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Title: The Atonement and the Modern Mind

Author: James Denney

Release Date: March 5, 2008 [EBook #24757]

Language: English

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THE ATONEMENT

AND

THE MODERN MIND


BY

JAMES DENNEY, D.D.


PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY

UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW



_WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

  THE DEATH OF CHRIST
  STUDIES IN THEOLOGY
  THE EPISTLES TO THE THESSALONIANS
  THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS
  GOSPEL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS





LONDON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

27 PATERNOSTER ROW

MCMIII




PREFACE

The three chapters which follow have already appeared in _The
Expositor_, and may be regarded as a supplement to the writer's work on
_The Death of Christ: its place and interpretation in the New
Testament_.  It was no part of his intention in that study to ask or to
answer all the questions raised by New Testament teaching on the
subject; but, partly from reviews of _The Death of Christ_, and still
more from a considerable private correspondence to which the book gave
rise, he became convinced that something further should be attempted to
commend the truth to the mind and conscience of the time.  The
difficulties and misunderstandings connected with it spring, as far as
they can be considered intellectual, mainly from two sources.  Either
the mind is preoccupied with a conception of the world which, whether
men are conscious of it or not, forecloses all the questions which are
raised by any doctrine of atonement, and makes them unmeaning; or it
labours under some misconception as to what the New Testament actually
teaches.  Broadly speaking, the first of these conditions is considered
in the first two chapters, and the second in the last.  The title--_The
Atonement and the Modern Mind_--might seem to promise a treatise, or
even an elaborate system of theology; but though it would cover a work
of vastly larger scope than the present, it is not inappropriate to any
attempt, however humble, to help the mind in which we all live and move
to reach a sympathetic comprehension of the central truth in the
Christian religion.  The purpose of the writer is evangelic, whatever
may be said of his method; it is to commend the Atonement to the human
mind, as that mind has been determined by the influences and
experiences of modern times, and to win the mind for the truth of the
Atonement.

With the exception of a few paragraphs, these pages were delivered as
lectures to a summer school of Theology which met in Aberdeen, in June
of this year.  The school was organised by a committee of the
Association of Former Students of the United Free Church College,
Glasgow; and the writer, as a member and former President of the
Association, desires to take the liberty of inscribing his work to his
fellow-students.


GLASGOW, _September_ 1903.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT


CHAPTER II

SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT


CHAPTER III

CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT




CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT

It will be admitted by most Christians that if the Atonement, quite
apart from precise definitions of it, is anything to the mind, it is
everything.  It is the most profound of all truths, and the most
recreative.  It determines more than anything else our conceptions of
God, of man, of history, and even of nature; it determines them, for we
must bring them all in some way into accord with it.  It is the
inspiration of all thought, the impulse and the law of all action, the
key, in the last resort, to all suffering.  Whether we call it a fact
or a truth, a power or a doctrine, it is that in which the
_differentia_ of Christianity, its peculiar and exclusive character, is
specifically shown; it is the focus of revelation, the point at which
we see deepest into the truth of God, and come most completely under
its power.  For those who recognise it at all it is Christianity in
brief; it concentrates in itself, as in a germ of infinite potency, all
that the wisdom, power and love of God mean in relation to sinful men.

Accordingly, when we speak of the Atonement and the modern mind, we are
really speaking of the modern mind and the Christian religion.  The
relation between these two magnitudes may vary.  The modern mind is no
more than a modification of the human mind as it exists in all ages,
and the relation of the modern mind to the Atonement is one phase--it
may be a specially interesting or a specially well-defined phase--of
the perennial relation of the mind of man to the truth of God.  There
is always an affinity between the two, for God made man in His own
image, and the mind can only rest in truth; but there is always at the
same time an antipathy, for man is somehow estranged from God, and
resents Divine intrusion into his life.  This is the situation at all
times, and therefore in modern times; we only need to remark that when
the Atonement is in question, the situation, so to speak, becomes
acute.  All the elements in it define themselves more sharply.  If
there is sympathy between the mind and the truth, it is a profound
sympathy, which will carry the mind far; if there are lines of
approach, through which the truth can find access to the mind, they are
lines laid deep in the nature of things and of men, and the access
which the truth finds by them is one from which it will not easily be
dislodged.  On the other hand, if it is antagonism which is roused in
the mind by the Atonement, it is an antagonism which feels that
everything is at stake.  The Atonement is a reality of such a sort that
it can make no compromise.  The man who fights it knows that he is
fighting for his life, and puts all his strength into the battle.  To
surrender is literally to give up himself, to cease to be the man he
is, and to become another man.  For the modern mind, therefore, as for
the ancient, the attraction and the repulsion of Christianity are
concentrated at the same point; the cross of Christ is man's only
glory, or it is his final stumbling-block.

What I wish to do in these papers is so to present the facts as to
mediate, if possible, between the mind of our time and the
Atonement--so to exhibit the specific truth of Christianity as to bring
out its affinity for what is deepest in the nature of man and in human
experience--so to appreciate the modern mind itself, and the influences
which have given it its constitution and temper, as to discredit what
is false in it, and enlist on the side of the Atonement that which is
profound and true.  And if any one is disposed to marvel at the
ambition or the conceit of such a programme, I would ask him to
consider if it is not the programme prescribed to every Christian, or
at least to every Christian minister, who would do the work of an
evangelist.  To commend the eternal truth of God, as it is finally
revealed in the Atonement, to the mind in which men around us live and
move and have their being, is no doubt a difficult and perilous task;
but if we approach it in a right spirit, it need not tempt us to any
presumption; it cannot tempt us, as long as we feel that it is our
duty.  '_Who is sufficient for these things! . . .  Our sufficiency is
of God._'

The Christian religion is a historical religion, and whatever we say
about it must rest upon historical ground.  We cannot define it from
within, by reference merely to our individual experience.  Of course it
is equally impossible to define it apart from experience; the point is
that such experience itself must be historically derived; it must come
through something outside of our individual selves.  What is true of
the Christian religion as a whole is pre-eminently true of the
Atonement in which it is concentrated.  The experience which it brings
to us, and the truth which we teach on the basis of it, are
historically mediated.  They rest ultimately on that testimony to
Christ which we find in the Scriptures and especially in the New
Testament.  No one can tell what the Atonement is except on this basis.
No one can consciously approach it--no one can be influenced by it to
the full extent to which it is capable of influencing human
nature--except through this medium.  We may hold that just because it
is Divine, it must be eternally true, omnipresent in its gracious
power; but even granting this, it is not known as an abstract or
eternal somewhat; it is historically, and not otherwise than
historically, revealed.  It is achieved by Christ, and the testimony to
Christ, on the strength of which we accept it, is in the last resort
the testimony of Scripture.

In saying so, I do not mean that the Atonement is merely a problem of
exegesis, or that we have simply to accept as authoritative the
conclusions of scholars as to the meaning of New Testament texts.  The
modern mind here is ready with a radical objection.  The writers of the
New Testament, it argues, were men like ourselves; they had personal
limitations and historical limitations; their forms of thought were
those of a particular age and upbringing; the doctrines they preached
may have had a relative validity, but we cannot benumb our minds to
accept them without question.  The intelligence which has learned to be
a law to itself, criticising, rejecting, appropriating, assimilating,
cannot deny its nature and suspend its functions when it opens the New
Testament.  It cannot make itself the slave of men, not even though the
men are Peter and Paul and John; no, not even though it were the Son of
Man Himself.  It resents dictation, not wilfully nor wantonly, but
because it must; and it resents it all the more when it claims to be
inspired.  If, therefore, the Atonement can only be received by those
who are prepared from the threshold to acknowledge the inspiration and
the consequent authority of Scripture, it can never be received by
modern men at all.

This line of remark is familiar inside the Church as well as outside.
Often it is expressed in the demand for a historical as opposed to a
dogmatic interpretation of the New Testament, a historical
interpretation being one to which we can sit freely, because the result
to which it leads us is the mind of a time which we have survived and
presumably transcended; a dogmatic interpretation, on the other hand,
being one which claims to reach an abiding truth, and therefore to have
a present authority.  A more popular and inconsistent expression of the
same mood may be found among those who say petulant things about the
rabbinising of Paul, but profess the utmost devotion to the words of
Jesus.  Even in a day of overdone distinctions, one might point out
that interpretations are not properly to be classified as historical or
dogmatic, but as true or false.  If they are false, it does not matter
whether they are called dogmatic or historical; and if they are true,
they may quite well be both.  But this by the way.  For my own part, I
prefer the objection in its most radical form, and indeed find nothing
in it to which any Christian, however sincere or profound his reverence
for the Bible, should hesitate to assent.  Once the mind has come to
know itself, there can be no such thing for it as blank authority.  It
cannot believe things--the things by which it has to live--simply on
the word of Paul or John.  It is not irreverent, it is simply the
recognition of a fact, if we add that it can just as little believe
them simply on the word of Jesus.[1]  This is not the sin of the mind,
but the nature and essence of mind, the being which it owes to God.  If
we are to speak of authority at all in this connection, the authority
must be conceived as belonging not to the speaker but to that which he
says, not to the witness but to the truth.  Truth, in short, is the
only thing which has authority for the mind, and the only way in which
truth finally evinces its authority is by taking possession of the mind
for itself.  It may be that any given truth can only be reached by
testimony--that is, can only come to us by some historical channel; but
if it is a truth of eternal import, if it is part of a revelation of
God the reception of which is eternal life, then its authority lies in
itself and in its power to win the mind, and not in any witness however
trustworthy.

Hence in speaking of the Atonement, whether in preaching or in
theologising, it is quite unnecessary to raise any question about the
inspiration of Scripture, or to make any claim of 'authority' either
for the Apostles or for the Lord.  Belief in the inspiration of
Scripture is neither the beginning of the Christian life nor the
foundation of Christian theology; it is the last conclusion--a
conclusion which becomes every day more sure--to which experience of
the truth of Scripture leads.  When we tell, therefore, what the
Atonement is, we are telling it not on the authority of any person or
persons whatever, but on the authority of the truth in it by which it
has won its place in our minds and hearts.  We find this truth in the
Christian Scriptures undoubtedly, and therefore we prize them; but the
truth does not derive its authority from the Scriptures, or from those
who penned them.  On the contrary, the Scriptures are prized by the
Church because through them the soul is brought into contact with this
truth.  No doubt this leaves it open to any one who does not see in
Scripture what we see, or who is not convinced as we are of its truth,
to accuse us here of subjectivity, of having no standard of truth but
what appeals to us individually, but I could never feel the charge a
serious one.  It is like urging that a man does not see at all, or does
not see truly, because he only sees with his own eyes.  This is the
only authentic kind of seeing yet known to mankind.  We do not judge at
all those who do not see what we do.  We do not know what hinders them,
or whether they are at all to blame for it; we do not know how soon the
hindrance is going to be put out of the way.  To-day, as at the
beginning, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
comprehends it not.  But that is the situation which calls for
evangelists; not a situation in which the evangelist is called to
renounce his experience and his vocation.

What, then, is the Atonement, as it is presented to us in the
Scriptures, and vindicates for itself in our minds the character of
truth, and indeed, as I have said already, the character of the
ultimate truth of God?

The simplest expression that can be given to it in words is: Christ
died for our sins.  Taken by itself, this is too brief to be
intelligible; it implies many things which need to be made explicit
both about Christ's relation to us and about the relation of sin and
death.  But the important thing, to begin with, is not to define these
relations, but to look through the words to the broad reality which is
interpreted in them.  What they tell us, and tell us on the basis of an
incontrovertible experience, is that the forgiveness of sins is for the
Christian mediated through the death of Christ.  In one respect,
therefore, there is nothing singular in the forgiveness of sins: it is
in the same position as every other blessing of which the New Testament
speaks.  It is the presence of a Mediator, as Westcott says in one of
his letters, which makes the Christian religion what it is; and the
forgiveness of sins is mediated to us through Christ, just as the
knowledge of God as the Father is mediated, or the assurance of a life
beyond death.  But there is something _specific_ about the mediation of
forgiveness; the gift and the certainty of it come to us, not simply
through Christ, but through the blood of His Cross.  The sum of His
relation to sin is that He died for it.  God forgives, but this is the
way in which His forgiveness comes.  He forgives freely, but it is at
this cost to Himself and to the Son of His love.

This, it seems to me, is the simplest possible statement of what the
New Testament means by the Atonement, and probably there are few who
would dispute its correctness.  But it is possible to argue that there
is a deep cleft in the New Testament itself, and that the teaching of
Jesus on the subject of forgiveness is completely at variance with that
which we find in the Epistles, and which is implied in this description
of the Atonement.  Indeed there are many who do so argue.  But to
follow them would be to forget the place which Jesus has in His own
teaching.  Even if we grant that the main subject of that teaching is
the Kingdom of God, it is as clear as anything can be that the Kingdom
depends for its establishment on Jesus, or rather that in Him it is
already established in principle; and that all participation in its
blessings depends on some kind of relation to Him.  All things have
been delivered to Him by the Father, and it is by coming under
obligation to Him, and by that alone, that men know the Father.  It is
by coming under obligation to Him that they know the pardoning love of
the Father, as well as everything else that enters into Christian
experience and constitutes the blessedness of life in the Kingdom of
God.  Nor is it open to any one to say that he knows this simply
because Christ has told it.  We are dealing here with things too great
to be simply told.  If they are ever to be known in their reality, they
must be revealed by God, they must rise upon the mind of man
experimentally, in their awful and glorious truth, in ways more
wonderful than words.  They can be spoken about afterwards, but hardly
beforehand.  They can be celebrated and preached--that is, declared as
the speaker's experience, delivered as his testimony--but not simply
told.  It was enough if Jesus made His disciples feel, as surely He did
make them feel, not only in every word He spoke, but more emphatically
still in His whole attitude toward them, that He was Himself the
Mediator of the new covenant, and that all the blessings of the
relation between God and man which we call Christianity were blessings
due to Him.  If men knew the Father, it was through Him.  If they knew
the Father's heart to the lost, it was through Him.  Through Him, be it
remembered, not merely through the words that He spoke.  There was more
in Christ than even His own wonderful words expressed, and all that He
was and did and suffered, as well as what He said, entered into the
convictions He inspired.  But He knew this as well as His disciples,
and for this very reason it is beside the mark to point to what He
said, or rather to what He did not say, in confutation of their
experience.  For it is their experience--the experience that the
forgiveness of sins was mediated to them through His cross--that is
expressed in the doctrine of Atonement: He died for our sins.

The objection which is here in view is most frequently pointed by
reference to the parable of the prodigal son.  There is no Atonement
here, we are told, no mediation of forgiveness at all.  There is love
on the one side and penitence on the other, and it is treason to the
pure truth of this teaching to cloud and confuse it with the thoughts
of men whose Master was over their heads often, but most of all here.
Such a statement of the case is plausible, and judging from the
frequency with which it occurs must to some minds be very convincing,
but nothing could be more superficial, or more unjust both to Jesus and
the apostles.  A parable is a comparison, and there is a point of
comparison in it on which everything turns.  The more perfect the
parable is, the more conspicuous and dominating will the point of
comparison be.  The parable of the prodigal illustrates this.  It
brings out, through a human parallel, with incomparable force and
beauty, the one truth of the freeness of forgiveness.  God waits to be
gracious.  His pardoning love rushes out to welcome the penitent.  But
no one who speaks of the Atonement ever dreams of questioning this.
The Atonement is concerned with a different point--not the freeness of
pardon, about which all are agreed, but the cost of it; not the
spontaneity of God's love, which no one questions, but the necessity
under which it lay to manifest itself in a particular way if God was to
be true to Himself, and to win the heart of sinners for the holiness
which they had offended.  The Atonement is not the denial that God's
love is free; it is that specific manifestation or demonstration of
God's free love which is demanded by the situation of men.  One can
hardly help wondering whether those who tell us so confidently that
there is no Atonement in the parable of the prodigal have ever noticed
that there is no Christ in it either--no elder brother who goes out to
seek and to save the lost son, and to give his life a ransom for him.
Surely we are not to put the Good Shepherd out of the Christian
religion.  Yet if we leave Him His place, we cannot make the parable of
the prodigal the measure of Christ's mind about the forgiveness of
sins.  One part of His teaching it certainly contains--one part of the
truth about the relation of God the Father to His sinful children; but
another part of the truth was present, though not on that occasion
rendered in words, in the presence of the Speaker, when 'all the
publicans and sinners drew near to Him for to hear Him.' The love of
God to the sinful was apprehended in Christ Himself, and not in what He
said as something apart from Himself; on the contrary, it was in the
identity of the speaker and the word that the power of the word lay;
God's love evinced itself to men as a reality in Him, in His presence
in the world, and in His attitude to its sin; it so evinced itself,
finally and supremely, in His death.  It is not the idiosyncrasy of one
apostle, it is the testimony of the Church, a testimony in keeping with
the whole claim made by Christ in His teaching and life and death: '_in
Him_ we have our redemption, _through His blood_, even the forgiveness
of our trespasses.'  And this is what the Atonement means: it means the
mediation of forgiveness through Christ, and specifically through His
death.  Forgiveness, in the Christian sense of the term, is only
realised as we believe in the Atonement: in other words, as we come to
feel the cost at which alone the love of God could assert itself as
Divine and holy love in the souls of sinful men.  We may say, if we
please, that forgiveness is bestowed freely upon repentance; but we
must add, if we would do justice to the Christian position, that
repentance in its ultimate character is the fruit of the Atonement.
Repentance is not possible apart from the apprehension of the mercy of
God _in Christ_.  It is the experience of the regenerate--_poenitentiam
interpretor regenerationem_, as Calvin says--and it is the Atonement
which regenerates.

This, then, in the broadest sense, is the truth which we wish to
commend to the modern mind: the truth that there is forgiveness with
God, and that this forgiveness comes to us only through Christ, and
signally or specifically through His death.  Unless it becomes true to
us that _Christ died for our sins_ we cannot appreciate forgiveness at
its specifically Christian value.  It cannot be for us that kind of
reality, it cannot have for us that kind of inspiration, which it
unquestionably is and has in the New Testament.

But what, we must now ask, is the modern mind to which this primary
truth of Christianity has to be commended?  Can we diagnose it in any
general yet recognisable fashion, so as to find guidance in seeking
access to it for the gospel of the Atonement?  There may seem to be
something presumptuous in the very idea, as though any one making the
attempt assumed a superiority to the mind of his time, an exemption
from its limitations and prejudices, a power to see over it and round
about it.  All such presumption is of course disclaimed here; but even
while we disclaim it, the attempt to appreciate the mind of our time is
forced upon us.  Whoever has tried to preach the gospel, and to
persuade men of truth as truth is in Jesus, and especially of the truth
of God's forgiveness as it is in the death of Jesus for sin, knows that
there is a state of mind which is somehow inaccessible to this truth,
and to which the truth consequently appeals in vain.  I do not speak of
unambiguous moral antipathy to the ideas of forgiveness and atonement,
although antipathy to these ideas in general, as distinct from any
given presentation of them, cannot but have a moral character, just as
a moral character always attaches to the refusal to acknowledge Christ
or to become His debtor; but of something which, though vaguer and less
determinate, puts the mind wrong, so to speak, with Christianity from
the start.  It is clear, for instance, in all that has been said about
forgiveness, that certain relations are presupposed as subsisting
between God and man, relations which make it possible for man to sin,
and possible for God, not indeed to ignore his sin, but in the very act
of recognising it as all that it is to forgive it, to liberate man from
it, and to restore him to Himself and righteousness.  Now if the latent
presuppositions of the modern mind are to any extent inconsistent with
such relations, there will be something to overcome before the
conceptions of forgiveness or atonement can get a hearing.  These
conceptions have their place in a certain view of the world as a whole,
and if the mind is preoccupied with a different view, it will have an
instinctive consciousness that it cannot accommodate them, and a
disposition therefore to reject them _ab initio_.  This is, in point of
fact, the difficulty with which we have to deal.  And let no one say
that it is transparently absurd to suggest that we must get men to
accept a true philosophy before we can begin to preach the gospel to
them, as though that settled the matter or got over the difficulty.  We
have to take men as we find them; we have to preach the gospel to the
mind which is around us; and if that mind is rooted in a view of the
world which leaves no room for Christ and His work as Christian
experience has realised them, then that view of the world must be
appreciated by the evangelist, it must be undermined at its weak
places, its inadequacy to interpret all that is present even in the
mind which has accepted it--in other words, its inherent
inconsistency--must be demonstrated; the attempt must be made to
liberate the mind, so that it may be open to the impression of
realities which under the conditions supposed it could only encounter
with instinctive antipathy.  It is necessary, therefore, at this point
to advert to the various influences which have contributed to form the
mind of our time, and to give it its instinctive bias in one direction
or another.  Powerful and legitimate as these influences have been,
they have nevertheless been in various ways partial, and because of
their very partiality they have, when they absorbed the mind, as new
modes of thought are apt to do, prejudiced it against the consideration
of other, possibly of deeper and more far-reaching, truths.

First, there is the enormous development of physical science.  This has
engrossed human intelligence in our own times to an extent which can
hardly be over-estimated.  Far more mind has been employed in
constructing the great fabric of knowledge, which we call science, than
in any other pursuit of men.  Far more mind has had its characteristic
qualities and temper imparted to it by scientific study than by study
in any other field.  It is of science--which to all intents and
purposes means physical science--of science and its methods and results
that the modern mind is most confident, and speaks with the most
natural and legitimate pride.  Now science, even in this restricted
sense, covers a great range of subjects; it may be physics in the
narrowest meaning of the word, or chemistry, or biological science.
The characteristic of our own age has been the development of the last,
and in particular its extension to man.  It is impossible to dispute
the legitimacy of this extension.  Man has his place in nature; the
phenomena of life have one of their signal illustrations in him, and he
is as proper a subject of biological study as any other living being.
But the intense preoccupation of much of the most vigorous intelligence
of our time with the biological study of man is not without effects
upon the mind itself, which we need to consider.  It tends to produce a
habit of mind to which certain assumptions are natural and inevitable,
certain other assumptions incredible from the first.  This habit of
mind is in some ways favourable to the acceptance of the Atonement.
For example, the biologist's invincible conviction of the unity of
life, and of the certainty and power with which whatever touches it at
one point touches it through and through, is in one way entirely
favourable.  Many of the most telling popular objections to the idea of
Atonement rest on an atomic conception of personality--a conception
according to which every human being is a closed system, incapable in
the last resort of helping or being helped, of injuring or being
injured, by another.  This conception has been finally discredited by
biology, and so far the evangelist must be grateful.  The Atonement
presupposes the unity of human life, and its solidarity; it presupposes
a common and universal responsibility.  I believe it presupposes also
such a conception of the unity of man and nature as biology proceeds
upon; and in all these respects its physical presuppositions, if we may
so express ourselves, are present to the mind of to-day, thanks to
biology, as they were not even so lately as a hundred years ago.

But this is not all that we have to consider.  The mind has been
influenced by the movement of physical and even of biological science,
not only in a way which is favourable, but in ways which are
prejudicial to the acceptance of the Atonement.  Every physical science
seems to have a boundless ambition; it wants to reduce everything to
its own level, to explain everything in the terms and by the categories
with which it itself works.  The higher has always to fight for its
life against the lower.  The physicist would like to reduce chemistry
to physics; the chemist has an ambition to simplify biology into
chemistry; the biologist in turn looks with suspicion on anything in
man which cannot be interpreted biologically.  He would like to give,
and is sometimes ready to offer, a biological explanation of
self-consciousness, of freedom, of religion, morality, sin.  Now a
biological explanation, when all is done, is a physical explanation,
and a physical explanation of self-consciousness or the moral life is
one in which the very essence of the thing to be explained is either
ignored or explained away.  Man's life is certainly rooted in nature,
and therefore a proper subject for biological study; but unless it
somehow transcended nature, and so demanded other than physical
categories for its complete interpretation, there could not be any
study or any science at all.  If there were nothing but matter, as M.
Naville has said, there would be no materialism; and if there were
nothing but life, there would be no biology.  Now it is in the higher
region of human experience, to which all physical categories are
unequal, that we encounter those realities to which the Atonement is
related, and in relation to which it is real; and we must insist upon
these _higher_ realities, in their specific character, against a strong
tendency in the scientifically trained modern mind, and still more in
the general mind as influenced by it, to reduce them to the merely
physical level.

Take, for instance, the consciousness of sin.  Evidently the Atonement
becomes incredible if the consciousness of sin is extinguished or
explained away.  There is nothing for the Atonement to do; there is
nothing to relate it to; it is as unreal as a rock in the sky.  But
many minds at the present time, under the influence of current
conceptions in biology, do explain it away.  All life is one, they
argue.  It rises from the same spring, it runs the same course, it
comes to the same end.  The life of man is rooted in nature, and that
which beats in my veins is an inheritance from an immeasurable past.
It is absurd to speak of my responsibility for it, or of my guilt
because it manifests itself in me, as it inevitably does, in such and
such forms.  There is no doubt that this mode of thought is widely
prevalent, and that it is one of the most serious hindrances to the
acceptance of the gospel, and especially of the Atonement.  How are we
to appreciate it?  We must point out, I think, the consequence to which
it leads.  If a man denies that he is responsible for the nature which
he has inherited--denies responsibility for it on the ground that it
_is_ inherited--it is a fair question to ask him for what he _does_
accept responsibility.  When he has divested himself of the inherited
nature, what is left?  The real meaning of such disowning of
responsibility is that a man asserts that his life is a part of the
physical phenomena of the universe, and nothing else; and he forgets,
in the very act of making the assertion, that if it were true, it could
not be so much as made.  The merely physical is transcended in every
such assertion; and the man who has transcended it, rooted though his
life be in nature, and one with the life of the whole and of all the
past, must take the responsibility of living that life out on the high
level of self-consciousness and morality which his very disclaimer
involves.  The sense of sin which wakes spontaneously with the
perception that he is not what he ought to have been must not be
explained away; at the level which life has reached in him, this is
unscientific as well as immoral; his sin--for I do not know another
word for it--must be realised as all that it is in the moral world if
he is ever to be true to himself, not to say if he is ever to welcome
the Atonement, and leave his sin behind.  We have no need of words like
sin and atonement--we could not have the experiences which they
designate--unless we had a higher than merely natural life; and one of
the tendencies of the modern mind which has to be counteracted by the
evangelist is the tendency induced by physical and especially by
biological science to explain the realities of personal experience by
sub-personal categories.  In conscience, in the sense of personal
dignity, in the ultimate inability of man to deny the self which he is,
we have always an appeal against such tendencies, which cannot fail;
but it needs to be made resolutely when conscience is lethargic and the
whole bias of the mind is to the other side.

Passing from physical science, the modern mind has perhaps been
influenced most by the great idealist movement in philosophy--the
movement which in Germany began with Kant and culminated in Hegel.
This idealism, just like physical science, gives a certain stamp to the
mind; when it takes possession of intelligence it casts it, so to
speak, into a certain mould; even more than physical science it
dominates it so that it becomes incapable of self-criticism, and very
difficult to teach.  Its importance to the preacher of Christianity is
that it assumes certain relations between the human and the divine,
relations which foreclose the very questions which the Atonement
compels us to raise.  To be brief, it teaches the essential unity of
God and man.  God and man, to speak of them as distinct, are necessary
to each other, but man is as necessary to God as God is to man.  God is
the truth of man, but man is the reality of God.  God comes to
consciousness of Himself in man, and man in being conscious of himself
is at the same time conscious of God.  Though many writers of this
school make a copious use of Christian phraseology, it seems to me
obvious that it is not in an adequate Christian sense.  Sin is not
regarded as that which ought not to be, it is that which is to be
transcended.  It is as inevitable as anything in nature; and the sense
of it, the bad conscience which accompanies it, is no more than the
growing pains of the soul.  On such a system there is no room for
atonement in the sense of the mediation of God's forgiveness through
Jesus Christ.  We may consistently speak in it of a man being
reconciled to himself, or even reconciled to his sins, but not, so far
as I can understand, of his being reconciled to God, and still less,
reconciled to God through the death of His Son.  The penetration of
Kant saw from the first all that could be made of atonement on the
basis of any such system.  What it means to the speculative mind is
that the new man bears the sin of the old.  When the sinner repents and
is converted, the weight of what he has done comes home to him; the new
man in him--the Son of God in him--accepts the responsibility of the
old man, and so he has peace with God.  Many whose minds are under the
influence of this mode of thought do not see clearly to what it leads,
and resent criticism of it as if it were a sort of impiety.  Their
philosophy is to them a surrogate for religion, but they should not be
allowed to suppose (if they do suppose) that it is the equivalent of
Christianity.  There can be no Christianity without Christ; it is the
presence of the Mediator which makes Christianity what it is.  But a
unique Christ, without Whom our religion disappears, is frankly
disavowed by the more candid and outspoken of our idealist
philosophers.  Christ, they tell us, was certainly a man who had an
early and a magnificently strong faith in the unity of the human and
the Divine; but it was faith in a fact which enters into the
constitution of every human consciousness, and it is absurd to suppose
that the recognition of the fact, or the realisation of it, is
essentially dependent on Him.  He was not sinless--which is an
expression without meaning, when we think of a human being which has to
rise by conflict and self-suppression out of nature into the world of
self-consciousness and right and wrong; He was not in any sense unique
or exceptional; He was only what we all are in our degree; at best, He
was only one among many great men who have contributed in their place
and time to the spiritual elevation of the race.  Such, I say, is the
issue of this mode of thought as it is frankly avowed by some of its
representative men; but the peculiarity of it, when it is obscurely
fermenting as a leaven in the mind, is, that it appeals to men as
having special affinities to Christianity.  In our own country it is
widely prevalent among those who have had a university education, and
indeed in a much wider circle, and it is a serious question how we are
to address our gospel to those who confront it in such a mental mood.

I have no wish to be unsympathetic, but I must frankly express my
conviction that this philosophy only lives by ignoring the greatest
reality of the spiritual world.  There is something in that
world--something with which we can come into intelligible and vital
relations--something which can evince to our minds its truth and
reality, for which this philosophy can make no room: Christ's
consciousness of Himself.  It is a theory of the universe which (on
principle) cannot allow Christ to be anything else than an additional
unit in the world's population; but if this were the truth about Him,
no language could be strong enough to express the self-delusion in
which He lived and died.  That He was thus self-deluded is a hypothesis
I do not feel called to discuss.  One may be accused of subjectivity
again, of course, though a subjective opinion which has the consent of
the Christian centuries behind it need not tremble at hard names; but I
venture to say that there is no reality in the world which more
inevitably and uncompromisingly takes hold of the mind as a reality
than our Lord's consciousness of Himself as it is attested to us in the
Gospels.  But when we have taken this reality for all that it is worth,
the idealism just described is shaken to the foundation.  What seemed
to us so profound a truth--the essential unity of the human and the
divine--may come to seem a formal and delusive platitude; in what we
once regarded as the formula of the perfect religion--the divinity of
man and the humanity of God--we may find quite as truly the formula of
the first, not to say the final, sin.  To see Christ not in the light
of this speculative theorem, but in the light of His own consciousness
of Himself, is to realise not only our kinship to God, but our
remoteness from Him; it is to realise our incapacity for
self-realisation when we are left to ourselves; it is to realise the
need of the Mediator if we would come to the Father; it is to realise,
in principle, the need of the Atonement, the need, and eventually the
fact.  When the modern mind therefore presents itself to us in this
mood of philosophical competence, judging Christ from the point of view
of the whole, and showing Him His place, we can only insist that the
place is unequal to His greatness, and that His greatness cannot be
explained away.  The mind which is closed to the fact of His unique
claims, and the unique relation to God on which they rest, is closed
inevitably to the mediation of God's forgiveness through His death.

There is one other modification of mind, characteristic of modern
times, of which we have yet to take account--I mean that which is
produced by devotion to historical study.  History is, as much as
science, one of the achievements of our age; and the historical temper
is as characteristic of the men we meet as the philosophical or the
scientific.  The historical temper, too, is just as apt as these
others, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps quite consciously, but under the
engaging plea of modesty, to pronounce absolute sentences which strike
at the life of the Christian religion, and especially, therefore, at
the idea of the Atonement.  Sometimes this is done broadly, so that
every one sees what it means.  If we are told, for example, that
everything historical is relative, that it belongs of necessity to a
time, and is conditioned in ways so intricate that no knowledge can
ever completely trace them; if we are told, further, that for this very
reason nothing historical can have absolute significance, or can
condition the eternal life of man, it is obvious that the Christian
religion is being cut at the root.  It is no use speaking about the
Atonement--about the mediation of God's forgiveness to the soul through
a historical person and work--if this is true.  The only thing to be
done is to raise the question whether it _is_ true.  It is no more for
historical than for physical science to exalt itself into a theory of
the universe, or to lay down the law with speculative absoluteness as
to the significance and value which shall attach to facts.  When we
face the fact with which we are here concerned--the fact of Christ's
consciousness of Himself and His vocation, to which reference has
already been made--are we not forced to the conclusion that here a new
spiritual magnitude has appeared in history, the very _differentia_ of
which is that it _has_ eternal significance, and that it is eternal
life to know it?  If we are to preach the Atonement, we cannot allow
either history or philosophy to proceed on assumptions which ignore or
degrade the fact of Christ.  Only a person in whom the eternal has
become historical can be the bearer of the Atonement, and it must be
our first concern to show, against all assumptions whether made in the
name of history or of philosophy, that in point of fact there is such a
person here.

This consideration requires to be kept in view even when we are dealing
with the modern mind inside the Church.  Nothing is commoner than to
hear those who dissent from any given construction of the Atonement
plead for a historical as opposed to a dogmatic interpretation of
Christ.  It is not always clear what is meant by this distinction, nor
is it clear that those who use it are always conscious of what it would
lead to if it were made absolute.  Sometimes a dogmatic interpretation
of the New Testament means an interpretation vitiated by dogmatic
prejudice, an interpretation in which the meaning of the writers is
missed because the mind is blinded by prepossessions of its own: in
this sense a dogmatic interpretation is a thing which no one would
defend.  Sometimes, however, a dogmatic interpretation is one which
reveals or discovers in the New Testament truths of eternal and divine
significance, and to discredit such interpretation in the name of the
historical is another matter.  The distinction in this case, as has
been already pointed out, is not absolute.  It is analogous to the
distinction between fact and theory, or between thing and meaning, or
between efficient cause and final cause.  None of these distinctions is
absolute, and no intelligent mind would urge either side in them to the
disparagement of the other.  If we are to apprehend the whole reality
presented to us, we must apprehend the theory as well as the fact, the
meaning as well as the thing, the final as well as the efficient cause.
In the subject with which we are dealing, this truth is frequently
ignored.  It is assumed, for example, that because Christ was put to
death by His enemies, or because He died in the faithful discharge of
His calling, therefore He did not die, in the sense of the Atonement,
for our sins: the historical causes which brought about His death are
supposed to preclude that interpretation of it according to which it
mediates to us the divine forgiveness.  But there is no incompatibility
between the two things.  To set aside an interpretation of Christ's
death as dogmatic, on the ground that there is another which is
historical, is like setting aside the idea that a watch is made to
measure time because you know it was made by a watchmaker.  It was both
made by a watchmaker and made to measure time.  Similarly it may be
quite true both that Christ was crucified and slain by wicked men, and
that He died for our sins.  But without entering into the questions
which this raises as to the relation between the wisdom of God and the
course of human history, it is enough to be conscious of the prejudice
which the historical temper is apt to generate against the recognition
of the eternal in time.  Surely it is a significant fact that the New
Testament contains a whole series of books--the Johannine books--which
have as their very burden the eternal significance of the historical:
eternal life in Jesus Christ, come in flesh, the propitiation for the
whole world.  Surely also it is a significant fact of a different and
even an ominous kind that we have at present in the Church a whole
school of critics which is so far from appreciating the truth in this
that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it has devoted itself to
a paltry and peddling criticism of these books in which the impression
of the eternal is lost.  But whether we are to be indebted to John's
eyes, or to none but our own, if the eternal is not to be seen in
Jesus, He can have no place in our religion; if the historical has no
dogmatic content, it cannot be essential to eternal life.  Hence if we
believe and know that we have eternal life in Jesus, we must assert the
truth which is implied in this against any conception of history which
denies it.  Nor is it really difficult to do so.  With the experience
of nineteen centuries behind us, we have only to confront this
particular historical reality, Jesus Christ, without prejudice; in
evangelising, we have only to confront others with Him; and we shall
find it still possible to see God in Him, the Holy Father who through
the Passion of His Son ministers to sinners the forgiveness of their
sins.

In what has been said thus far by way of explaining the modern mind,
emphasis may seem to have fallen mainly on those characteristics which
make it less accessible than it might be to Christian truth, and
especially to the Atonement.  I have tried to point out the assailable
side of its prepossessions, and to indicate the fundamental truths
which must be asserted if our intellectual world is to be one in which
the gospel may find room.  But the modern mind has other
characteristics.  Some of these may have been exhibited hitherto mainly
in criticising current representations of the Atonement; but in
themselves they are entirely legitimate, and the claims they put
forward are such as we cannot disown.  Before proceeding to a further
statement of the Atonement, I shall briefly refer to one or two of
them: a doctrine of Atonement which did not satisfy them would
undoubtedly stand condemned.

(1) The modern mind requires that everything shall be based on
experience.  Nothing is true or real to it which cannot be
experimentally verified.  This we shall all concede.  But there is an
inference sometimes drawn from it at which we may look with caution.
It is the inference that, because everything must be based on
experience, no appeal to Scripture has any authority.  I have already
explained in what sense it is possible to speak of the authority of
Scripture, and here it is only necessary to make the simple remark that
there is no proper contrast between Scripture and experience.
Scripture, so far as it concerns us here, is a record of experience or
an interpretation of it.  It was the Church's experience that it had
its redemption in Christ; it was the interpretation of that experience
that Christ died for our sins.  Yet in emphasising experience the
modern mind is right, and Scripture would lose its authority if the
experience it describes were not perpetually verified anew.

(2) The modern mind desires to have everything in religion ethically
construed.  As a general principle this must command our unreserved
assent.  Anything which violates ethical standards, anything which is
immoral or less than moral, must be excluded from religion.  It may be,
indeed, that ethical has sometimes been too narrowly defined.  Ideas
have been objected to as unethical which are really at variance not
with a true perception of the constitution of humanity, and of the laws
which regulate moral life, but with an atomic theory of personality
under which moral life would be impossible.  Persons are not atoms; in
a sense they interpenetrate, though individuality has been called the
true impenetrability.  The world has been so constituted that we do not
stand absolutely outside of each other; we can do things for each
other.  We can bear each other's burdens, and it is not unethical to
say so, but the reverse.  And again, it need not be unethical, though
it transcends the ordinary sphere and range of ethical action, if we
say that God in Christ is able to do for us what we cannot do for one
another.  With reference to the Atonement, the demand for ethical
treatment is usually expressed in two ways.  (_a_) There is the demand
for analogies to it in human life.  The demand is justifiable, in so
far as God has made man in His own image; but, as has been suggested
above, it has a limit, in so far as God is God and not man, and must
have relations to the human race which its members do not and cannot
have to each other.  (_b_) There is the demand that the Atonement shall
be exhibited in vital relation to a new life in which sin is overcome.
This demand also is entirely legitimate, and it touches a weak point in
the traditional Protestant doctrine.  Dr. Chalmers tells us that he was
brought up--such was the effect of the current orthodoxy upon him--in a
certain distrust of good works.  Some were certainly wanted, but not as
being themselves salvation; only, as he puts it, as tokens of
justification.  It was a distinct stage in his religious progress when
he realised that true justification sanctifies, and that the soul can
and ought to abandon itself spontaneously and joyfully to do the good
that it delights in.  The modern mind assumes what Dr. Chalmers
painfully discovered.  An atonement that does not regenerate, it truly
holds, is not an atonement in which men can be asked to believe.  Such
then, in its prejudices good and bad, is the mind to which the great
truth of the Christian religion has to be presented.



[1] Of course this does not touch the fact that the whole 'authority'
of the Christian religion is in Jesus Himself--in His historical
presence in the world, His words and works, His life and death and
resurrection.  He _is_ the truth, the acceptance of which by man is
life eternal.




CHAPTER II

SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT

We have now seen in a general way what is meant by the Atonement, and
what are the characteristics of the mind to which the Atonement has to
make its appeal.  In that mind there is, as I believe, much which falls
in with the Atonement, and prepares a welcome for it; but much also which
creates prejudice against it, and makes it as possible still as in the
first century to speak of the offence of the cross.  No doubt the
Atonement has sometimes been presented in forms which provoke antagonism,
which challenge by an ostentation of unreason, or by a defiance of
morality, the reason and conscience of man; but this alone does not
explain the resentment which it often encounters.  There is such a thing
to be found in the world as the man who will have nothing to do with
Christ on any terms, and who will least of all have anything to do with
Him when Christ presents Himself in the character which makes man His
debtor for ever.  All men, as St. Paul says, have not faith: it is a
melancholy fact, whether we can make anything of it or not.  Discounting,
however, this irrational or inexplicable opposition, which is not
expressed in the mind but in the will, how are we to present the
Atonement so that it shall excite the least prejudice, and find the most
unimpeded access to the mind of our own generation?  This is the question
to which we have now to address ourselves.

To conceive the Atonement, that is, the fact that forgiveness is mediated
to us through Christ, and specifically through His death, as clearly and
truly as possible, it is necessary for us to realise the situation to
which it is related.  We cannot think of it except as related to a given
situation.  It is determined or conditioned by certain relations
subsisting between God and man, as these relations have been affected by
sin.  What we must do, therefore, in the first instance, is to make clear
to ourselves what these relations are, and how sin affects them.

To begin with, they are personal relations; they are relations the truth
of which cannot be expressed except by the use of personal pronouns.  We
need not ask whether the personality of God can be proved antecedent to
religion, or as a basis for a religion yet to be established; in the only
sense in which we can be concerned with it, religion is an experience of
the personality of God, and of our own personality in relation to it.  'O
Lord, _Thou_ hast searched _me_ and known _me_.'  '_I_ am continually
with _Thee_!  No human experience can be more vital or more normal than
that which is expressed in these words, and no argument, be it ever so
subtle or so baffling, can weigh a feather's-weight against such
experience.  The same conception of the relations of God and man is
expressed again as unmistakably in every word of Jesus about the Father
and the Son and the nature of their communion with each other.  It is
only in such personal relations that the kind of situation can emerge,
and the kind of experience be had, with which the Atonement deals; and
antecedent to such experience, or in independence of it, the Atonement
must remain an incredible because an unrealisable thing.

But to say that the relations of God and man are personal is not enough.
They are not only personal, but universal.  _Personal_ is habitually used
in a certain contrast with _legal_, and it is very easy to lapse into the
idea that personal relations, because distinct from legal ones, are
independent of law; but to say the least of it, that is an ambiguous and
misleading way of describing the facts.  The relations of God and man are
not lawless, they are not capricious, incalculable, incapable of moral
meaning; they are personal, but determined by something of universal
import; in other words, they are not merely personal but ethical.  That
is ethical which is at once personal and universal.  Perhaps the simplest
way to make this evident is to notice that the relations of man to God
are the relations to God not of atoms, or of self-contained individuals,
each of which is a world in itself, but of individuals which are
essentially related to each other, and bound up in the unity of a race.
The relations of God to man, therefore, are not capricious though they
are personal: they are reflected or expressed in a moral constitution to
which all personal beings are equally bound, a moral constitution of
eternal and universal validity, which neither God nor man can ultimately
treat as anything else than what it is.

This is a point at which some prejudice has been raised against the
Atonement by theologians, and more, perhaps, by persons protesting
against what they supposed theologians to mean.  If one may be excused a
personal reference, few things have astonished me more than to be charged
with teaching a 'forensic' or 'legal' or 'judicial' doctrine of
Atonement, resting, as such a doctrine must do, on a 'forensic' or
'legal' or 'judicial' conception of man's relation to God.  It is all the
more astonishing when the charge is combined with what one can only
decline as in the circumstances totally unmerited compliments to the
clearness with which he has expressed himself.  There is nothing which I
should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which
is expressed by these words.  To say that the relations of God and man
are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statute--that sin is a
breach of statute--that the sinner is a criminal--and that God
adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his
case.  Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth, and it is
surprising that any one should be charged with teaching it, or that any
one should applaud himself, as though he were in the foremost files of
time, for not believing it.  It is superfluously apparent that the
relations of God and man are not those of a magistrate on the bench
pronouncing according to the act on the criminal at the bar.  To say
this, however, does not make these relations more intelligible.  In
particular, to say that they are personal, as opposed to forensic, does
not make them more intelligible.  If they are to be rational, if they are
to be moral, if they are to be relations in which an ethical life can be
lived, and ethical responsibilities realised, they must be not only
personal, but universal; they must be relations that in some sense are
determined by law.  Even to say that they are the relations, not of judge
and criminal, but of Father and child, does not get us past this point.
The relations of father and child are undoubtedly more adequate to the
truth than those of judge and criminal; they are more adequate, but so
far as our experience of them goes, they are not equal to it.  If the
sinner is not a criminal before his judge, neither is he a naughty child
before a parent whose own weakness or affinity to evil introduces an
incalculable element into his dealing with his child's fault.  I should
not think of saying that it is the desire to escape from the
inexorableness of law to a God capable of indulgent human tenderness that
inspires the violent protests so often heard against 'forensic' and
'legal' ideas: but that is the impression which one sometimes
involuntarily receives from them.  It ought to be apparent to every one
that even the relation of parent and child, if it is to be a moral
relation, must be determined in a way which has universal and final
validity.  It must be a relation in which--ethically speaking--some
things are for ever obligatory, and some things for ever impossible; in
other words, it must be a relation determined by law, and law which
cannot deny itself.  But law in this sense is not 'legal.'  It is not
'judicial,' or 'forensic,' or 'statutory.'  None the less it is real and
vital, and the whole moral value of the relation depends upon it.  When a
man says--as some one has said--'There are many to whom the conception of
forgiveness resting on a judicial transaction does not appeal at all,' I
entirely agree with him; it does not appeal at all to me.  But what would
be the value of a forgiveness which did not recognise in its eternal
truth and worth that universal law in which the relations of God and man
are constituted?  Without the recognition of that law--that moral order
or constitution in which we have our life in relation to God and each
other--righteousness and sin, atonement and forgiveness, would all alike
be words without meaning.

In connection with this, reference may be made to an important point in
the interpretation of the New Testament.  The responsibility for what is
called the forensic conception of the Atonement is often traced to St.
Paul, and the greatest of all the ministers of grace is not infrequently
spoken of as though he had deliberately laid the most insuperable of
stumbling-blocks in the way to the gospel.  Most people, of course, are
conscious that they do not look well talking down to St.  Paul, and
occasionally one can detect a note of misgiving in the brave words in
which his doctrine is renounced, a note of misgiving which suggests that
the charitable course is to hear such protests in silence, and to let
those who utter them think over the matter again.  But there is what
claims to be a scientific way of expressing dissent from the apostle, a
way which, equally with the petulant one, rests, I am convinced, on
misapprehension of his teaching.  This it would not be fair to ignore.
It interprets what the apostle says about law solely by reference to the
great question at issue between the Jewish and the Christian religions,
making the word law mean the statutory system under which the Jews lived,
and nothing else.  No one will deny that Paul does use the word in this
sense; the law often means for him specifically the law of Moses.  The
law of Moses, however, never means for him anything less than the law of
God; it is one specific form in which the universal relations subsisting
between God and man, and making religion and morality possible, have
found historical expression.  But Paul's mind does not rest in this one
historical expression.  He generalises it.  He has the conception of a
universal law, to which he can appeal in Gentile as well as in Jew--a law
in the presence of which sin is revealed, and by the reaction of which
sin is judged--a law which God could not deny without denying Himself,
and to which justice is done (in other words, which is maintained in its
integrity), even when God justifies the ungodly.  But when law is thus
universalised, it ceases to be legal; it is not a statute, but the moral
constitution of the world.  Paul preached the same gospel to the Gentiles
as he did to the Jews; he preached in it the same relation of the
Atonement and of Christ's death to divine law.  But he did not do this by
extending to all mankind a Pharisaic, legal, forensic relation to God: he
did it by rising above such conceptions, even though as a Pharisee he may
have had to start from them, to the conception of a relation of all men
to God expressing itself in a moral constitution--or, as he would have
said, but in an entirely unforensic sense, in a law--of divine and
unchanging validity.  The maintenance of this law, or of this moral
constitution, in its inviolable integrity was the signature of the
forgiveness Paul preached.  The Atonement meant to him that forgiveness
was mediated through One in whose life and death the most signal homage
was paid to this law: the very glory of the Atonement was that it
manifested the righteousness of God; it demonstrated God's consistency
with His own character, which would have been violated alike by
indifference to sinners and by indifference to that universal moral
order--that law of God--in which alone eternal life is possible.

Hence it is a mistake to say--though this also has been said--that
'Paul's problem was not that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was
the Jewish law, the Old Testament dispensation: how to justify his breach
with it, how to demonstrate that the old order had been annulled and a
new order inaugurated.'  There is a false contrast in all such
propositions.  Paul's problem was that of the Jewish law, and it was also
that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was that of the Jewish law,
and it was also that of a revelation of grace, in which God should
justify the ungodly, Jew or Gentile, and yet maintain inviolate those
universal moral relations between Himself and man for which law is the
compendious expression.  It does not matter whether we suppose him to
start from the concrete instance of the Jewish law, and to generalise on
the basis of it; or to start from the universal conception of law, and to
recognise in existing Jewish institutions the most available and definite
illustration of it: in either case, the only Paul whose mind is known to
us has completely transcended the forensic point of view.  The same false
contrast is repeated when we are told that, 'That doctrine (Paul's
"juristic doctrine") had its origin, not so much in his religious
experience, as in apologetic necessities.'  The only apologetic
necessities which give rise to fundamental doctrines are those created by
religious experience.  The apologetic of any religious experience is just
the definition of it as real in relation to other acknowledged realities.
Paul had undoubtedly an apologetic of forgiveness--namely, his doctrine
of atonement.  But the acknowledged reality in relation to which he
defined forgiveness--the reality with which, by means of his doctrine of
atonement, he showed forgiveness to be consistent--was not the law of the
Jews (though that was included in it, or might be pointed to in
illustration of it): it was the law of God, the universal and inviolable
order in which alone eternal life is possible, and in which all men, and
not the Jews only, live and move and have their being.  It was the
perception of this which made Paul an apostle to the Gentiles, and it is
this very thing itself, which some would degrade into an awkward,
unintelligent, and outworn rag of Pharisaic apologetic, which is the very
heart and soul of Paul's Gentile gospel.  Paul himself was perfectly
conscious of this; he could not have preached to the Gentiles at all
unless he had been.  But there is nothing in it which can be
characterised as 'legal,' 'judicial,' or 'forensic'; and of this also, I
have no doubt, the apostle was well aware.  Of course he occupied a
certain historical position, had certain historical questions to answer,
was subject to historical limitations of different kinds; but I have not
the courage to treat him, nor do his words entitle any one to do so, as a
man who in the region of ideas could not put two and two together.

But to return to the point from which this digression on St. Paul
started.  We have seen that the relations of God and man are personal,
and also that they are universal, that is, there is a law of them, or, if
we like to say so, a law in them, on the maintenance of which their whole
ethical value depends.  The next point to be noticed is that these
relations are deranged or disordered by sin.  Sin is, in fact, nothing
else than this derangement or disturbance: it is that in which wrong is
done to the moral constitution under which we live.  And let no one say
that in such an expression we are turning our back on the personal world,
and lapsing, or incurring the risk of lapsing, into mere legalism again.
It cannot be too often repeated that if the universal element, or law, be
eliminated from personal relations, there is nothing intelligible left:
no reason, no morality, no religion, no sin or righteousness or
forgiveness, nothing to appeal to mind or conscience.  In the widest
sense of the word, sin, as a disturbance of the personal relations
between God and man, is a violence done to the constitution under which
God and man form one moral community, share, as we may reverently express
it, one life, have in view the same moral ends.

It is no more necessary in connection with the Atonement than in any
other connection that we should have a doctrine of the origin of sin.  We
do not know its origin, we only know that it is here.  We cannot observe
the genesis of the bad conscience any more than we can observe the
genesis of consciousness in general.  We see that consciousness does
stand in relief against the background of natural life; but though we
believe that, as it exists in us, it has emerged from that background, we
cannot see it emerge; it is an ultimate fact, and is assumed in all that
we can ever regard as its physical antecedents and presuppositions.  In
the same way, the moral consciousness is an ultimate fact, and
irreducible.  The physical theory of evolution must not be allowed to
mislead us here, and in particular it must not be allowed to discredit
the conception of moral responsibility for sin which is embodied in the
story of the Fall.  Each of us individually has risen into moral life
from a mode of being which was purely natural; in other words, each of
us, individually, has been a subject of evolution; but each of us also
has fallen--fallen, presumably, in ways determined by his natural
constitution, yet certainly, as conscience assures us, in ways for which
we are morally answerable, and to which, in the moral constitution of the
world, consequences attach which we must recognise as our due.  They are
not only results of our action, but results which that action has
merited, and there is no moral hope for us unless we accept them as such.
Now what is true of any, or rather of all, of us, without compromise of
the moral consciousness, may be true of the race, or of the first man, if
there was a first man.  Evolution and a Fall cannot be inconsistent, for
both enter into every moral experience of which we know anything; and no
opinion we hold about the origin of sin can make it anything else than it
is in conscience, or give its results any character other than that which
they have to conscience.  Of course when one tries to interpret sin
outside of conscience, as though it were purely physical, and did not
have its being in personality, consciousness, and will, it disappears;
and the laborious sophistries of such interpretations must be left to
themselves.  The point for us is that no matter how sin originated, in
the moral consciousness in which it has its being it is recognised as a
derangement of the vital relations of man, a violation of that universal
order outside of which he has no true good.

In what way, now, let us ask, does the reality of sin come home to the
sinner?  How does he recognise it as what it is?  What is the reaction
against the sinner, in the moral order under which he lives, which
reveals to him the meaning of his sinful act or state?

In the first place, there is that instantaneous but abiding reaction
which is called the bad conscience--the sense of guilt, of being
answerable to God for sin.  The sin may be an act which is committed in a
moment, but in this aspect of it, at least, it does not fade into the
past.  An animal may have a past, for anything we can tell, and
naturalistic interpreters of sin may believe that sin dies a natural
death with time, and need not trouble us permanently; but this is not the
voice of conscience, in which alone sin exists, and which alone can tell
us the truth about it.  The truth is that the spiritual being has no
past.  Just as he is continually with God, his sin is continually with
him.  He cannot escape it by not thinking.  When he keeps silence, as the
Psalmist says--and that is always his first resource, as though, if he
were to say nothing about it, God might say nothing about it, and the
whole thing blow over--it devours him like a fever within: his bones wax
old with his moaning all day long.  This sense of being wrong with God,
under His displeasure, excluded from His fellowship, afraid to meet Him
yet bound to meet Him, is the sense of guilt.  Conscience confesses in it
its liability to God, a liability which in the very nature of the case it
can do nothing to meet, and which therefore is nearly akin to despair.

But the bad conscience, real as it is, may be too abstractly interpreted.
Man is not a pure spirit, but a spiritual being whose roots strike to the
very depths of nature, and who is connected by the most intimate and
vital relations not only with his fellow-creatures of the same species,
but with the whole system of nature in which he lives.  The moral
constitution in which he has his being comprehends, if we may say so,
nature in itself: the God who has established the moral order in which
man lives, has established the natural order also as part of the same
whole with it.  In some profound way the two are one.  We distinguish in
man, legitimately enough, between the spiritual and the physical; but man
is one, and the universe in which he lives is one, and in man's relation
to God the distinction of physical and spiritual must ultimately
disappear.  The sin which introduces disorder into man's relations to God
produces reactions affecting man as a whole--not reactions that, as we
sometimes say, are purely spiritual, but reactions as broad as man's
being and as the whole divinely constituted environment in which it
lives.  I am well aware of the difficulty of giving expression to this
truth, and of the hopelessness of trying to give expression to it by
means of those very distinctions which it is its nature to transcend.
The distinctions are easy and obvious; what we have to learn is that they
are not final.  It seems so conclusive to say, as some one has done in
criticising the idea of atonement, that spiritual transgressing brings
spiritual penalty, and physical brings physical; it seems so conclusive,
and it is in truth so completely beside the mark.  We cannot divide
either man or the universe in this fashion into two parts which move on
different planes and have no vital relations; we cannot, to apply this
truth to the subject before us, limit the divine reaction against sin, or
the experiences through which, in any case whatever, sin is brought home
to man as what it is, to the purely spiritual sphere.  Every sin is a sin
of the indivisible human being, and the divine reaction against it
expresses itself to conscience through the indivisible frame of that
world, at once natural and spiritual, in which man lives.  We cannot
distribute evils into the two classes of physical and moral, and
subsequently investigate the relation between them: if we could, it would
be of no service here.  What we have to understand is that when a man
sins he does something in which his whole being participates, and that
the reaction of God against his sin is a reaction in which he is
conscious, or might be conscious, that the whole system of things is in
arms against him.

There are those, no doubt, to whom this will seem fantastic, but it is a
truth, I am convinced, which is presupposed in the Christian doctrine of
Atonement, as the mediation of forgiveness through the suffering and
death of Christ: and it is a truth also, if I am not much mistaken, to
which all the highest poetry, which is also the deepest vision of the
human mind, bears witness.  We may distinguish natural law and moral law
as sharply as we please, and it is as necessary sometimes as it is easy
to make these sharp and absolute distinctions; but there is a unity in
experience which makes itself felt deeper than all the antitheses of
logic, and in that unity nature and spirit are no more defined by
contrast with each other: on the contrary, they interpenetrate and
support each other: they are aspects of the same whole.  When we read in
the prophet Amos, 'Lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the
wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning
darkness and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, the Lord, the
God of hosts, is His name,' this is the truth which is expressed.  The
power which reveals itself in conscience--telling us all things that ever
we did, declaring unto us what is our thought--is the same which reveals
itself in nature, establishing the everlasting hills, creating the winds
which sweep over them, turning the shadow of death into the morning and
making the day dark with night, calling for the waters of the sea, and
pouring them out on the face of the earth.  Conscience speaks in a still
small voice, but it is no impotent voice; it can summon the thunder to
give it resonance; the power which we sometimes speak of as if it were
purely spiritual is a power which clothes itself spontaneously and of
right in all the majesty and omnipotence of nature.  It is the same
truth, again, in another aspect of it, which is expressed in Wordsworth's
sublime lines to Duty:

  'Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong,
  And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.'

When the mind sees deepest, it is conscious that it needs more than
physical astronomy, more than spectrum analysis, to tell us everything
even about the stars.  There is a moral constitution, it assures us, even
of the physical world; and though it is impossible for us to work it out
in detail, the assumption of it is the only assumption on which we can
understand the life of a being related as man is related both to the
natural and the spiritual.  I do not pretend to prove that there is
articulate or conscious reflection on this in either the Old Testament or
the New; I take it for granted, as self-evident, that this sense of the
ultimate unity of the natural and the spiritual--which is, indeed, but
one form of belief in God--pervades the Bible from beginning to end.  It
knows nothing of our abstract and absolute distinctions; to come to the
matter in hand, it knows nothing of a sin which has merely spiritual
penalties.  Sin is the act or the state of man, and the reaction against
it is the reaction of the whole order, at once natural and spiritual, in
which man lives.

Now the great difficulty which the modern mind has with the Atonement, or
with the representation of it in the New Testament, is that it assumes
some kind of connection between sin and death.  Forgiveness is mediated
through Christ, but specifically through His death.  He died for our
sins; if we can be put right with God apart from this, then, St. Paul
tells us, He died for nothing.  One is almost ashamed to repeat that this
is not Paulinism, but the Christianity of the whole Apostolic Church.
What St. Paul made the basis of his preaching, that Christ died for our
sins, according to the Scriptures, he had on his own showing received as
the common Christian tradition.  But is there anything in it?  Can we
receive it simply on the authority of the primitive Church?  Can we
realise any such connection between death and sin as makes it a truth to
us, an intelligible, impressive, overpowering thought, that Christ died
for our sins?

I venture to say that a great part of the difficulty which is felt at
this point is due to the false abstraction just referred to.  Sin is put
into one world--the moral; death is put into another world--the natural;
and there is no connection between them.  This is very convincing if we
find it possible to believe that we live in two unconnected worlds.  But
if we find it impossible to believe this--and surely the impossibility is
patent--its plausibility is gone.  It is a shining example of this false
abstraction when we are told, as though it were a conclusive objection to
all that the New Testament has to say about the relation of sin and
death, that 'the specific penalty of sin is not a fact of the natural
life, but of the moral life.'  What right has any one, in speaking of the
ultimate realities in human life, of those experiences in which man
becomes conscious of all that is involved in his relations to God and
their disturbance by sin, to split that human life into 'natural' and
'moral,' and fix an impassable gulf between?  The distinction is
legitimate, as has already been remarked, within limits, but it is not
final; and what the New Testament teaches, or rather assumes, about the
relation of sin and death, is one of the ways in which we are made
sensible that it is not final.  Sin and death do not belong to unrelated
worlds.  As far as man is concerned, the two worlds, to use an inadequate
figure, intersect; and at one point in the line of their intersection sin
and death meet and interpenetrate.  In the indivisible experience of man
he is conscious that they are parts or aspects of the same thing.

That this is what Scripture means when it assumes the connection of death
and sin is not to be refuted by pointing either to the third chapter of
Genesis or to the fifth of Romans.  It does not, for example, do justice
either to Genesis or to St. Paul to say, as has been said, that according
to their representation, 'Death--not spiritual, but natural death--is the
direct consequence of sin and its specific penalty.'  In such a dictum,
the distinctions again mislead.  To read the third chapter of Genesis in
this sense would mean that what we had to find in it was a mythological
explanation of the origin of physical death.  But does any one believe
that any Bible writer was ever curious about this question? or does any
one believe that a mythological solution of the problem, how death
originated--a solution which _ex hypothesi_ has not a particle of truth
or even of meaning in it--could have furnished the presupposition for the
fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, that Christ died for our
sins, and that in Him we have our forgiveness through His blood?  A truth
which has appealed so powerfully to man cannot be sustained on a
falsehood.  That the third chapter of Genesis is mythological in form, no
one who knows what mythology is will deny; but even mythology is not made
out of nothing, and in this chapter every atom is 'stuff o' the
conscience.'  What we see in it is conscience, projecting as it were in a
picture on a screen its own invincible, dear-bought, despairing
conviction that sin and death are indissolubly united--that from death
the sinful race can never get away--that it is part of the indivisible
reality of sin that the shadow of death darkens the path of the sinner,
and at last swallows him up.  It is this also which is in the mind of St.
Paul when he says that by one man sin entered into the world and death by
sin.  It is not the origin of death he is interested in, nor the origin
of sin either, but the fact that sin and death hang together.  And just
because sin is sin, this is not a fact of natural history, or a fact
which natural history can discredit.  Scripture has no interest in
natural history, nor does such an interest help us to understand it.  It
is no doubt perfectly true that to the biologist death is part of the
indispensable machinery of nature; it is a piece of the mechanism without
which the movement of the whole would be arrested; to put it so, death to
the biologist is part of the same whole as life, or life and death are
for him aspects of one thing.  One can admit this frankly without
compromising, because without touching, the other and deeper truth which
is so interesting and indeed so vital alike in the opening pages of
revelation and in its consummation in the Atonement.  The biologist, when
he deals with man, and with his life and death, deliberately deals with
them in abstraction, as merely physical phenomena; to him man is a piece
of nature, and he is nothing more.  But the Biblical writers deal with
man in the integrity of his being, and in his relations to God; they
transcend the distinction of natural and moral, because for God it is not
final: they are sensible of the unity in things which the everyday mind,
for practical purposes, finds it convenient to keep apart.  It is one
great instance of this that they are sensible of the unity of sin and
death.  We may call sin a spiritual thing, but the man who has never felt
the shadow of death fall upon it does not know what that spiritual thing
is: and we may call death a natural thing, but the man who has not felt
its natural pathos deepen into tragedy as he faced it with the sense of
sin upon him does not know what that natural thing is.  We are here, in
short, at the vanishing point of this distinction--God is present, and
nature and spirit interpenetrate in His presence.  We hear much in other
connections of the sacramental principle, and its importance for the
religious interpretation of nature.  It is a sombre illustration of this
principle if we say that death is a kind of sacrament of sin.  It is in
death, ultimately, that the whole meaning of sin comes home to the
sinner; he has not sounded it to its depths till he has discovered that
this comes into it at last.  And we must not suppose that when Paul read
the third chapter of Genesis he read it as a mythological explanation of
the origin of physical death, and accepted it as such on the authority of
inspiration.  With all his reverence for the Old Testament, Paul accepted
nothing from it that did not speak to his conscience, and waken echoes
there; and what so spoke to him from the third chapter of Genesis was not
a mythical story of how death invaded Paradise, but the profound
experience of the human race expressed in the story, an experience in
which sin and death inter-penetrate, interpret, and in a sense constitute
each other.  To us they are what they are only in relation to each other,
and when we deny the relation we see the reality of neither.  This is the
truth, as I apprehend it, of all we are taught either in the Old
Testament or in the New about the relation of sin and death.  It is part
of the greater truth that what we call the physical and spiritual worlds
are ultimately one, being constituted with a view to each other; and most
of the objections which are raised against it are special cases of the
objections which are raised against the recognition of this ultimate
unity.  So far as they are such, it is not necessary to discuss them
further; and so far as the ultimate unity of the natural and the
spiritual is a truth rather to be experienced than demonstrated, it is
not probable that much can be done by argument to gain acceptance for the
idea that sin and death have essential relations to each other.  But
there are particular objections to this idea to which it may be worth
while to refer.

There is, to begin with, the undoubted fact that many people live and die
without, consciously at least, recognising this relation.  The thought of
death may have had a very small place in their lives, and when death
itself comes it may, for various reasons, be a very insignificant
experience to them.  It may come in a moment, suddenly, and give no time
for feeling; or it may come as the last step in a natural process of
decay, and arrest life almost unconsciously; or it may come through a
weakness in which the mind wanders to familiar scenes of the past, living
these over again, and in a manner escaping by so doing the awful
experience of death itself; or it may come in childhood before the moral
consciousness is fully awakened, and moral reflection and experience
possible.  This last case, properly speaking, does not concern us; we do
not know how to define sin in relation to those in whom the moral
consciousness is as yet undeveloped: we only know that somehow or other
they are involved in the moral as well as in the natural unity of the
race.  But leaving them out of account, is there any real difficulty in
the others? any real objection to the Biblical idea that sin and death in
humanity are essentially related?  I do not think there is.  To say that
many people are unconscious of the connection is only another way of
saying that many people fail to realise in full and tragic reality what
is meant by death and sin.  They think very little about either.  The
third chapter of Genesis could never have been written out of their
conscience.  Sin is not for them all one with despair: they are not,
through fear of death, all their lifetime subject to bondage.  Scripture,
of course, has no difficulty in admitting this; it depicts, on the
amplest scale, and in the most vivid colours, the very kind of life and
death which are here supposed.  But it does not consider that such a life
and death are _ipso facto_ a refutation of the truth it teaches about the
essential relations of death and sin.  On the contrary, it considers them
a striking demonstration of that moral dulness and insensibility in man
which must be overcome if he is ever to see and feel his sin as what it
is to God, or welcome the Atonement as that in which God's forgiveness of
sin is mediated through the tremendous experience of death.  I know there
are those who will call this arrogant, or even insolent, as though I were
passing a moral sentence on all who do not accept a theorem of mine; but
I hope I do not need here to disclaim any such unchristian temper.  Only,
it is necessary to insist that the connection of sin and death in
Scripture is neither a fantastic piece of mythology, explaining, as
mythology does, the origin of a physical law, nor, on the other hand, a
piece of supernaturally revealed history, to be accepted on the authority
of Him who has revealed it; in such revelations no one believes any
longer; it is a profound conviction and experience of the human
conscience, and all that is of interest is to show that such a conviction
and experience can never be set aside by the protest of those who aver
that they know nothing about it.  One must insist on this, however it may
expose him to the charge of judging.  Can we utter any truth at all, in
which conscience is concerned, and which is not universally acknowledged,
without seeming to judge?

Sometimes, apart from the general denial of any connection between death
and sin, it is pointed out that death has another and a totally different
character.  Death in any given case may be so far from coming as a
judgment of God, that it actually comes as a gracious gift from Him; it
may even be an answer to prayer, a merciful deliverance from pain, an
event welcomed by suffering human nature, and by all who sympathise with
it.  This is quite true, but again, one must point out, rests on the
false abstraction so often referred to.  Man is regarded in all this
simply in the character of a sufferer, and death as that which brings
suffering to an end; but that is not all the truth about man, nor all the
truth about death.  Physical pain may be so terrible that consciousness
is absorbed and exhausted in it, sometimes even extinguished, but it is
not to such abnormal conditions we should appeal to discover the deepest
truths in the moral consciousness of man.  If the waves of pain subsided,
and the whole nature collected its forces again, and conscience was once
more audible, death too would be seen in a different light.  It might not
indeed be apprehended at once, as Scripture apprehends it, but it would
not be regarded simply as a welcome relief from pain.  It would become
possible to see in it something through which God spoke to the
conscience, and eventually to realise its intimate relation to sin.

The objections we have just considered are not very serious, because they
practically mean that death has no moral character at all; they reduce it
to a natural phenomenon, and do not bring it into any relation to the
conscience.  It is a more respectable, and perhaps a more formidable
objection, when death is brought into the moral world, and when the plea
is put forward that so far from being God's judgment upon sin, it may be
itself a high moral achievement.  A man may die greatly; his death may be
a triumph; nothing in his life may become him like the leaving it.  Is
not this inconsistent with the idea that there is any peculiar connection
between death and sin?  From the Biblical point of view the answer must
again be in the negative.  There is no such triumph over death as makes
death itself a noble ethical achievement, which is not at the same time a
triumph over sin.  Man vanquishes the one only as in the grace of God he
is able to vanquish the other.  The doom that is in death passes away
only as the sin to which it is related is transcended.  But there is more
than this to be said.  Death cannot be so completely an action that it
ceases to be a passion; it cannot be so completely achieved that it
ceases to be accepted or endured.  And in this last aspect of it the
original character which it bore in relation to sin still makes itself
felt.  Transfigure it, as it may be transfigured, by courage, by
devotion, by voluntary abandonment of life for a higher good, and it
remains nevertheless the last enemy.  There is something in it monstrous
and alien to the spirit, something which baffles the moral intelligence,
till the truth dawns upon us that for all our race sin and death are
aspects of one thing.  If we separate them, we understand neither; nor do
we understand the solemn greatness of martyrdom itself if we regard it as
a triumph only, and eliminate from the death which martyrs die all sense
of the universal relation in humanity of death and sin.  No one knew the
spirit of the martyr more thoroughly than St. Paul.  No one could speak
more confidently and triumphantly of death than he.  No one knew better
how to turn the passion into action, the endurance into a great spiritual
achievement.  But also, no one knew better than he, in consistency with
all this, that sin and death are needed for the interpretation of each
other, and that fundamentally, in the experience of the race, they
constitute one whole.  Even when he cried, 'O death, where is thy sting?'
he was conscious that 'the sting of death is sin.' Each, so to speak, had
its reality in the other.  No one could vanquish death who had not
vanquished sin.  No one could know what sin meant without tasting death.
These were not mythological fancies in St.  Paul's mind, but the
conviction in which the Christian conscience experimentally lived, and
moved, and had its being.  And these convictions, I repeat, furnish the
point of view from which we must appreciate the Atonement, _i.e._ the
truth that forgiveness, as Christianity preaches it, is specifically
mediated through Christ's death.




CHAPTER III

CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT

What has now been said about the relations subsisting between God and
man, about the manner in which these relations are affected by sin, and
particularly about the Scripture doctrine of the connection between sin
and death, must determine, to a great extent, our attitude to the
Atonement.  The Atonement, as the New Testament presents it, assumes
the connection of sin and death.  Apart from some sense and recognition
of such connection, the mediation of forgiveness through the death of
Christ can only appear an arbitrary, irrational, unacceptable idea.
But leaving the Atonement meanwhile out of sight, and looking only at
the situation created by sin, the question inevitably arises, What can
be done with it?  Is it possible to remedy or to reverse it?  It is an
abnormal and unnatural situation; can it be annulled, and the relations
of God and man put upon an ideal footing?  Can God forgive sin and
restore the soul?  Can we claim that He shall?  And if it is possible
for Him to do so, can we tell how or on what conditions it is possible?

When the human mind is left to itself, there are only two answers which
it can give to these questions.  Perhaps they are not specially
characteristic of the modern mind, but the modern mind in various moods
has given passionate expression to both of them.  The first says
roundly that forgiveness is impossible.  Sin is, and it abides.  The
sinner can never escape from the past.  His future is mortgaged to it,
and it cannot be redeemed.  He can never get back the years which the
locust has eaten.  His leprous flesh can never come again like the
flesh of a little child.  Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap, and reap for ever and ever.  It is not eternal punishment which
is incredible; nothing else has credibility.  Let there be no illusion
about this: forgiveness is a violation, a reversal, of law, and no such
thing is conceivable in a world in which law reigns.

The answer to this is, that sin and its consequences are here conceived
as though they belonged to a purely physical world, whereas, if the
world were only physical, there could be no such thing as sin.  As soon
as we realise that sin belongs to a world in which freedom is real--a
world in which reality means the personal relations subsisting between
man and God, and the experiences realised in these relations--the
question assumes a different aspect.  It is not one of logic or of
physical law, but of personality, of character, of freedom.  There is
at least a possibility that the sinner's relation to his sin and God's
relation to the sinner should change, and that out of these changed
relations a regenerative power should spring, making the sinner, after
all, a new creature.  The question, of course, is not decided in this
sense, but it is not foreclosed.

At the opposite extreme from those who pronounce forgiveness impossible
stand those who give the second answer to the great question, and
calmly assure us that forgiveness may be taken for granted.  They
emphasise what the others overlooked--the personal character of the
relations of God and man.  God is a loving Father; man is His weak and
unhappy child; and of course God forgives.  As Heine put it, _c'est mon
métier_, it is what He is for.  But the conscience which is really
burdened by sin does not easily find satisfaction in this cheap pardon.
There is something in conscience which will not allow it to believe
that God can simply condone sin: to take forgiveness for granted, when
you realise what you are doing, seems to a live conscience impious and
profane.  In reality, the tendency to take forgiveness for granted is
the tendency of those who, while they properly emphasise the personal
character of the relations of God and man, overlook their universal
character--that is, exclude from them that element of law without which
personal relations cease to be ethical.  But a forgiveness which
ignores this stands in no relation to the needs of the soul or the
character of God.

What the Christian religion holds to be the truth about forgiveness--a
truth embodied in the Atonement--is something quite distinct from both
the propositions which have just been considered.  The New Testament
does not teach, with the naturalistic or the legal mind, that
forgiveness is impossible; neither does it teach, with the sentimental
or lawless mind, that it may be taken for granted.  It teaches that
forgiveness is mediated to sinners through Christ, and specifically
through His death: in other words, that it is possible for God to
forgive, but possible for God only through a supreme revelation of His
love, made at infinite cost, and doing justice to the uttermost to
those inviolable relations in which alone, as I have already said, man
can participate in eternal life, the life of God Himself--doing justice
to them as relations in which there is an inexorable divine reaction
against sin, finally expressing itself in death.  It is possible on
these terms, and it becomes actual as sinful men open their hearts in
penitence and faith to this marvellous revelation, and abandon their
sinful life unreservedly to the love of God in Christ who died for them.

From this point of view it seems to me possible to present in a
convincing and persuasive light some of the truths involved in the
Atonement to which the modern mind is supposed to be specially averse.

Thus it becomes credible--we say so not _à priori_, but after
experience--that there is a _divine necessity_ for it; in other words,
there is no forgiveness possible to God without it: if He forgives at
all, it must be in this way and in no other.  To say so beforehand
would be inconceivably presumptuous, but it is quite another thing to
say so after the event.  What it really means is that in the very act
of forgiving sin--or, to use the daring word of St. Paul, in the very
act of justifying the ungodly--God must act in consistency with His
whole character.  He must demonstrate Himself to be what He is in
relation to sin, a God with whom evil cannot dwell, a God who maintains
inviolate the moral constitution of the world, taking sin as all that
it is in the very process through which He mediates His forgiveness to
men.

It is the recognition of this divine necessity--not to forgive, but to
forgive in a way which shows that God is irreconcilable to evil, and
can never treat it as other or less than it is--it is the recognition
of this divine necessity, or the failure to recognise it, which
ultimately divides interpreters of Christianity into evangelical and
non-evangelical, those who are true to the New Testament and those who
cannot digest it.

No doubt the forms in which this truth is expressed are not always
adequate to the idea they are meant to convey, and if we are only
acquainted with them at second hand they will probably appear even less
adequate than they are.  When Athanasius, _e.g._, speaks of God's
_truth_ in this connection, and then reduces God's truth to the idea
that God must keep His word--the word which made death the penalty of
sin--we may feel that the form only too easily loses contact with the
substance.  Yet Athanasius is dealing with the essential fact of the
case, that God must be true to Himself, and to the moral order in which
men live, in all His dealings with sin for man's deliverance from it;
and that He has been thus true to Himself in sending His Son to live
our life and to die our death for our salvation.  Or again, when Anselm
in the _Cur Deus Homo_ speaks of the satisfaction which is rendered to
God for the infringement of His honour by sin--a satisfaction apart
from which there can be no forgiveness--we may feel again, and even
more strongly, that the form of the thought is inadequate to the
substance.  But what Anselm means is that sin makes a real difference
to God, and that even in forgiving God treats that difference _as_
real, and cannot do otherwise.  He cannot ignore it, or regard it as
other or less than it is; if He did so, He would not be more gracious
than He is in the Atonement, He would cease to be God.  It is Anselm's
profound grasp of this truth which, in spite of all its inadequacy in
form, and of all the criticism to which its inadequacy has exposed it,
makes the _Cur Deus Homo_ the truest and greatest book on the Atonement
that has ever been written.  It is the same truth of a divine necessity
for the Atonement which is emphasised by St. Paul in the third chapter
of Romans, where he speaks of Christ's death as a demonstration of
God's righteousness.  Christ's death, we may paraphrase his meaning, is
an act in which (so far as it is ordered in God's providence) God does
justice to Himself.  He does justice to His character as a gracious
God, undoubtedly, who is moved with compassion for sinners: if He did
not act in a way which displayed His compassion for sinners, He would
_not_ do justice to Himself; there would be no [Greek] _endeixis_ of
His [Greek] _dikaiosune_: it would be in abeyance: He would do Himself
an injustice, or be untrue to Himself.  It is with this in view that we
can appreciate the arguments of writers like Diestel and Ritschl, that
God's righteousness is synonymous with His grace.  Such arguments are
true to this extent, that God's righteousness includes His grace.  He
could not demonstrate it, He could not be true to Himself, if His grace
remained hidden.  We must not, however, conceive of this as if it
constituted on our side a claim upon grace or upon forgiveness: such a
claim would be a contradiction in terms.  All that God does in Christ
He does in free love, moved with compassion for the misery and doom of
men.  But though God's righteousness as demonstrated in Christ's
death--in other words, His action in consistency with His
character--includes, and, if we choose to interpret the term properly,
even necessitates, the revelation of His grace, it is not this only--I
do not believe it is this primarily--which St. Paul has here in mind.
God, no doubt, would not do justice to Himself if He did not show His
compassion for sinners; but, on the other hand--and here is what the
apostle is emphasising--He would not do justice to Himself if He
displayed His compassion for sinners in a way which made light of sin,
which ignored its tragic reality, or took it for less than it is.  In
this case He would again be doing Himself injustice; there would be no
demonstration that He was true to Himself as the author and guardian of
the moral constitution under which men live; as Anselm put it, He would
have ceased to be God.  The apostle combines the two sides.  In Christ
set forth a propitiation in His blood--in other words, in the Atonement
in which the sinless Son of God enters into the bitter realisation of
all that sin means for man, yet loves man under and through it all with
an everlasting love--there is an [Greek] _endeixis_ of God's
righteousness, a demonstration of His self-consistency, in virtue of
which we can see how He is at the same time just Himself and the
justifier of him who believes on Jesus, a God who is irreconcilable to
sin, yet devises means that His banished be not expelled from Him.  We
may say reverently that this was the only way in which God could
forgive.  He cannot deny Himself, means at the same time He cannot deny
His grace to the sinful, and He cannot deny the moral order in which
alone He can live in fellowship with men; and we see the inviolableness
of both asserted in the death of Jesus.  Nothing else in the world
demonstrates how real is God's love to the sinful, and how real the sin
of the world is to God.  And the love which comes to us through such an
expression, bearing sin in all its reality, yet loving us through and
beyond it, is the only love which at once forgives and regenerates the
soul.

It becomes credible also that there is a _human necessity_ for the
Atonement: in other words, that apart from it the conditions of being
forgiven could no more be fulfilled by man than forgiveness could be
bestowed by God.

There are different tendencies in the modern mind with regard to this
point.  On the one hand, there are those who frankly admit the truth
here asserted.  Yes, they say, the Atonement is necessary for us.  If
we are to be saved from our sins, if our hearts are to be touched and
won by the love of God, if we are to be emancipated from distrust and
reconciled to the Father whose love we have injured, there must be a
demonstration of that love so wonderful and overpowering that all
pride, alienation and fear shall be overcome by it; and this is what we
have in the death of Christ.  It is a demonstration of love powerful
enough to evoke penitence and faith in man, and it is through penitence
and faith alone that man is separated from his sins and reconciled to
God.  A demonstration of love, too, must be given in act; it is not
enough to be told that God loves: the reality of love lies in another
region than that of words.  In Christ on His cross the very thing
itself is present, beyond all hope of telling wonderful, and without
its irresistible appeal our hearts could never have been melted to
penitence, and won for God.  On the other hand, there are those who
reject the Atonement on the very ground that for pardon and
reconciliation nothing is required but repentance, the assumption being
that repentance is something which man can and must produce out of his
own resources.

On these divergent tendencies in the modern mind I should wish to make
the following remarks.

First, the idea that man can repent as he ought, and whenever he will,
without coming under any obligation to God for his repentance, but
rather (it might almost be imagined) putting God under obligation by
it, is one to which experience lends no support.  Repentance is an
adequate sense not of our folly, nor of our misery, but of our sin: as
the New Testament puts it, it is repentance _toward God_.  It is the
consciousness of what our sin is to Him: of the wrong it does to His
holiness, of the wound which it inflicts on His love.  Now such a
consciousness it is not in the power of the sinner to produce at will.
The more deeply he has sinned, the more (so to speak) repentance is
needed, the less is it in his power.  It is the very nature of sin to
darken the mind and harden the heart, to take away the knowledge of God
alike in His holiness and in His love.  Hence it is only through a
revelation of God, and especially of what God is in relation to sin,
that repentance can be evoked in the soul.  Of all terms in the
vocabulary of religion, repentance is probably the one which is most
frequently misused.  It is habitually applied to experiences which are
not even remotely akin to true penitence.  The self-centred regret
which a man feels when his sin has found him out--the wish, compounded
of pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable folly, that he had
not done it: these are spoken of as repentance.  But they are not
repentance at all.  They have no relation to God.  They constitute no
fitness for a new relation to Him.  They are no opening of the heart in
the direction of His reconciling love.  It is the simple truth that
that sorrow of heart, that healing and sanctifying pain in which sin is
really put away, is not ours in independence of God; it is a saving
grace which is begotten in the soul under that impression of sin which
it owes to the revelation of God in Christ.  A man can no more repent
than he can do anything else without a motive, and the motive which
makes evangelic repentance possible does not enter into his world till
he sees God as God makes Himself known in the death of Christ.  All
true penitents are children of the Cross.  Their penitence is not their
own creation: it is the reaction towards God produced in their souls by
this demonstration of what sin is to Him, and of what His love does to
reach and win the sinful.

The other remark I wish to make refers to those who admit the death of
Christ to be necessary _for us_--necessary, in the way I have just
described, to evoke penitence and trust in God--but who on this very
ground deny it to be _divinely_ necessary.  It had to be, because the
hard hearts of men could not be touched by anything less moving: but
that is all.  This, I feel sure, is another instance of those false
abstractions to which reference has already been made.  There is no
incompatibility between a _divine_ necessity and a necessity _for us_.
It may very well be the case that nothing less than the death of Christ
could win the trust of sinful men for God, and at the same time that
nothing else than the death of Christ could fully reveal the character
of God in relation at once to sinners and to sin.  For my own part I am
persuaded, not only that there is no incompatibility between the two
things, but that they are essentially related, and that only the
acknowledgment of the divine necessity in Christ's death enables us to
conceive in any rational way the power which it exercises over sinners
in inducing repentance and faith.  It would not evoke a reaction
Godward unless God were really present in it, that is, unless it were a
real revelation of His being and will: but in a real revelation of
God's being and will there can be nothing arbitrary, nothing which is
determined only from without, nothing, in other words, that is not
divinely necessary.  The demonstration of what God is, which is made in
the death of Christ, is no doubt a demonstration singularly suited to
call forth penitence and faith in man, but the necessity of it does not
lie simply in the desire to call forth penitence and faith.  It lies in
the divine nature itself.  God could not do justice to Himself, in
relation to man and sin, in any way less awful than this; and it is the
fact that He does not shrink even from this--that in the Person of His
Son He enters, if we may say so, into the whole responsibility of the
situation created by sin--which constitutes the death of Jesus a
demonstration of divine love, compelling penitence and faith.  Nothing
less would have been sufficient to touch sinful hearts to their
depths--in that sense the Atonement is humanly necessary; but neither
would anything else be a sufficient revelation of what God is in
relation to sin and to sinful men--in that sense it is divinely
necessary.  And the divine necessity is the fundamental one.  The power
exercised over us by the revelation of God at the Cross is dependent on
the fact that the revelation is true--in other words, that it exhibits
the real relation of God to sinners and to sin.  It is not by
calculating what will win us, but by acting in consistency with
Himself, that God irresistibly appeals to men.  We dare not say that He
must be gracious, as though grace could cease to be free: but we may
say that He must be Himself, and that it is because He is what we see
Him to be in the death of Christ, understood as the New Testament
understands it, that sinners are moved to repentance and to trust in
Him.  That which the eternal being of God made necessary to Him in the
presence of sin is the very thing which is necessary also to win the
hearts of sinners.  Nothing but what is divinely necessary could have
met the necessities of sinful men.

When we admit this twofold necessity for the Atonement, we can tell
ourselves more clearly how we are to conceive Christ in it, in relation
to God on the one hand and to man on the other.  The Atonement is God's
work.  It is God who makes the Atonement in Christ.  It is God who
mediates His forgiveness of sins to us in this way.  This is one aspect
of the matter, and probably the one about which there is least dispute
among Christians.  But there is another aspect of it.  The Mediator
between God and man is Himself man, Christ Jesus.  What is the relation
of the man Christ Jesus to those for whom the Atonement is made?  What
is the proper term to designate, in this atoning work, what He is in
relation to them?  The doctrine of Atonement current in the Church in
the generation preceding our own answered frankly that in His atoning
work Christ is our substitute.  He comes in our nature, and He comes
into our place.  He enters into all the responsibilities that sin has
created for us, and He does justice to them in His death.  He does not
deny any of them: He does not take sin as anything less or else than it
is to God; in perfect sinlessness He consents even to die, to submit to
that awful experience in which the final reaction of God's holiness
against sin is expressed.  Death was not _His_ due: it was something
alien to One Who had nothing amiss; but it was our due, and because it
was ours He made it His.  It was thus that He made Atonement.  _He_
bore _our_ sins.  He took to Himself all that they meant, all in which
they had involved the world.  He died for them, and in so doing
acknowledged the sanctity of that order in which sin and death arc
indissolubly united.  In other words, He did what the human race could
not do for itself, yet what had to be done if sinners were to be saved:
for how could men be saved if there were not made in humanity an
acknowledgment of all that sin is to God, and of the justice of all
that is entailed by sin under God's constitution of the world?  Such an
acknowledgment, as we have just seen, is divinely necessary, and
necessary, too, for man, if sin is to be forgiven.

This was the basis of fact on which the substitutionary character of
Christ's sufferings and death in the Atonement was asserted.  It may be
admitted at once that when the term substitute is interpreted without
reference to this basis of fact it lends itself very easily to
misconstruction.  It falls in with, if it does not suggest, the idea of
a transference of merit and demerit, the sin of the world being carried
over to Christ's account, and the merit of Christ to the world's
account, as if the reconciliation of God and man, or the forgiveness of
sins and the regeneration of souls, could be explained without the use
of higher categories than are employed in bookkeeping.  It is surely
not necessary at this time of day to disclaim an interpretation of
personal relations which makes use only of sub-personal categories.
Merit and demerit cannot be mechanically transferred like sums in an
account.  The credit, so to speak, of one person in the moral sphere
cannot become that of another, apart from moral conditions.  It is the
same truth, in other words, if we say that the figure of paying a debt
is not in every respect adequate to describe what Christ does in making
the Atonement.  The figure, I believe, covers the truth; if it did not,
we should not have the kind of language which frequently occurs in
Scripture; but it is misread into falsehood and immorality whenever it
is pressed as if it were exactly equivalent to the truth.  But granting
these drawbacks which attach to the word, is there not something in the
work of Christ, as mediating the forgiveness of sins, which no other
word can express?  No matter on what subsequent conditions its virtue
for us depends, what Christ did had to be done, or we should never have
had forgiveness; we should never have known God, and His nature and
will in relation to sin; we should never have had the motive which
alone could beget real repentance; we should never have had the spirit
which welcomes pardon and is capable of receiving it.  We could not
procure these things for ourselves, we could not produce them out of
our own resources: but He by entering into our nature and lot, by
taking on Him our responsibilities and dying our death, has so revealed
God to us as to put them within our reach.  We owe them to Him; in
particular, and in the last resort, we owe them to the fact that He
bore our sins in His own body to the tree.  If we are not to say that
the Atonement, as a work carried through in the sufferings and death of
Christ, sufferings and death determined by our sin, is vicarious or
substitutionary, what are we to call it?

The only answer which has been given to this question, by those who
continue to speak of Atonement at all, is that we must conceive Christ
not as the substitute but as the representative of sinners.  I venture
to think that, with some advantages, the drawbacks of this word are
quite as serious as those which attach to substitute.  It makes it less
easy, indeed, to think of the work of Christ as a finished work which
benefits the sinner _ipso facto_, and apart from any relation between
him and the Saviour: but of what sort is the relation which it does
suggest?  It suggests that the sinners who are to be saved by Christ
can put Christ forward in their name: they are not in the utterly
hopeless case that has hitherto been supposed; they can present
themselves to God in the person and work of One on whom God cannot but
look with approval.  The boldest expression of this I have ever seen
occurs in some remarks in the _Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review_ on
the doctrine of St. Paul.  The reviewer is far from saying that a
writer who finds a substitutionary doctrine throughout the New
Testament is altogether wrong.  He goes so far as to admit that 'if we
look at the matter from what may be called an external point of view,
no doubt we may speak of the death of Christ as in a certain sense
substitutionary.'  What this 'certain sense' is, he does not define.
But no one, he tells us, can do justice to Paul who fails to recognise
that the death of Christ was a racial act; and 'if we place ourselves
at Paul's point of view, we shall see that to the eye of God the death
of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race
than as an act which the race does in Christ.'  In plain English, Paul
teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly, than that the ungodly in
Christ died for themselves.  This is presented to us as something
profound, a recognition of the mystical depths in Paul's teaching: I
own I can see nothing profound in it except a profound misapprehension
of the apostle.  Nevertheless, it brings out the logic of what
representative means when representative is opposed to substitute.  The
representative is ours, we are in Him, and we are supposed to get over
all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just
because He is ours, and because we are one with Him.  But the
fundamental fact of the situation is that, to begin with, Christ is
_not_ ours, and we are _not_ one with Him.  In the apostle's view, and
in point of fact, we are 'without Christ' ([Greek] _chôris Christou_).
It is not we who have put Him there.  It is not to us that His presence
and His work in the world are due.  If we had produced Him and put Him
forward, we might call Him our representative in the sense suggested by
the sentences just quoted; we might say it is not so much He who dies
for us, as we who die in Him; but a representative not produced by us,
but given to us--not chosen by us, but the elect of God--is not a
representative at all, but in that place a substitute.  He stands in
our stead, facing all our responsibilities for us as God would have
them faced; and it is what He does for us, and not the effect which
this produces in us, still less the fantastic abstraction of a 'racial
act,' which is the Atonement in the sense of the New Testament.  To
speak of Christ as our representative, in the sense that His death is
to God less an act which He does for the race than an act which the
race does in Him, is in principle to deny the whole grace of the
gospel, and to rob it of every particle of its motive power.

To do justice to the truth here, both on its religious and its ethical
side, it is necessary to put in their proper relation to one another
the aspects of reality which the terms substitute and representative
respectively suggest.  The first is fundamental.  Christ is God's gift
to humanity.  He stands in the midst of us, the pledge of God's love,
accepting our responsibilities as God would have them accepted,
offering to God, under the pressure of the world's sin and all its
consequences, that perfect recognition of God's holiness in so visiting
sin which men should have offered but could not; and in so doing He
makes Atonement for us.  In so doing, also, He is our substitute, not
yet our representative.  But the Atonement thus made is not a
spectacle, it is a motive.  It is not a transaction in business, or in
book-keeping, which is complete in itself; in view of the relations of
God and man it belongs to its very nature to be a moral appeal.  It is
a divine challenge to men, which is designed to win their hearts.  And
when men are won--when that which Christ in His love has done for them
comes home to their souls--when they are constrained by His infinite
grace to the self-surrender of faith, then we may say He becomes their
representative.  They begin to feel that what He has done for them must
not remain outside of them, but be reproduced somehow in their own
life.  The mind of Christ in relation to God and sin, as He bore their
sins in His own body to the tree, must become their mind; this and
nothing else is the Christian salvation.  The power to work this change
in them is found in the death of Christ itself; the more its meaning is
realised as something there, in the world, outside of us, the more
completely does it take effect within us.  In proportion as we see and
feel that out of pure love to us He stands in our place--our
substitute--bearing our burden--in that same proportion are we drawn
into the relation to Him that makes Him our representative.  But we
should be careful here not to lose ourselves in soaring words.  The New
Testament has much to say about union with Christ, but I could almost
be thankful that it has no such expression as mystical union.  The only
union it knows is a moral one--a union due to the moral power of
Christ's death, operating morally as a constraining motive on the human
will, and begetting in believers the mind of Christ in relation to sin;
but this moral union remains the problem and the task, as well as the
reality and the truth, of the Christian life.  Even when we think of
Christ as our representative, and have the courage to say we died with
Him, we have still to _reckon_ ourselves to be dead to sin, and to _put
to death_ our members which are upon the earth; and to go past this,
and speak of a mystical union with Christ in which we are lifted above
the region of reflection and motive, of gratitude and moral
responsibility, into some kind of metaphysical identity with the Lord,
does not promote intelligibility, to say the least.  If the Atonement
were not, to begin with, outside of us--if it were not in that sense
objective, a finished work in which God in Christ makes a final
revelation of Himself in relation to sinners and sin--in other words,
if Christ could not be conceived in it as our substitute, given by God
to do in our place what we could not do for ourselves, there would be
no way of recognising or preaching or receiving it as a motive; while,
on the other hand, if it did not operate as a motive, if it did not
appeal to sinful men in such a way as to draw them into a moral
fellowship with Christ--in other words, if Christ did not under it
become representative of us, our surety to God that we should yet be
even as He in relation to God and to sin, we could only say that it had
all been vain.  Union with Christ, in short, is not a presupposition of
Christ's work, which enables us to escape all the moral problems raised
by the idea of a substitutionary Atonement; it is not a presupposition
of Christ's work, it is its fruit.  To see that it is its fruit is to
have the final answer to the objection that substitution is immoral.
If substitution, in the sense in which we must assert it of Christ, is
the greatest moral force in the world--if the truth which it covers,
when it enters into the mind of man, enters with divine power to
assimilate him to the Saviour, uniting him to the Lord in a death to
sin and a life to God--obviously, to call it immoral is an abuse of
language.  The love which can literally go out of itself and make the
burden of others its own is the radical principle of all the genuine
and victorious morality in the world.  And to say that love cannot do
any such thing, that the whole formula of morality is, every man shall
bear his own burden, is to deny the plainest facts of the moral life.

Yet this is a point at which difficulty is felt by many in trying to
grasp the Atonement.  On the one hand, there do seem to be analogies to
it, and points of attachment for it, in experience.  No sin that has
become real to conscience is ever outlived and overcome without
expiation.  There are consequences involved in it that go far beyond
our perception at the moment, but they work themselves inexorably out,
and our sin ceases to be a burden on conscience, and a fetter on will,
only as we 'accept the punishment of our iniquity,' and become
conscious of the holy love of God behind it.  But the consequences of
sin are never limited to the sinner.  They spread beyond him in the
organism of humanity, and when they strike visibly upon the innocent,
the sense of guilt is deepened.  We see that we have done we know not
what, something deeply and mysteriously bad beyond all our reckoning,
something that only a power and goodness transcending our own avail to
check.  It is one of the startling truths of the moral life that such
consequences of sin, striking visibly upon the innocent, have in
certain circumstances a peculiar power to redeem the sinful.  When they
are accepted, as they sometimes are accepted, without repining or
complaint--when they are borne, as they sometimes are borne, freely and
lovingly by the innocent, because to the innocent the guilty are
dear--then something is appealed to in the guilty which is deeper than
guilt, something may be touched which is deeper than sin, a new hope
and faith may be born in them, to take hold of love so wonderful, and
by attaching themselves to it to transcend the evil past.  The
suffering of such love (they are dimly aware), or rather the power of
such love persisting through all the suffering brought on it by sin,
opens the gate of righteousness to the sinful in spite of all that has
been; sin is outweighed by it, it is annulled, exhausted, transcended
in it.  The great Atonement of Christ is somehow in line with this, and
we do not need to shrink from the analogy.  'If there were no witness,'
as Dr. Robertson Nicoll puts it, 'in the world's deeper literature'--if
there were no witness, that is, in the universal experience of man--'to
the fact of an Atonement, the Atonement would be useless, since the
formula expressing it would be unintelligible.'  It is the analogy of
such experiences which makes the Atonement credible, yet it must always
in some way transcend them.  There is something in it which is
ultimately incomparable.  When we speak of others as innocent, the term
is used only in a relative sense; there is no human conscience pure to
God.  When we speak of the sin of others coming in its consequences on
the innocent, we speak of something in which the innocent are purely
passive; if there is moral response on their part, the situation is not
due to moral initiative of theirs.  But with Christ it is different.
He knew _no_ sin, and He entered _freely_, deliberately, and as the
very work of His calling, into all that sin meant for God and brought
on man.  Something that I experience in a particular relation, in which
another has borne my sin and loved me through it, may help to open my
eyes to the meaning of Christ's love; but when they are opened, what I
see is the propitiation for the whole world.  There is no guilt of the
human race, there is no consequence in which sin has involved it, to
which the holiness and love made manifest in Christ are unequal.  He
reveals to all sinful men the whole relation of God to them and to
their sins--a sanctity which is inexorable to sin, and cannot take it
as other than it is in all its consequences, and a love which through
all these consequences and under the weight of them all, will not let
the sinful go.  It is in this revelation of the character of God and of
His relation to the sin of the world that the forgiveness of sins is
revealed.  It is not intimated in the air; it is preached, as St. Paul
says, 'in this man'; it is mediated to the world through Him and
specifically through His death, because it is through Him, and
specifically through His death, that we get the knowledge of God's
character which evokes penitence and faith, and brings the assurance of
His pardon to the heart.

From this point of view we may see how to answer the question that is
sometimes asked about the relation of Christ's life to His death, or
about the relation of both to the Atonement.  If we say that what we
have in the Atonement is an assurance of God's character, does it not
follow at once that Christ's teaching and His life contribute to it as
directly as His death?  Is it not a signal illustration of the false
abstractions which we have so often had cause to censure, when the
death of Christ is taken as if it had an existence or a significance
apart from His life, or could be identified with the Atonement in a way
in which His life could not?  I do not think this is so clear.  Of
course it is Christ Himself who is the Atonement or propitiation--He
Himself, as St. John puts it, and not anything, not even His death,
into which He does not enter.  But it is He Himself, as making to us
the revelation of God in relation to sin and to sinners; and apart from
death, as that in which the conscience of the race sees the final
reaction of God against evil, this revelation is not fully made.  If
Christ had done less than die for us, therefore--if He had separated
Himself from us, or declined to be one with us, in the solemn
experience in which the darkness of sin is sounded and all its
bitterness tasted,--there would have been no Atonement.  It is
impossible to say this of any particular incident in His life, and in
so far the unique emphasis laid on His death in the New Testament is
justified.  But I should go further than this, and say that even
Christ's life, taking it as it stands in the Gospels, only enters into
the Atonement, and has reconciling power, because it is pervaded from
beginning to end by the consciousness of His death.  Instead of
depriving His death of the peculiar significance Scripture assigns to
it, and making it no more than the termination, or at least the
consummation, of His life, I should rather argue that the Scriptural
emphasis is right, and that His life attains its true interpretation
only as we find in it everywhere the power and purpose of His death.
There is nothing artificial or unnatural in this.  There are plenty of
people who never have death out of their minds an hour at a time.  They
are not cowards, nor mad, nor even sombre: they may have purposes and
hopes and gaieties as well as others; but they see life steadily and
see it whole, and of all their thoughts the one which has most
determining and omnipresent power is the thought of the inevitable end.
There is death in all their life.  It was not, certainly, as the
inevitable end, the inevitable 'debt of nature,' that death was present
to the mind of Christ; but if we can trust the Evangelists at all, from
the hour of His baptism it was present to His mind as something
involved in His vocation; and it was a presence so tremendous that it
absorbed everything into itself.  'I have a baptism to be baptized
with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.'  Instead of
saying that Christ's life as well as His death contributed to the
Atonement--that His active obedience (to use the theological formula)
as well as His passive obedience was essential to His propitiation--we
should rather say that His life is part of His death: a deliberate and
conscious descent, ever deeper and deeper, into the dark valley where
at the last hour the last reality of sin was to be met and borne.  And
if the objection is made that after all this only means that death is
the most vital point of life, its intensest focus, I should not wish to
make any reply.  Our Lord's Passion _is_ His sublimest action--an
action so potent that all His other actions are sublated in it, and we
know everything when we know that He _died_ for our sins.

The desire to bring the life of Christ as well as His death into the
Atonement has probably part of its motive in the feeling that when the
death is separated from the life it loses moral character: it is
reduced to a merely physical incident, which cannot carry such vast
significance as the Atonement.  Such a feeling certainly exists, and
finds expression in many forms.  How often, for example, we hear it
said that it is not the death which atones, but the spirit in which the
Saviour died--not His sufferings which expiate sin, but the innocence,
the meekness, the love to man and obedience to God in which they were
borne.  The Atonement, in short, was a moral achievement, to which
physical suffering and death are essentially irrelevant.  This is our
old enemy, the false abstraction, once more, and that in the most
aggressive form.  The contrast of physical and moral is made absolute
at the very point at which it ceases to exist.  As against such
absolute distinctions we must hold that if Christ had not really died
for us, there would have been no Atonement at all, and on the other
hand that what are called His physical sufferings and death have no
existence simply as physical: they are essential elements in the moral
achievement of the passion.  It leads to no truth to say that it is not
His death, but the spirit in which He died, that atones for sin: the
spirit in which He died has its being in His death, and in nothing else
in the world.

It seems to me that what is really wanted here, both by those who seek
to co-ordinate Christ's life with His death in the Atonement, and by
those who distinguish between His death and the spirit in which He
died, is some means of keeping hold of the Person of Christ in His
work, and that this is not effectively done apart from the New
Testament belief in the Resurrection.  There is no doubt that in
speaking of the death of Christ as that through which the forgiveness
of sins is mediated to us we are liable to think of it as if it were
only an event in the past.  We take the representation of it in the
Gospel and say, "Such and such is the impression which this event
produces upon me; I feel in it how God is opposed to sin, and how I
ought to be opposed to it; I feel in it how God's love appeals to me to
share His mind about sin; and as I yield to this appeal I am at once
set free from sin and assured of pardon; this is the only ethical
forgiveness; to know this experimentally is to know the Gospel."  No
one can have any interest in disputing another's obligation to Christ,
but it may fairly be questioned whether this kind of obligation to
Christ amounts to Christianity in the sense of the New Testament.
There is no living Christ here, no coming of the living Christ to the
soul, in the power of the Atonement, to bring it to God.  But this is
what the New Testament shows us.  It is _He_ who is the propitiation
for our sins--He who died for them and rose again.  The New Testament
preaches a Christ who was dead and is alive, not a Christ who was alive
and is dead.  It is a mistake to suppose that the New Testament
conception of the Gospel, involving as it does the spiritual presence
and action of Christ, in the power of the Atonement, is a matter of
indifference to us, and that in all our thinking and preaching we must
remain within purely historical limits, if by purely historical limits
is meant that our creed must end with the words "crucified, dead, and
buried."  To preach the Atonement means not only to preach One who bore
our sins in death, but One who by rising again from the dead
demonstrated the final defeat of sin, and One who comes in the power of
His risen life--which means, in the power of the Atonement accepted by
God--to make all who commit themselves to Him in faith partakers in His
victory.  It is not His death, as an incident in the remote past,
however significant it may be; it is the Lord Himself, appealing to us
in the virtue of His death, who assures us of pardon and restores our
souls.

One of the most singular phenomena in the attitude of many modern minds
to the Atonement is the disposition to plead against the Atonement what
the New Testament represents as its fruits.  It is as though it had
done its work so thoroughly that people could not believe that it ever
needed to be done at all.  The idea of fellowship with Christ, for
example, is constantly urged against the idea that Christ died for us,
and by His death made all mankind His debtors in a way in which we
cannot make debtors of each other.  The New Testament itself is pressed
into the service.  It is pointed out that our Lord called His disciples
to drink of His cup and to be baptized with His baptism, where the
baptism and the cup are figures of His passion; and it is argued that
there cannot be anything unique in His experience or service, anything
which He does for men which it is beyond the power of His disciples to
do also.  Or again, reference is made to St. Paul's words to the
Colossians: 'Now I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf, and fill up
on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my
flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church'; and it is argued that
St. Paul here represents himself as doing exactly what Christ did, or
even as supplementing a work which Christ admittedly left imperfect.
The same idea is traced where the Christian is represented as called
into the fellowship of the Son of God, or more specifically as called
to know the fellowship of His sufferings by becoming conformed to His
death.  It is seen pervading the New Testament in the conception of the
Christian as a man _in Christ_.  And to descend from the apostolic age
to our own, it has been put by an American theologian into the
epigrammatic form that Christ redeems us by making us redeemers.  What,
it may be asked, is the truth in all this? and how is it related to
what we have already seen cause to assert about the uniqueness of
Christ's work in making atonement for sin, or mediating the divine
forgiveness to man?

I do not think it is impossible or even difficult to reconcile the two:
it is done, indeed, whenever we see that the life to which we are
summoned, in the fellowship of Christ, is a life which we owe
altogether to Him, and which He does not in the least owe to us.  The
question really raised is this: Has Jesus Christ a place of His own in
the Christian religion?  Is it true that there is one Mediator between
God and man, Himself man, this man, Christ Jesus?  In spite of the
paradoxical assertion of Harnack to the contrary, it is not possible to
deny, with any plausibility, that this was the mind of Christ Himself,
and that it has been the mind of all who call Him Lord.  He knew and
taught, what they have learned by experience as well as by His word,
that all men must owe to Him their knowledge of the Father, their place
in the Kingdom of God, and their part in all its blessings.  He could
not have taught this of any but Himself, nor is it the experience of
the Church that such blessings come through any other.  Accordingly,
when Christ calls on men to drink His cup and to be baptized with His
baptism, while He may quite well mean, and does mean, that His life and
death are to be the inspiration of theirs, and while He may quite well
encourage them to believe that sacrifice on their part, as on His, will
contribute to bless the world, He need not mean, and we may be sure He
does not mean, that their blood is, like His, the blood of the
covenant, or that their sinful lives, even when purged and quickened by
His Spirit, could be, like His sinless life, described as the world's
ransom.  The same considerations apply to the passages quoted from St.
Paul, and especially to the words in Colossians i. 24.  The very
purpose of the Epistle to the Colossians is to assert the exclusive and
perfect mediatorship of Christ, alike in creation and redemption; all
that we call being, and all that we call reconciliation, has to be
defined by relation to Him, and not by relation to any other persons or
powers, visible or invisible; and however gladly Paul might reflect
that in his enthusiasm for suffering he was continuing Christ's work,
and exhausting some of the afflictions--they were Christ's own
afflictions--which had yet to be endured ere the Church could be made
perfect, it is nothing short of grotesque to suppose that in this
connection he conceived of himself as doing what Christ did, atoning
for sin, and reconciling the world to God.  All this was done already,
perfectly done, done for the whole world; and it was on the basis of
it, and under the inspiration of it, that the apostle sustained his
enthusiasm for a life of toil and pain in the service of men.  Always,
where we have Christian experience to deal with, it is the Christ
through whom the divine forgiveness comes to us at the Cross--the
Christ of the substitutionary Atonement, who bore all our burden alone,
and did a work to which we can for ever recur, but to which we did not
and do not and never can contribute at all--it is this Christ who
constrains us to find our representative with God in Himself, and to
become ourselves His representatives to men.  It is as we truly
represent Him that we can expect our testimony to Him to find
acceptance, but that testimony far transcends everything that our
service enables men to measure.  What is anything that a sinful man,
saved by grace, can do for his Lord or for his kind, compared with what
the sinless Lord has done for the sinful race?  It is true that He
calls us to drink of His cup, to learn the fellowship of His
sufferings, even to be conformed to His death; but under all the
intimate relationship the eternal difference remains which makes Him
_Lord_--He knew no sin, and we could make no atonement.  It is the goal
of our life to be found in Him; but I cannot understand the man who
thinks it more profound to identify himself with Christ and share in
the work of redeeming the world, than to abandon himself to Christ and
share in the world's experience of being redeemed.  And I am very sure
that in the New Testament the last is first and fundamental.




THE EXPOSITOR'S GREEK TESTAMENT.


Edited by the

Rev. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.


ALREADY PUBLISHED.

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    By the Rev. Prof. A. B. BRUCE, D.D.
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    By the Rev. Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.

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    By the Rev. R. J. KNOWLING, D.D.
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    By the Rev. Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, D.D.

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