THE ATONEMENT
+II. Semitic Ideas of Atonement+
+Atonement in history.+--What, then, has this death to do with the
Atonement? A great deal; but the best way to answer the question will
be to obtain a clear idea as to what the Atonement really means and
always has meant to Christian experience, notwithstanding the tortuous
ways in which the doctrine has been articulated. I am convinced that
underneath every genuine attempt to explain the Atonement which has
ever held the field for any length of time in Christian history the
same truth is always to be found. It is so even with the statement of
it which is supposed to be orthodox to-day, but which is quite modern
after all, and is practically discredited by all thoughtful minds. The
mental dialect changes from one generation to another, but truth does
not. As a matter of fact, statements of truth are but conventional
symbols at the best, and possess only the ethical and emotional value
associated with them in our minds. This is why venerable propositions
which seem obscurantist to us originally possessed vital significance
to their framers; the ethical and emotional content were greater than
the form of statement, as they always must be. Every one of my readers
is no doubt aware of the power possessed by some particular landscape
or piece of music to awaken certain emotions in the heart or bring back
the memory of certain events to the mind. The same scene or song might
not do this for anyone else because the associations are different. It
is much the same with the forms in which religious truth is stated from
age to age. The form is no more the truth than the landscape is the
emotion or recollection it excites; it is only a symbol for the truth.
To grasp this clearly should not only make us more tolerant of archaic
confessions of faith, but should help us to realise that truth is one
even under apparently contradictory forms of statement. It is our duty
in religion as in everything else to endeavour to express the content
of spiritual experience in the forms which best accord with the mental
dialect of our own day. I repeat, therefore, that underneath every one
of the principal forms of statement in which the doctrine of Atonement
has been presented in the past the same truth is to be found. It is an
interesting historical and psychological study to try to find out what
it is.
+Atonement in the Old Testament.+--As I have already said above, it is
usual for writers on the Atonement to begin by taking scripture for
granted and presenting an examination of the principal passages in
which the Atonement is thought to be presumed or declared. But if what
I have just said be true, we have to get behind even the language of
scripture and ask how the writers of the Old and New Testaments came to
use these particular symbols and what they originally meant. The word
"atonement" is not an exact translation of any one Old Testament term,
but connotes a group of related religious ideas. In its Christian use
other elements enter into it from Greek thought which are not to be
found in the Old Testament. But the Old Testament source of the ideas
as well as the term is much older than the Greek, and therefore we are
right in looking to the Old Testament for the origin of the doctrine
which has taken such an important place in Christianity. But here
again modern research has opened up an enormous field of investigation.
Israel was a member of a vast family of nations all of which had sprung
from one stock, and of which the Babylonians and Assyrians were the
most powerful representatives. The Israelites were, politically
speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk surrounded by mighty
empires which had attained a high degree of civilisation. The
excavations which are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the
territories occupied by ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt, are
bringing much valuable and interesting matter to light. We find that
the civilisation of these peoples was much older than up to now
scholars have believed. The communities inhabiting the land of Canaan,
for example, had developed a complex political and commercial
organisation long before the Israelitish invasion; Canaan was in fact
the highway along which passed the commerce of Egypt with the mighty
nations to the north. The painstaking efforts of expert explorers are
bringing vast forgotten literatures to light and reconstituting for us
the religious ideas and modes of life of these people of the ancient
world. One result of these researches has been to prove that Hebrew
religious ideas were closely allied to those of other Semitic peoples,
and even the way in which they were expressed owed not a little to
older civilisations. In nothing was this more clearly the case than
with the ideas included afterward in the doctrine of Atonement. The
word translated Atonement in our version of the Old Testament
scriptures played an important part in the Old Testament sacrificial
system, and this again was closely connected with Semitic modes of
worship in general.
+The Day of Atonement.+--There was one great day in the Jewish
religious year called the Day of Atonement, when a special ritual was
gone through and special offerings made to God on account of the sins
of the people as a whole. The ceremonial was very elaborate and the
occasion was observed with great solemnity by the whole nation. As
described in the Old Testament the prescriptions for this Day of
Atonement, the Good Friday of the Levitical system as it has been
called, probably owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It should
be remembered that the outstanding event in later Jewish history was
the carrying away of the flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into
Babylon, where they remained for more than two generations. It is
quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness and their hatred of
their conquerors, the Jews may have borrowed some of their religious
ritual from the Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas
underlying their respective modes of worship were much the same.
Primitive religious sacrifice among Semitic peoples appears to have
been mainly of a joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in
hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer to their gods
sacrifices of everything which the votaries themselves valued,--the
fruits of the earth, their material possessions, their flocks and
herds, the prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally even the
children of their own body. It was only on great and solemn occasions,
such as the necessity for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in
war, that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice was
made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us to inquire what were
the underlying ideas assumed in Semitic religious sacrifice.
+Underlying ideas in Semitic sacrifice. 1. The solidarity of man with
God.+--In the first place there was the idea of community of life
between the worshipper and his god. It is doubtful how far this can be
pressed, but it is clear that in the Semitic mind there was always a
conviction that the deity of the clan or tribe was the giver as well as
the sustainer of its life. This did not apply to the minor divinities,
the demons of wood and stream, but to the tribal deities, the Chemosh
of Moab, the Dagon of the Philistines, the Jehovah of Israel. Probably
the Philistines were not Semites, but no doubt ancient worship in
general took for granted this community of life between any particular
people and their deity. In the offering of the best of their
possessions to the god the worshippers thought they were rendering to
him of his own. As he was at once the giver and the guardian of life,
they felt bound to render him the best of the fruits of life. This was
a true thought, a principle essential to all true spiritual life, and
implied in all spiritual aspiration. The reader will have already seen
that it is fundamental to the New Theology. However crude and even
repellent some of its expressions may have been in ancient modes of
worship, it is the same truth all ages through--the truth that God and
man are essentially one.
+2. The solidarity of the individual with the community.+--A further
idea underlying primitive sacrifice was that of the solidarity of the
individual with the community as a whole. In the Chaldean tribes out
of which Israel arose personality as we know it had not even emerged.
Readers of the Old Testament will not need to be reminded that in the
earlier stages of Israel's existence as a people the whole nation was
repeatedly said to be punished for the behaviour of individuals, and
families perished for the transgression of a father, as in the case of
Achan. No particular attention was ever paid to the individual as
such. A man had no life of his own, and no value, apart from the life
of the community. He belonged to it, not to himself. Hence, when any
communal act of worship was performed, when any tribal sacrifice was
made to the deity, the organic unity of the individual with the whole
was specially emphasised. Physically and spiritually the unit was held
to belong to the whole, and to exist for the sake of the whole. Here
again we have a great truth, the foundation truth of all morality, and
a truth which reaches its highest in the life of Jesus. The deepening
of individual self-consciousness, and the increased perception of
individual value, have neither weakened nor destroyed it, for it is
written in the very constitution of the universe. Mankind is
fundamentally one; here is morality. We are individually fulfilled in
God; here is religion. These are the cognate ideas underlying all
modes of sacrificial worship, ancient or modern. These are the ideas
which find elaborate ceremonial expression in the Israelitish Day of
Atonement as described in the Old Testament. The main purpose of these
observances was the desire to assert as solemnly and emphatically as
possible the essential oneness of the community with God, and of every
individual with all the rest. Everything which tended to separate
between Israel and her God was ceremonially put away on this great
occasion. From the religious point of view it was the beginning of a
new year. The Babylonian new year began about the same time. It was
supposed that a man's good or evil fortune was appointed on new year's
day and settled past all possibility of revision on the tenth day
after. The intervening nine days were therefore kept as a sort of
Lenten season; the tenth day was the grand occasion for the making sure
of the harmonious relations of the community with the deity. It will
be seen, therefore, that psychologically the idea of Atonement takes
precedence of the idea of sin. Most westerners are accustomed to think
exactly the reverse, and that is why the various theories of Atonement
which have appeared and disappeared in the course of Christian history
have so generally obscured the truth. The root principle of Atonement
is not that of escaping punishment for transgression, but the assertion
of the fundamental oneness of God and man. This may or may not be
accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, but it is the very
marrow of religion. Atonement implies the acting-together of God and
man, the subordination of the individual will to the universal will,
the fulfilment of the unit in the whole.
+Sense of sin not originally essential to atonement.+--It ought to be
recognised that in Semitic modes of worship the idea of sin did not
originally hold the place it has since come to hold in the Christian
consciousness. The Babylonian and the early Israelite were greatly
afraid of offending God, but they do not seem to have thought of such a
transgression as being morally culpable. The profound sense of sin
which characterises so many of the psalms and prophetic writings of the
Old Testament was a comparatively late development. The primitive
Semites had a markedly anthropomorphic idea of their deities. They
thought of any divine being as more or less like an ordinary man and
liable to take umbrage at little things. It was even possible to
offend him without knowing it, and therefore to be left without
protection against the ills of life. It was to make sure of smoothing
away all possible misunderstandings that covering sacrifices were
offered from time to time; but the offering of these sacrifices did not
necessarily mean that the worshipper thought he had done anything to be
ashamed of and which required to be put right. He was simply treating
his god as he would have treated a powerful earthly patron or
potentate, that is, he was apologising for anything he might have done
to alienate his favour. This notion of the necessity for placating God
is to be found in close association with the worthier spiritual
instincts to which I have already referred, and it has not even yet
disappeared from our thinking. Unbiassed readers of the Old Testament
will find abundant justification for this statement. We are told
repeatedly therein that the anger of the Lord was kindled against
Israel or against this or that individual, and that the whole community
had in consequence to humble itself before Him in order to avert
plague, or pestilence, or some other form of general calamity. Not
only was Jehovah thought of as a kind of larger man who was at once
protector and tyrant to his people, he was but the God of Israel in
contradistinction to the gods of other nations, one God out of many.
It was only gradually, and after the lapse of ages, that Israelites
came to think of their God as the God of the whole earth and a being
who must be worshipped in righteousness. Israel was fortunate in
possessing what other nations had not in the same degree, a succession
of specially inspired men, teachers of moral and spiritual truth called
prophets. The best of these--for no doubt the generality of them spoke
only the language of their time--earnestly protested against material
ideas of sacrifice and inadequate notions about God. They declared
that God and the moral ideal were one and that the best way to serve
the former was to be true to the latter. True sacrifice, they
maintained, was of a spiritual kind and ought never to be thought about
in any other sense. Thus in the fifty-first psalm the writer, one of
the prophetic school, thus contrasts mere ceremonialism with spiritual
worship:
Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not
in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A
broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.
Or take the prophet Micah, chapter vi., verse 6. Here is a reference
to human sacrifice, to which the Israelites were prone from time to
time, following the example of their neighbours:
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the Most
High God? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of
a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with
ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
And the answer of the prophet is:
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord
require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God?
Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms that the moral ideal
and the religious ideal are one, and that to worship God properly the
worshipper must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get the idea
that sin against God is not something into which a man may fall without
knowing it, but the living of a selfish life.
+Atonement never an equivalent for penalty.+--We ought to recognise too
that the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement were never held to secure a
complete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man committed theft or
murder, he had to bear the appropriate penalty of his misdemeanour
because he had been guilty of an action directed against the well-being
of the community and the community had to take measures to protect
itself; the Day of Atonement availed nothing in such a case. Here is
where many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type and
anticipation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide
of the facts. The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and symbolical
assertion of the willingness of the individual and the nation to fulfil
their true destiny by being at one with God. If some particular man
had been so living as to cut himself off from the communal well-being,
he had to suffer.
+The significance of the blood.+--Many people seem to think that some
actual saving efficacy was supposed to attach to the shedding of the
blood of the victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never
was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind material sacrifices came
to be looked upon as possessing some virtue in themselves, but the
intelligence of the nation never regarded them in this way. In the
offering of a victim the worshipper symbolically offered himself. The
Semites thought that the life of any organism was in the blood. Thus
in Numbers we read, "The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have
given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it
is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or life)."
When, therefore, a man offered the blood of a victim upon the altar, he
was symbolically declaring his recognition of the truth that the
individual life belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself out
to the common life and to God the source of all. Only in this way
could individuality realise itself; apart from the whole it was
meaningless and valueless.
+The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous.+--This helps us to
see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of
ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and
noble. When a heathen mother passed her child through the fire to
Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It
must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She
did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one's best
and dearest possession for the life of the whole was an action
acceptable to God and worthy of our relationship to Him. We have
deepened and purified that ideal, but we have not lost it; we never
can. As time went on men came to see that there was a higher way of
giving the self to the whole than that of immolating a physical life,
and a better way of symbolising that offering than by shedding the
blood of bulls and goats; but the essential truth beneath all the
intricate sacrificial systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is
one that can never perish.
To sum up. Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental unity of all
existence, the unity of the individual with the race and the race with
God. The individual can only realise that unity by sacrificing himself
to it. To fulfil the self we must give the self to the All. This is
the truth presumed in all ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of
placating a manlike God for offences committed against his dignity has
been a concomitant of this perception, even a hindrance to it, but it
has never wholly obscured the truth itself. That truth is constant and
essential to all religion and morality, and is the coördinating
principle to all between them.