THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE
+Atonement and New Testament language.+--It will have been observed
that in my examination of the subject of the Atonement I have said
almost nothing about the New Testament evidence for the doctrine.
This, I admit, is an entire departure from the method usually followed
by those who write upon it, and may be thought by some to vitiate my
whole argument. But the omission is of set purpose, for I am convinced
that New Testament language about the Atonement, especially the
language of St. Paul, has been, and still is, the prolific source of
most of the mischievous misinterpretations of it which exist in the
religious mind. To an extent this is the same with the Old Testament,
but to a far less degree, for the language of the Old Testament is only
liable to misapprehension when interpreted by the New. In a previous
chapter I have endeavoured to show the imperishable truths which
underlie Old Testament symbolism in regard to the Atonement, and I
trust I have shown that these truths are as fresh and indispensable
to-day, and play as great a part in human affairs as they ever did.
But before I proceed to say anything about the New Testament symbolism,
which has been largely derived from the Old, let us consider the
question of the authority of scripture as a whole.
+Tendency to bow to external authority.+--There is always a tendency in
the ordinary mind to rely upon some form of external authority in
religious as in other matters. With one man it is the authority of an
infallible church; with another the authority of an infallible book;
with another the authority of some infallible statement of belief which
ought to hold good for all time, but never does. At the best, external
authority is only a crutch, and at the worst it may become a rigid
fetter upon the expanding soul. The true seat of authority is within,
not without, the human soul. We are so constituted as to be able to
recognise, little by little, the truth of God as it comes to us. It
may come from any one of a thousand different quarters, but to be
recognised and felt as truth it must awaken an echo within the
individual soul. If it does not awaken such a response, it is of no
effect so far as the growth of the soul is concerned. What is true in
this book will not be received as true by the readers merely because I
say it, but because they feel it to be true and cannot get away from
it. Why should we be afraid of trusting the human soul to recognise
and respond to its own truth? All truth is one, and all earnest
truth-seekers are converging upon one goal. It is the divine self
within everyone of us which enables us to discern the truth best fitted
to our needs, and this divine self is, as has already been pointed out,
fundamentally one with the source of all truth, which is God.
If men could only come to see this more clearly and to trust their own
divine nature to enable them to follow and express the truth as well as
to receive it, they would not suffer themselves to be hampered by
formal and literal statements of belief whether in the church, the
Bible, or anywhere else. But this is what they seldom do. Your devout
Anglican or Roman Catholic will tell you that the church teaches this
or the church teaches that: as though that fact ever permanently
settled anything. One cannot really begin to appreciate the value of
united continuous church testimony until one is able to stand apart
from it, so to speak, and ask whether it rings true to the reason and
the moral sense. Suppose the Christian church enjoined or permitted
rape and murder, would the devout Catholic believe and obey? "But it
is inconceivable that the church could ever do that," he might answer.
Yes, but suppose it did, would he obey? If not, why not? He would not
obey because he would know quite well that the higher law within his
heart would forbid and render impossible any such obedience. That is
all the answer I want. Why should we not apply it all the way round?
The real test of truth is to be found in the response it awakens within
the soul.
+The supposed authority of the letter a great hindrance to truth.+--Now
one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of many devout and
intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of
the letter of scripture. When a good man hears some inspiring or
common-sense statement of truth,--for instance, that of universal
salvation,--he often replies in some such way as the following: "Yes, I
know it seems very plausible, and my heart desires to believe it; but
then, you know, it says in the scripture, 'These shall go away into
everlasting punishment, but the righteousness into life eternal.' I
cannot get behind that." He will go on stringing together, passage
after passage, often without the slightest suspicion that the original
meaning had nothing whatever to do with the subject under discussion;
as, for example, that well-known sentence in Ezekiel, "The soul that
sinneth, it shall die." Whatever Ezekiel originally meant by that
saying,--and it is well worth examination,--he was not thinking of a
modern revival meeting. The plain, average, level-headed business man
of religious temperament will sometimes bother himself in this way
until he thinks of giving up religion altogether. The letter of
scripture often seems to say one thing and the Christlike human heart
another. Take, as one example out of many, that pungent passage in
Psalm cxxxvii, "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little
ones against the stones." That passage does not breathe the spirit of
Jesus, nor is it true to the best in human nature; no follower of Jesus
wants to see a little one dashed against a stone. But even to do
justice to a passage of this kind we have to get into intellectual and
moral sympathy with the man who wrote it. It was written by one of the
poor Jewish prisoners carried away captive into Babylon by
Nebuchadnezzar six centuries or more before Jesus was born. Try and
picture the scene. Across eight hundred miles of desert that
melancholy procession winds its way, leaving the highland home behind
and going into slavery in the cruel city of the plain. One by one the
weakest fall and die; and where a baby is left without a mother, or the
mother cannot walk with the weight of the helpless child, the cruel
Babylonian ruffians riding at the side will snatch it from the
anguished bosom and dash its brains out against the rocks. Should we
be likely to forget that if we had ever formed part of such a
procession of prisoners of war? Hence when Psalm cxxxvii came to be
written by some poor suffering father who had lost maybe both wife and
child, he gave vent to his feelings in one of the most plaintive
patriotic songs ever sung:--
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down--yea, we wept when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one
of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange
land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.... O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy
shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he
be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones!
One can feel deep sympathy with this unknown poet and his suffering
people without adopting the absurd view that this passage represents
God's word to our souls. It is a cry of suffering mingled with a
desire for vengeance, and that is all. But when a preacher declares
that he takes his stand and bases his gospel on the infallible Book, he
is either a fool or--a rhetorician.
+Belief in the infallible Book impossible.+--There are many good people
who maintain that they believe the Bible from cover to cover, and they
seem to think that this is something to be proud of. But they credit
themselves with an impossible feat; no one can believe contradictions,
in the sense of accepting them, whether intellectual or moral. The
very same people who will read with unction the most sanguinary
exhortations from scripture are usually people who themselves would not
hurt a fly. The Bible is not like a parliamentary blue book, an exact
and literal statement of facts; it represents for the most part what
earnest men belonging to a particular nationality in a bygone age
thought about life in relation to God. Many good people talk as though
the Bible were written by the finger of God Himself and let down from
heaven; on the other hand there are those who think that when they have
shown the inconsistencies of scripture, they have destroyed its value.
But they are both mistaken. The Bible is not one book, but a
collection of books, a slow growth extending over centuries. It has
come to be reverenced not because of any supernormal attestations of
its authority, but because we have found it helps us more than any
other book. The fact that the best part of it was written by good and
serious men, men who were living for the highest they were able to see,
does not necessarily give binding authority to the opinions of these
men. I question whether we should ever have heard of the Old Testament
if it had not been for Jesus, and the New is only a statement of what
some good men thought about Jesus and his gospel at the beginning of
Christian history. Jesus knew and loved the Old Testament scriptures,
but whenever He found a statement therein that jarred upon His moral
sense, He rejected it in the name of the higher truth declared by the
Spirit of Truth within His own soul: "Ye have heard that it was said by
them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall
be in danger of the judgment. But I say unto you that whosoever is
angry with his brother without a cause"--and even "without a cause"
seems to have been interpolated in later days--"shall be in danger of
the judgment." "Again ye have heard that it hath been said by them of
old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the
Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by the
heavens, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for it is His
footstool. Let your communication be Yea, yea, nay, nay; for
whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." "Ye hath heard that it
hath been said, Thou shalt love thine neighbour and hate thine enemy:
but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you
and persecute you." Jesus knew what He was doing. In all these
instances He was quoting from the Old Testament, and deliberately
superseding in the name of truth certain prescriptions of the very law
which He said He had come to fulfil. Everyone was taken by surprise at
His daring to do this. Matthew vii. 28, 29, says, "And it came to
pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were
astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one having (in
Himself) authority, and not as the scribes." No doubt some people
would say to-day that this authority came from His Godhead. But the
people on the hillsides of Galilee knew nothing about the Godhead of
Jesus. To them He was a heaven-sent teacher, a great and inspiring
master, whose words carried weight. His authority, therefore, must
have been self-evident in contradistinction to that of the scribes, who
always began their discourses by saying, "It is written." They never
seem to have thought of appealing to anything else than the authority
of the letter. But we see that Jesus, notwithstanding His reverence
for the scripture, handled it with perfect freedom. His authority was
that of the Spirit of God speaking within His own soul, the only
authority that has ever mattered in the history of religious thought.
He did not deny the authority of Scripture, but He claimed to be able
to see when it rang true to His own inner experience and when it did
not.
+The true seat of authority.+--If we could grasp this principle clearly
and strongly, it would give us a new and higher sense of freedom and of
confidence in the word of God as declared in the Bible and revealed in
human hearts. God has never stopped speaking to men. He speaks
through us collectively and individually. "The word is very nigh unto
thee, in thy mouth and in thine heart, that thou mayest do it." If we
are only in earnest to listen for the divine voice and to trust it when
we hear it, we shall not listen in vain. To realise that God is
speaking to us just as He spoke to earnest souls in the days of old
will send us to the sacred scriptures with an even greater appreciation
and reverence for the men of whose experience they are the expression.
But they will no longer bind us; they can only help and encourage us.
We shall feel that these men of faith of an earlier day and a different
race were our brothers after all, men who lived a life much like our
own, and who were trying to understand God as we are trying to
understand Him. The Bible is not infallible for the simple reason that
the human nature, even of wise and great men, is not infallible. It
helps us because these men were struggling with the same problems as
ourselves, and therefore what they have to say about them is valuable.
But the best of them had their limitations and shortcomings. They did
not know all the truth that was to be known, but they kept their faces
to the light. If we allow ourselves to be fettered by their actual
words, we shall be in danger of losing sympathy with them in the spirit
which animated those words. We are writing a Bible with our own lives
to-day, a Bible which may never be read in its fulness by human eyes,
but every letter of which is known and read in heaven. Every noble
life is a word of God to the world; every brave, unselfish deed is a
ray of eternal truth. Our characters ought to become living epistles
known and read of all men while we strive to express the best that God
has given us to see; for the same eternal Spirit of Truth, the Spirit
who has been the teacher of all the Elijahs, Isaiahs, and Pauls of
history is with us to-day as He was with them.
+The unity of truth.+--But, someone will remonstrate, What then are we
to believe? For by speaking in this way you erect as many standards of
truth as there are individuals. What the ordinary man wants is to be
told just what to believe, so that he can settle down and be at rest.
It is small comfort to tell him that every scripture statement may be
more or less fallible, and that he must trust to his own perception, or
perhaps to his own fancies, as to what is true. I know all that kind
of argument. It is as old as, or older than, Christianity itself. It
was used in all sincerity against Jesus by some earnest people of His
time. It was used again at the Reformation. It is still used by
sacerdotal controversialists, and looks very plausible on the face of
it. A devout and earnest Roman Catholic will tell you that in
Protestantism there are a thousand different creeds, all claiming to be
authoritative, and that the principle of private judgment can only lead
to intellectual and moral chaos. Your Protestant literalist will tell
you that the Romanist criticism has a good deal in it, and that you
must have a final standard of authority, either the infallible church,
the infallible Book, or the infallible Confession of Faith. But
notwithstanding the dogmatists the supposed infallible Confession of
Faith is almost universally discredited, and common honesty is
compelling Protestants to abandon the theory of an infallible Book.
The supposed infallible church has by no means been invariably
self-consistent. Besides, the important point is this; no man really
believes or can believe a thing until it becomes, so to speak, part of
himself. Holding propositions is not necessarily believing them, no
matter how tenaciously they may be adhered to. But all truth is really
one and the same. I may be unable to take exactly my neighbour's point
of view about some aspects of it, but if we are both in earnest and
faithful to what we have seen, we shall arrive in the end at the same
goal. Religious thinkers and teachers are never really so far apart as
seems to be the case. It is in the expression of the truth that they
differ, not in the truth itself. Language is never more than
approximately convenient expression of the reality it is meant to
declare. The man of the future will realise this better than the man
of the present or the past. He will replace all external authority by
the principle of spiritual autonomy. He will no longer be afraid of
trusting the human spirit to recognise and respond to truth from
whatsoever source it may come, for he will know that that spirit is one
with the universal Spirit of all Truth, and needs not to look beyond
itself for anything stronger or more divine. He will know that the
Spirit of Truth in himself is the Spirit of Truth in all men, and that
therefore in the end all men must know, and be, and do the Truth.
+The New Testament and the Atonement.+--Now let us apply this principle
to the New Testament writings about the redeeming work of Jesus. The
same principle, of course, would apply to anything that the New
Testament has to say about the gospel of Jesus, but perhaps the failure
to recognise it has done more mischief in connection with the doctrine
of Atonement than in anything else. At present Paul's opinion on this
great subject is by many people supposed to be decisive: Paul says
this, and Paul says that, and when Paul has spoken, there is no more to
be said. But why should it be so? Paul's opinion is simply Paul's
opinion, and not necessarily a complete and adequate statement of
truth. It is entitled to be considered weighty because it is the
utterance of a great man, and a great seer of truth, as well as being
the earliest writing on the subject which we possess. Any man of the
moral and intellectual eminence of Paul is entitled to reverence when
he speaks, whether his views are in the Bible or not. It is one of the
ironies of history that the words of this Paul who strove so hard
against literalism and legalism in his day have since come to be
regarded as a sort of fixed and final authority for Christian thought.
He would be the first to denounce it. To him the Spirit of Christ
operating within the individual soul was the true guide in matters of
faith. He even made a point of the fact that in thinking out the truth
about Jesus and His gospel he had "conferred not with flesh and blood."
+Inconsistency of New Testament writers with one another.+--Again, it
is somehow taken for granted that Paul and all the other New Testament
writers agree together in their theology of the Atonement. That is
quite a mistake, and the curious thing is that people should have been
so slow in finding it out. It may be instructive to some to give a
brief survey of the main points in Paul's theory of the Atonement, and
compare them with some of the others.
+The fundamental principle of its Atonement always the same.+--It would
simplify our acquaintance with Paul's modes of reasoning if we could
recognise that the truth of Atonement which he has to declare, and
which he associates so closely with the life and death of Jesus, is in
principle precisely the same as that which the writers of the Old
Testament had in mind. What that was we have already seen. It was the
assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man, and the means to
it was the principle of self-sacrifice. This is just what St. Paul set
himself to proclaim to the world, and to him the whole process centred
in Jesus, just as it does for Christian experience. But to his
presentation of the subject Paul almost of necessity had to bring the
whole apparatus of his rabbinical training. This it was which supplied
him with the most of his figures, symbols, and illustrations; but his
gospel was no more dependent upon these than--as I trust I have shown
in a previous chapter--the ancient spiritual truth of Atonement
depended upon Semitic ritual sacrifices. Paul's thought-forms were
supplied by the Old Testament and his Pharisaic education, just as the
forms in which we ordinarily express our thoughts to-day belong to the
mental atmosphere of our time. Most of the allusions in a _Times_
leading article, for example, would be lost upon an English reader five
hundred years hence unless they were carefully explained. To me one of
the most remarkable things about Jesus is the fact that He was able to
escape so completely the mental environment of the time in which, and
the people among whom, He lived His earthly life. How He managed to
deliver His peerless teaching while making so little allusion to
current Jewish modes of thought and worship is a mystery, and marks His
greatness as perhaps nothing else does. It was utterly different with
Paul; he spoke the language of his time, and never tried to do anything
else. When, therefore, we want to get at what he meant about the death
of Jesus, we have first of all to get behind the symbolism by which he
illustrates it, and even when we have done this we have to make
allowance for some limiting Pharisaic conceptions about justice and the
punishment of sin. Every now and then he breaks through these and
rises into a rarer, purer region without troubling about consistency.
Paul never dreamed that he was writing theological treatises which
would be numbered off into chapters and verses and lectured upon in
class rooms, or perhaps he would have been more careful about being
exact. How many of us could afford to have our letters, written at
different times and to different readers, analysed and dissected and
taken as a full and permanent statement of our thought upon any
particular subject or group of subjects?
+Paul's view of the death of the Saviour and the forgiveness of
sins.+--The first important thing to be noted in Paul's thought about
sin and salvation is his view that there was a vital connection between
the death of the Messiah and God's forgiveness of sins. But we should
be mightily mistaken if we were to understand this view to be the same
as that of a modern evangelical who talks about the "fountain filled
with blood," for it was quite different. The modern evangelical, of
so-called orthodox opinions, believes that Jesus died to save all men
from hell; but this was not what Paul was thinking about at all.
According to Paul, the wages of sin were actually and literally death.
But for sin there would have been no death, and to break the power of
sin would also be to break the power of death. But in this Paul was
wrong, in company with a good many of his contemporaries, and there is
no reason why we should not frankly say so, for, as we shall presently
see, the great apostle did not confine himself to the literal statement
of this view, but gave it also a mystical form in which it becomes
indisputably true. In his thought the Messiah of Jewish national
expectation was the head and representative of the nation in its
relation to God. For ages men had been dying because of sin--"in Adam
all die"--and so when the Sinless One came into human conditions and in
the likeness of sinful flesh, He also had to pass through death. But
there was a difference between His death and all other deaths in that,
being sinless, death could not hold Him, and so He rose again from the
tomb triumphant over it. His triumph then becomes potentially the
triumph of humanity--"in Christ shall all be made alive"--if only we
unite ourselves to Him by faith. God will remit the death penalty to
all who are "in Christ" and "justified by faith"; that is, we shall all
rise from the dead as He rose. Apparently Paul's belief was that no
one would ever have died but for the sin of Adam, a taint which has
affected all Adam's descendants. Death in his view was synonymous with
annihilation.
The next thing to be noticed is the juridical nature of Paul's
conception of the relationship of man and God. God is a lawgiver and
man a transgressor, a rebel against his sovereignty. In accordance
with God's law of righteousness sin is punishable by the death of the
whole race. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." But when the eternal Son of
God, the head and representative of the race, submits to this penalty
and in so doing acknowledges the righteousness of God, justice is
satisfied. "If one died for all, therefore all died." Those who claim
by faith the benefits of Messiah's submission to death on behalf of the
race are at peace with God. Henceforth they are not to live to
themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.
Anyone who reads Paul's words without dogmatic prejudice will see that
this is not the present-day doctrine of Atonement. It takes for
granted certain ideas which were current among the Jews of Paul's day,
but which have since sunk into the background of Christian thought or
been abandoned altogether. Paul's use of them in the framing of his
theology is ingenious but not convincing, and was not essential to his
gospel; in fact the juridical and the ethical elements in Paul's
teaching stand in irreconcilable contrast. His theology is saved by
his mysticism, for no sooner has he enunciated these unbelievable
propositions about the death penalty of sin, the judicial sovereignty
of God, justification by faith, the imputed merits of the Redeemer, and
such like, than he proceeds to use them as symbols to illustrate a
subjective change in the sinner and a mystical union between the soul
and Christ. He does this so beautifully that the reader can hardly
discern where Paul quits the region of literalism and takes us into
that of mysticism. Hence he talks about dying with Christ, being
crucified with Christ, dying to sin, and so on, evidently meaning that
the whole redeeming process has to take place within the soul of the
sinner who seeks God. Even the conception of the resurrection ceases
to be literal and becomes the uprising of the divine man within the
human soul by faith in the risen Lord. "If any man be in Christ there
is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold all things are
become new." "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are
in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit."
We see from these expressions that in practice Paul transfers the whole
drama of redemption from without to within the individual soul. What a
pity it is that his interpreters in Christian history have so seldom
thought of doing the same!
+The Hebrews theory.+--The epistle to the Hebrews belongs to quite a
different category from the writings of St. Paul. The dominant thought
in this epistle is that of salvation by sacrifice, a perfectly true and
spiritual idea, as we have already seen. The writer, like Paul,
employs Old Testament symbolism, but in quite a different way.
Probably this is due to the fact that he was an Alexandrian Jew whose
thinking was shaped under the influence of Philo, whereas that of Paul
was governed by the rabbinical schools of Palestinian Judaism. At this
time Alexandria was the greatest intellectual centre in the world, a
meeting place for Greek thought and Hebrew religion as represented by
Philo. The influence of Alexandria is plainly to be seen in the
epistle to the Hebrews, which, possibly, was written by the learned and
courtly Apollos. Like Paul, the writer thinks of salvation as getting
right with God and living a holy life, but he omits all reference to a
judicial penalty, or the necessity for escaping annihilation by faith
in the substitutionary work of a sinless Redeemer. In his view Christ
is from first to last the priestly representative of the race, making a
sacrifice to God after the Old Testament fashion, but in a more perfect
way. He regards the Old Testament sacrificial offerings as being but
the types and shadows of the one perfect and eternal offering which
humanity through Christ is making to God. Most of my readers will at
once admit that this is not fanciful, although the language in which it
is expressed is so different from our own; it is quite faithful to the
spiritual meaning of Old Testament sacrifice. When, therefore, this
writer refers to the offering of the blood of Christ, he is thinking
not only of Calvary, but of all that Calvary symbolises, the perfect
spiritual offering of mankind to God, the sacramental realisation of
our oneness with Him. This view is not worked out with the moral
intensity which characterises St. Paul's, but it is unassailably true
once we get the writer's point of view. As a theory it is quite
different from Paul's, unless we are content to shed Paul's literalism,
get rid of all thought of an angry God and a physical death penalty for
sin, and betake ourselves instead to the inner spiritual region where
self-sacrifice is realised to be the means of saving, not only the
individual, but the whole race, by uniting it to the source of all
being.
+The Johannine theory.+--There is a certain similarity between the view
of Atonement set forth in the epistle to the Hebrews and that contained
in the Johannine writings. It is easy to understand why this is so
when we recognise that both are dominated by Alexandrian modes of
thinking. These Johannine writings--the fourth gospel, the three
epistles ascribed to St. John, and the book of Revelation--are all that
have come down to us of what was at one time, no doubt, a considerable
literature. How much the apostle John had to do with it cannot be
determined with any certainty, but it is clear enough that these
writings are not all from one hand, and that they are much later than
the work of St. Paul. The all-important conception in the Johannine
writings is that salvation is secured by the union of the individual
soul with the eternal Christ, or Logos, or Divine Man of pre-Christian
thought and experience. Here again we have a perfectly true and
necessary idea, an idea implied in all spiritual experience worthy of
the name; but as the root factor in a presentation of the doctrine of
Atonement, it differs widely from Paul's way of putting things. When
the Johannine writers speak of the blood of Christ, they mean the
outpoured, forthgiven life of the eternal Son of God, the ideal
humanity, perfectly and centrally expressed in Jesus of Nazareth.
There is not from beginning to end a hint or a suggestion in these
writings that a sinless being was tortured in order to appease the
wrath of God against guilty ones, or that the penalty of sin in a world
to come will be remitted to a penitent sinner in consideration of his
faith in such an arrangement.
+Underlying unity.+--This is by no means an exhaustive examination of
New Testament teaching on the subject of Atonement, but it should be
sufficient to show two things: first, that the theories of the New
Testament writers concerning the redeeming works of Christ are not,
taken literally, mutually consistent; secondly, the truth implied in
all the theories is precisely that truth of Atonement which we have
already seen to be implied in all religion. The great thing which
impressed the primitive Christian consciousness in regard to the life
and death of Jesus was that this life and death were the most complete
and consistent self-offering of the individual to the whole that had
ever been made. In this self-offering was the one perfect
manifestation of the eternal Christ, the humanity which reveals the
innermost of God, the humanity which is love. To partake of the
benefits of that Atonement we have to unite ourselves to it; that is,
to employ the mystical language of St. Paul, we have to die to self
with Christ and rise with Him into the experience of larger, fuller
life, the life eternal.
It is just the same truth under every one of these different theories,
but if we persist in regarding them literally we shall miss it, for by
no kind of ingenuity can we square the theory of St. Paul with that of
the other writers; the way of putting it is different. But once we see
what the essential truth of Atonement is, we are no longer bound by the
intellectual symbolism of Paul or Hebrews or any other authority; we
can get beneath the symbol to the thing symbolised. The Pauline
principle of dying with Christ, the Hebrews idea of the eternal
sacrifice manifested in time, the Johannine thought about the outpoured
life of the eternal Christ, are all one and the same. Jesus did
nothing for us which we are not also called upon to do for ourselves
and one another in our degree. Faith in His atoning work means death
to self that we may live to God; as selfhood perishes on its Calvary,
the Christ, the true man, the divine reality, in whom we are one with
all men, rises in power in our hearts and unites us to the source of
all goodness and joy. Institutional, forensic, external, the Atonement
never has been and never will be. But vicarious suffering, willingly
accepted, is the great redeeming force by which the world is gradually
being won to its true life in God, for vicarious suffering is the
expression of the law that in a finite world the service of the whole
involves pain, although it is also the deepest joy that the human heart
can know. The sacrifice of Jesus is the central and ideal expression
of this principle on the field of time, but it only possesses meaning
and value as it is repeated in our lives; the Christ has to be offered
perpetually on the altar of human hearts. There is no justification
except by becoming just, and no imputed righteousness which means
availing ourselves of merits that are not ours. We are "justified by
faith," indeed, but only in the sense that no man can become good
without believing in goodness, and no man can really believe in the
Christ revealed in Jesus without gradually becoming like Him. Here is
Atonement, Justification, Sanctification, and all else that is needed
to unite mankind to the life eternal which is to know God and Jesus
Christ whom He has sent.
+No Old Testament prophecy of Atonement of Jesus.+--It can hardly be
necessary to point out that there is therefore no direct reference in
the Old Testament to the atoning work of Jesus. All the beautiful
passages with which we are so familiar, and which have become the
language of devotion in reference to such sacred seasons as Christmas
Day and Good Friday, can only be associated with Jesus in an ideal
sense. The noble fifty-third of Isaiah, for example, and all similar
passages about the prophetic conception of the suffering servant of
God, have, literally understood, nothing whatever to do with Jesus.
But the striking thing about such passages is that the men who wrote
them were able to realise and express the very essence of the spiritual
Atonement, the giving of the individual for the race. The pathetic and
inspiring description, "He was despised and rejected of men, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from
him, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our
griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken,
smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of
our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed," is perhaps
the grandest presentation of the atoning life, the Christ man, that
exists in literature. The ideal fulfilment of it was Jesus, as
primitive Christianity quickly saw; but had the original writer no
specific example in mind belonging to his own day when he wrote? To be
sure he had; the case of Jeremiah would furnish it if no other. This
brave and faithful advocate of the moral ideal, after standing alone in
his resistance to the materialising tendencies of his time, was scorned
and hated by his fellow-countrymen, flung into prison, beaten,
tortured, and probably murdered in the end. He shared the captivity of
the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, a captivity against which he had warned
them in vain. "Despised and rejected of men," he died, but in later
days his name came to be reverenced as perhaps none had ever been
before. For centuries afterwards he was referred to by the returned
exiles as _the_ prophet, in contradistinction to all other prophets.
He had lived the atoning life and died a sacrificial death. It was not
wonderful that the author of the fifty-third of Isaiah should have such
a noble example in mind when he penned his deathless words, but these
words were meant to have an impersonal meaning too. They stand as a
description of the ideal manhood, the true servant of God, the saviour
of the race in any and every generation. This kind of manhood, just
because it is the true manhood, the eternal or divine manhood, must
inevitably suffer in a selfish world, but these sufferings are never in
vain; they are the Calvary from which the eternal Christ rises in
redeeming might over the power of sin and death. Let any man ask
himself what it is that is saving the world to-day, and gradually but
surely lifting it out of the mire of ignorance and wickedness, and he
cannot find a better answer than the fifty-third of Isaiah. It tells
of Jesus, but it tells also of all the sons of God who in the spirit of
Jesus have ever given their lives in the service of love.
When we go to the Bible in this common-sense way, entering with
understanding and sympathy into the thoughts and aspirations of the men
who wrote it, it becomes a living book, and a real help in our
endeavour to live our lives in union with Jesus Christ. But to regard
it as a sort of official document written by the finger of God, of
equal authority in every part, and containing a full and complete
statement of the propositions we must accept in order to make sure of
salvation, is hampering and belittling to the soul. God inspires men,
not books; and He will go on inspiring men to the end of time, whether
they write books or not. I do not know anything which is such a
serious hindrance and stumbling-block to spiritual religion to-day as
this supposed authority of the letter of scripture. If only the
average Protestant could emancipate himself from this intellectual
bondage, the gain to truth would be immeasurable. I do not suppose
there is a single man who reads these words who would make light of the
religious opinions of a pious mother, but would he allow them to fetter
him in the exercise of his own mature judgment? But surely your own
mother stands as near to you as men who wrote centuries before she was
born. If God spoke to the hearts of men centuries ago, He can and does
speak to them now. If He spoke to Isaiah, He can and does speak to
you. If your mother's way of stating truth is not necessarily yours,
no more is Paul's. The deeper unity of the spirit forbids this blind
obedience to the letter. Therefore, knowing quite well what use
hostile reviewers will make of this sentence, I close by solemnly
adding: Never mind what the Bible says if you are in search for truth,
but trust the voice of God within you. The Bible will help you in your
quest, just as any good man might be able to help you; but you must
judge, test, and weigh the various statements it contains, just as you
would judge, test, and weigh the opinions of the best friend you ever
had. Nothing can make up for this quiet and assured confidence in the
Spirit of Truth within your own soul. If God is not there, you will
not find Him in the Bible or anywhere else.