me." It would seem
from this that the one thing which Jesus was desirous that all His
followers should remember was the fact that He had laid down His life
for them. One can not read the gospels without feeling that he is
being borne steadily and irresistibly toward the cross.
When we get out of the gospels into the epistles we find ourselves
face to face with the same tragic and glorious fact. Peter's first
letter is not a theological treatise. He is not writing a dissertation
on the person of Christ, or attempting to give any interpretation of
the death of Jesus; he is dealing with very practical matters. He
exhorts the Christians who are discouraged and downhearted to hold up
their heads and to be brave. It is interesting to see how again
and again he puts the cross behind them in order to keep them from
slipping back. "Endure," he says, "because Christ suffered for us.
Who his own self bore our sins in his own body on the tree." The
Christians of that day had been overtaken by furious persecution.
They were suffering all sorts of hardships and disappointments. But
"suffer," he says, "because Christ has once suffered for sins, the
just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God." Certainly the
gospel, according to St. Peter, was: Christ died for our sins.
Read the first letter of St. John, and everywhere it breathes the
same spirit which we have found in the gospels and in St. Peter. John
punctuates almost every paragraph with some reference to the cross.
In the first chapter he is talking about sin. "The blood of Jesus
Christ," he says, "cleanses us from all sins." In the second chapter
he is talking about forgiveness, and this leads him to think at once
of Jesus Christ, the righteous, "who is the propitiation for our sins,
and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world." In the
third chapter he is talking about brotherly love. He is urging the
members of the Church to lay down their lives, one for another,
"Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for
us." In the fourth chapter he tells of the great mystery of Christ's
love: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us,
and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." To the beloved
disciple evidently the great fact of the Christian revelation is that
Christ died for our sins.
But it is in the letters of Paul that we find the fullest and most
emphatic assertion of this transcendent fact. It will not be possible
for me to quote to you even a half of what he said on the subject. If
you should cut out of his letters all the references to the cross, you
would leave his letters in tatters. Listen to him as he talks to his
converts in Corinth: "First of all I delivered unto you that which
I also received, how that Christ died for our sins." That was the
foremost fact, to be stated in every letter and to be unfolded in
every sermon. To Saul of Tarsus, Jesus is not an illustrious Rabbi
whose sentences are to be treasured up and repeated to listening
congregations; He is everywhere and always the world's Redeemer.
And throughout all of Paul's epistles one hears the same jubilant,
triumphant declaration, "I live by the faith of the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me."
Let us now turn to the last book of the New Testament, the Book of
the Revelation. What does this prophet on the Isle of Patmos see and
hear, as he looks out into future ages and coming worlds? The book
begins with a doxology: "Unto him that loved us, and washed us from
our sins in his own blood, to him be glory and dominion forever and
ever." John looks, and beholds a great company of the redeemed. He
asks who these are, and the reply comes back, "These are they who have
washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." He
listens, and the song that goes up from the throats of the redeemed
is, "Worthy art thou to take the book, and to open the seals thereof;
for thou wast slain and didst purchase us for God with thy blood."
At the center of the great vision which bursts upon the soul of the
exiled apostle, there is a Lamb that was slain. Whatever we may think
of Jesus of Nazareth, there is no question concerning what the men who
wrote the New Testament thought. To the men who wrote the book, Jesus
was not a Socrates or a Seneca, a Martin Luther or an Abraham Lincoln.
His life was not an incident in the process of evolution, His death
was not an episode in the dark and dreadful tragedy of human history.
His life is God's. greatest gift to men, His death is the climax and
the crowning revelation of the heart of the eternal. You can not open
the New Testament anywhere without the idea flying into your face,
"Christ died for our sins."
How different all this is from the atmosphere of the modern Church.
When you go into the average church to-day, what great idea meets you?
Do you find yourselves face to face with the fact that Christ died
for our sins? I do not think you will often hear that great truth
preached. In all probability you will hear a sermon dealing with the
domestic graces, or with business obligations, or with political
duties and complications. You may hear a sermon on city missions, or
on foreign missions; you may hear a man dealing with some great evil,
or pointing out some alarming danger, or discussing some interesting
social problem, or urging upon men's consciences the performance of
some duty. It is not often in these modern days that you will hear
a sermon dealing with the thought that set the apostles blazing and
turned the world upside down. And right there, I think, lies one of
the causes of the weaknesses of the modern Church. We have been so
busy attending to the things that ought to be done, we have had no
time to feed the springs that keep alive these mighty hopes which make
us Christian men. What is the secret of the strength of the Roman
Catholic Church? How is it that she pursues her conquering way, in
spite of stupidities and blunders that would have killed any other
institution? I know the explanations that are usually offered, but it
seems to me they are far from adequate. Somebody says, But the Roman
Catholic Church does not hold any but the ignorant. That is not true.
It may be true of certain localities in America, but it is not true of
the nations across the sea. In Europe she holds entire nations in the
hollow of her hand; not only the ignorant, but the learned; not only
the low, but the high; not only the rude, but the cultured, the noble,
and the mighty. It will not do to say that the Roman Catholic Church
holds nobody but the ignorant. But even if it were true, it would
still be interesting to ascertain how she exercises such an influence
over the minds and hearts of ignorant people--for ignorant people are
the hardest of all to hold. When you say that the Church can hold
ignorant men, you are giving her the very highest compliment, for
you are acknowledging that she is in the possession of a power which
demands an explanation. The very fact that she is able to bring out
such hosts of wage-earning men and women in the early hours of Sunday
morning, men and women who have worked hard through the week, and many
of them far into the night, but who are willing on the Lord's Day to
wend their way to the house of God and engage in religious worship,
is a phenomenon which is worth thinking about. How does the Roman
Catholic Church do it? Somebody says she does it all by appealing to
men's fears, she scares men into penitence and devotion. Do you think
that that is a fair explanation? I do not think so. I can conceive how
she might frighten people for one generation, or for two, but I can
not conceive how she could frighten a dozen generations. One would
suppose that the spell would wear off by and by. There is a deeper
explanation than that The explanation is to be found in the spiritual
nature of man. The Roman Catholic leaders, notwithstanding their
blunders and their awful sins, have always seen that the central fact
of the Christian revelation is the death of Jesus, and around that
fact they have organized all their worship. Roman Catholics go to
mass; what is the mass? It is the celebration of the Lord's Supper.
What is the Lord's Supper? It is the ceremony that proclaims our
Lord's death until He comes. The hosts of worshipers that fill our
streets in the early Sunday morning hours are not going to church to
hear some man discuss an interesting problem, nor are they going to
listen to a few singers sing; they are going to celebrate once
more the death of the Savior of the world. In all her cathedrals
Catholicism places the stations of the cross, that they may tell to
the eye the story of the stages of His dying. On all her altars she
keeps the crucifix. Before the eyes of every faithful Catholic that
crucifix is held until his eyes close in death. A Catholic goes out of
the world thinking of Jesus crucified. So long as a Church holds on to
that great fact, she will have a grip on human minds and hearts that
can not be broken. The cross, as St. Paul said, a stumbling-block
to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, is the power of God unto
salvation to every one that believes. The Catholic Church has picked
up the fact of Jesus' death and held it aloft like a burning torch.
Around the torch she has thrown all sorts of dark philosophies, but
through the philosophies the light has streamed into the hearts and
homes of millions of God's children.
Protestantism has prospered just in proportion as she has kept the
cross at the forefront of all her preaching. The missionaries bring
back the same report from every field, that it is the story of Jesus'
death that opens the hearts of the pagan world. Every now and then a
denomination has started, determined to get rid of the cross of Jesus,
or at least to pay scant attention to it, and in every case these
denominations have been at the end of the third or fourth generation
either decaying or dead. There is no interpretation of the Christian
religion that has in it redeeming power which ignores or belittles the
death of Christ.
If Protestantism to-day is not doing what it ought to do, and is
manifesting symptoms which are alarming to Christian leaders, it is
because she has in these recent years been engaged so largely in
practical duties as to forget to drink inspiration from the great
doctrines which must forever furnish life and strength and hope.
If you will allow me to prophesy this morning, I predict that the
preaching of the next fifty years will be far more doctrinal than the
preaching of the last fifty years has been. I imagine some of you will
shudder at that. You say you do not like doctrinal preaching, you want
preaching that is practical. Well, pray, what is practical preaching?
Practical preaching is preaching that accomplishes the object for
which preaching is done, and the primary object of all Christian
preaching is to reconcile men to God. The experience of 1900 years
proves that it is only doctrinal preaching that reconciles the heart
to God. If, then, you really want practical preaching, the only
preaching that is deserving the name is preaching that deals with the
great Christian doctrines. But somebody says, I do not like doctrinal
preaching. A great many people have said that within recent years. I
do not believe they mean what they say. They are not expressing with
accuracy what is in their mind. They do like doctrinal preaching if
they are intelligent, faithful Christians, for doctrinal preaching is
bread to hearts that have been born again. When people say they do
not like doctrinal preaching, they often mean that they do not like
preaching which belongs to the eighteenth or seventeenth or sixteenth
centuries. They are not to be blamed for this. There is nothing that
gets stale so soon as preaching. We can not live upon the preaching
of a bygone age. If preachers bring out the interpretations and
phraseology which were current a hundred years ago, people must of
necessity say, "Oh, please do not give us that, we do not like such
doctrinal preaching." But doctrinal preaching need not be antiquated
or belated, it may be fresh, it may be couched in the language in
which men were born, it may use for its illustrations the images and
figures and analogies which are uppermost in men's imagination. And
whenever it does this there is no preaching which is so thrilling
and uplifting and mighty as the preaching which deals with the great
fundamental doctrines.
In one sense, the Christian religion never changes, in another sense
it is changing all the time. The facts of Christianity never change,
the interpretations of those facts alter from age to age. It is with
religion as it is with, the stars, the stars never change. They move
in their orbits in our night sky as they moved in the night sky of
Abraham when he left his old Chaldean home. The constellations were
the same at the opening of our century as they were when David watched
his flocks on the old Judean hills. But the interpretations of the
stars have always changed, must always change. Pick up the old charts
which the astrologers made and compare them with the charts of
astronomers of our day. How vast the difference! Listen to our
astronomers talk about the magnitudes and disunites and composition of
the stars, and compare with their story that which was written in
the astronomy of a few centuries ago. The stellar universe has not
changed, but men's conceptions have changed amazingly. The facts of
the human body do not change. Our heart beats as the heart of Homer
beat, our blood flows as the blood of Julius Caesar flowed, our
muscles and nerves live and die as the nerves and muscles have lived
and died in the bodies of men in all the generations--and yet, how the
theories of medicine have been altered from time to time. A doctor
does not want to hear a medical lecturer speak who persists in using
the phraseology and conceptions which were accepted by the medical
science of fifty years ago. Conceptions become too narrow to fit the
growing mind of the world, and when once outgrown they must be thrown
aside. As it is in science, so it is in religion. The facts of
Christianity never change, they are fixt stars in the firmament of
moral truth. Forever and forever it will be true that Christ died for
our sins, but the interpretations of this fact must be determined by
the intelligence of the age. Men will never be content with simple
facts, they must go behind them to find out an explanation of them.
Man is a rational being, he must think, he will not sit down calmly in
front of a fact and be content with looking it in the face, he will
go behind it and ask how came it to be and what are its relations to
other facts. That is what man has always been doing with the facts of
the Christian revelation, he has been going behind them and bringing
out interpretations which will account for them. The interpretations
are good for a little while, and then they are outgrown and cast
aside.
A good illustration of the progressive nature of theology is found in
the doctrine of the atonement. All of the apostles taught distinctly
that Christ died for our sins. The early Christians did not attempt to
go behind that fact, but by and by men began to attempt explanations.
In the second century a man by the name of Irenaeus seized upon the
word "ransom" in the sentence, "The Son of man is come to give his
life a ransom for many," and found in that word "ransom" the key-word
of the whole problem. The explanation of Irenaeus was taken up in the
third century by a distinguished preacher, Origen. And in the fourth
century the teaching of Origen was elaborated by Gregory of Nyssa.
According to the interpretation of these men, Jesus was the price paid
for the redemption of men. Paul frequently used the word redemption,
and the word had definite meanings to people who lived in the first
four centuries of the Christian era. If Christ was indeed a ransom,
the question naturally arose, who paid the price? The answer was, God.
A ransom must be paid to somebody--to whom was this ransom paid? The
answer was, the devil. According to Origen and to Gregory, God paid
the devil the life of Jesus in order that the devil might let humanity
go free. The devil, by deceit, had tricked man, and man had become his
slave--God now plays a trick upon the devil, and by offering him the
life of Jesus, secures the release of man. That was the interpretation
held by many theologians for almost a thousand years, but in the
eleventh century there arose a man who was not satisfied with the
old interpretation. The world had outgrown it. To many it seemed
ridiculous, to some it seemed blasphemous. There was an Italian by the
name of Anselm who was an earnest student of the Scriptures, and he
seized upon the word "debt" as the key-word of the problem. He wrote
a book, one of the epoch-making books of Christendom, which he called
"_Cur Deus Homo_." In this book Anselm elaborated his interpretation
of the reconciliation. "Sin," he said, "is debt, and sin against an
infinite being is an infinite debt. A finite being can not pay an
infinite debt, hence an infinite being must become man in order that
the debt may be paid. The Son of God, therefore, assumes the form of
man, and by his sufferings on the cross pays the debt which allows
humanity to go free." The interpretation was an advance upon that of
Origen and Gregory, but it was not final. It was repudiated by men of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and finally, in the day of the
Reformation, it was either modified or cast away altogether.
Martin Luther, Calvin, and the other reformers seized upon the
word "propitiation," and made that the starting-point of their
interpretation. According to these men, God is a great governor and
man has broken the divine law--transgressors must be punished--if the
man who breaks the law is not punished, somebody else must be punished
in his stead. The Son of God, therefore, comes to earth to suffer in
His person the punishment that rightly belongs to sinners. He is not
guilty, but the sins of humanity are imputed to Him, and God wreaks
upon Him the penalty which rightfully should have fallen on the heads
of sinners. That is known as "the penal substitution theory."
It was not altogether satisfactory, many men revolted from it, and in
the seventeenth century a Dutchman, Hugo Grotius, a lawyer, brought
forth another interpretation, which is known in theology as "the
governmental theory." He would not admit that Christ was punished.
His sufferings were not penal, but illustrative. "God is the moral
governor," said Grotius, "his government must be maintained, law can
not be broken with impunity. Unless sin is punished the dignity of
God's government would be destroyed. Therefore, that man may see how
hot is God's displeasure against sin, Christ comes into the world and
suffers the consequences of the transgressions of the race. The cross
is an exhibition of what God thinks of sin." That governmental theory
was carried into England and became the established doctrine of the
English Church for almost three hundred years. It was carried across
the ocean and became the dominant theory in the New Haven school of
theologians, as represented by Jonathan Edwards, Dwight, and Taylor.
The Princeton school of theology still clung to the penal substitution
theory, and it was the clashing of the New Haven school and the
Princeton school which caused such a commotion in the Presbyterian
Church of sixty years ago. They are antiquated. They are too little.
They seem mechanical, artificial, trivial. We can say of the
governmental theory what Dr. Hodge said, "It degrades the work of
Christ to the level of a governmental contrivance." If I should
attempt to preach to you the governmental theory as it was preached by
theologians fifty years ago, you would not be interested in it There
is nothing in you that would respond to it. You would simply say, "I
do not like doctrinal preaching." Or if I should go back and take up
the penal substitution theory in all its nakedness and hideousness,
and attempt to give it to you as the correct interpretation of the
gospel, you would rise up in open rebellion and say, "We will not
listen to such preaching." If I should go back and take up the
Anselmic theory and attempt to show how an infinite debt must be paid
by infinite suffering, you would say: "Stop, you are converting God
into a Shylock, who is demanding His pound of flesh. We prefer to
think of Him as our heavenly Father." If I should go further back and
take up the old ransom theory of Origen and Gregory, I suspect
that some of you would want to laugh. You could not accept an
interpretation which represents God as playing a trick upon Satan in
order to get humanity out of his grasp. No, those theories have all
been outgrown. We have come out into larger and grander times. We have
higher conceptions of the Almighty than the ancients ever had. We see
far deeper into the Christian revelation than Martin Luther or John
Calvin ever saw. These old interpretations are simply husks, and men
and women will not listen to the preaching of them. If, now and then,
a belated preacher attempts to preach them, the people say, "If that
is doctrinal preaching, please give us something practical."
And so the Church is to-day slowly working out a new interpretation of
the great fact that Christ died for our sins. The interpretation has
not yet been completed, and will not be for many years. I should like
this morning simply to outline in a general way some of the more
prominent features of the new interpretation. The Holy Ghost is at
work. He is taking the things of Christ and showing them unto us. The
interpretation of the reconciliation of the future will be superior in
every point to any of the interpretations of the past.