Part 6 — Chapter I. Christology, Or The Redemption Wrought By Christ. (continued 5)

Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of “redemption by sample.”It is a purely subjective atonement which Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, to Irving's view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned in Eph. 4:11—“apostles ... prophets ... evangelists ... pastors ... teachers.” But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving's apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237.

(b) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of [pg 746] punishment; that penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On Irving's theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of the personto rid itself of something in the humanity which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus' sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take a sinful nature, unless sin is essential to human nature. In Irving's view, the death of Christ's body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.”Penalty would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.

Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2. guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man's sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.

(c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture, with regard to Christ's freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby.

“I shall maintain until death,” said Irving, “that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.”The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.

Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks ‘Why?’ well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness: ‘I glorified thee’ (John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation from Ps. 31:5—‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does, ‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’ for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”

(d) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.

In Irving's theory there is no imputation, or representation, or substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (Gal. 5:11—“then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old, “the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16; cf. 1 Cor. 1:23, 24—“we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).

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As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was “made to be sin on our behalf” (2 Cor. 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to “cleanse that red right hand” of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving's view, when he claimed that “Christ took human nature as he found it.”

(e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.

Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence; or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken. 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.

5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.

This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.

The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.” Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.

These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the [pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.” Gregory Nazianzen (390) “retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”

But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled “Cur Deus Homo” constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that “whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.” Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.” Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God. “If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.” The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must “give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.” Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.

The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).

To this theory we make the following objections:

(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.

The theory has been called the “Criminal theory” of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the “Military theory.” It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.

Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.” William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called [pg 749]the cruelty ‘retributive justice,’ and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a ‘delightful conviction,’ as of a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’ appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”

(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.

Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”

It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach “the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,” and says: “We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.” Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty: “The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite, i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.

Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes ‘ten thousand talents’ and has ‘not wherewith to pay’ (Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he ‘magnified the law and made it honorable’ (Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.” Cf. Edwards, Works, 1:406.

(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.

Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.” The main text [pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory is Mat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.” Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.” Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”

(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.

Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that “so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them” (Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903: “Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.” The Bishop says: “I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is ‘fitting’ that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”

(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.

This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.

Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.” For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416 sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.

6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.

In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory [pg 751] can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.

Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.

Adolphe Monod said well: “Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.” Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.” And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.” See John 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.” Christ was “lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as “the serpent lifted up in the wilderness” (John 3:14), and we overcoming “because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).

First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.

The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.

The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.” Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes: “First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.” Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.” Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from [pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.” Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.” Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.” Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.” See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.

Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.

John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489): “Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].” Quarles's Emblems: “O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”

Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question: ‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”

This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.

Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is ‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is ‘full of truth’ also, and so ‘the only-begotten from the Father’ (John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.” Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows: “On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.

“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that [pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”

Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.

The great classical passage with reference to the atonement is Rom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.” Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”

Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the “righteousness of God” (= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in 1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in 1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.

“Verse 25. ‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’ i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ, ‘for the display of his [judicial and punitive] righteousness,’ which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited. ‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’ i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment. ‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’ expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.

“Verse 26. εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God's being just, and secondly, his appearing just in consequence of this. Justus et justificans, instead of justus et condemnans, this is the summum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”

We repeat what was said on pages 719, 720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God may appear righteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God may be righteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. See Heb. 2:10—it “became” God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer; cf. Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.

[pg 754]

Charnock: “He who once ‘quenched the violence of fire’ for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.” The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf. Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,” “Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.

Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it. ‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’ (2 Cor. 9:15).” Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”

See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.

Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.

The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.

Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us: “What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?” We would change the form of the question, so that it should read: “What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?” Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.

Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions: “1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate. [pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”

Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that “2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.” If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.

We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.

In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature. “He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.” J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.” In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth: “In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (not in) a world-soul.”

G. B. Foster, on Mat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” “On this ‘must be’ the Scripture is based, not this ‘must be’ on the Scripture. The ‘must be’ was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’ As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”

Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son [pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.” The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.

Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 117—“Christ had taken upon him, as the living expression of himself, a nature which was weighed down, not merely by present incapacities, but by present incapacities as part of the judicial necessary result of accepted and inherent sinfulness. Human nature was not only disabled but guilty, and the disabilities were themselves a consequence and aspect of the guilt”; see review of Moberly by Rashdall, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 3:198-211. Lidgett, Spir. Princ. of Atonement, 166-168, criticizes Dr. Dale for neglecting the fatherly purpose of the Atonement to serve the moral training of the child—punishment marking ill-desert in order to bring this ill-desert to the consciousness of the offender,—and for neglecting also the positive assertion in the atonement that the law is holy and just and good—something more than the negative expression of sin's ill-desert. See especially Lidgett's chapter on the relation of our Lord to the human race, 351-378, in which he grounds the atonement in the solidarity of mankind, its organic union with the Son of God, and Christ's immanence in humanity.

Bowne, The Atonement, 101—“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections upon his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive of God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not love at all, but only a reflex of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing upon us out of his infinite fulness but at no real cost to himself, he sinks before the moral heroes of the race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burdenbearer and leader in all self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and love and moral heroism and condescension filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ himself, so far as it was an historical event, must be viewed, not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that Cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:90, 91—“Conceive of the ideal of moral perfection incarnate in a human personality, and at the same time one who loves us with a love so absolute that he identifies himself with us and makes our good and evil his own—bring together these elements in a living, conscious human spirit, and you have in it a capacity of shame and anguish, a possibility of bearing the burden of human guilt and wretchedness, which lost and guilty humanity can never bear for itself.”

[pg 757]

If Christ had been born into the world by ordinary generation, he too would have had depravity, guilt, penalty. But he was not so born. In the womb of the Virgin, the human nature which he took was purged from its depravity. But this purging away of depravity did not take away guilt, or penalty. There was still left the just exposure to the penalty of violated law. Although Christ's nature was purified, his obligation to suffer yet remained. He might have declined to join himself to humanity, and then he need not have suffered. He might have sundered his connection with the race, and then he need not have suffered. But once born of the Virgin, once possessed of the human nature that was under the curse, he was bound to suffer. The whole mass and weight of God's displeasure against the race fell on him, when once he became a member of the race.

Because Christ is essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race, he is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, he must bear in his own person all the burdens of humanity, and must be “the Lamb of God, that” taketh, and so “taketh away, the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Simms Reeves, the great English tenor, said that the passion-music was too much for him; he was found completely overcome after singing the prophet's words in Lam. 1:12—“Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is brought upon me, Wherewith Jehovah hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.”

Father Damien gave his life in ministry to the lepers' colony of the Hawaiian Islands. Though free from the disease when he entered, he was at last himself stricken with the leprosy, and then wrote: “I must now stay with my own people.” Once a leper, there was no release. When Christ once joined himself to humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Through himself personally without sin, he was made sin for us. Christ inherited guilt and penalty. Heb. 2:14, 15—“Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their life-time subject to bondage.”

Only God can forgive sin, because only God can feel it in its true heinousness and rate it at its true worth. Christ could forgive sin because he added to the divine feeling with regard to sin the anguish of a pure humanity on account of it. Shelley, Julian and Maddolo: “Me, whose heart a stranger's tear might wear, As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone; Me, who am as a nerve o'er which do creep The Else unfelt oppressions of the earth.” S. W. Culver: “We cannot be saved, as we are taught geometry, by lecture and diagram. No person ever yet saved another from drowning by standing coolly by and telling him the importance of rising to the surface and the necessity of respiration. No, he must plunge into the destructive element, and take upon himself the very condition of the drowning man, and by the exertion of his own strength, by the vigor of his own life, save him from the impending death. When your child is encompassed by the flames that consume your dwelling, you will not save him by calling to him from without. You must make your way through the devouring flame, till you come personally into the very conditions of his peril and danger, and, thence returning, bear him forth to freedom and safety.”

Notice, however, that this guilt which Christ took upon himself by his union with humanity was: (1) not the guilt of personal sin—such guilt as belongs to every adult member of the race; (2) not even the guilt of inherited depravity—such guilt as belongs to infants, and to those who have not come to moral consciousness; but (3) solely the guilt of Adam's sin, which belongs, prior to personal transgression, and apart from inherited depravity, to every member of the race who has derived his life from Adam. This original sin and inherited guilt, but without the depravity that ordinarily [pg 758] accompanies them, Christ takes, and so takes away. He can justly bear penalty, because he inherits guilt. And since this guilt is not his personal guilt, but the guilt of that one sin in which “all sinned”—the guilt of the common transgression of the race in Adam, the guilt of the root-sin from which all other sins have sprung—he who is personally pure can vicariously bear the penalty due to the sin of all.

Christ was conscious of innocence in his personal relations, but not in his race relations. He gathered into himself all the penalties of humanity, as Winkelried gathered into his own bosom at Sempach the pikes of the Austrians and so made a way for the victorious Swiss. Christ took to himself the shame of humanity, as the mother takes upon her the daughter's shame, repenting of it and suffering on account of it. But this could not be in the case of Christ unless there had been a tie uniting him to men far more vital, organic, and profound than that which unites mother and daughter. Christ is naturally the life of all men, before he becomes spiritually the life of true believers. Matheson, Spir. Devel. of St. Paul, 197-215, 244, speaks of Christ's secular priesthood, of an outer as well as an inner membership in the body of Christ. He is sacrificial head of the world as well as sacrificial head of the church. In Paul's latest letters, he declares of Christ that he is “the Savior of all men, specially of them that believe” (1 Tim. 4:10). There is a grace that “hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men” (Tit. 2:11). He “gave gifts unto men” (Eph. 4:8), “Yea, among the rebellious also, that Jehovah God might dwell with them” (Ps. 68:18). “Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected” (1 Tim. 4:4).

Royce, World and Individual, 2:408—“Our sorrows are identically God's own sorrows.... I sorrow, but the sorrow is not only mine. This same sorrow, just as it is for me, is God's sorrow.... The divine fulfilment can be won only through the sorrows of time.... Unless God knows sorrow, he knows not the highest good, which consists in the overcoming of sorrow.” Godet, in The Atonement, 331-351—“Jesus condemned sin as God condemned it. When he felt forsaken on the Cross, he performed that act by which the offender himself condemns his sin, and by that condemnation, so far as it depends on himself, makes it to disappear. There is but one conscience in all moral beings. This echo in Christ of God's judgment against sin was to re-echo in all other human consciences. This has transformed God's love of compassion into a love of satisfaction. Holiness joins suffering to sin. But the element of reparation in the Cross was not in the suffering but in the submission. The child who revolts against its punishment has made no reparation at all. We appropriate Christ's work when we by faith ourselves condemn sin and accept him.”

If it be asked whether this is not simply a suffering for his own sin, or rather for his own share of the sin of the race, we reply that his own share in the sin of the race is not the sole reason why he suffers; it furnishes only the subjective reason and ground for the proper laying upon him of the sin of all. Christ's union with the race in his incarnation is only the outward and visible expression of a prior union with the race which began when he created the race. As “in him were all things created,” and as “in him all things consist,” or hold together (Col. 1:16, 17), it follows that he who is the life of humanity must, though personally pure, be involved in responsibility for all human sin, and “it was necessary that the Christ should suffer” (Acts 17:3). This suffering was an enduring of the reaction of the divine holiness against sin and so was a bearing of penalty (Is. 53:6; Gal. 3:13), but it was also the voluntary execution of a plan that antedated creation (Phil. 2:6, 7), and Christ's sacrifice in time showed what had been in the heart of God from eternity (Heb. 9:14; Rev. 13:8).

Our treatment is intended to meet the chief modern objection to the atonement. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:222, speaks of “the strangely inconsistent doctrine that God is so just that he could not let sin go unpunished, yet so unjust that he could punish it in the person of the innocent.... It is for orthodox dialectics to explain how the divine justice can be impugned by pardoning the guilty, and yet vindicated by punishing [pg 759]the innocent” (quoted in Lias, Atonement, 16). In order to meet this difficulty, the following accounts of Christ's identification with humanity have been given:

1. That of Isaac Watts (see Bib. Sac., 1875:421). This holds that the humanity of Christ, both in body and soul, preëxisted before the incarnation, and was manifested to the patriarchs. We reply that Christ's human nature is declared to be derived from the Virgin.

2. That of R. W. Dale (Atonement, 265-440). This holds that Christ is responsible for human sin because, as the Upholder and Life of all, he is naturally one with all men, and is spiritually one with all believers (Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”; Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”; John 14:20—“I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”). If Christ's bearing our sins, however, is to be explained by the union of the believer with Christ, the effect is made to explain the cause, and Christ could have died only for the elect (see a review of Dale, in Brit. Quar. Rev., Apr., 1876:221-225). The union of Christ with the race by creation—a union which recognizes Christ's purity and man's sin—still remains as a most valuable element of truth in the theory of Dr. Dale.

3. That of Edward Irving. Christ has a corrupted nature, an inborn infirmity and depravity, which he gradually overcomes. But the Scriptures, on the contrary, assert his holiness and separateness from sinners. (See references, on pages 744-747.)

4. That of John Miller, Theology, 114-128; also in his chapter: Was Christ in Adam? in Questions Awakened by the Bible. Christ, as to his human nature, although created pure, was yet, as one of Adam's posterity, conceived of as a sinner in Adam. To him attached “the guilt of the act in which all men stood together in a federal relation.... He was decreed to be guilty for the sins of all mankind.” Although there is a truth contained in this statement, it is vitiated by Miller's federalism and creatianism. Arbitrary imputation and legal fiction do not help us here. We need such an actual union of Christ with humanity, and such a derivation of the substance of his being, by natural generation from Adam, as will make him not simply the constructive heir, but the natural heir, of the guilt of the race. We come, therefore, to what we regard as the true view, namely:

5. That the humanity of Christ was not a new creation, but was derived from Adam, through Mary his mother; so that Christ, so far as his humanity was concerned, was in Adam just as we were, and had the same race-responsibility with ourselves. As Adam's descendant, he was responsible for Adam's sin, like every other member of the race; the chief difference being, that while we inherit from Adam both guilt and depravity, he whom the Holy Spirit purified, inherited not the depravity, but only the guilt. Christ took to himself, not sin (depravity), but the consequences of sin. In him there was abolition of sin, without abolition of obligation to suffer for sin; while in the believer, there is abolition of obligation to suffer, without abolition of sin itself.

The justice of Christ's sufferings has been imperfectly illustrated by the obligation of the silent partner of a business firm to pay debts of the firm which he did not personally contract; or by the obligation of the husband to pay the debts of his wife; or by the obligation of a purchasing country to assume the debts of the province which it purchases (Wm. Ashmore). There have been men who have spent the strength of a lifetime in clearing off the indebtedness of an insolvent father, long since deceased. They recognized an organic unity of the family, which morally, if not legally, made their father's liabilities their own. So, it is said, Christ recognized the organic unity of the race, and saw that, having become one of that sinning race, he had involved himself in all its liabilities, even to the suffering of death, the great penalty of sin.

The fault of all the analogies just mentioned is that they are purely commercial. A transference of pecuniary obligation is easier to understand than a transference of criminal liability. I cannot justly bear another's penalty, unless I can in some way share his guilt. The theory we advocate shows how such a sharing of our guilt on the part of Christ was possible. All believers in substitution hold that Christ bore our guilt: “My soul looks back to see The burdens thou didst bear When hanging on the accursed tree, And hopes her guilt was there.” But we claim that, by virtue of Christ's union with humanity, that guilt was not only an imputed, but also an imparted, guilt.

With Christ's obligation to suffer, there were connected two other, though minor, results of his assumption of humanity: first, the longing to suffer; and secondly, the inevitableness of his suffering. He felt the longing to suffer which perfect love to God must feel, in view of the demands upon the race, of that holiness of God which he loved more than he loved the race itself; which perfect love to man must feel, in view of the fact that bearing the penalty of man's sin was the only way to save him. Hence we see Christ pressing forward to the cross with such majestic determination that the [pg 760]disciples were amazed and afraid (Mark 10:32). Hence we hear him saying: “With desire have I desired to eat this passover” (Luke 23:15); “I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:50).

Here is the truth in Campbell's theory of the atonement. Christ is the great Penitent before God, making confession of the sin of the race, which others of that race could neither see nor feel. But the view we present is a larger and completer one than that of Campbell, in that it makes this confession and reparation obligatory upon Christ, as Campbell's view does not, and recognizes the penal nature of Christ's sufferings, which Campbell's view denies. Lias, Atonement, 79—“The head of a clan, himself intensely loyal to his king, finds that his clan have been involved in rebellion. The more intense and perfect his loyalty, the more thorough his nobleness of heart and affection for his people, the more inexcusable and flagrant the rebellion of those for whom he pleads,—the more acute would be his agony, as their representative and head. Nothing would be more true to human nature, in the best sense of those words, than that the conflict between loyalty to his king and affection for his vassals should induce him to offer his life for theirs, to ask that the punishment they deserved should be inflicted on him.”

The second minor consequence of Christ's assumption of humanity was, that, being such as he was, he could not help suffering; in other words, the obligatory and the desired were also the inevitable. Since he was a being of perfect purity, contact with the sin of the race, of which he was a member, necessarily involved an actual suffering, of an intenser kind than we can conceive. Sin is self-isolating, but love and righteousness have in them the instinct of human unity. In Christ all the nerves and sensibilities of humanity met. He was the only healthy member of the race. When life returns to a frozen limb, there is pain. So Christ, as the only sensitive member of a benumbed and stupefied humanity, felt all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belonged to sinners; but which they could not feel, simply because of the depth of their depravity. Because Christ was pure, yet had united himself to a sinful and guilty race, therefore “it must needs be that Christ should suffer” (A. V.) or, “it behooved the Christ to suffer” (Rev. Vers., Acts 17:3); see also John 3:14—“so must the Son of man be lifted up”—“The Incarnation, under the actual circumstances of humanity, carried with it the necessity of the Passion” (Westcott, in Bib. Com., in loco).

Compare John Woolman's Journal, 4, 5—“O Lord, my God, the amazing horrors of darkness were gathered about me, and covered me all over, and I saw no way to go forth; I felt the depth and extent of the misery of my fellow creatures, separated from the divine harmony, and it was greater than I could bear, and I was crushed down under it; I lifted up my head, I stretched out my arm, but there was none to help me; I looked round about, and was amazed. In the depths of misery, I remembered that thou art omnipotent and that I had called thee Father.” He had vision of a “dull, gloomy mass,” darkening half the heavens, and he was told that it was “human beings, in as great misery as they could be and live; and he was mixed with them, and henceforth he might not consider himself a distinct and separate being.”

This suffering in and with the sins of men, which Dr. Bushnell emphasized so strongly, though it is not, as he thought, the principal element, is notwithstanding an indispensable element in the atonement of Christ. Suffering in and with the sinner is one way, though not the only way, in which Christ is enabled to bear the wrath of God which constitutes the real penalty of sin.

Exposition of 2 Cor. 5:21.—It remains for us to adduce the Scriptural proof of this natural assumption of human guilt by Christ. We find it in 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” “Righteousness” here cannot mean subjective purity, for then “made to be sin” would mean that God made Christ to be subjectively depraved. As Christ was not made unholy, the meaning cannot be that we are made holy persons in him. Meyer calls attention to this parallel between “righteousness” and “sin”:—“That we might become the righteousness of God in him” = that we might become justified persons. Correspondingly, “made to be sin on our behalf” must = made to be a condemned person. “Him who knew no sin” = Christ had no experience of sin—this was the necessary postulate of his work of atonement. “Made sin for us,” therefore, is the abstract for the concrete, and = made a sinner, in the sense that the penalty of sin fell upon him. So Meyer, for substance.

We must, however, regard this interpretation of Meyer's as coming short of the full meaning of the apostle. As justification is not simply remission of actual punishment, but is also deliverance from the obligation to suffer punishment,—in other words, as “righteousness” in the text = persons delivered from the guilt as well as from the penalty [pg 761]of sin,—so the contrasted term “sin,” in the text,—a person not only actually punished, but also under obligation to suffer punishment;—in other words, Christ is “made sin,” not only in the sense of being put under penalty, but also in the sense of being put under guilt. (Cf. Symington, Atonement, 17.)

In a note to the last edition of Meyer, this is substantially granted. “It is to be noted,” he says, “that ἁμαρτίαν, like κατάρα in Gal. 3:13, necessarily includes in itself the notion of guilt.” Meyer adds, however: “The guilt of which Christ appears as bearer was not his own (μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν); hence the guilt of men was transferred to him; consequently the justification of men is imputative.” Here the implication that the guilt which Christ bears is his simply by imputation seems to us contrary to the analogy of faith. As Adam's sin is ours only because we are actually one with Adam, and as Christ's righteousness is imputed to us only as we are actually united to Christ, so our sins are imputed to Christ only as Christ is actually one with the race. He was “made sin”by being made one with the sinners; he took our guilt by taking our nature. He who “knew no sin” came to be “sin for us” by being born of a sinful stock; by inheritance the common guilt of the race became his. Guilt was not simply imputed to Christ; it was imparted also.

This exposition may be made more clear by putting the two contrasted thoughts in parallel columns, as follows:

Made righteousness in him = Made sin for us =

righteous persons; a sinful person;

justified persons; a condemned person;

freed from guilt, or obligation to suffer; put under guilt, or obligation to suffer;

by spiritual union with Christ. by natural union with the race.

For a good exposition of 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13, and Rom. 3:25, 26, see Denney, Studies in Theology, 109-124.

The Atonement, then, on the part of God, has its ground (1) in the holiness of God, which must visit sin with condemnation, even though this condemnation brings death to his Son; and (2) in the love of God, which itself provides the sacrifice, by suffering in and with his Son for the sins of men, but through that suffering opening a way and means of salvation.

The Atonement, on the part of man, is accomplished through (1) the solidarity of the race; of which (2) Christ is the life, and so its representative and surety; (3) justly yet voluntarily bearing its guilt and shame and condemnation as his own.

Melanchthon: “Christ was made sin for us, not only in respect to punishment, but primarily by being chargeable with guilt also (culpæ et reatus)”—quoted by Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 3:95, 102, 103, 107; also 1:307, 314 sq. Thomasius says that “Christ bore the guilt of the race by imputation; but as in the case of the imputation of Adam's sin to us, imputation of our sins to Christ presupposes a real relationship. Christ appropriated our sin. He sank himself into our guilt.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:442 (Syst. Doct., 3:350, 351), agrees with Thomasius, that “Christ entered into our natural mortality, which for us is a penal condition, and into the state of collective guilt, so far as it is an evil, a burden to be borne; not that he had personal guilt, but rather that he entered into our guilt-laden common life, not as a stranger, but as one actually belonging to it—put under its law, according to the will of the Father and of his own love.”

When, and how, did Christ take this guilt and this penalty upon him? With regard to penalty, we have no difficulty in answering that, as his whole life of suffering was propitiatory, so penalty rested upon him from the very beginning of his life. This penalty was inherited, and was the consequence of Christ's taking human nature (Gal. 4:4, 5—“born of a woman, born under the law”). But penalty and guilt are correlates; if Christ inherited penalty, it must have been because he inherited guilt. This subjection to the common guilt of the race was intimated in Jesus' circumcision (Luke 2:21); in his ritual purification (Luke 2:22—“their purification”—i. e., the purification of Mary and the babe; see Lange, Life of Christ; Commentaries of Alford, Webster and Wilkinson; and An. Par. Bible); in his legal redemption (Luke 2:23, 24; cf. Ex. 13:2, 13); and in his baptism (Mat. 3:15—“thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness”). The baptized person went [pg 762]down into the water, as one laden with sin and guilt, in order that this sin and guilt might be buried forever, and that he might rise from the typical grave to a new and holy life. (Ebrard: “Baptism = death.”) So Christ's submission to John's baptism of repentance was not only a consecration to death, but also a recognition and confession of his implication in that guilt of the race for which death was the appointed and inevitable penalty (cf. Mat. 10:38; Luke 12:50; Mat. 26:39); and, as his baptism was a prefiguration of his death, we may learn from his baptism something with regard to the meaning of his death. See further, under The Symbolism of Baptism.

As one who had had guilt, Christ was “justified in the spirit” (1 Tim. 3:16); and this justification appears to have taken place after he “was manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16), and when “he was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Compare Rom. 1:4—“declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead”; 6:7-10—“he that hath died is justified from sin. But if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him; knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once; but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”—here all Christians are conceived of as ideally justified in the justification of Christ, when Christ died for our sins and rose again. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh”—here Meyer says: “The sending does not precede the condemnation; but the condemnation is effected in and with the sending.” John 16:10—“of righteousness, because I go to the Father”; 19:30—“It is finished.” On 1 Tim. 3:16, see the Commentary of Bengel.

If it be asked whether Jesus, then, before his death, was an unjustified person, we answer that, while personally pure and well-pleasing to God (Mat. 3:17), he himself was conscious of a race-responsibility and a race-guilt which must be atoned for (John 12:27—“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour”); and that guilty human nature in him endured at the last the separation from God which constitutes the essence of death, sin's penalty (Mat. 27:46—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). We must remember that, as even the believer must “be judged according to man in the flesh” (1 Pet. 4:6), that is, must suffer the death which to unbelievers is the penalty of sin, although he “live according to God in the Spirit,” so Christ, in order that we might be delivered from both guilt and penalty, was “put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (3:18);—in other words, as Christ was man, the penalty due to human guilt belonged to him to bear; but, as he was God, he could exhaust that penalty, and could be a proper substitute for others.

If it be asked whether he, who from the moment of the conception “sanctified himself”(John 17:19), did not from that moment also justify himself, we reply that although, through the retroactive efficacy of his atonement and upon the ground of it, human nature in him was purged of its depravity from the moment that he took that nature; and although, upon the ground of that atonement, believers before his advent were both sanctified and justified; yet his own justification could not have proceeded upon the ground of his atonement, and also his atonement have proceeded upon the ground of his justification. This would be a vicious circle; somewhere we must have a beginning. That beginning was in the cross, where guilt was first purged (Heb. 1:3—“when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”; Mat. 27:42—“He saved others; himself he cannot save”; cf. Rev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”).

If it be said that guilt and depravity are practically inseparable, and that, if Christ had guilt, he must have had depravity also, we reply that in civil law we distinguish between them,—the conversion of a murderer would not remove his obligation to suffer upon the gallows; and we reply further, that in justification we distinguish between them,—depravity still remaining, though guilt is removed. So we may say that Christ takes guilt without depravity, in order that we may have depravity without guilt. See page 645; also Böhl, Incarnation des göttlichen Wortes; Pope, Higher Catechism, 118; A. H. Strong, on the Necessity of the Atonement, in Philosophy and Religion, 213-219. Per contra, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:59 note, 82.

Christ therefore, as incarnate, rather revealed the atonement than made it. The historical work of atonement was finished upon the Cross, but that historical work only revealed to men the atonement made both before and since by the extra-mundane Logos. The eternal Love of God suffering the necessary reaction of his own Holiness against the sin of his creatures and with a view to their salvation—this is the essence of the Atonement.

[pg 763]

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 252, 253—“Christ, as God's atonement, is the revelation and discovery of the fact that sacrifice is as deep in God as his being. He is a holy Creator.... He must take upon himself the shame and pain of sin.” The earthly tabernacle and its sacrifices were only the shadow of those in the heavens, and Moses was bidden to make the earthly after the pattern which he saw in the mount. So the historical atonement was but the shadowing forth to dull and finite minds of an infinite demand of the divine holiness and an infinite satisfaction rendered by the divine love. Godet, S. S. Times, Oct. 16, 1886—“Christ so identified himself with the race he came to save, by sharing its life or its very blood, that when the race itself was redeemed from the curse of sin, his resurrection followed as the first fruits of that redemption”; Rom. 4:25—“delivered up for our trespasses ... raised for our justification.”

Simon, Redemption of Man, 322—“If the Logos is generally the Mediator of the divine immanence in Creation, especially in man; if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation, i. e., the principle of all form—must not the self-perversion of these human differentiations necessarily react on him who is their constitutive principle? 339—Remember that men have not first to engraft themselves into Christ, the living whole.... They subsist naturally in him, and they have to separate themselves, cut themselves off from him, if they are to be separate. This is the mistake made in the ‘Life in Christ’ theory. Men are treated as in some sense out of Christ, and as having to get into connection with Christ.... It is not that we have to create the relation,—we have simply to accept, to recognize, to ratify it. Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to become one with Christ, as it is refusal to remain one with him, refusal to let him be our life.”

A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 33, 172—“When God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, he communicated freedom, and made possible the creature's self-chosen alienation from himself, the giver of that life. While man could never break the natural bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond, and could introduce even into the life of God a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. Yet the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. The illustration is far from adequate; but it helps at a single point. There has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually, to isolate himself from God, while yet he is naturally joined to God, and is wholly dependent upon God for the removal of the sin which has so separated him from his Maker. Sin is the act of the creature, but salvation is the act of the Creator.

“If you could imagine a finger endowed with free will and trying to sunder its connection with the body by tying a string around itself, you would have a picture of man trying to sunder his connection with Christ. What is the result of such an attempt? Why, pain, decay; possible, nay, incipient death, to the finger. By what law? By the law of the organism, which is so constituted as to maintain itself against its own disruption by the revolt of the members. The pain and death of the finger is the reaction of the whole against the treason of the part. The finger suffers pain. But are there no results of pain to the body? Does not the body feel pain also? How plain it is that no such pain can be confined to the single part! The heart feels, aye, the whole organism feels, because all the parts are members one of another. It not only suffers, but that suffering tends to remedy the evil and to remove its cause. The body summons its forces, pours new tides of life into the dying member, strives to rid the finger of the ligature that binds it. So through all the course of history, Christ, the natural life of the race, has been afflicted in the affliction of humanity and has suffered for human sin. This suffering has been an atoning suffering, since it has been due to righteousness. If God had not been holy, if God had not made all nature express the holiness of his being, if God had not made pain and loss the necessary consequences of sin, then Christ would not have suffered. But since these things are sin's penalty and Christ is the life of the sinful race, it must needs be that Christ should suffer. There is nothing arbitrary in laying upon him the iniquities of us all. Original grace, like original sin, is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts.” See also Ames, on Biological Aspects of the Atonement, in Methodist Review, Nov. 1905:943-953.

In favor of the Substitutionary or Ethical view of the atonement we may urge the following considerations:

[pg 764]

(a) It rests upon correct philosophical principles with regard to the nature of will, law, sin, penalty, righteousness.

This theory holds that there are permanent states, as well as transient acts, of the will; and that the will is not simply the faculty of volitions, but also the fundamental determination of the being to an ultimate end. It regards law as having its basis, not in arbitrary will or in governmental expediency, but rather in the nature of God, and as being a necessary transcript of God's holiness. It considers sin to consist not simply in acts, but in permanent evil states of the affections and will. It makes the object of penalty to be, not the reformation of the offender, or the prevention of evil doing, but the vindication of justice, outraged by violation of law. It teaches that righteousness is not benevolence or a form of benevolence, but a distinct and separate attribute of the divine nature which demands that sin should be visited with punishment, apart from any consideration of the useful results that will flow therefrom.

(b) It combines in itself all the valuable elements in the theories before mentioned, while it avoids their inconsistencies, by showing the deeper principle upon which each of these elements is based.

The Ethical theory admits the indispensableness of Christ's example, advocated by the Socinian theory; the moral influence of his suffering, urged by the Bushnellian theory; the securing of the safety of government, insisted on by the Grotian theory; the participation of the believer in Christ's new humanity, taught by the Irvingian theory; the satisfaction to God's majesty for the elect, made so much of by the Anselmic theory. But the Ethical theory claims that all these other theories require, as a presupposition for their effective working, that ethical satisfaction to the holiness of God which is rendered in guilty human nature by the Son of God who took that nature to redeem it.

(c) It most fully meets the requirements of Scripture, by holding that the necessity of the atonement is absolute, since it rests upon the demands of immanent holiness, the fundamental attribute of God.

Acts 17:3—“it behooved the Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead”—lit.: “it was necessary for the Christ to suffer”; Luke 24:26—“Behooved it not the Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into his glory?”—lit.: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things?” It is not enough to say that Christ must suffer in order that the prophecies might be fulfilled. Why was it prophesied that he should suffer? Why did God purpose that he should suffer? The ultimate necessity is a necessity in the nature of God.

Plato, Republic, 2:361—“The righteous man who is thought to be unrighteous will be scourged, racked, bound; will have his eyes put out; and finally, having endured all sorts of evil, will be impaled.” This means that, as human society is at present constituted, even a righteous person must suffer for the sins of the world. “Mors mortis Morti mortem nisi morte dedisset, Æternæ vitæ janua clausa foret”—“Had not the Death-of-death to Death his death-blow given, Forever closed were the gate, the gate of life and heaven.”

(d) It shows most satisfactorily how the demands of holiness are met; namely, by the propitiatory offering of one who is personally pure, but who by union with the human race has inherited its guilt and penalty.

“Quo non ascendam?”—“Whither shall I not rise?” exclaimed the greatest minister of modern kings, in a moment of intoxication. “Whither shall I not stoop?” says the Lord Jesus. King Humbert, during the scourge of cholera in Italy: “In Castellammare they make merry; in Naples they die: I go to Naples.”

Wrightnour: “The illustration of Powhatan raising his club to slay John Smith, while Pocahontas flings herself between the uplifted club and the victim, is not a good one. God is not an angry being, bound to strike something, no matter what. If Powhatan could have taken the blow himself, out of a desire to spare the victim, it would be better. The Father and the Son are one. Bronson Alcott, in his school at Concord, when punishment was necessary, sometimes placed the rod in the hand of the offender and bade him strike his (Alcott's) hand, rather than that the law of the school should be broken without punishment following. The result was that very few rules were [pg 765]broken. So God in Christ bore the sins of the world, and endured the penalty for man's violation of his law.”

(e) It furnishes the only proper explanation of the sacrificial language of the New Testament, and of the sacrificial rites of the Old, considered as prophetic of Christ's atoning work.

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 207-211—“The imposition of hands on the head of the victim is entirely unexplained, except in the account of the great day of Atonement, when by the same gesture and by distinct confession the sins of the people were ‘put upon the head of the goat’ (Lev. 16:21) to be borne away into the wilderness. The blood was sacred and was to be poured out before the Lord, evidently in place of the forfeited life of the sinner which should have been rendered up.” Watts, New Apologetics, 205—“ ‘The Lord will provide’ was the truth taught when Abraham found a ram provided by God which he ‘offered up as a burnt offering in the stead of his son’ (Gen. 22:13, 14). As the ram was not Abraham's ram, the sacrifice of it could not teach that all Abraham had belonged to God, and should, with entire faith in his goodness, be devoted to him; but it did teach that ‘apart from shedding of blood there is no remission’ (Heb. 9:22).” 2 Chron. 29:27—“when the burnt offering began, the song of Jehovah began also.”

(f) It alone gives proper place to the death of Christ as the central feature of his work,—set forth in the ordinances, and of chief power in Christian experience.

Martin Luther, when he had realized the truth of the Atonement, was found sobbing before a crucifix and moaning: “Für mich! für mich!”—“For me! for me!”Elisha Kane, the Arctic explorer, while searching for signs of Sir John Franklin and his party, sent out eight or ten men to explore the surrounding region. After several days three returned, almost crazed with the cold—thermometer fifty degrees below zero—and reported that the other men were dying miles away. Dr. Kane organized a company of ten, and though suffering himself with an old heart-trouble, led them to the rescue. Three times he fainted during the eighteen hours of marching and suffering; but he found the men. “We knew you would come! we knew you would come, brother!” whispered one of them, hardly able to speak. Why was he sure Dr. Kane would come? Because he knew the stuff Dr. Kane was made of, and knew that he would risk his life for any one of them. It is a parable of Christ's relation to our salvation. He is our elder brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and he not only risks death, but he endures death, in order to save us.