1. Christ's Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
1. Christ's Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
1. Christ's Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
1. Christ's Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
1. Christ's Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
1. Christ's Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
1. Christ's Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows:—
(a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.
We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.
We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that[pg 714]holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation; and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute, can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another; and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation.
(b) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.
We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.
We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God's creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God's ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God's being.
(c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God's holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.
Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.
Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares inRom. 8:3—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco:“When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul's gospel; seeRom. 3:25sq.”But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ;“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”(2 Cor. 5:19); Christ was the condemner, as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin-bearer.
(d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience, and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin's penalty, humanity ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and satisfies the demands of holiness.
My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.
My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe. Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive, but which indicate the working in him of an[pg 715]absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God's love flows into us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:“Our loves in higher love endure.”No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed;“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work”(Phil. 2:12, 13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being (Col. 2:10;Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson:“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.”This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (John 1:4, 9). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.
(e) While Christ's love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.
Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.
Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God“might himself be just”(Rom. 3:26); and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God's righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ's suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn,“Love's Redeeming Work is Done,”expressed the believer's joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea ofsubstitutionthe idea ofsharing. Christ's doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race.
(f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.
The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.
The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin;“in all our affliction he has been afflicted”(Is. 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say:“Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation”(Ps. 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of[pg 716]the love that provided, man's redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God's suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180.
(g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it, and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and Christ's victory, or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.
We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.
We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord“fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body's sake, which is the church”(Col. 1:24). The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ's sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner's heart and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole evangelical system is weakened, God's righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God; while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God's constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.