6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.
In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory[pg 751]can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object of Christ's death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ's relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.
Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).
Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ's sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God's wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment; (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ's endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.
Adolphe Monod said well:“Save first the holy law of my God,—after that you shall save me.”Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The necessity of Christ's satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.”And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”SeeJohn 12:32—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die.”Christ was“lifted up”: 1. as a propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men, Jesus being as“the serpent lifted up in the wilderness”(John 3:14), and we overcoming“because of the blood of the Lamb”(Rev. 12:11).
First,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.
The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially ill-deserving. As we who are made in God's image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others' wickedness, but our own wickedness, be visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God's nature that penalty follow sin.
The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.
The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.”Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes:“First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to have redemption By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.”Richard II, 4:1—“The world's Ransom, blessed Mary's Son.”Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from[pg 752]his Father's wrathful curse.”Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.”Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that died for all!”All's Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.”See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.
Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God's being against moral evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ's penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.
John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”
John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489):“Ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself [i. e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”Quarles's Emblems:“O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”
Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question:‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”
This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.
Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”
Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (Heb. 9:12). He is‘full of grace’—forgiving grace—but he is‘full of truth’also, and so‘the only-begotten from the Father’(John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.”Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation, affirms as follows:“On the contrary the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity. Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.
“The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin.... Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of man he bore all that[pg 753]which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows.”
Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.
The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.[pg 754]Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.
The great classical passage with reference to the atonement isRom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith is Jesus.”Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read:—“whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”
Exposition of Rom. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the“righteousness of God”(= the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in1:18-3:20, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation, and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer's comments upon this passage.
“Verse 25.‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’i. e., in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ,‘for the display of his[judicial and punitive]righteousness,’which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited.‘On account of the passing-by of sins that had previously taken place,’i. e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon and punishment.‘In virtue of the forbearance of God’expresses the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ's sacrifice, God's administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement is God's answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.
“Verse 26.εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God'sbeing just, and secondly, hisappearing justin consequence of this.Justus et justificans, instead ofjustus et condemnans, this is thesummum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”
We repeat what was said on pages719,720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God mayappearrighteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ's suffering is that God mayberighteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself. SeeHeb. 2:10—it“became”God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer;cf.Zech. 6:8—“they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country”—the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.
Charnock:“He who once‘quenched the violence of fire’for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God's anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.”The same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful God”—cf.Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”“Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.
Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement 1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord's endurance of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it.‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’(2 Cor. 9:15).”Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”
See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards's Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.
Secondly,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.
The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God's holiness demands Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.
Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.
Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?”We would change the form of the question, so that it should read:“What must be Christ's relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?”Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism, of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ's obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ's organic union with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.
Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions:“1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate.[pg 755]A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them.... Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”
Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that“2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.”If Christ's union with the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.
We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ's union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ's sharing of man's life justly and inevitably subjected him to man's exposures and liabilities, and especially to God's condemnation on account of sin.
In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.
In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord's representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature.“He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.”J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.”In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth:“In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world's sin on (notin) a world-soul.”
G. B. Foster, onMat. 26:53, 54—“Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”“On this‘must be’the Scripture is based, not this‘must be’on the Scripture. The‘must be’was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each part,—Rom. 12:5—‘members one of another.’As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”
Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son[pg 756]that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it.... One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.”The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey's own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.
Christ's share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell. The consequences of Adam's sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness; (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.