B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system.(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.[pg 725](d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
(a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.
For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.
For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr's view, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171.Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change God's symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God's sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo:“God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”Compare with this the ghosts in Homer's Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bähr's view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.”Jahn, Bib. Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the presentation shall be destroyed.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:“Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before arguments.”“The old dispensation was God's great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?[pg 723]The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.”OnEph. 1:7—“the blood of Christ,”as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament.
(b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and, thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.
Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).
Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, 338sq.—“The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”
Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be done by the priest.”In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus:“Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.”And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.
Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer's Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is“no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.”But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.”We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by substitutionary suffering.
Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith's explanation that[pg 724]sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The“bursting forth of the blood”satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith onIsaiah 53(2:364)—“Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”
Satisfactionmeans simply that there is a principle in God's being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson:“Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God's satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted:“For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me”(Rom. 15:3;cf.Ps. 69:9).
(c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God's method of salvation.
Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.
Heb. 9:13, 14—“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”10:3, 4—“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”Christ's death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.
Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command:“An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings”(Ex. 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says:“new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you”(Is. 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simplyheartlesssacrifice; else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple.Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when“the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah”(Micah 4:1, 2).Hos. 6:6—“I desire goodness, and not sacrifice,”is interpreted by what follows,“and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”CompareProv. 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel's words:“to obey is better than sacrifice”(1 Sam. 15:22). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God's theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (Is. 6:1-8). Jer. 7:22—“I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice.”Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart.
(d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon the victim's head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.
Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.
Lev. 1:4—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”;4:20—“Thus shall he do with the bullock; as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so31and35—“and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so5:10, 16;6:7.Lev. 17:11—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”
The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses:Job 42:7-9—“My wrath is kindled against thee[Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering”;cf.33:24—“Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”;1:5—Job offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said,“It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts”;Gen. 8:20—Noah“offered burnt-offerings on the altar”;21—“and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.”
That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain fromLev. 16:1-34—the account of the sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also fromGen. 22:13—“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead of his son”;Ex. 32:30-32—where Moses says:“Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”See alsoDeut. 21:1-9—the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:389, says:“Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.”InIs. 53:1-12—“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin”—the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.
Wallace, Representative Responsibility:“The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest and the sacrifice wereone symbol. [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his own person,—another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground.‘In the blood is the life.’The life is reserved by God. It is givenforman, but nottohim. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, forourlife.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race. But he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ's death.”
This following is a tentative scheme of theJewish Sacrifices. The general reason for sacrifice is expressed inLev. 17:11(quoted above). I.For the individual: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation):Lev. 4:14, 20, 31. 2. The trespass-offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of omission:[pg 726]Lev. 5:5, 6. 3. The burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness:Lev. 1:3(the offering of Mary,Luke 2:24). II.For the family: The Passover:Ex. 12:27. III.For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice:Ex. 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement:Lev. 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the justification—by putting away sin.
Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby:‘My flesh ... which I will give ... for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’(John 6:51, 57).”
Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great day of atonement“the double offering—one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,”i. e., Satan. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”
On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle's Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test.
(e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man's expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man's own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.
Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”
Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history.Heb. 11:4—“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts”—here it may be argued that since Abel's faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.Gen. 4:3, 4—“Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”
It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated inGen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah:“Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of[pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.”We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.
OnGen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said,‘if thou doest well(lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly)shalt thou not be accepted?’But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is‘the way of Cain’(Jude 11).”Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,‘This is now bone of my bones....’(Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.”Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of theoriginalman was probably a prayer, the first action offallenman a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler:“By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”
(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.
“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”
“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead[pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words:‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’(John 1:29).”
A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it becamefunctum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”
For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.”Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual,e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.
With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?
“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, deathwithJesus, regeneration.
“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”