These chapters need to have it said
that they were given as extempore lectures from rough notes to a
gathering, largely of young ministers, in connection with Rev. Dr.
Campbell Morgan's annual conference at Mundesley, Norfolk. They
were taken down in shorthand and then carefully revised. They took
place in July, 1909, immediately after the delivery of my
Congregational Lecture on the Person and Place of Christ,
which they supplement - especially when taken with my Cruciality
of the Cross a few months before. It will be seen from the
conditions that the book cannot pretend to be more than a higher
kind of popularisation, though this is less true of the two last
chapters, which have been more worked over. The style approaches in
parts a conversational familiarity which would have been out of
place in addressing theological experts. And as some of the ideas
are unfamiliar I have not been too careful to avoid repetition. My
hope is to be of some use to those ministers who are still at a
stage when they are seeking more footing on such matters than they
have been provided with in mere Biblical or Historical Theology.
There is no region where religion becomes so quickly theology as in
dealing with the work of Christ. No doctrine takes us so straight
to the heart of things, or so forces on us a discussion of the
merits of the case, the dogmatic of it, as distinct from its
scriptural or its ecclesiastical career. No doctrine draws so
directly on the personal religion of sinful men, and none,
therefore, is open to so much change in the course of the Church's
thought upon its growing faith and life. Thus when we consider that
here we are at once where the form may change most in time and yet
the feet be most firmly set for eternity, we realize how difficult
and delicate our task must be. And we are made to feel as if the
due book on such a theme could only be written from behind the veil
with the most precious blood that ever flowed in human veins.
We are in a time when a spirituality
without positive content seems attractive to many minds. And the
numbers may grow of those favouring an undogmatic Christianity
which is without apostolic or evangelical substance, but cultivates
a certain emulsion of sympathetic mysticism, intuitional belief,
and benevolent action. Among lay minds of a devout and social but
impatiently practical habit, this is not unlikely to spread; and
particularly among those whose public interests get the upper hand
of ethical and historical insight and denude their religion of most
of the reflection it demands.
Upon undogmatic, undenominational
religion no Church can live. With mere spirituality the Church has
not much directly to do; it is but a subjective thing; and its
favour with many may be but another phase of the uncomprehending
popular reverence (not to say superstition) for the recluse
religionist, the mysterious ecstatic, and the ascetic pietist. What
Christian faith and the Christian Church have to do with is
holy spirituality - the spirituality of the Holy Spirit of
our Redemption. The Christian revelation is not "God is a spirit,"
nor is it "God is love." Each of these great words is now much used
to discredit the more positive faith from whose midst John wrote
them down. Herein is love, not in affection but in propitiation (
It is upon such faith alone, given
by the Cross alone, that a Church can live - upon the faith that
founded it - upon a positive New Testament Gospel. Of that Gospel
the Church is the trustee. And the Church betrays its trust and
throws its life and its Lord away when it says, "Be beautifully
spiritual and believe as you like," or "Do blessed good and think
as you please."
There is timely saying of that
searching Christian genius Kierkegaard - the great and melancholy
Dane in whom Hamlet was mastered by Christ:
"For long the tactics have been: use
every means to move as many as you can - to move everybody if
possible - to enter Christianity. Do not be too curious whether
what they enter is Christianity. My tactics have been, with
God's help, to use every means to make it clear what the demand of
Christianity really is - if not one entered it."
The statement is extreme; but that
way lies the Church's salvation - in its anti-Nicene relation to
the world, its pre-Constantinian, non-established, relation to the
world, and devotion to the Word. Society is hopeless except for the
Church. And the Church has nothing to live on but the Cross that
faces and overcomes the world. It cannot live on a cross which is
on easy terms with the world as the apotheosis of all its aesthetic
religion, or the classic of all its ethical intuition. The work of
Christ, rightly understood, is the final spiritual condition of all
the work we may aspire to do in converting society to the kingdom
of God.
What I am going to say is not
directly unto edification, but indirectly it is so must certainly.
Directly it is rather for that instruction which is a need in our
Christian life as essential as edification. We cannot do without
either. On the one hand instruction with no idea of edification at
all becomes mere academical discourse. It may begin anywhere and it
may end anywhere. On the other hand, edification without
instruction very soon becomes a feeble and ineffective thing. I
think a great many of us would be agreed that part of the poverty
and weakness of the Church at the present moment is due to the fact
that edification has been pursued to the neglect of instruction. We
have been a little too prone to dwell upon the simple side of the
gospel. All our capital is in small circulation. We have not put by
a reserve, as it were. And therefore the simplicity itself has
become unsettled and ineffectual, confused and confusing.
I ask your attention to certain
aspects of our Christian faith which perhaps do not lie immediately
upon the surface, but which are yet the condition of the Church's
continued energy and success in the world. I suppose there is
nobody here who does not believe in the Church. At any rate, what I
propose to say will be said entirely from that standpoint. We
believe in the Holy Catholic Church. My contention would be that,
apart from such a position as I desire to bring to your notice -
some real apostolic belief in the real work of Jesus Christ - apart
from that no Church can continue to exist. That is the point of
view which I take at the outset. The Church is precious, not in
itself, but because of God's purpose with it. It is there because
of what God has done for it. It is there, more particularly,
because of what Christ has done, and done in history. It is there
solely to serve the Gospel.
It is impossible not to observe at
the present day that the Church is under a cloud. You cannot take
any division of it, in any country of the world, without feeling
that that is so. Therefore I will begin by making quite a bold
statement; and I should be quite prepared, given time and
opportunity, to devote a whole week to making it good. The
statement is that the Church of Christ is the greatest and finest
product of human history. It is the greatest thing in the universe.
That is in complete defiance of the general view and tendency of
society at the present moment. I say the Church is the greatest and
finest product of human history; because it is not really a product
of human history, but the product of the Holy Spirit within
history. It stands for the new creation, the New Humanity, and it
has that in trust. The man who has a slight acquaintance with
history is ready to bridle at a statement like that. He says:
"Consider what the Roman Church has done; consider how obscurantist
many sections of the Protestant Church are; consider the
ineffectual position of the Church in modern civilization - and
what nonsense to talk about the Church as the greatest and finest
product of human history!" True enough, the authority of the Church
is failing in many quarters. And that does not mean only the
external authority of what you might call a statutory Church, a
great institutional Church, a great organized Church like Rome, for
example. It means much more than that. It means that the authority
of the whole Church is weakened in respect of the inward and
spiritual matter which it contains and preaches, and which makes it
what it is. The Church is there as the vehicle of the power of the
Holy Ghost and of the authority of the saving God - a God, that is,
who is saving not groups here and there, but the whole of human
society. But a spiritual authority for man altogether is at a
discount. Perhaps we have brought that in some measure upon
ourselves. Perhaps, too, it was historically necessary. But,
necessary or not, it is a matter of fact that our Protestantism has
developed often into a masterless individualism which is as deadly
to Christian life as an over-organized institution like Rome. Many
spiritual people today find it difficult to make their choice
between the two extremes. Without going into the historic causes of
the situation, let us recognize the situation. Spiritual authority,
especially that of the Church, is for the time being at a great
discount.
The Church is valuable as the organ
of Christian grace, and truth, and power. But what do we find
offered us in place of the Church? Those who attack the Church most
seriously, and disbelieve in it most thoroughly, are not proposing
simply to level the Church to the ground in the sense of destroying
any religious society. What they want to do is to put some other
kind of society in the place of the Church. For they say, as we all
say, that it is impossible for religion, certainly impossible for
Christianity, to exist without a social body in which it is
cultivated and has its effect. Therefore, those who are opposed to
the Church most bitterly are yet not prepared to make a total
desert. But they put all kinds of organizations, fancy
organizations and fancy religions, in its place. Take the great
movement in the direction of Socialism. Take the Socialist programs
that you find so plentifully everywhere. What do these various
organizations mean? What do all these organizations mean which
profess to embody human brotherhood, and are represented by Trades
Unions, Co-operation, Fraternities, Guilds, Socialism? What is it
they all confess? That some social vehicle there must be. You
cannot promote Anarchy itself without associations for the purpose.
So that the very existence of these rival organizations is a
confession of the one fundamental principle of the Church, namely,
that the human ideal, that religion in the true sense of the word,
cannot do without a social habitation. They put in their own way
what we put in our way (and we think a better way), that there must
be a Church builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
Our individualisms have been troubling and weakening us so much
that everybody is looking away to some form of human life which
shall have the advantages of individualism without its perils. The
pietistic form of individualism did in its day great service. But
it is out of date. Rationalistic individualism, again, taking shape
in political radicalism, has done good work in its day. That also
seems going out of date. The value of the new movement is its -
shall I say - solidarity; which is a confession of that social,
fraternal principle which finds its consummation really, and its
power only, in the Church of Christ.
When we look at these rival
organizations (and they are many, and some will occur to you which
I have not named), we can, I think, gather most of them under one
head. In contrast with the Church the various social forms that are
offered to us today would build society upon a natural basis, the
basis of natural brotherhood, natural humanity, natural goodness -
on human nature. And the issue between the Church and the chief
rivals of the Church is an issue between society upon this natural
basis, and society upon a supernatural basis. Our Christian belief
is based upon the work of Christ; and we hold that human society
can only continue to exist in final unity upon that same
supernatural basis. It is an issue, therefore, between human nature
deified and human nature saved; between mere sympathy and faith -
faith taken in a quite positive and definite sense. We think that a
brotherhood of mere sympathy, however warm it can be at a
particular moment, has no stay in it, no eternal promise. The
eternal promise is with supernatural faith. Do you ever believe
otherwise? I hope you have been so tempted; because having got over
it you will be very much better for having gone through it. I wish
much more of our belief had gone through troubled scenes and come
to its rest; we should make far greater impression upon men if we
gave them to feel we had fought our way to the peace and power we
have. Well, were you ever tempted to believe that Christianity is
just human nature at its best? That is the most powerful and
dangerous plea that is put forward just now in challenge of our
Christian position and Church. Is the Kingdom of God just our
natural spirituality and altruism developed? Is it just the spirit
of religion or self-sacrifice, which you often find in human
nature, developed to its highest? Is that the Kingdom of God? I
trust you believe not - that human nature is not capable, by all
the finest sacrifices it might develop, of saving, or ensuring
itself, and setting up the Kingdom of God. Take the best side of
human nature, that side which moves men to unselfishness and
sacrifice, the side that comes out in many a heroic battle, in the
silent battles of our civilization, where the victims get no
applause and no reputation for their heroism whatever. Take the
best side of human nature, illustrated in every coalpit accident
and every such thing, in countless quiet homes of poverty, where
lives are being worked down to the bone and ground to death toiling
and slaving for others. Take the vast mass of fatherhood and
motherhood living for the children only. Take that best side of
human nature, make the most of it, and then put this question: "How
does man's noblest work differ from Christ's great work?" That is
the question to which I desire to attract your attention today. How
does man's best work differ from Christ's great work?
Let me begin with a story which was
reported in the Belgian papers some years ago. Two passenger trains
were coming in opposite directions at full speed. As they
approached the station, it was found the levers would not work,
owing to the frost, and the points could not be set to clear the
trains of each other. A catastrophe seemed to be inevitable; when a
signalman threw himself flat between the rails, and with his hands
held the tie-rod in such a way that the points were properly set
and kept; and he remained thus while the train thundered over him,
in great danger of having his head carried away by the low-hung
gear of the Westinghouse brake. When the train had passed, he
quietly rose and returned to his work.
I offer you some reflections on this
incident. It is the kind of incident that may be multiplied
indefinitely. I offer you certain reflections, first, on some of
its analogies with Christ's work, and secondly, on some of its
differences.
1. This man, in a very true sense,
died and rose again. His soul went through what he would have gone
through if he had never risen from the track. He gave himself; and
that is all a man can give at last. His deed had the moral value
which it would have had if he had lost his life. He laid it down,
but it did not please God to take it. Like Abraham's sacrifice of
Isaac, it was complete and acceptable, even though not accepted.
The man's rising from the ground - was it not really a resurrection
from the dead? It was not simply a return to his post. He went back
another man. He went back a heavenlier man. He had died and risen,
just as if he had been called, and had gone, to God's presence -
could he but remain there. This is a death and rising again
possible to us all. If the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
do not end in producing that kind of thing amongst us, then it is
not the power of God unto salvation. These moral deaths and
resurrections are what make men of us. "In deaths oft." That is the
first point.
2. The second point is this. Not one
of the passengers in either of those trains knew until they read it
what had been done for them, nor to whom they owed their lives. It
is so with the whole world. Today it owes its existence, in a way
it but poorly understands, to the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. That is the permanent element in Christianity -the Cross
and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And yet it is nothing to all them
that pass by. Under the feet of those travelers in Belgium there
had taken place one of those deeds that are the very soul and glory
of life, and they had no idea of it. Perhaps some of them were at
the very moment grumbling at the staff of the railway for some
small grievance or other. It is useful to remember, when we are
inclined to grumble thus, what an amount of devotion to duty goes
to make it possible for us to travel as safely as we do - far more
than can be acknowledged by the payment of a wage. These people
were ploughing along in safety over one of the railway staff lying
in a living grave. I say it is so with the whole civilized world.
Its progress is like that of the train; it seldom stops to think
that its safety is owing to a divine death and resurrection, much
more than heroic. The safety of that train was not due to the
mechanism. The mechanism had gone wrong. It was not due to
organization, or to work done from fear of punishment. Heroic duty
raised to martyrdom saved the whole train. And the world's progress
is saved today because of a death and resurrection of which it
knows little and mostly cares to know less. "Propter Jesum non
quoerimus Jesum." The success of Christ hides Him. It is the
death of Christ that is the chief condition of modern progress. It
is not civilization that keeps civilization safe and progressive.
It is that power which was in Jesus Christ and culminated in His
death and resurrection. When people read the Bible, and get behind
the Bible, and that principle comes home to them, it may sometimes
be like the shock that those travelers would receive when they read
in the newspaper of their risk and deliverance.
3. Another point. And I am now
coming on to the difference. This man died for people who would
thrill with the sense of what they owed him as soon as they read
about it. His act appeals to the instinct which is ready to spring
to life in almost every breast. You felt the response at once when
I told you the story. Some of you may have even felt it keenly. Do
you ever feel as keenly about the devoted death of Christ? Perhaps
you never have. You have believed it, of course, but it never came
home to you and gripped you as the stories of the kind I instance
do You see the difference between Christ's death and every case of
human heroism. I am moving to answer that question I put a moment
ago as to whether the development of the best in human nature would
ever give us the work of Christ and the Kingdom of God. I have been
illustrating one of the finest things in human nature, and I am
asking whether, if that were multiplied indefinitely, we should yet
have the effect which is produced by the death of Christ, or which
is still to be produced by it in God's purpose. No, there is a
difference between Christ's death and every case of heroism.
Christ's was a death on behalf of people within whom the power of
responding had to be created. Everybody thrills to that story I
told you, and to every similar story. The power of response is
lying there in the human heart ready - it only needs to be touched.
There is in human nature a battery charged with admiration for such
things; you have only to put your knuckle to it and out comes the
spark. But when we are dealing with the death of Christ we are in
another position. Christ's was a death on behalf of people in whom
the power of responding had to be created. We are all afraid of
death, and rise to the man who delivers us from it. But we are not
afraid of that worse thing than death from which Christ came to
deliver us. Christ's death was not a case of heroism simply, it was
a case of redemption. It acted upon dull and dead hearts. It was a
death which had to evoke a feeling not only latent but paralyzed,
not only asleep but dead. What does Paul say? "While we were yet
without strength, Christ died for us" - without power, without
feeling, as the full meaning is.
Let me illustrate. Take a poet like
Wordsworth. When he began to publish his poetry he was received,
just as Browning was received later, with ridicule and contempt.
The greatest critic of the time began an article in the leading
critical organ of the day by saying, "This will never do." But it
has done; and it has done for Jeffrey's critical reputation. Lord
Jeffrey wrote himself down as one who was incapable of gauging the
future, however much he might be capable of understanding the
literature of the past. Some of you may remember - I remember
perfectly well - the same kind of thing in the penny papers about
Browning when he was fighting for recognition. I remember, when I
was a student, reading articles in luminaries like The
Standard which sneered and jeered at Browning, just as smaller
men today would sneer at men of like originality. But Wordsworth
and Browning have conquered. I take another case. Turner was
assailed with even more ridicule when he exposed his works to the
British public. What would have happened to Turner if Ruskin had
not arisen to be his prophet I do not know. His pictures might not
even have been moldering in the cellars of the National Gallery.
They might have been selling at little second-hand shops in back
streets for ten shillings to any one who had eyes in his head.
Wordsworth, Browning, and Turner were all people of such original
and unprecedented genius that there was no taste and interest for
them when they appeared; they had to create the very power of
understanding themselves. A poet of less original genius, a great
genius but less of a genius, like Tennyson, comes along, and he
writes about the "May Queen" and "The Northern Farmer," and all
those simple, elementary things which immediately fetch the
handkerchiefs out. Now no doubt to do that properly takes a certain
amount of genius. But it taps the prompt and fluent emotions; and
the misfortune is that kind of work is easily counterfeited and
abused by those who wish to exploit our feelings rather than exalt
them. It is a more easy kind of thing than was done by those great
geniuses I first named. Original poets like Wordsworth and Browning
had to create the taste for their work.
Now in like manner Christ had to
make the soul which should respond to Him and understand Him. He
had to create the very capacity for response. And that is where we
are compelled to recognize the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as well
as the doctrine of the Savour. We are always told that faith is the
gift of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. The reason why we are
told that, and must be told it, lies in the direction I have
indicated. The death of Christ had not simply to touch like
heroism, but it had to redeem us into power of feeling its own
worth. Christ had to save us from what we were too far gone to
feel. Just as the man choked with damp in a mine, or a man going to
sleep in arctic cold, does not realize his danger, and the sense of
danger has to be created within him, so the violent action of the
Spirit takes men by force. The death of Christ must call up more
than a responsive feeling. It is not satisfied with affecting our
heart. That is mere impressionism. It is very easy to impress an
audience. Every preacher knows that there is nothing more simple
than to produce tears. You have only to tell a certain number of
stories about dying children, lifeboats, fire escapes, and so on,
and you can make people thrill. But the thrill is neither here nor
there. What is the thrill going to end in? What is the meaning of
the thrill for life? If it is not ending as it should, and not
ending for life, it is doing harm, not good, because it is sealing
the springs of feeling and searing the power of the spiritual
life.
What the work of Christ requires is
the tribute not of our admiration or even gratitude, not of our
impressions or our thrills, but of ourselves and our shame. Now we
are coming to the crux of the matter - the tribute of our shame.
That death had to make new men of us. It had to turn us not from
potential friends to actual, but from enemies into friends. It had
not merely to touch a spring of slumbering friendship. There was a
new creation. The love of God - I quote Paul, who did understand
something of these things - the love of God is not merely evoked
within us, it is "shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit
which is given to us." That is a very different thing from simply
having the reservoir of natural feeling tapped. The death of Christ
had to do with our sin and not with our sluggishness. It had to
deal with our active hostility, and not simply with the passive
dullness of our hearts. Our hostility - that is what the easy-going
people cannot be brought to recognize. That is what the shallow
optimists, who think we can now dispense with emphasis on the death
of Christ, feel themselves able to do - to ignore the fact that the
human heart is enmity against God, against a God who makes demands
upon it; who goes so far as to make demands for the whole, the
absolute obedience of self. Human nature puts its back up against
that. That is what Paul means when he speaks about human nature,
the natural man - the carnal man is a bad translation - being
enmity against God. Man will cling to the last rag of his
self-respect. He does not part with that when he thrills, admires,
sympathizes; but he does when he has to give up his whole self in
the obedience of faith. How much self-respect do you think Paul had
left in him when he went into Damascus? Christ, with the demand for
saving obedience, arouses antagonism in the human heart. And so
will the Church that is faithful to Him. You hear people of the
type I have been speaking about saying, If only the Church had been
true to Christ's message it would have done wonders for the world.
If only Christ were preached and practiced in all His simplicity to
the world, how fast Christianity would spread. Would it? Do you
really find that the deeper you get into Christ and the meaning of
His demands Christianity spreads faster in your heart? Is it not
very much the other way? When it comes to close quarters you have
actually to be got down and broken, that the old man may be
pulverized and the new man created from the dust. Therefore when we
hear people abusing the Church and its history the first thing we
have to say is, Yes, there is a great deal too much truth in what
you say, but there is also a greater truth which you are not
allowing for, and it is this. One reason why the Church has been so
slow in its progress in mankind and its effect on human history is
because it has been so faithful to Christ, so faithful to His
Cross. You have to subdue the most intractable, difficult, and slow
thing in the world - man's self-will. You cannot expect rapid
successes if you truly preach the Cross whereon Christ died, and
which He surmounted not simply by leaving it behind but by rising
again, and converting the very Cross into a power and glory.
Christ arouses antagonism in the
human heart and heroism does not. Everybody welcomes a hero. The
minority welcome Christ. We do resent His absolute command. We do
resent parting completely with ourselves. We do resent Christ.
4. I go back to the word I spoke
about the tribute of our shame. The demand is unsparing,
remorseless. It is not simply that you are called on by God for a
certain due, a change, an amendment, but for the tribute of
yourself and your shame. When you heard about that heroism of my
story, when you thrilled to it, I wonder did you pat yourself on
the back a little for being capable of thrilling to things so high,
so fine? When you thrilled to that story you felt a certain
satisfaction with yourself because there was as much of the God in
you as allowed you to be capable of thrilling to such heroisms. You
felt, If I am capable of thrilling to such things, I cannot be such
a bad sort. But when you felt the meaning of Christ's death for
you, did you ever pat yourself on the back? The nearer the Cross
came to you, the deeper it entered into you, were you the more
disposed to admire yourself? There is no harm in your feeling
pleased with yourself because you were able to thrill to these
human heroisms; but if the impression Christ makes upon you is to
leave you more satisfied with yourself, more proud of yourself for
being able to respond, He has to get a great deal nearer to you
yet. You need to be - I will use a Scottish phrase which old
ministers used to apply to a young minister when he had preached a
"thoughtful and interesting discourse" - you need to be well shaken
over the mouth of the pit. The great deep classic cases of
Christian experience bear testimony to that. Christ and His Cross
come nearer and nearer, and we do not realize what we owe Him until
we realize that He has plucked us from the fearful pit, and the
miry clay, and set us upon a rock of God's own founding. The
meaning of Christ's death rouses our shame, self-contempt, and
repentance. And we resent being made to feel ashamed of ourselves,
we resent being made to feel ashamed of ourselves, we resent being
made to repent. A great many people are afraid to come too near to
anything that does that for them. That is a frequent reason for not
going to church.
5. Again, continuing. You would have
gone a long way to see this Belgian man. You would have gazed upon
him with something of reverence, certainly with admiration. You
would have regarded him as one received back from the dead. You
think, If all men were like that, the world would be heaven. Well,
there are a great many more like that than we think, who daily
imperil their life for their duty. But supposing every man and
woman in the world were up to that pitch, and supposing you added
them all together and took the total value of their moral heroism
(if moral quantities were capable of being summed like that), would
you then have the equivalent of the deed and death of Christ? No,
indeed! If you took all the world, and made heroes of them all, and
kept them heroic all their lives, instead of only in one act, still
you would not get the value, the equivalent, of Christ's sacrifice.
It is not the sum of all heroisms. It would be more true to say it
is the source of all heroisms, the foundation of them all. It is
the underground something that makes heroisms, not something that
heroisms make up. When Christ did what He did, it was not human
nature doing it, it was God doing it. That is the great, absolutely
unique and glorious thing. It is God in Christ reconciling. It was
not human nature offering its very best to God. It was God offering
His very best to man. That is the grand difference between the
Church and civilization, even when civilization is religious. We
must attend more to those great issues between our faith and our
world. Our religion has been too much a thing done in a corner. We
must adjust our religion to the great currents and movements of the
world's history. And the great issue of the hour is the issue
between the Church and civilization. Their essential difference is
this. Civilization at its best represents the most man can do with
the world and with human nature; but the Church, centered upon
Christ, His Cross, and His work, represents the best that God can
do upon them. The sacrifice of the Cross was not man in Christ
pleasing God; it was God in Christ reconciling man, and in a
certain sense, reconciling Himself. My point at this moment is that
the Cross of Christ was Christ reconciling man. It was not heroic
man dying for a beloved and honored God; it was God in some form
dying for man. God dying for man. I am afraid of that phrase; I
cannot do without it. God dying for man; and for such men -hostile,
malignantly hostile men. That is a puzzling phrase where we read in
a gospel: "Greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down
his life for his friends." There is more love in the phrase of the
epistle, that a man should lay down his life for his bitter
enemies. It is not so heroic, so very divine, to die for our
friends. Kindness between the nice people is not so very divine -
fine and precious as it is. To die for enemies - that is the divine
thing. Christ's was grace that died for such for malignant enemies.
There is more in God than love. There is all that we mean by His
holy grace. Truly, "God is love." Yes, but the kind of love which
you must interpret by the whole of the New Testament. When John
said that, did he mean that God was simply the consummation of
human affection? He knew that he was dealing with a holy, gracious
God, a God who loved His enemies and redeemed them. Read with
extreme care
6. Let me gather up the points of
difference which I have been indication.
First, that Belgian hero did not act
from love so much as from duty. Secondly, he died only in one act,
not in his whole life, dying daily. There have been men capable of
acts of sacrifice like this hero; loose-living men who, after a
heroism, were quite capable of returning to their looseness of life
- heroes of the Bret Harte type. There have been many valiant,
fearless things done on the battlefield by men who in the face of
bullets never flinched, never turned a hair; and when they came
home they could not stand against a breath of ridicule, they could
not stand against a little temptation, and were soon wallowing in
the mire. One act of sacrifice is not the same thing as a life
gathered into one consummate sacrifice, whose value is that it has
the whole personality put into it for ever.
Third, this man could not take the
full measure of all that he was doing, and Christ could. Christ did
not go to His death with His eyes shut. He died because He willed
to die, having counted the cost with the greatest, deepest moral
vision in the world.
Fourthly, the hero in the story had
nothing to do with the moral condition of those whom he saved. The
scoundrel and the saint in that train were both alike to him.
Again, he had no quarrel with those
whom he saved. He had nothing to complain of. He had nothing from
them to try his heroism. They were not his bitter enemies. His
valour was not the heroism of forgiveness, where lies the wondrous
majesty of God. His act was not an act of grace, which is the grand
glory of the love of Christ. Christ died for people who not only
did not know Him, but who hated and despised Him. He died, not for
a trainful of people, but for the whole organic world of people. It
was an infinite death, that of His, in its range and in its power.
It was death for enemies more bitter than anything that man can
feel against man, for such haters as only holiness can produce.
Here is the singular thing: the greater the favour that is done to
us, the more fiercely we resent it if it does not break us down and
make us grateful. The greater the favour, if we do not respond in
its own spirit, so much the more resentful and antagonistic it
makes us. I have already said that we speak too often as though the
effect of Christ's death upon human nature must be gratitude as
soon as it is understood. It is not always gratitude. Unless it is
received in the Holy Ghost, the effect may just be the other way.
It is judgment. It is a death unto death.
I conclude by saying what I have
often said, and what often needs saying, that it is not possible to
hear the gospel and to go away just as you came. I wish that were
more realized. We should not have so many sermon-hunters. If people
felt that every time they heard the gospel they were either better
or worse for it, they would be more careful about hearing. They
would not go so often, possibly; better they should not perhaps. I
am not speaking about hearing of sermons. That is neither here nor
there. A man may hear sermons and be neither the better nor the
worse. But a man cannot hear the gospel without being either better
or worse, whether he knows it or not. When you come to face the
last issues, it is either unto salvation or unto condemnation. The
great central, decisive thing, the last judgment of the world, is
the Cross of Christ. The reason why so many sermons are found
uninteresting is not always due to the dullness of the preacher.
God knows how often that is the case, but it is not always. It is
because the sermons so often turn, or ought to turn, upon the
miracle of the grace of God, which is so great a miracle that it is
strange, remote, and alien to our natural ways of thinking and
feeling. It seems foreign to us. It is like reading a guide-book if
you have never been in the country. I take down my Baedeker in the
winter and read it with the greatest delight, because I know the
country. If I had not been there I should find it the dreariest
reading. Why do not people read the Bible more? Because they have
not been in that country. There is no experience for it to stir and
develop. The Cross of Christ, the infinite wonder of it - we have
got to learn that. We have got to learn the deep meaning of that by
having been there, by the evangelical experience whose lack is the
cause of all the religious vagrancy of the hour. We have got to
learn that it was not simply magnificent heroism, but that it was
God in Christ reconciling the world. It was God that did that work
in Christ. And Christ was the living God working upon man, and
working out the Kingdom of God.
The great need of the religious
world today is a return to the Bible. That is necessary for two
reasons, negative and positive. Negatively, because the most
serious feature of the hour in the life of the Church is the
neglect of the Bible for personal use and study by religious
people. Positively, because we have today enormous advantages in
connection with that return to the Bible. Modern scholarship has
made of the Bible a new Book. It has in a certain sense
rediscovered it. You might say that the soul of the Reformation was
the rediscovery of the Bible; and in a wider sense that is true
today also. We have, through the labors of more than a century of
the finest scholarship in all the world, come to understand the
Bible, in its original sense, as it was never understood before.
These instructed scribes draw forth from their treasury things as
new as old. It is the old Book, and it is a new Book. It is the old
Book, and the precious Book, because of its power of unceasing
self-renovation. The spirit that lives within the Bible is a spirit
of constant self-preservation. One way of describing the
Reformation is to say that, since the early Gnostic centuries, it
was the greatest effort that ever took place in the Church for the
self-preservation of Christianity. Remember, the Church was not
reformed from the outside, but from the inside. It was the Church
reforming the Church. It was the Church's faith that arose, under
the Holy Spirit, and reformed the Church. So it is with the Bible.
Whatever renovation we find in connection with the Bible - I do not
here man renovation of ourselves, but renovation of our way of
understanding the Book - arises out of the Bible itself. This
remains true today, as it was true in the Reformation time,
although it is now true in a somewhat different application. The
Bible is still the best commentary upon itself. I have always done
much in my ministry in the way of expounding the Bible, and I would
say to the younger ministers particularly who are here, Do not be
afraid of that manner of preaching. I have known young ministers
who were over-scrupulous I have known them say, "If I take a long
text people will think it is because I am lazy and do not want the
labour of getting a sermon out of a small one." Never mind such
foolish people. Do not be afraid of long texts, long passages.
Preach less from verses and more from paragraphs. If I had my time
over again I would do a great deal more in that way than I have
done. Read but one lesson, and read it with elucidatory comments.
Of course some people can do that better than others. There is
always the danger that if a person try it who has no sort of knack
in that direction, the people will feel they have been let in for
two sermons instead of one; and, excellent as these might be,
people do not like to feel they have been got to church upon false
pretenses. It might even given an excuse to certain people for
omitting one of the services altogether, on the plea they had put
in the requisite amount of attention at one service. I would also
admit that if you do this it will not reduce your labour. It will
really add what might amount to another sermon to your weekly work.
It is no use doing it if you do it on the spur of the moment. If
you just say things that occur to your mind while you are reading,
you may say some banal, or some nonsensical and fantastic things.
It means careful preparation. The lesson should be prepared as
truly as the prayer should be prepared, and as the sermon should be
prepared. You have to work your way through the chapter with the
aid of the best commentary that you can get; and you have to
exercise continual judgment in doing so lest you be dragged away
into little matters of detail instead of keeping to the larger
lines of thought in the passage in hand. Then, if you do as I say,
there is this other advantage, that you can take a particular verse
out of the long passage for your sermon; and thus you come to the
sermon with an audience which you yourself have prepared to listen
to you. You have created your own atmosphere, and you have done it
on a Bible basis.
Now I will confess against myself
that sometimes, as I preach about here and there, and have done as
I have been recommending you to do, people have come to me
afterwards and said, as nicely as they could, that the sermon was
all very well, but in respect of the reading of the Scripture, they
never heard it after that fashion; they had never realized how
vivid Scripture could become. That simply results from paying
attention to the chapter with the best help. You will find, I am
sure, that your congregation will welcome it.
Supposing, then, we return to the
Bible. Supposing that the Church did - as I think it must do if it
is not going to collapse; certainly the Free Churches must -
supposing we return to the Bible, there are three ways of reading
the Bible. The first way asks, What did the Bible say? The second
way asks, What can I make the Bible say? The third way asks, What
does God say in the Bible?
The first way is, with the aid of
these magnificent scholars, to discover the true historic sense of
the Bible. There is no more signal illustration of success here
than in the case of the Prophets. During the time when theology
dominated everything and was considered to be the Church's one
grand concern, about one hundred years after the Reformation, when
its great prophets had passed away, and the Church had fallen into
different hands, the whole of the Old Testament - the Prophets
amongst the rest - was read for proof passages of theological
doctrines. Now for books like the Prophets that is absolutely fatal
- fatal to the books and to the Church; and fatal in the long run
to Christian truth. There is no greater service that has been done
to the Bible than what has been done by the scholars I speak of, in
making the Prophets live again, putting them in their true
historical setting and position. Dr. George Adam Smith, for
example, has done inestimable service in this way. And what has
been done for the Prophets has also been done for the New
Testament. Immense steps onward have been taken; and we are coming
to know with much exactness what the writer actually had in his
mind at the moment of writing, and what he was understood to have
had in his mind by those to whom he first wrote. In this way we get
rid, for example, of the idea that Paul was thinking about us who
live two thousand years after him. He was not thinking of us at
all. He did not expect the world to last a century. It is quite
another question what the Holy Spirit was thinking about. Paul was
thinking in a natural way about his age and his Churches, about
their actual situation and needs. That is another illustration of
the principle that if you want to work for immortality you must
work in the most relevant and faithful way amid the circumstances
round about you. The present duty is the path to immortality. And
so also I might illustrate in respect to the Gospels.
The second way of reading the Bible
is reading it unto edification. That is to say, we read a passage,
and we allow ourselves to receive any suggestion that may come to
us from it, and we do not stop to ask whether that was in the
writer's mind, or whether it was in the mind of the people to whom
he wrote. That is immaterial. We allow the Spirit of God to suggest
to us whatever lessons or ideas He thinks fit out of the words that
are under our eyes. We read the Bible not for correct or historic
knowledge, but for religious and spiritual purposes, for our own
private and personal needs. That is, or course, a perfectly
legitimate thing - indeed, it is quite necessary. It is the way of
reading the Bible which the large mass of the Church must always
practice. But it has its dangers. You need the other ways to
correct it. All the three must cooperate for the true use and
understanding of the Bible by the Church at large. But I am
speaking now about its use by individuals, and the danger I mean is
that the suggestiveness may sometimes become fantastic. Some
preachers fail at times in that way. They get to taking what are
called fancy texts, texts which impress the audience much more with
the ingenuity of the preacher than with his inspiration. For
instance, a preacher in the North, now dead, was preaching against
the Higher Criticism and its slicing up of the Bible, and he took
his text from Nehemiah, "He cut it with a penknife"! That is all
very well, perhaps, for a motto, but for a text it is rather a
liberty. It is not fair to the Bible to indulge in much of that at
least. If I remember rightly, Dr. Parker had a great gift in this
way, and more than sometimes it ran way with him. It is a
temptation of every witty man, and every ingenious-minded man. But
there is a peril in it, the abuse of a right principle. We are
bound, or course, to vindicate for ourselves and for others the
right to use the Bible in the suggestive way, if we are not to make
a present of it to the scholars. And that would be just as bad as
making a present of it to a race of priests. But when we read too
much in that way it is apt to become a minister to our spiritual
egotism, or, what is equally bad, our fanciful subjectivity.
Now the grand value of the bible is
just the other thing - its objectivity. The first thing is not how
I feel, but it is, How does God feel, and what has God said or done
for my soul? When we get to real close quarters with that our
feeling and response will look after itself. Do not tell people how
they ought to feel towards Christ. That is useless. It is just what
they ought that they cannot do. Preach a Christ that will make them
feel as they ought. That is objective preaching. The tendency and
fashion of the present moment is all in the direction of
subjectivity. People welcome sermons of a more or less
psychological kind, which go into the analysis of the soul or of
society. They will listen gladly to sermons on character-building,
for instance; and in the result they will get to think of nothing
else but their own character. They will be the builders of their
own character; which is a fatal thing. Learn to commit your soul
and the building of it to One who can keep it and build it as you
never can. Attend then to Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom, and
the Cause, and He will look after your soul. A consequence of this
passion for subjective and psychological analysis, for sentimental
experience and problem-preaching a real, objective, New Testament
gospel he has raised against him what is not the most fatal
accusation - even within the Christian Church it has come to be
very fatal - he is accused of being a theologian. That is a very
fatal charge to make now against any preacher. It ought to be
actionable in the way of libel. We have come to this - that if you
penetrate into the interior of the New Testament you will be
accused of being a theologian; and then it is all over with your
welcome. But that state of things has to be turned upside down,
else the Church dries into the sand. There is no message in it.
The third way of reading the Bible
is reading it to discover the purpose and thought of God, whether
it immediately edify us or whether it do not. If we did actually
become aware of the will and thought of God it would edify us as
nothing else could. No inner process, no discipline to which we
might subject ourselves, no way of cultivating subjective holiness
would do so much for us as if we could lose ourselves, and in some
godly sort forget ourselves, because we are so preoccupied with the
mind of Christ. If you want psychological analysis, analyze the
will, work, and purpose of Christ our Lord. I read a fine sentence
the other day which puts in a condensed form what I have often
preached about as the symptom of the present age: "Instead of
placing themselves at the service of God most people want a God who
is at their service." These two tendencies represent in the end two
different religions. The man who is exploiting God for the purposes
of his own soul or for the race, has in the long run a different
religion from the man who is putting his own soul and race
absolutely at the disposal of the will of God in Jesus Christ.
All this is by way of preface to an
attempt to approach the New Testament and endeavour to find what is
really the will of God concerning Christ and what Christ did.
Doctrine and life are really two sides of one Christianity; and
they are equally indispensable, because Christianity is living
truth. It is not merely truth; it is not simply life. It is living
truth. The modern man says that doctrine which does not pass into
life is dead; and then the mistake he makes is that he wants to
turn it into life directly, and to politicize it, perhaps; whereas
it works in-directly. The experience of many centuries, on the
other hand, says that Christian life which does not grow out of
Christian doctrine becomes a failure. If not in individuals, it
does in the Church. You cannot keep Christian piety alive except
upon Christian truth. You can never get a Catholic Church except by
Catholic truth. I think perhaps we all here agree about that. It is
of immense importance that we do not think entirely about our
individual souls, and that we think more about the Church, the
divine will, the divine Word, and the divine Kingdom in the world.
It is of supreme importance that we should know what the Christian
doctrine is on the great matters.
Now in connection with the work of
Christ the great expositor in the Bible is St. Paul. And Paul has a
word of his own to describe Christ's work - the word
"reconciliation." But he thinks of reconciliation not as a doctrine
but as an act of God - because he was not a theologian but an
experience preacher. To view it so produces an immense change in
your whole way of thinking. It secures for you all that is worth
having in theology, and it delivers you from the danger of
obsession by theology in a one-sided way. Remember, then, that the
truth we are dealing with is precious not as a mere truth but as
the means of expressing the eternal act of God. The most important
thing in all the world, in the Bible or out of it, is something
that God has done - for ever finally done. And it is this
reconciliation; which is only secondarily a doctrine; it is only
secondarily even a manner of life. Primarily it is an act of God.
That is to say, it is a salvation before it is a religion. For
Christianity as a religion stands upon salvation. Religion which
does not grow out of salvation is not Christian religion; it may be
spiritual, poetic, mystic; but the essence of Christianity is not
just to be spiritual; it is to answer God's manner of spirituality,
which you find in Jesus Christ and in Him crucified. Reconciliation
is salvation before it is religion. And it is religion before it is
theology. All our theology in this matter rests upon the certain
experience of the fact of God's salvation. It is salvation upon
divine principles It is salvation by a holy God. It is bound of
course, to be theological in its very nature its statement is a
theology. The moment you begin to talk about the holiness of God
you are theologians. And you cannot talk about Christ and His death
in any thorough way without talking about the holiness of God.
Christ and Him crucified, that is
the historic fact. But what do I mean when I say Christ and Him
crucified? Does it mean that a certain personality lived who was
recognized in history as Jesus Christ, and that He came by His end
by crucifixion? That in itself is worthless for religious purposes.
It is useful enough if you are writing history; but for religion
historical fact must have interpretation, and the whole of
Christianity depends upon the interpretation that is put upon such
facts. You will find people sometimes who say, "Let us have the
simple historic facts, the Cross and Christ." That is not
Christianity. Christianity is a certain interpretation of those
facts. How and why did the New Testament come into being? Was it
simply to convince posterity that those facts had taken place? Was
it simply to convince the world that Christ had risen from the
dead? If that were the grand object of the New Testament we should
have a very different Bible in our hands, one addressed to the
world and not to the Church, to critical science and not to faith;
and there would not be so much argument amongst scholars as there
is. The Bible did not come into being in order to provide future
historians with a valuable document. It came for the purposes of
interpretation. Here is a sentence I came across once: "The fact
without the word is dumb; the word without the fact is empty." It
is useful to turn it over and over in your mind.
Paul was almost the creator and the
great representative of that interpretation. It was continued on
his lines by Augustine, Anselm, Luther, and many another. But what
is it that we hear about so much today? We hear a great deal about
an undogmatic Christianity. And there is a certain plausibility in
it. If you have no theological training, no training in the
understanding of the Scripture in a serious way, that is, if you do
not know your business as ministers of the Word, it seems natural
that undogmatic Christianity should be just the thing you want.
Leave the dogma of it, you will say, to those who devote their
lives to dogma - just as though theologians were irrepressible
people who take up theology as a hobby and become the bores of the
Church! It was not a hobby to the apostles. Why, there are actually
people of a similar stamp who look upon missions as a hobby of the
Church, instead of their belonging to the very being and fidelity
of the Church. So some people think theology is a hobby, and that
theologians are persons with an uncomfortable preponderance of
intellect, who are trying to destroy the privileges secured by our
national lack of education and to sacrifice Christianity to mind.
People say we do not want so much intellect in preaching; we want
sympathy and unction. Now, I am always looking afield, and looking
forward, and thinking about the prospects of the Church in the
great world. And unction dissociated from Christian truth and
Christian intelligence has at last the sentence of the Church's
death within itself. You may cherish an undogmatic Christianity
with a sort of magnetic casing, a purely human, mystical,
subjective kind of Christ for yourself or an audience, but you
could not continue to preach that in a Church for the ages. The
Church could not live on that and do its preaching in such a world.
You could not spread a gospel like that. Subjective religion is
valuable in its place, but its place is limited. The only Cross you
can preach to the whole world is a theological one. It is not the
fact of the Cross, it is the interpretation of the Cross, the prime
theology of the Cross, what God meant by the Cross, that is
everything. That is what the New Testament came to give. That is
the only kind of Cross that can make or keep a Church.
You will say, perhaps, "Cannot I go
out and preach my impressions of the Cross?" By all means. You will
only discover the sooner that you cannot preach a Cross to any
purpose if you preach it only as an experience. If you only preach
it so you would not be an apostle; and you could not do the work of
an apostle for the Church The apostles were particular about this,
and one expressed it quite pointedly: "We preach not ourselves [not
our experiences] but Christ crucified." "We do not preach
religion," said Paul, "but God's revelation. We do not preach the
impression the Cross made upon us, but the message that God by His
Spirit sent through a Christ we experience." And so with ourselves.
We do not preach our impressions, or even our experience. These
make but the vehicle, as it were. What we preach is something much
more solid, more objective, with more stay in it; something that
can suffice when our experience has ebbed until it seems to be as
low as Christ's was in the great desertion and victory on the
Cross. We want something that will stand by us when we cannot feel
any more; we want a Cross we can cling to, not simply a subjective
Cross. That is, to put the thing in another way, what we want today
is an insight into the Cross. You see I am making a distinction
between impression and insight. It is a useful part of the Church's
work, for instance, that it should act by means of revival
services, where perhaps the dominant element may be temporary
impression. But unless that is taken up and turned to account by
something more, we all know how evanescent a thing it is apt to be.
We need, not simply to be impressed by Christ, but to see into
Christ and into His Cross. We need to deepen the impression until
it become new life by seeing into Christ. There are certain
circumstances in which we may be entitled to declare that we do not
want so many people who glibly say they love Jesus; we want more
people who can really see into Christ. We do, of course, want more
people who love Jesus; but we want a multitude of more people who
are not satisfied with that, but whose love fills them with holy
curiosity and compels them habitually to cultivate in the Spirit
the power of seeing into Christ and into His Cross. More than
impression, do we need a spirit of divination. Insight is what we
want for power - less of mere interest and more of real insight.
There are some people who talk as though, when we speak of the
Cross and the meaning of the Cross, we were spinning something out
of the Cross. Paul was not spinning anything out of the Cross. He
was gazing into the Cross, seeing what was really there with eyes
that had been unsealed and purged by the Holy Ghost.
The doctrine of Christ's
reconciliation, or His Atonement, is not a piece of mediaeval dogma
like transubstantiation, not a piece of ecclesiastical dogma or
Aristotelian subtlety which it might be the Bible's business to
destroy. If you look at the Gospels you will see that from the
Transfiguration onward this matter of the Cross is the great center
of concern; it is where the center of gravity lies. I met a man the
other day who had come under some poor and mischievous pulpit
influence, and he said, "It is time we got rid of hearing so much
about the Cross of Christ; there should be preached to the world a
humanitarian Christ, the kind of Christ that occupies the Gospels."
There was nothing for it but to tell that man he was the victim of
smatterers, and that he must go back to his Gospels and read and
study for a year or two. It is the flimsiest religiosity, and the
most superficial reading of the Gospel, that could talk like that.
What does it mean that an enormous proportion of the Gospel story
is occupied with the passion of Christ? The center of gravity, even
in the Gospels, falls upon the Cross of Christ and what was done
there, and not simply upon a humanitarian Christ. You cannot set
the Gospels against Paul. Why, the first three Gospels were much
later than Paul's Epistles. They were written for Churches that
were made by the apostolic preaching. But how, then, do the first
three Gospels seem so different from the Epistles? If
course, there is a superficial difference. Christ was a very living
and real character for the people of His own time, and His grand
business was to rouse his audiences' faith in His Person and in His
mission. But in His Person and in His mission the Cross lay latent
all the time. It emerged only in the fullness of time - that
valuable phrase - just when the historic crisis, the organic
situation, produced it. Jesus was not a professor of theology. He
did not lecture the people. He did not come with a theology of the
Cross. He did not come to force events to comply with that
theology. He did not force His own people to work out a theological
scheme. He did force an issue, but it was not to illustrate a
theology. It was to establish the Kingdom of God, which could be
established in no other wise than as He established it - upon the
Cross. And He could only teach the Cross when it had happened -
which He did through the Evangelists with the space they gave it,
and through the Apostles and the exposition they gave it.
To come back to this work of Christ
described by Paul as reconciliation. On this interpretation of the
work of Christ the whole Church rests. If you move faith from that
enter you have driven the nail into the Church's coffin. The
Church is then doomed to death, and is only a matter of time when
she shall expire. The Apostle, I say, described the work of Christ
as above all things reconciliation. And Paul was the founder of the
Church, historically speaking. I do not like to speak of Christ as
the Founder of the Church. It seems remote, detached, journalistic.
It would be far more true to say that He is the foundation of the
Church. "The Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord." The
founder of the Church, historically speaking, was Paul. It was
founded by and through him on this reconciling principle - may, I
go deeper than that, on this mighty act of God's
reconciliation. For this great act the interpretation was given to
Paul by the Holy Spirit. In this connection read that great word in
What, then, did Paul mean by this
reconciliation which is the backbone of the Church? He meant the
total result of Christ's life-work in permanently changing the
relation between collective man and God. By reconciliation Paul
meant the total result of Christ's life-work in the fundamental,
permanent, final changing of the relation between man and God,
altering it from a relation of hostility to one of confidence and
peace. Remember, I am speaking as Paul spoke, about man, and not
about individual men or groups of men.
There are two principal Greek words
connected with the idea of reconciliation, one of them being always
translated by it, the other sometimes. They are
katallassein, and hilaskesthai - reconciliation and
atonement. Atonement is an Old Testament phrase, where the idea is
that of the covering of sin from God's sight. But by whom? Who was
that great benefactor of the human race that succeeded in covering
up our sin from God's sight? Who was skillful enough to hoodwink
the Almighty? Who covered the sin? The all-seeing God alone. There
can therefore be no talk of hoodwinking. Atonement means the
covering of sin by something which God Himself had provided, and
therefore the covering of sin by God Himself. It was of course not
the blinding of Himself to it, but something very different. How
could the Judge of all the earth make His judgment blind? It was
the covering of sin by something which makes it lose the power of
deranging the covenant relation between God and man and founds the
new Humanity. That is the meaning of it.
If you think I am talking theology,
you must blame the New Testament. I am simply expounding to you the
New Testament. Of course, you need not take it unless you please.
It is quite open to you to throw the New Testament overboard (so
long as you are frank about it), and start what you may loosely
call Christianity on the floating lines. But if you take the New
Testament you are bound to try to understand the New Testament. If
you understand the New Testament you are bound to recognize that
this is what the New Testament says. It is a subsequent question
whether the New Testament is right in saying so. Let us first find
out what the Bible really says, and then discuss whether the Bible
is right or wrong.
The idea of atonement is the
covering of sin by something which God provided, and by the use of
which sin looses its accusing power, and its power to derange that
grand covenant and relationship between man and God which founds
the New Humanity. The word katallassein (reconcile) is
peculiar to Paul. He uses both words; but the other word,
"atonement," you also find in other New Testament writings.
Reconciliation is Paul's great characteristic word and thought. The
great passages are those I have mentioned at the head of this
lecture. I cannot take time to expound them here. That would mean a
long course. Read those passages carefully and check me in anything
I say - particularly, for instance,
In this connection let me offer you
two cautions. First, take care that the direct fact of
reconciliation is not hidden up by the indispensable means -
namely, atonement. There have been ages in the Church when the
attention has been so exclusively centered upon atonement that
reconciliation was lost sight of. You found theologians flying at
each other's throats in the interest of particular theories of
atonement. That is to say, atonement had obscured reconciliation.
In the same way, after the Reformation period, they dwelt upon
justification until they lost sight of sanctification altogether.
Then the great pietistic movement had to arise in order to redress
the balance. Take care that the end, reconciliation, is not hidden
up by the means, atonement. Justification, sanctification,
reconciliation and atonement are all equally inseparable from the
one central and compendious work of Christ. Various ages need
various aspects of it turned outward. Let us give them all their
true value and perspective. If we do not we shall make that fatal
severance which orthodoxy has so often made between doctrine and
life.
The second caution is this. Beware
of reading atonement out of reconciliation altogether. Beware of
cultivating a reconciliation which is not based upon justification.
The apostle's phrases are often treated like that. They are emptied
of the specific Christian meaning. There are a great many Christian
people, spiritual people of a sort, today, who are perpetrating
that injustice upon the New Testament. They are taking mighty old
words and giving them only a subjective, arbitrary meaning,
emptying out of them the essential, objective, positive content.
They are preoccupied with what takes place within their own
experience, or imagination, or thought; and they are oblivious of
that which is declared to have taken place within the experience of
God and of Christ. They are oblivious and negligent of the
essential things that Christ did, and God in Christ. That is not
fair treatment of New Testament terms - to empty them of positive
Christian meaning and water them down to make something that might
suit a philosophic or mystic or subjective or individualist
spirituality. There is a whole system of philosophy that has
attempted this dilution at the present day. It is associated with a
name that has now become very well known, the name of the greatest
philosopher the world ever saw, Hegel. I am not now going to
expound Hegelianism. But I have to allude to one aspect of it. If
you are paying any attention to what is going on around you in the
thinking world, you are bound to come face to face with some phase
of it or other. But I see my time is at an end for today.
Tomorrow I begin where I now leave
off and shall say something about this version of St. Paul's idea
of reconciliation, which is so attractive philosophically. I
remember the appeal it had for me when I came into contact with it
first. I did feel that it seemed to give a largeness to certain New
Testament terms, which I finally found was a largeness of latitude
only. If it did seem to give breadth it did not give depth. And I
close here by reminding you of this - that while Christ and
Christianity did come to make us broad men, it did not come to do
that in the first instance. It came to make us deep men. The living
interest of Christ and of the Holy Spirit is not breadth, but it is
depth. Christ said little that was wide compared with what He said
piercing and searching. I illustrate by referring you to an
interest that is very prominent amongst you - the interest of
missions. How did modern missions arise? I mean the last hundred
years of them. Modern Protestant missions are only one hundred
years old. Where did they begin? Who began them? They began at the
close of the eighteenth century, the century whose close was
dominated by philosophers, by scientists, by a reasonable, moderate
interpretation of religion, by broad humanitarian religion. Of
course, you might expect it was amongst those broad people that
missions arose. We know better. We know that the Christian movement
which has spread around the world did not arise out of the liberal
thinkers, the humanitarian philosophers of the day, who were its
worst enemies, but with a few men - Carey, Marshman, Ward, and the
like - whose Calvinistic theology we should now consider very
narrow. But they did have the root of the universal matter in them.
A gospel deep enough has all the breadth of the world in its heart.
If we are only deep enough the breadth will take care of itself. I
would ten times rather have one man who was burning deep, even
though he wanted to burn me for my modern theology, than I would
have a broad, hospitable, and thin theologian who was willing to
take me in and a nondescript crowd of others in a sheet let down
from heaven, but who had no depth, no fire, no skill to search, and
no power to break. For the deep Christianity is that which not only
searches us, but breaks us. and a Christianity which would exclude
none has no power to include the world.
I place on the board before you five
points as to Christ's reconciling work which I think vital:
1. It is between person and person. 2. Therefore it affects both sides. 3. It rest on atonement. 4. It is a reconciliation of the world as one whole. 5. It is final in its nature and effect.
I was saying yesterday that two
cautions ought to be observed in connection with this matter of
reconciliation. First, we should not hide up the idea of
reconciliation by the idea of atonement; we should not obscure the
end, or the effect, by the great and indispensable means to it.
Second, at the other extreme we are to beware of emptying
reconciliation of atonement altogether. Two very great thinkers
arose last century in Germany - where most of the thinking on this
subject has for the last hundred years been done. Much of our work
has been to steal. That does not matter if it is done wisely and
gratefully. When a man gives out a great thought, get it, work it;
it is common property. It belongs to the whole world, to be claimed
and assimilated by whoever shall find. Well, there were two very
powerful men in Germany much opposed to each other, yet at a
certain point at one - Hegel and Ritschl. While they preached the
doctrine of reconciliation in different senses, they both united to
obscure the idea of atonement or expiation. Now we are to beware of
emptying the reconciliation idea of the idea of atonement, whether
we do it philosophically with Hegel or theologically with Ritschl.
I mention these men because their thought has very profoundly
affected English thinking, whether philosophical or theological. I
protested yesterday against the practice, so common, of taking New
Testament words, and words consecrated to Christian experience,
emptying them of their essential content, and keeping them in a
vapid use. That is done for various reasons. It is sometimes done
because the words are too valuable to be parted with; sometimes
because a philosophic interpretation seems to rescue them from the
narrowness of an outworn theology; and it is sometimes done for
lower motives in order to produce a fictitious impression upon
people that they are still substantially hearing the substance of
the old truths when really they are not.
Especially I began yesterday to call
attention to the view which is associated with the philosophical
position of Hegel. Being a philosopher he was great upon the idea.
The whole world, he said, was a movement or process of the grand,
divine idea; but it was a process. Now please to put down
and make much use of this fundamental distinction between a process
and an act. A process had nothing moral in it. We are simply
carried along on the crest of a wave. An act, on the other hand,
can only be done by a moral personality. The act involves the
notion of will and responsibility, and, indeed, the whole existence
of a moral world. The process destroys that notion. Now the general
tendency of philosophy is to devote itself to the idea and to the
process. Science, for example, which is the ground floor, not to
say the basement, of philosophy - science knows nothing about acts,
it only knows about processes. The chemist knows only about
processes. The biologist knows only about processes. The
psychologist treats even acts as processes. But the theologian,
and, indeed, religion altogether, stands or falls with the idea of
an act. For him an infinite process is at bottom an eternal act.
The philosophical thinker says the world is the process of an
evolving idea, which may be treated as personal or may not. But for
Christianity the world is the action of the eternal, divine act, a
moral act, an act of will and of conscience.
Let us see how this applies to our
thoughts about reconciliation. I have already indicated to you that
the grand goal of the divine reconciliation is communion with God,
not simply that we should be in tune with the Infinite, as an
attractive but thin book has it. The object of the divine atonement
is something much more than bringing us into time with God. It is
more than raising our pitch and defining our note. It means that we
are brought into actual, reciprocal communion with God out of
guilt. We have personal intercourse with the Holy, we exchange
thoughts and feelings. But this Christian idea of reconciliation,
the idea of communion with the living and holy God, is replaced in
philosophic theology by another idea, that, namely, of adjustment
to rational Godhead, our adjustment to that mighty idea, that
mighty rational process, which is moving on throughout the world.
Sometimes the Godhead is conceived as personal, sometimes as
impersonal; but in any case reconciliation would be rather a
resigned adjustment to this great and overwhelming idea, which,
having issued everything, is perpetually recalling, or exalting,
everything into fusion with itself. But fusion, however organic and
concrete, is one thing, communion is another thing. An individual
might be lost in the great sum of being as a drop of water is lost
in the ocean. That is fusion. Or it might be taken up as a cell in
the body's organic process. That is a certain kind of
reconciliation or absorption. But moral, spiritual reconciliation,
where we have personal beings to deal with, is much more than
fusion; more than absorption; it is communion. It is more than
placing us in our niche. When we think in the philosophic way it
practically means that reconciliation is understood almost entirely
from man's side, without realizing the divine initiative as an act.
But such divine initiative is everything. It is in the mercy of our
God that all our hopes begin. Nothing that confuses that gets at
the root of our Christian reconciliation. Or, sometimes, those
philosophic ideas are carried so far that God's concern for the
individual is ignored. These great processes work according to
general laws; and general laws, like Acts of Parliament, are bound
to do some injustice to individuals. You cannot possibly get
complete justice by Act of Parliament. It is bound to hit somebody
very hard. And it has often been doubted by exponents of
philosophical theology such as I describe whether the individual as
an individual was really present to God's mind and affection at
all. And they think prayer is unreasonable except for its reflex
effect on us. Thus the whole stress comes to be put upon our
attitude to God, and not upon a reciprocal relationship. That is to
say, religion becomes, as I described yesterday, a subjectivity, a
resignation. In others it becomes a sense of dependence. People are
invited to become preoccupied with their own attitude, their own
relation, their own feelings toward the unchangeable, but
absorbing, and even unfeeling God. Attention is directed upon the
human side instead of insight cultivated into the divine side. The
result of that practically is that religion comes to consist far
too much in working up a certain frame of feeling instead of
dwelling upon the objective reality of the act of God. Resignation
is, then, my act; but it is not resignation to a sympathetic act of
approach in God, but only to His onward movement. But, as I have
said before, if we are to produce the real Christian faith we must
dwell upon, we must preach and press, that objective act and gift
of God which in itself produces that faith. We cannot produce it.
Many try. There are some people who actually work at holiness. It
is a dangerous thing to do, to work at your own holiness. The way
to cultivate the holiness of the New Testament is to cultivate the
New Testament Christ, the interpretation of Christ in His Cross, by
His Spirit, which cannot but produce holiness, and holiness of a
far profounder order than anything we may make by taking ourselves
to pieces and putting ourselves together in the best way we can, or
by adjusting ourselves with huge effort to a universal process.
Religious subjectivity is truly a most valuable phase; and at some
periods in the Church's history it is urgently called for. In the
seventeenth century it was so called for because Protestantism had
degenerated into a mere theological orthodoxy, a very hard-shell
kind of Christianity. It was necessary that the great Pietistic
movement should arise and correct it. But this is itself a danger
in turn; and we have to rise up in the name of the gospel, of the
New Testament, and demand a more objective religion; and we have to
declare that if ever divine holiness is to be produced in man it
can only be produced by God's act through Christ in the Holy
Spirit.
The philosophic kind of theology
(which is rather theosophy) often ends, you perceive, in turning
real reconciliation into something quite different. It becomes
turned into the mere forced adjustment of man to his fate; and
naturally this often ends in a resentful pessimism. Supposing the
whole universe to be a vast rational process unfolding itself like
an infinite cosmic flower, you cannot have communion or any hearty
understanding between a living, loving soul and that evolutionary
process. All you can do is to adjust yourself to that process,
settle down to it and make the best of it, square yourself to it in
the way that seems best for you, and that will cause you and others
least discomfort. But reconciliation becomes debased indeed when it
turns to mere resignation. Of course, we have to practice
resignation. But Christianity is not the practice of resignation.
At least, that is not the meaning of reconciliation. When two
friends fall out and are reconciled, it does not simply mean that
one adjusts himself to the other. That is a very one-sided
arrangement. There must be a mutuality. Theology of the kind I have
been describing has a great deal to say about men changing their
way of looking at things or feeling about them. If I were preaching
a theology like that I should say: "This mighty process, of which
you are all parts, is unfolding itself to a grand closing result.
It is going to be a grand thing for everybody in the long run
(provided, that is, that they continue to exist as individuals and
are capable of feeling anything, whether grand or mean). It is all
going to work out to a grand consummation. You do not see that, but
you must make an effort and accept it as the genius and drift of
things; and that is faith. You must accept the idea that the whole
world is working out, through much suffering and by many
round-about ways, to a grand final consummation which will be a
blessing for everybody, even though it might mean their individual
extinction. What you have to do in these circumstances is, by a
great act of faith, to believe that this is so and to immolate
yourself, if need be, for the benefit of this grand whole; at any
rate, accommodate yourself to its evolving movement."
The gospel of Christ speaks
otherwise. It speaks of a God to whom we are to be reconciled in a
mutual act which He begins; and not of an order or process with
which we are to be adjusted by our lonely act, or to which we are
to be resigned. If we have an idea of such a Godhead as I have been
describing, how does it affect our thought of Christ? Christ then
becomes but one of its grandest prophets, or one of the greatest
instances and illustrations of that adjustment to the mighty order.
He first realized, and He first declared, this great change in the
way of reading the situation. What you have to do if you accept Him
is to change your way of reading the situation, to accept His
interpretation of life, and accept it as rationally, spiritually,
and resignedly as you best can. Accept His principle. Die to live.
But what a poor use of Christ - to accept His interpretation of
life, as if He were a mere spiritual Goethe! That is a very
attenuated Christ compared with the Christ that is offered to us in
the New Testament. That is not the eternal Son of God in whom God
was reconciling the world unto Himself. That is another Christ -
from some hasty points of view indeed a larger Christ; for the
philosophers have a larger Christ, apparently, one more cosmic. But
it is a diluted Christ, and one that cannot penetrate to the center
and depth of our human need or our human personality, cannot reach
our guilt and hell, and therefore cannot be the final Christ of
God.
Whether from the side of the
philosophers, as I have been showing, or from the side of certain
theologians like Ritschl, who was so much opposed to Hegel, you
will often hear this said: that only man needed to be reconciled,
that God did not need any reconciliation. Now, I have been asking
you to observe that we are dealing with persons. That is the first
point I put upon the board. Our reconciliation is between person
and person. It is not between an order or a process on the one hand
and a person on the other. Therefore a real and deep change of the
relation between the two means a change on both sides. That is
surely clear if we are dealing with living persons. God is an
eternal person; I am a finite person; yet we are persons both.
There is that parity. Any reconciliation which only means change on
one side is not a real reconciliation at all. A real, deep change
of relation affects both sides when we are dealing with persons.
That is not the case when we are dealing on the one side with
ideas, or one vast idea or process, and on the other side a person
only.
When Christianity is being watered
down in the way I have described, we have to concentrate our
attention upon the core of it. All round us Christianity is being
diluted either by thought or by blague; we must press to the
core of the matter. It is true the theology of the Christian Church
on this head needs a certain amount of modification and correction
at the present day. That will appear presently. But I want to make
it clear that the view of the Church upon the whole, especially the
great view associated with the Reformation, preserves the core of
the matter, which we are in danger of losing either on one side or
the other.
Let me call your attention, then, to
these five points, which you will find immanent in what I have
subsequently to say.
First, you will note that the
reconciliation is between two persons who have fallen out,
and not between a failing person on the one hand and a perfect,
imperturbable process on the other.
The second thing is a corollary from
the first, and is that the reconciliation affects and alters
both parties and not only one party. There was reconciliation
on both sides.
Thirdly, it is a reconciliation
which rests upon atonement and redemption.
Fourthly, it is a reconciliation of
the world as a cosmic whole. The world as one whole; not a
person here and another there, snatched as brands from the burning;
not a group here and a group there; but the reconciliation of the
whole world.
Fifthly, it is a reconciliation
final in Jesus Christ and His Cross, done once for all;
really effected in the spiritual world in such a way that in
history the great victory is not still to be won; it has been won
in reality, and has only to be followed up and secured in
actuality. In the spiritual place, in Christ Jesus, in the divine
nature, the victory has been won. That is what I mean by using the
word "Final" at the close of the list.
I will expound these heads as I go
along. Let me begin almost at the foundation and say this.
Reconciliation has no moral meaning as between finite and infinite
- none apart from the sense of guilt. The finished reconciliation,
the setting up of the New Covenant by Christ, meant that human
guilt was once for all robbed of its power to prevent the
consummation of the Kingdom of God. It is the sense of guilt that
we have to get back today for the soul's sake and the kingdom's;
not simply the sense of sin. There are many who recognize the power
of sin, the misfortune of it; what they do not recognize is the
thing that makes it most sinful, which makes it what it is before
God, namely, guilt; which introduces something noxious and not
merely deranged, malignant and not merely hostile; the fact that it
is transgression against not simply God, not simply against a
loving God, but against a holy God. Everything begins and ends in
our Christian theology with the holiness of God. That is the idea
we have to get back into our current religious thinking. We have
been living for the last two or three generations, our most
progressive side has been living, upon the love of God, God's love
to us. And it was very necessary that it should be appreciated.
Justice had not been done to it. But we have now to take a step
further, and we have to saturate our people in the years that are
to come as thoroughly with the idea of God's holiness as
they have been saturated with the idea of God's love. I have
sometimes thought when preaching that I saw a perceptible change
come over my audience when I turned from speaking about the love of
God to speak about the holiness of God. There was a certain
indescribable relaxing of interest, as though their faces should
say, "What, have we not had enough of these incorrigible and
obtrusive theologians who will not let us rest with the love of God
but must go on talking about things that are so remote and
professional as His holiness!" All that has to be changed. We have
to stir the interest of our congregations as much with the holiness
of God as the Church was stirred - first with the justice and then
latterly with the love of God. It is the holiness of God which
makes sin guilt. It is the holiness of God that necessitates the
work of Christ, that calls for it, and that provides it. What is
the great problem? The great problem in connection with atonement
is not simply to show how it was necessary to the fatherly love,
but how it was necessary to a holy love, how a holy love not only
must have it but must make it. The problem is how Christ can be a
revelation not of God's love simply, but of God's holy love.
Without a holy God there would be not problem of atonement. It is
the holiness of God's love that necessitates the atoning Cross.
I say, then, that the reconciliation
has no meaning apart from guilt which must stir the anger of a holy
God and produce separation from Him. That is, the reconciliation
rests upon a justification, upon an atonement. Those were the great
Pauline ideas which were rediscovered in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries and became the backbone of the Reformation.
They were practically rediscovered. Look at the movement in the
history of the Church's thought in this respect. You have three
great points: you might name them - the first from Augustine, the
second from Luther; for the third, our modern time, we have as yet
no such outstanding name. The first great movement towards the
rediscovery of Paul was by Augustine. Do you know that Paul went
under after the first century? He went under for historic reasons I
cannot stay to explain. It is a remarkable thing how he was kept in
the canon of Scripture. Paul went under, and for centuries remained
under, and he had to be rediscovered. That was done by Augustine.
Again he went under, and Luther rediscovered him. And he is being
rediscovered again today. Augustine's rediscovery was this,
justification by grace alone; Luther's side of the rediscovery was
justification by faith alone - faith in the Cross, that is to say,
faith in grace. What is our modern point of emphasis? Justification
by holiness and for it alone. That is to say, as I have already
pointed out, reconciliation is something that comes from the whole
holy God, and it covers the whole of life, and it is not exhausted
by the idea of atonement only or redemption only. It is the
new-created race being brought to permanent, vital, life-deep
communion with the holy God. Only holiness can be in communion with
the holy God. We have to be saved - not indeed from morality,
because we can only be saved by the moral; that is the grand
sheet-anchor of our modern theories. However we be saved, we can
only be saved in a way consistent with God's morality - that is to
say, with holiness. The rescue is not from morality; but it is from
mere moralism, from a religion three parts conduct. We are saved
through the Spirit of a new life, an indiscerptible life in Jesus
Christ. That is the grand new thing in Christianity (
Reconciliation, then, has no meaning
apart from a sense of guilt, that guilt which is involved in our
justification. I am going to try to expound that before I am done.
I want to note here that it means not so much that God is
reconciled, but that God is the Reconciler. It is the neglect of
that truth which has produced so much skepticism in the matter of
the atonement. So much of our orthodox religion has come to talk as
though God were reconciled by a third party. We lose sight of this
great central verse, "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself." As we are both living persons, that means that there was
reconciliation on God's side as well as ours; but wherever it was,
it was effected by God Himself in Himself. In what sense was God
reconciled within Himself? We come to that surely as we see that
the first charge upon reconciling grace is to put away guilt,
reconciling by not imputing trespasses. Return to our cardinal
verse,
It was not a case of wiping a slate.
Sin is graven in. You cannot wipe off sin. It goes into the tissue
of the spiritual being. And it alters things for both parties.
Guilt affected both God and man. It was not a case of destroying an
unfortunate prejudice we had against God. It was not a case of
putting right a misunderstanding we had of God. "You are afraid of
God," you hear easy people say; "it is a great mistake to be afraid
of God. There is nothing to be afraid of. God is love." But there
is everything in the love of God to be afraid of. Love is not holy
without judgment. It is the love of holy God that is the consuming
fire. It was not simply a case of changing our method, or thought,
our prejudices, or the moral direction of our soul. It was not a
case of giving us courage when we were cast down, showing us how
groundless our depression was. It was not that. If that were all it
would be a comparatively light matter.
If that were all, Paul could only
have spoken about the reconciliation of single souls, not about the
reconciliation of the whole world as a unity. He could not have
spoken about a finished reconciliation to which every age of the
future was to look back as its glorious and fontal past. In the
words of that verse which I am constantly pressing, "God was in
Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." Observe, first, "the
world" is the unity which corresponds to the reconciled unity of
"Himself"; and second, that He was not trying, not taking steps to
provide means of reconciliation, not opening doors of
reconciliation if we would only walk in at them, not laboring
toward reconciliation, not (according to the unhappy phrase)
waiting to be gracious, but "God was in Christ reconciling,"
actually reconciling, finishing the work. It was not a tentative,
preliminary affair (
I go on to show that reconciliation
has its effect not upon man only, but upon God also. That is a
difficulty to many people. And, indeed, we require to be somewhat
discriminating here. If you say bluntly that Christ reconciled God,
it is more false than true. I do not say it is untrue. It is the
people who want plain black and white, false or true, that do so
much mischief in these matters. It is the thin, commonsense
rationalists, orthodox or heterodox. It is the people who put a
pistol to your head and say, "I am a plain man and I want a plain
yes or no," that cause so much difficulty. Christ always refused to
answer with a pistol to His head. It was the whole manner of His
ministry to refuse to give a plain answer when asked a blunt
question. We see that in Peter's discovery and confession, "Thou
art the Christ," and in Christ's joyful answer, "Blessed Simon."
Peter in his confession had crowned what Christ had labored to live
in upon them, but what He had never said plainly in so many words -
"I am the Christ." He lived it into them and made them discover it.
Repeatedly He was asked, "Give us signs," "Give us yes or no," and
He always refused. That would be sight, not faith. A plain yes or
no is sight. But faith is insight into Christ. In this region a
plain yes or no is somewhat out of place. So, therefore, while it
is not false to say that Christ reconciled God, it is more false
than true as it is mostly put. You do not get it in the Bible. It
would be a useful exercise to go through the Bible and see what
proofs you can get of Christ reconciling God. If we talk about
Christ reconciling God in the way some do, we suggest that there
was some third party coming between us and God, reconciling God on
the one hand and us on the other, like a daysman. That is one great
mischief that is done by the popular theories of atonement. God can
never be regarded as the object of some third party's intervention
in reconciling. If it were so, what would happen? There would be no
grace. It would be a bought thing, a procured thing, the work of a
pardon-broker; and the one essential thing about grace is that it
is unbought and unpurchasable. It is the freest thing in heaven or
earth. It would not be free if procured by some third party. The
"daysman" metaphor has been much abused. It is a Scriptural figure,
but we get it in the Old Testament, in Job, the idea being that of
one who, in the case of a dispute, puts one hand on one head and
the other on another and brings two persons together. That is a
crude version of the Christian idea of reconciliation. The grace of
God would not then be the prime and moving cause. It would not be
spontaneous and creative, it would be negotiated grace; and that is
a contradiction in terms. Mediation can never mean that. In
paganism the gods were mollified. God, our God, could never be
mollified. There is no mollification of God, no placation of God.
Atonement was not the placating of God's anger. Even in the old
economy we are told, "I have given you the blood to make
atonement." Given! Did you ever see the force of it? "I have given
you the blood to make atonement. This is an institution which I set
up for you to comply with, set it up for purposes of My own, on
principles of My own, but it is My gift." The Lord Himself provided
the lamb for the burnt offering. Atonement in the Old Testament was
not the placating of God's anger, but the sacrament of God's grace.
It was the expression of God's anger on the one hand and the
expressing and putting in action of God's grace on the other hand.
The effect of atonement was to cover sin from God's eyes, so that
it should no longer make a visible breach between God and His
people. The actual ordinance was established, they held, by God
Himself. He covered the sin. Sacrifices were not desperate efforts
and surrenders made by terrified people in the hope of propitiating
an angry deity. The sacrifices were in themselves prime acts of
obedience to God's means of grace and His expressed will. If you
want to follow that out further, perhaps I may be forgiven if I
were to allude to the last chapter in my book, "The Cruciality of
the Cross" (1909), in which there is a fuller discussion of the
particular point, and especially of what is morally meant by the
blood of Christ.
But some one immediately asks, Is
there then no objective atonement? It is a question worth deep
attention. A great many people say Christianity wrecks chiefly on
the idea of objective atonement. How cheap the objection is in many
cases, how easy and common it is! If you find somebody who is
making it his mission in life to pull to pieces the venerable
theology of the Catholic Church, and show how poor a thing it is in
the light of the thirty years in which he has lived, you will hear
it put likely enough in such terms as these: that objective
atonement is sheer paganism. The Christian idea of atonement is
identified offhand with the pagan idea of atonement, as a Hyde Park
lecturer might. And when you have done that at the outset, it is
the simplest thing to show how false and absurd and pagan such
theology is. It is said further, that the whole Church has become
paganized in this way, and has spoken as though God could be
mollified by something offered to Him. The criticism is sometimes
ignorant, sometimes ungenerous, sometimes culpable. If such
language has ever been held, it has only been by sections of the
Church, sections that have gone wrong in the direction of
unqualified extremes. You have extravagances, remember, even in
rational heresy. Has the Church on the whole ever really forgotten
that it is in the mercy of God that all our hopes begin and end?
And even if the Church had gone further wrong than it has done
about this, we do not live upon the Church, but upon the gospel and
upon the Bible. We live in and through the Church. We cannot do
without it. We must get back a great deal more respect for it. But
we do not live on the Church; we live on the word of the gospel
which is in the Bible.
What is the real objective element
in the Bible's gospel? What is the real objective element in
atonement? We are tempted, I say, to declare that it was the
offering of a sacrifice to God outside of Him and us, the offering
of a sacrifice to God by somebody not God yet more than a single
man. That is the natural, the pagan notion of objective atonement.
But the real meaning of an objective atonement is that God Himself
made the complete sacrifice. The real objectivity of the atonement
is not that it was made to God, but by God. It was atonement made
by God, not by man. When I use the word objective, I do not mean
objective to you or to me. You are objective to me, and I to you.
That is not the idea. Let us learn to thing on the scale of the
whole race. What is objective to that? The deadly kind of
subjectivity is the kind that is engrossed with individuals, or
with humanity, and does not allow for God. It is the egotism of the
race. And the real objectivity is that which is objective to the
whole human race, over against it, and not merely facing you or me
within it. The real objective element in the atonement, therefore,
is that God made it and gave it finished to man, not that it was
made to God by man. Any atonement made by man would be subjective,
however much it might be made for man by his brother, or by a
representative of entire Humanity.
But we have a certain farther
difficulty to face here. If it was God that made the atonement -
which it certainly was in Christianity - then was it not made to
man? Can God reconcile Himself? And can the atonement mean anything
more than the attuning of man to God - that is to say, of
individual men in their subjective experience? God then says to
each soul, "Be reconciled. See, I have put My anger away." Can such
attuning of Himself by God have for its results anything more than
individual conversion? Now, conversion means much, but it does not
mean the whole of Christianity. Reconciliation means the
life-communion of the race. But, if God made the atonement, it
might seem that the result and effect of this atonement could only
be reached gradually by the attuning of individual men to God. It
would seem to destroy the totality of the race, or (to employ
another word even more useful) the solidarity of the race. That
would seem to be the effect; and it is such a serious effect, for
this reason: that it affects the universality of Christ's work.
Whatever affects the universality of Christ's work cuts the ground
from under aggressive Christianity, from under missions, whether at
home or abroad. They cannot thrive except upon a faith which means
the universality of Christ's work, which means again the
solidarity, the organic unity, of the whole human race. And the
conversion of a race is a work that exceeds conversion and is
redemption. About that the Old Testament and the New Testament are
at one.
But, you say, you do not have the
solidarity of the human race in the Old Testament. Well, you do,
and you do not. What you have fact to face with God in the Old
Testament is a collective nation, Israel. We shall never read the
Old Testament with true understanding until we realize that. That
is one of the great things modern scholarship has brought home to
us - that the vis-a-vis of God in the Old Testament is
Israel and not the individual Jew. Gradually, as the Old Testament
develops in spiritual intimacy, you have this changing and becoming
intensely individual, as in the later Psalms. In Jeremiah it became
so especially. The greatest prefiguration of Christ's individual
solitude in the Old Testament is Jeremiah. But both of them were
representative or collective individuals. They condensed the
people. The object that faced God in the God in the Old Testament
in the main was not primarily the individual soul, it was the soul
of the nation of Israel, even though it was sometimes reduced to a
remnant. What took place when Israel made the great refusal of
Christ? There was set up another collective unity, the Church, the
new Israel, the spiritual Israel, the landless, homeless Israel,
whose home was in Him, the universal Israel, the new Humanity of
the new covenant. The Church became the prophecy and prefiguration
of the unity of Humanity. It is through the Church alone that the
unity of Humanity can be consummated, because it is possible only
through the gospel. And the preacher of this gospel in the world is
the collective Church.
We must, therefore, avoid every idea
of atonement which seems to reduce it to God's dealing with a mass
of individuals instead of with the race as a whole - instead of a
racial, a social, a collective salvation, in which alone each
individual has his place and part. Our Protestant theology has been
too individualist, too little collectivist. And that has had
serious social consequences as well as theological. The basis of a
social salvation is the final redemption in one act of the total
race. And that act was the Cross of Christ.
The point at which I broke off
yesterday was this. I was pointing out that objective atonement is
absolutely necessary. Of course, it is quite necessary also that we
should know what is meant by an objective atonement. The real
objective element in atonement is not that something was offered to
God, but that God made the offering. And in this connection I
hinted that my remarks today and tomorrow would have to follow the
idea also, that God's atonement initially was made on behalf of the
race, and on behalf of individuals in so far as they were members
of the race. The first charge upon Christ and His Cross was the
reconciliation of the race, and of its individuals by
implication.
We start today, then, from the
position that God made the atonement. This (we saw) suggests a
number of questions, not to say difficulties. If God made the
atonement, but reconciliation meant no more than simply the moving
and attuning of individual men in their subjective experience, it
might seem as though it destroyed the solidarity of mankind and
made it granular. And the peril there is that whatever destroys
that, destroys the universality of Christ's work. But that atomism
is not the Gospel. To reduce the reconciliation merely to the
aggregate of individual conversions would be a total
misrepresentation of New Testament reconciliation, which is both
solidary and final.
Then there is another difficulty. If
we say that the one object of the atonement was not the
reconciliation of God, but the reconciliation of man to God, then
it looks as though the work of Christ became only the grand
heliograph from divine heights, the chief word in what I might call
a language of signs; as though it were only the leading expression
of God's will towards men, instead of something actually done, and
not merely said or shown, by God, something really done from the
depth of God Who is the action of the world, something eternally
changing the whole situation, and destiny, and responsibility of
our race. If God in Christ simply said the most powerful word about
His goodwill, His placability, and His permanence of Christ - the
depth of His work, and the height of His place. Thus God would be
saying more than He did; and we have a natural and
proper difficulty in thoroughly trusting people who say more than
they do. If Christ were simply an expression of God's love, then
His Cross would simply be what is called an object-lesson of God's
love; or it would simply be a witness to the serious way in which
God takes man's sin; or it might even be nor more than the
expression of the strong conviction of Jesus about it. We are
exposed to the danger there always is when we make revelation a
word rather than a deed, something said instead of something done,
when we make it manifestation only and redemption. The work of
Christ would be only something educational, or at most impressive.
And what happens then? If the work of Christ is only impressively
educational, if the need and value of it ceases when we have
recognized its meaning, when we have taken God's word for it in
Christ that He does really love us, what happens then? Why, as soon
as the lesson had been learnt, the work of Christ might be left
behind. There are a great many people today who are Christian in a
way, but have very loose ideas as to what is involved centrally in
their Christianity. Many of them are in this position I describe -
they think they can ignore Christ and the work of Christ since they
have assimilated the lesson these taught. If the Cross is a kind of
practical parable which God set forth of His love and His
willingness to save, then when the parable has done its work it can
be forgotten. When the lesson has been taught, the example can be
put away into the school store-room until we want it again. It is
exhausted for the time being, until somebody else comes who needs
the same lesson. In that case the work of Christ simply sinks to
the level of other valuable events in the history of religion. It
is not fontal but episodic. It represents the transition from
Judaism to a religion of Humanity. It represents a great movement
in the history of religion, when religion ceased to be national and
particularist, and became universal, when it ceased to be ritual
and became spiritual. The death of Christ would thus be a great
monument in the past, which fades out of sight as we surmount it
and leave it behind; and it does not retain a permanent meaning and
function at the center of our faith.
I said that the work of Christ meant
not only an action on man, it meant an action on God. Yet I pointed
out that it was more false than true to say that Christ and His
death reconciled God to man. I said that we must in some way
construe the matter as God reconciling Himself. It was out of the
question to think of any reconciliation effected upon God by a
third party standing between God and man. God could not be
reconciled by man nor by one neither God nor man. The only
alternative, therefore, is that God should reconcile Himself. But
then is there not something in that which seems a little forced and
unnatural? Did God have to compel Himself to change His feeling
about us? Did He force Himself to be gracious? There is something
wrong here surely, something that needs adjustment, explanation,
restatement in some way.
Are we obliged to suppose that if
God did reconcile Himself it was in the sense of changing His own
heart and affection towards us? I have pointed out that the heart
of God towards us, His gracious disposition towards us, was from
His own holy eternity; that grace is of the unchangeable. God in
that respect had not to be changed. Was He changed at all then? If
His heart was not changed, what remained in Him to be changed, what
was changed in connection with the work of Christ?
There was a change. And I am going
to ask you to recognize here another of those valuable distinction
of which the man without the evangelical experience and its
theological discipline is so impatient. As I work my way through
the difficulties and questions that present themselves, over and
over again I perceive that many of the difficulties that seem so
serious to some turn entirely upon some valuable distinction that
has been ignored, often for lack of deep religion or due
professional education. Of course the man in the street says, as
soon as he is asked to distinguish, that that is getting into the
region of subtleties. Never mind the man in the street. The
distinguished person for him is the person with the least
distinction from himself, the person who gives him most
satisfaction with least trouble, the person who works in black and
white with no shades. Besides, the man in the street is not devoted
to his Bible, nor to getting into the interior of the Bible, as you
preachers are. We must take our way, God's way, and follow the
subtle and searching Holy Spirit as He leads and speaks in and
through the questions that arise to our earnest thought concerning
Christ's death. And the man in the street must be left to the grace
which has taken us in from the street.
The distinction I ask you to observe
is between a change of feeling and a change of treatment, between
affection and discipline, between friendly feeling and friendly
relations. God's feeling toward us never needed to be changed. But
God's treatment of us, God's practical relation to us - that had to
change. I have pointed out that the relation between God and man in
reconciliation is a personal one, and that, where you have real
personal relation and personal communion, if there is change on one
side there must be change on the other. The question is as to the
nature of the change. We have barred out the possibility of its
being a change of affection, of hatred into grace. God never ceased
to love us even when He was most angry and severe with us. It will
not do to abolish the reality of God's anger towards us. True love
is quite capable of being angry, and must be angry and even sharp
with its beloved children. Let us fix our attention more closely
upon this distinction of mood and manner.
Take the parable of the prodigal for
illustration. There are those who say you have the whole of the
gospel really in the parable of the prodigal son, that that was the
culmination of Christ's grand revelation of God. Well, if that were
so the wonder to me is, first, that the apostles never seem to have
used it; and, second, that having delivered this parable Christ did
not at once consider His mission discharged and return to heaven.
Or, on the other hand, why did He not continue to live to a ripe
and useful age, reiterating in various forms and in different
settings this waiting (but inert) love and grace of God? We are
moved sometimes to think He might have done well had He not
provoked death so early, had He remained, like John, to seventy or
ninety years of age continually publishing, applying, and spreading
the message which He gave His disciples. But you have not the whole
gospel in the parable of the prodigal son. What is the function of
a parable? It is one of the great discoveries and lessons taught us
by modern scholarship, that parables are not allegories, because
they exist for the sake of one central idea. While we may allow
ourselves, under the suggestion of the Holy Spirit to receive hints
of edifying truth from this or the other phase or detail of the
parable, we have chiefly to ask, What was it in the mind of Christ
for the sake of which He uttered this parable? Each parable puts in
an ample ambit one central idea. Now the one ruling idea in the
parable of the prodigal son is the idea of the centrality, the
completeness, the unreservedness, the freeness, fullness,
whole-heartedness of God's grace - the absolute fullness of it,
rather that the method of its action. But however a parable might
preach that fullness, it took the Cross and all its train to give
it effect, to put it into action, life, and history, to charge it
with the Spirit. Those who tell us that the whole gospel is
embodied in the parable say, You observe nothing is suggested in
the parable about the Cross and the Atonement; therefore the Cross
and the Atonement are subsequent and gratuitous additions,
confusing the gospel of grace. But that turns Christ into a mere
preacher, instead of the center of the world's history. Bear in
mind also that this parable was spoken by the Christ who had the
Cross in the very structure of His personality as its vocation, and
at the root, therefore, of all His words. That Cross was deep
embedded in the very structure of Christ's Person, because nowadays
you cannot separate His Person from His vocation, from the work He
came to do, and the words He came to speak. The Cross was not
simply a fate awaiting Christ in the future; it pervaded
subliminally His holy Person. He was born for the Cross. It was His
genius, His destiny. If was quite inevitable that, in a world like
this, One holy as Jesus was holy should come to the Cross. The
parable was spoken by One in whom the Cross and all it stands for
were latent in His idea of God; and it became patent, came to the
surface, became actual, and practical, and powerful in the stress
of man's crisis and the fullness of God's time. That is an
important phrase. Christ Himself came in a fullness of time. The
Cross which consummated and crowned Christ came in its fullness of
time. The time was not full during Christ's life for preaching an
atonement that life could never make. Hence as to the method
of God's free and flowing grace the parable has nothing to say. It
does not even say that the father was seeking the prodigal. The
seeking grace of God we find there as little as the redeeming
grace. And so also you have not the mode of grace's action on a
world. But, speaking of what you do have in the parable, the
father knows no change of feeling towards the prodigal; yet could
he go on making no difference? Could he go on treating the prodigal
as though he never had become a prodigal? He did not certainly when
he returned; and as little could he before. His heart followed the
prodigal, but his relations, his confidence, his intercourse were
with his brother. So long as the son is prodigal he cannot be
treated as though he were otherwise. Even repentance needs some
guarantee of permanence. The father's heart is the same, but his
treatment must be different. Cases have been known where the father
had to expel the black sheep from the family for the sake of the
others. Loving the poor creature all the same, he yet found it
quite impossible, in the interests of the whole family, to treat
him as though he were like the rest. So God needed no placation,
but He could not exercise His kindness to the prodigal world, He
certainly could not restore communion with its individuals, without
doing some act which permanently altered the relation. And this is
what set up that world's reconciliation with Him. It was set up by
an act of crisis, of judgment.
Remember always we are dealing with
the world in the first instance and not with individuals. I
constantly come back upon that, for the orthodox and their critics
forget it alike. I suppose the prodigal was a slave, I suppose he
had sold himself to that vile work of swine-feeding. When he
returned I suppose he ran away from his master. But the prodigal
world, of course, could not run away from its master, it could not
run away from the power that it was enslaved to. "Myself am hell."
Supposing now the prodigal had not been able to run away. Supposing
he had been guarded as a convict is guarded, then he could only
come back by being bought of. As soon as you go beyond the one
theme of the parable, the absolute heartiness of grace, and begin
to think of grace's methods with a world, this point must be faced
by all who are more than pooh-pooh sentimentalists in their
religion. We have to deal with a world in a bondage it could not
break. If the prodigal could not have arisen to go to his father;
if the elder brother had sold up the whole farm, reduced himself to
poverty, taken the sum in his hand, followed the prodigal into the
far country, and there spent the whole amount in buying his
brother's manumission from his master before a judge; and if it was
all done by mutual purpose and consent of himself and his father;
would not that act be a great and effective thing, not so much in
producing repentance but in a harder matter - in destroying a lien
and making absolute certainty of the father's forgiveness? He is
sure because the father not only says but pays. His mere repentance
could not make him sure, could not place him at home again, could
not put him where he set out. His mere repentance could turn his
heart to his father, but it could not break the bar and fill him
with certainty of his father's love and forgiveness. And that is
what the sinner wants, and what the great and classic penitents
find it so hard to believe. Now, the parable tells us of the
freeness of God's grace, and its fullness, but the Cross enacts it
and inserts it in really history. It shows to what length that
grace could go in dealing with a difficulty otherwise insuperable
when we turn from a single prodigal to a world. The act which I
have described by a New Testament extension of the parable - the
act of Christ's Cross - is not simply to produce individual
repentance, but it has its great effect upon the relation of the
whole world to God. And the judgment, the payment, was on that
scale. I will show you later that it was not pain that was paid but
holy obedience.
What the elder brother does in the
supposition I have made is twofold. First, he secures the
liberation, he deals with the equitable conditions of the release.
Secondly, he also acts upon the prodigal's heart and confidence. In
the first case he meets certain judicial conditions, certain social
conditions, ethical conditions, bound up with the existing order,
the law of society in which the prodigal was living. But it is said
sometimes that there the analogy fails, because the elder son,
acting for the father, in my extension of the story, has to deal
with a law which is outside his control and outside the father's
control; he has to deal with the law of society, with the law of
the land where the prodigal was. Whereas, if you come to think
about God, there can be no social and moral conditions which are
outside His control. There, it is said, your illustration breaks
down. God could ignore any such impediments at His loving will.
Now, that is just the crucial mistake that you make, that even Kant
does not allow us to make. God could do nothing of the kind. So far
the omnipotence of God is a limited omnipotence. He could not
trifle with His own holiness. He could will nothing against His
holy nature, and He could not abolish the judgment bound up with
it. Nothing in the compass of the divine nature could enable Him to
abolish a moral law, the law of holiness. That would be tampering
with His own soul. It had to be dealt with. Is the law of God more
loose than the law of society? Can it be taken liberties with,
played with, and put aside at the impulse even of love? How little
we should come to think of God's love if that were possible! How
essential the holiness of that love is to our respect for it and
our faith in its unchangeableness! It God's love were not
essentially holy love, in course of time mankind would cease to
respect it, and consequently to trust it. We need not a fond love,
but a love we can trust, and for ever. What love wants is not
simply love in response, but respect and confidence. In the
bringing up of children today one often wishes they had more
training in respect, even if less in affection. God's holy law is
His own holy nature. His love is under the condition of eternal
respect. It is quite unchangeable. It is just as much outside His
operation, so far as abrogation goes, as was the law of the far
country to the father of the prodigal.
What was there in the work of Christ
which went beyond a mere impressive declaration of a God who could
not help being gracious, but fell on the prodigal's neck without
more ado? It was solidary judgment. I am urging that the difficulty
we have in answering that questions is due to our modern
individualism. Individualism has done its work for Christianity for
the time being, and we are now suffering from its after-effects. We
do not realize that we are each one of us saved in a racial
salvation. We are each one of us saved in the salvation of the
race, in a collectivist redemption. What Christ saved was the whole
human race. What He bought, if we may provisionally use the
metaphor, was the Church, and not any aggregate of isolated souls.
So great is a soul, and so great is its sin, that each man is only
saved by an act which at the same time saves the whole world. If
you reduce or postpone Christ's effect upon the totality of the
world, you are in the long run preparing the way for a poor
estimate of the human soul. The more you abolish the significance
of Christ's redeeming death once for all, the more you are doing to
lower Humanity morally, and make it a less precious thing than the
cosmic world around us. My plea is that with no atonement, no
solidary judgment of sin, you reduce reconciliation not only to
sentiment but to a piecemeal series of individual repentances and
conversions, leaving it a problem whether the race as a whole will
be saved at last. For the universality of Christianity (so dear to
Broad Church) you must have that foregone finality which the New
Testament offers in the atonement.
I pointed out to you that in the Old
Testament, for the most part, what faced God was not this prophet
or that saint, this king or that particular juncture, but Israel. I
said that in the subsequent phases of Jewish religion, indeed, that
idea has its detail filled in; and in the later psalms, in many of
those psalms which we know could only have been written after the
captivity, you have pious individualism sometimes expressing itself
very strongly. But there the two warring notes were - new
individualism and old collectivism; and between these there never
came complete reconcilement until Christ came and Christ's work.
What have we in that great text,
Again, in speaking of the change in
God, Christ has been represented as enabling God to forgive by
enabling Him to adjust His two attributes of justice and mercy
within Himself. Some theologians of the Reformation - Melancthon
for one - spoke of Christ in that fashion. But we have entirely
outgrown that way of thinking and talking about it. It has produced
much difficulty and sceptism. What does it proceed upon? It
proceeds upon a certain definition of an attribute, as though an
attribute were something loose within God which He could manipulate
- as though the attributes of God were not God Himself,
unchangeable God, in certain relations. The attributes of God are
not things within Himself which He could handle and adjust. An
attribute of God is God Himself behaving, with all His unity, in a
particular way in a particular situation. God is a thinking God,
let us say. He has the attribute of thought. Does that mean that
the attribute of thought could be taken away, that God could divest
Himself of it? No. The thought of God is simply God thinking. So
also the love of God is not an attribute of God; it is God loving.
The holiness of God is not an attribute of God; it is the whole God
Himself as holy. There is nothing in the Bible about the strife of
attributes. Rather remember
What, then, does it mean when we
hear about the anger of God being turned away? To begin with, the
anger of God means a great deal more than His passion, His temper,
His mode of feeling, more than anger as an affection. The anger of
God in the Bible means much rather the judgment of God in the
reaction of His moral and spiritual order. The judgment of God is
perfectly compatible with His continued love, just as a father's
punishment is perfectly compatible with his love for his children.
The father has to discipline his children. He institutes certain
laws, the children disobey; they must be punished, or, using the
more dignified term, judged. The anger of God: we shall get the
most meaning out of it when we think of it as the judgment of God,
the exalted, inflexible judgment of God.
Taking a step further, it is
judgment on the world. It seems at first sight as though it were
meaningless to speak as if God could be wroth with the world and
yet gracious and loving to individuals. But I may be very angry
with a political party, yet I cherish respect and love for
individuals belonging to that party. We must be on our guard
against narrow, individual views, against treating individuals
according to their public and collective condemnation. We are
created, redeemed, judged as members of a race or of a Church.
Salvation is personal, but it is not individual. (There is another
distinction for you, if you have come in off the street.) It is
personal in its appropriation but collective in its nature. What
did the Reformation stand for? Not for religious individualism. But
I hear some one asking in the back of his mind, Was not the
Reformation the charter of private judgment and individual
independence? It was nothing of the kind. It was the charter of
personal direct faith and its freedom. What the Reformation did was
to turn religion from being a thing mainly institutional into a
thing mainly personal. The reformers were as strong as their
opponents about the necessity of the Church for the soul - though
as its home, not its master. They were not individualists.
Individualism is fatal to faith. It was the backbone of the
rationalism and atheism of the French Revolution. The Reformation
stands for personal religion and social religion and not for
religious individualism.
There is no such thing as an
absolute individual. What is the change that takes place when we
are converted? Our change is really from one membership to another,
from membership of the world to membership of the Church. When we
become a member of the Church we are not really changed from
individualism, but from membership of the world. It is membership
either way. The greatest egoist and self-seeker is a member of the
world. He could not indulge his egotism if it were not for the
society in the midst of which he lives and into which he is
articulated. He is a member of the world who exploits his
membership instead of serving with it. When we are converted we are
not converted from a sheer and absolute individual. There never was
such a person. Certainly Robinson Crusoe was not. We are converted
from membership of the world to membership of Christ. Before our
conversion and after we belong. We are not absolute,
solitary individuals. We are in a society, an organism. We are made
by the past. And our selfish, godless actions and influence go out,
radiate, affect the organism as they could not do were we absolute
units. They spread far beyond our memory or control. In the same
way we are acted upon by the other people. We are members one of
another both for evil and for good. When you are told that evil is
only selfishness it is worth while bearing this in mind. Even as
selfish men, as egoists, we belong - only to a pagan order instead
of to Christ. The selfish man is a member of a kingdom of evil.
There is no such thing as an absolute individual. Hence, to save
us, to reconcile us, involves the whole race we belong to. Before
God that race is an organic unity. It is not a mere mass of atoms
joined together by various arbitrary relations, sympathies, and
affinities. Hence, as the race before God is one, a personal God is
able to do for the race some one thing which at the same time is
good for every person in it.
But now, if the race is a unity,
where does its unity lie? Does it lie in our elementary affections
for each other, in the palpable relationships of natural life with
our parents, brothers, lovers, and friends? Or is the unity of the
race simply its capacity for being organized by skillful engineers?
Is the unity of the race like the unity of machines? No. The unity
of the race is a moral unity. Therefore it is a unity of
conscience. If you want to find the trunk out of which all the
loves and practices of humanity proceed, you must go to conscience
at the center. That is where the unity of Humanity lies. It is in
the conscience, where man is member of a vast moral world. It is
the one changeless order of the moral world, emerging in
conscience, that makes man universal. What have you to preach if
you have no gospel that goes to the foundations of human
conscience? What ground have you for a social religion? The most
universal God is one that goes there, not to the heart in the sense
of affections, but to the conscience. The great motive for missions
of every high kind is not sentiment, but salvation. It is dangerous
to take your theology from poets and literary people. You quote,
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." Well, if you are
going to build a religion on that, it will have a very short life.
In the long run nature means anarchy when taken by and for itself.
But it was never meant to be taken by itself. It was meant to go in
an eternal context with super-nature. It is not the touch of nature
that makes us kin enough for religion, for eternity, but the touch,
and more than a touch, of the supernatural - not nature, but grace.
What makes the world God's world is the action and unity of God's
moral order of which our conscience speaks.
Now, if that order be broken, how
can it be healed? If I slit the canvas of this tent it can be
patched. I make a fissure, but it is not irremediable. I simply get
some one to stitch it up. At the worst I can have a new width put
in. But if the moral order, and its universal solidarity, its
holiness, is broken, how can that be healed? That cannot be patched
up. It is not merely a rent in a tissue, a gap in a process, which
the same process goes on to heal into a scar. The moral law differs
from all natural law in having in it a demand, a claim, an "ought"
of a universal kind. It is all of one piece. We use the word "law"
in a loose kind of way. We apply the same word to gravitation and
to the moral law of retribution. It is that ambiguity of terms
which leads us astray. The moral law differs from every other law
in having a demand, and a universal demand, a claim upon us for
ever. And that has to be made good as well as the rents and bruises
in us from our own collision with it. It is not a gap that has to
be made good and sound. It is a claim, because we are here in a
moral and not a natural world. It is one thing to make good a gap
and another thing to make good a claim. The claim must be met. It
will not do simply to draw the edges together by mere amendment, to
have God here and man there, and gradually bring them together till
they unite. It is two moral persons with moral passions we have to
do with. It is moral relationship that is in question, communion,
trustful mutuality, is the object of the divine requirement. It is
a case of moral, holy reconcilement. It is the expression of God's
holy personality whenever God makes His claim. It is Himself in
holy, changeless personality that says, "Thou shalt." Then the
claim can only be honored by personality of acknowledgment. But
what does that mean? Some confession, some compunction - "I have
sinned?" That is a poor acknowledgment of God's holiness. It was
neither in word nor in feeling that we wounded that, but in life
and deed. It must be acknowledged in like fashion - practically.
The holiness of God is the sum of all His action and relation to
the world; and the acknowledgment of it must be made in like
action. Do we acknowledge the holiness of God's infinite law simply
when its penalty wrings from poor us a confession of sin? We
acknowledge natural law in spite of ourselves when we suffer its
penalty amid our rebellion. But the acknowledgment of moral, of
holy law is something different. It must be actively acknowledged -
acknowledged not in spite of ourselves but by ourselves, with our
whole heart; and it cannot be acknowledged simply by individual,
or, indeed, any suffering. For divine judgment it must be
acknowledged in kind and scale, and met by a like holiness. Mere
suffering is no acknowledgment really; it is a pure sequel; it is
not a confession of the moral law and its righteousness, only of
its power. Mere suffering is no confession of the holiness of God.
God, truly, might and does assert His power upon our defiance by
making us suffer. But do you think any holiness, any loving
holiness, could be satisfied with making the offender suffer? There
is only one thing that can satisfy the holiness of God, and that is
holiness - adequate holiness. To judge is to secure that at cost of
any pain both to the judge and the culprit. But the pain is
not the end. Nothing, no penalty, no passionate remorse, no verbal
acknowledgment, no ritual, can satisfy the claim of holy law -
nothing but holiness, actual holiness, and holiness upon the same
scale as the one holy law which was broken. The confession must be
adequate. Fix that word in your mind. All your repentance, and all
the world's repentance, would not be adequate to satisfying,
establishing the broken law of holy God. Confession must be
adequate - as Christ's was. We do not now speak of Christ's
sufferings as being the equivalent of what we deserved, but
we speak of His confession of God's holiness, his acceptance of
God's judgment, being adequate in a way that sin forbade any
acknowledgment from us to be. For the only adequate confession of a
holy God is perfectly holy man. Wounded holiness can only be met by
a personal holiness upon the scale of the race, upon the universal
scale of the sinful race, and upon the eternal scale of the holy
God who was wounded. It is not enough that the eternal validity of
the holy law should be declared as some prophet might arise and
declare it, with power to make the world admire, as the great and
sublime Kant did. It must take effect. Prophets have arisen who
have produced tremendous effect by insisting upon the moral
ultimacy in life and things. The greatest prophets of the last
century, like George Eliot, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Maurice among
ourselves had that as a chief note. But it is not enough that the
eternal validity and inflexibility of eternal law should be
powerfully, searchingly declared. It must take effect. Its breach
must be closed up not merely by recognition, but by judgment. It is
not enough that the whole human race should come confessing, "We
have offended against Thy holy law." That would recognize the holy
law and confess its place, but it would not give it its own, it
would not bring to pass that which is essential to holiness,
namely, judgment. It would not actually establish holiness in a
kingdom, in command of history. You cannot separate the idea of
holiness and its kingdom from the idea of judgment. In the Old
Testament the final coming of the Great Salvation was always
connected with a great judgment, which was therefore not a terror,
as we view it, but the grandest hope. If the essence of God is that
He should be holy, it is equally essential that He should judge. If
He sets up actual holiness it must be by actual adjustment of
everything to it. It is not enough that we should say, "Thou art
our Judge, we submit and are willing to take the penalty. The wages
of sin is death." All that is best and greatest in human life turns
upon something more than that. There is a phrase which I never tire
of quoting, and it is this: "The dignity of man is better assured
if he were broken upon the maintenance of that holiness of God than
if it were put aside just to give him an existence." The dignity,
the very dignity of man himself is better assured if he were broken
upon the maintenance of that holiness of God than if it were put
aside arbitrarily, just to let him off with his life. This holy
order is as essential to man's greatness as it is to God's; and
that is why the holy satisfaction Christ made to God's holiness is
in the same act the glorifier of the new humanity. Any religion
which leaves out of supreme count the judging holiness of God is
making a great contribution to the degradation of man. We need a
religion which decides the eternal destiny of man; and unless
holiness were practically and adequately established - not merely
recognized and eulogized, but established - there could be no real,
deep, permanent change in the world or the sinner. The change in
the treatment of us by eternal grace must rest on judgment taking
effect. Man is not forgiven simply be forgetting and mending, by
agreeing that no more is to be said about it. To make little of sin
is to belittle the holiness of God; and from a reduced holiness no
salvation could come, nor could human dignity remain.
Here, perhaps, you want to ask me
what I mean exactly by saying that the judgment-death of Christ set
up a real and actual kingdom of holiness. It is a point which it is
easier for faith to realize than for theology to explain. But the
answer would lie along this line: What Christ presented to God for
His complete joy and satisfaction was a perfect racial obedience.
It was not the perfect obedience of a saintly unit of the race. It
was a racial holiness. God's holiness found itself again in the
humbled holiness of Christ's "public person." He presented before
God a race He created for holiness. Remember that the very nature
of our faith in Christ is union with Him. The kingdom is set up by
Christians being united with the work, the victory, the obedience,
the holiness of the King. Christ, in His victorious death and risen
life, has power to unite the race to Himself, and to work His
complete holiness into its actual experience and history. He has
power, by uniting us with Him in His Spirit, to reduce Time to
acknowledge in act and fact His conclusive victory of Eternity.
When you think of what He did for the race and its history, you
must on no account do what the Church and its theology has too
often done - you must no omit our living union with Him. It is not
enough to believe that He gained a victory at a historic point.
Christ is the condensation of history. You must go on to think of
His summary reconciliation as being worked out to cover the whole
of history and enter each soul by the Spirit. You must think of the
Cross as setting up a new covenant and a new Humanity, in which
Christ dwells as the new righteousness of God. "Christ for us" is
only intelligible as "Christ in us" and we in Him. By uniting us to
Himself and His resurrection in His Spirit He becomes the eternal
guarantee of the historical consummation of all things some great
day. I return to this later.
Sometimes, when I have been talking
about this claim of God's holiness, a critic has said: "You are
treating the holiness of God as though it were a power outside God,
tying His hands." Nothing of the kind. What is meant by the
holiness of God is the holy God. We talk nonsense in a like way
about the decrees of God. We say they stand for the wretched
survival of an outworn Calvinism, as though they were things that
God could handle. Do you think that mighty men such as the great
Reformers were would have been led into saying the things they did
about God if they thought the decrees were simply things God could
handle, or things like a doom on God? The decrees of God were to
them God decreeing. The holiness of God was God as holy. When that
holiness is wounded or defied, could God be content to take us back
with a mere censure or other penance and the declaration that He
was holy? We could not respect a God like that. Servants despise
indulgent masters. Sinners would despise a God who would take us
back when we wept, and speak thus: "Let us say no more about it.
You did very wrong, and you have suffered for it, and I; but let us
forget it now you have come back," We should not respect that. We
should go on, as servants do in the case I have named, to take more
liberties still. He would be a God who only talked His holiness and
did not put it into force. Now, if our repentance were our
atonement, and the Cross were simply an object-lesson to us of
God's patient and tender mercy to penitence, He would be talking, I
said, and not acting. He would mention the gravity of our sin very
impressively, but that would not be establishing goodness actually
in the history and experience of man. The sinner's reconciliation
to a God of holy love could not take place if guilt were not
destroyed, if judgment did not take place on due scale, if the
wrath of God did not somehow take real effect. You say, perhaps, it
did take effect in the unseen world of spirits. But the moral world
is not a world of ghostly spirits. It is the unseen side of the
world of history and of experience, it is its inner reality and
center. The vindication, the judgment, must take place within human
history and experience. It must take place in the terms of human
history, by human action, in a place, at some point, on a due scale
and with adequate depth. That was what took place in the Cross of
Christ. The idea of judgment is not complete without the idea of a
crisis, a day of judgment. Now the Cross of Christ was the world's
great day of judgment, the crisis of all crises for history. The
holy love of God yearning over souls could not deal with individual
sinners, there was a cloud between God and the race, till the
holiness was owned and perfectly praised by its racial confession,
until holiness was confessed much more than sin, until on man's
side there was not only confession of sin but confession of
holiness from sin's side amid the experience of a judgment on the
scale of the race, until the confessing race was thus put in right
relation to God's holiness. Then judgment had done its perfect
work. The race's sin was covered and atoned by it, i.e., by
the God who bore it. Individuals could not be reconciled to a holy
God until He thus reconciled the world. Not until sin had been
brought to do its very worst, and had in that culminating act been
foiled, judged, and overcome; not till then could individuals
receive the reconciliation. That was the unitary reconciliation
they must receive in detail. God there, in a racial holiness amid
racial curse, sets up a racial salvation, which our souls enter
upon by faith. It is by Himself in His changeless love and pity
that it is set up. It is not the Son's suffering and death, but His
holy obedience to both that is the satisfying thing to God, the
holiness of God the Son. In a sense, a great solemn sense, it is an
exercise of God's absolute self-satisfaction, exhibited after a
long historic process, amidst the dissatisfaction of a world's
ruin. "In His love and in His pity He redeemed them." He set up
reconciliation by an act of judgment on His Son, cutting off His
own right hand that we might enter into the Kingdom of heaven: "In
His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and
carried them all the days of old." The redemption was a thing that
was coming through the whole of Israel's history, and in a remoter
sense through the whole history of the world. The changeless
holiness must assert itself in such judgment as surely as in the
kingdom. You all believe that the holiness of God must assert
itself in the Kingdom of God. But how can there be a final kingdom
without final judgment? Is not all judgment in the name of the
king, even in our human society? Are not king and judge
inseparable, as inseparable as king and father? We say today that
king and father are inseparable. But king and judge are equally
inseparable, especially if you take the great Old Testament idea.
Christ submitted with all His heart to God's holy final judgment on
the race. He did not view it as an unfortunate incident in His
life. He did not treat it as though it happened to drop upon Him.
But He treated it as the grand will of God, as the effectuation in
history of God's holiness, which holiness must have complete
response and practical confession both on its negative side of
judgment and its positive side of obedience. Christ's death was
atoning not simply because it was sacrifice even unto death, but
because it was sacrifice unto holy and radical judgment. There is
something much more than being obedient unto death. Plenty of men
can be obedient unto death; but the core of Christianity is
Christ's being obedient unto judgment, and unto the final judgment
of holiness. It is being obedient to a kind of death prescribed by
God, indispensable to the holiness of God's love, necessitated in
such a world by the last moral conditions, and not simply inflicted
by the wickedness of men.
Get rid of the idea that judgment is
chiefly retribution, and directly infliction. Realize that it is,
positively, the establishing and the securing of eternal
righteousness and holiness. View punishment as an indirect and
collateral necessity, like the surgical pains that make room for
nature's curing power. You will then find nothing morally repulsive
in the idea of judgment effected in and on Christ, any more than in
the thought that the kingdom was set up in Him.
To conclude, then, God could only
justify man before Him by justifying Himself and His holy law
before men. If He had not vindicated His holiness to the uttermost
in that way of judgment, it would not be a kind of holiness that
men could trust. Thus a faith which could justify man, which could
make a foundation for a new humanity, could not exist. We can only
be eternally justified by faith in a God who justifies Himself as
so holy that He must set up His holiness in human history at any
price, even at the price of His own beloved and eternal Son.
I close, then, upon that
unchangeable word of God's self-justifying holiness. Even the
sinner could not trust a love that could not justify itself as
holy. It is the holiness in God's love, I urge, that alone enables
us to trust Him. Without that we should only love Him, and the love
would fluctuate. For we could not be perfectly sure that His would
not. It is the holiness in God's love that is the eternal, stable,
unchangeable element in it - the holiness secured for history and
its destine in the Cross. It is only the unchangeable that we could
trust; and there alone we find it. If we only loved the love of
God, we should have no stable, eternal, universal religion. But we
love the holy love He established in Christ, and therefore
we are safe with an everlasting salvation.
In the days of our fathers Christian
belief was more solid within the Church than it is now; and the
defending and expounding of Christianity, more especially the
defending of it, had to concern itself with outsiders - outside the
Church, and outside Christianity very often. Today our difficulties
have changed; and a great part of our exposition must keep in view
the fact that some of the most dangerous challenges of Christianity
are found amongst those who claim the Christian name. There are
those who have a very real reverence for the character of Jesus
Christ, and they can speak, and do speak, quite sincerely, with
great devotion and warmth and beauty, about Christ, and about many
of the ideas that are associated with apostolic Christianity. All
the same, they are strongly and sometimes even violently,
antagonistic to that redemption which is the very center of the
Christian faith; and they make denials and challenges which are
bound to tell upon the existence of that faith before many
generations are over. We do not take the true measure of the
situation unless we realize that the thing which is at stake at
this moment is something that will not affect the present
generation, but is sure to affect two or three generations hence.
Those who are concerned about Christianity on the largest scale
today are concerned with what may be its position and its prospects
then. The ideas at the center of the Christian faith are too large,
too deep and subtle, to show their effects in one age; and the
challenge of them does not show its effect in one generation or
even in two. Individuals, society, and the Church, indeed, are able
to go on, externally almost unaffected, by the way that they have
upon them from the past; and it is only within the range of several
generations that the destruction of truths with such a
comprehensive range as those of Christianity takes effect.
Therefore it is part of the duty of the Church, in certain sections
and on certain occasions, to be less concerned about the effect of
the Gospel upon the individual immediately, or on the present age,
and to look ahead to what may be the result of certain changes in
the future. God sets watchmen in Zion who have to keep their eye on
the horizon; and it is only a drunken army that could scout their
warning. We are not only bound to attend to the needs and interests
of the present generation; we are trustees for a long future, as
well as a long past. Therefore it is quite necessary that the
Church should give very particular attention to these central and
fundamental points whose influence, perhaps, is not so promptly
prized, and whose destruction would not be so mightily felt at
once, but would certainly become apparent in the days and decades
ahead.
That is why one feels bound to
invite attention, and to press attention, upon points concerning
which it may very easily be said, "These are matters that do not
concern my faith and my piety; I can afford to let these things
alone." Perhaps A, B, and C can, and X, Y, and Z can; but the
Christian Church cannot afford to let these things alone. The
Church carries the individual amid much failure of his faith; there
is a vicarious faith; but what is to carry the Church if its faith
fail? Remove concern from these things, and the effect of the
collective message of the Church to the great world becomes
undermined. Then the world must look somewhere else than to the
Church for that which is to save it. That is some apology for
dwelling upon points which many people would say were simply
theological and were outside the interest of the individual
Christian. Theology simply means thinking in centuries. Religion
tells on the present, but theology tells on the religion of the
future and the race.
Moreover, there are always natures
among Christian people who refuse, and properly refuse, to remain
satisfied with superficial experiences or current views of their
faith. They are bound by the spirit that moves within them - by the
kind of temperament God has given them they are bound to penetrate
to the heart, to the depths of things. Their work does not
immediately pay; and while they grind in their mill the Philistines
mock and the libertines jeer. But it would be a great misfortune if
the whole of the work of the Church were measured by the standard
which is so necessary in the world - the standard of what will
immediately pay, or promptly tell. It is, of course, a great thing
to go back upon the history of Christianity, and to point out to
ourselves and to our people the great things that Christianity has
done in the course of history. But you cannot rest Christianity
upon that. You can only rest Christianity upon Christ Himself, and
His living presence in the New Humanity. You can put the matter in
this way. You can ask, On what did the Christianity rest of those
who believed in the very first years of the Church's life? They had
no results of Christianity before them. They had no history of the
Church before them. They had not the glorious story of Christian
philanthropy before them, nor the magnificent expansion of
Christian doctrine, nor the enormous influence of the Christian
Church and its effect upon the course of the world's history. On
what did they rest their faith? That upon which they rested their
faith must be that upon which we rest our faith when we come to a
real crisis, and are driven into a real corner. It thus becomes
necessary to go into the deep things of God as they are revealed to
us by the Holy Spirit, through His inspired apostles, in Christ and
His Cross.
From what I have said you will be
prepared to hear me state that reconciliation is effected by the
representative sacrifice of Christ crucified; by Christ crucified
as the representative of God on the one hand and of Humanity, or
the Church, on the other hand. Also it was by Christ crucified in
connection with the divine judgment. Judgment is a far greater idea
than sacrifice. For you see great sacrifices made for silly or
mischievous causes, sacrifices which show no insight whatever into
the moral order or the divine sanctity. Now this sacrifice of
Christ, when you connect it with the idea of judgment, must in some
form or other be described as a penal sacrifice. Round that word
penal there rages a great deal of controversy. And I am using the
word with some reserve, because there are forms of interpreting it
which do the idea injustice. The sacrifice of Christ was a penal
sacrifice. In what sense is that so? We can begin by clearing the
ground, by asking, In what sense is it not true that the sacrifice
of Christ was penal? Well, it cannot be true in the sense that God
punished Christ. That is an absolutely unthinkable thing. How could
God punish Him in whom He was always well pleased? The two things
are a contradiction in terms. And it cannot be true in the sense
that Christ was in our stead in such a way as to exclude and exempt
us. The sacrifice of Christ, then, was penal not in the sense of
God so punishing Christ that there is left us only religious
enjoyment, but in this sense. There is a penalty and curse for sin;
and Christ consented to enter that region. Christ entered
voluntarily into the pain and horror which is sin's penalty from
God. Christ, by the deep intimacy of His sympathy with men, entered
deeply into the blight and judgment which was entailed by man's sin
and which must be entailed by man's sin if God is a holy and
therefore a judging God. It is impossible for us to say that God
was angry with Christ; but still Christ entered the wrath of God,
understanding that phrase as I endeavoured to explain it yesterday.
He entered the penumbra of judgment, and from it He confessed in
free action, He praised and justified by act, before the world, and
on the scale of all the world, the holiness of God. You can
therefore say that although Christ was not punished by God, He bore
God's penalty upon sin. That penalty was not lifted even when the
Son of God passed through. Is there not a real distinction between
the two statements? To say that Christ was punished by God who was
always well pleased with Him is an outrageous thing. Calvin himself
repudiates the idea. But we may say that Christ did, at the depth
of that great act of self-identification with us when He became
man, He did enter the sphere of sin's penalty and the horror of
sin's curse, in order that, from the very midst and depth of it,
His confession and praise of God's holiness might rise like a
spring of fresh water at the bottom of the bitter sea, and sweeten
all. He justified God in His judgment and wrath. He justified God
in this thing.
So the act of Christ had this
twofold aspect. On the one hand it was God offering, and on the
other hand it was man confessing. Now, what was it that Christ
chiefly confessed? I hope you have read McLeod Campbell on the
Atonement. Every minister ought to know that book, and know it
well. But there is one criticism to be made upon the great, fine,
holy book. And it is this. It speaks too much, perhaps, about
Christ confessing human sin, about Christ becoming the Priest and
Confessor before God of human sin and exposing it to God's
judgment. The horror of the Cross expresses the repentance of the
race before a holy God for its sin. But considerable difficulties
arise in that connection, and critics were not slow to point them
out. How could Christ in any real sense confess a sin, even a
racial sin, with whose guilt He had nothing in common? Now that is
rather a serious criticism if the confession of sin were the first
charge upon either Christ or us, if the confession of human sin
were the chief thing that God wanted or Christ did I think it is
certainly a defect in that great book that it fixes our attention
too much upon Christ's vicarious confession of human sin.
The same criticism applies to another very fine book, that by the
late Canon Moberly, or Christ Church, "Atonement and Personality."
I once had the privilege of meeting Canon Moberly in discussion on
this subject, and ventured to point out that defect in his theory,
and I was relieved to find that on the occasion the same criticism
was also made by Bishop Gore. But we get out of the difficulty, in
part at least, if we recognize that the great work of Christ, while
certainly it did confess human sin, was yet not to confess that,
but to confess something greater, namely God's holiness in His
judgment upon sin. His confession, indeed, was not in so many
words, but in a far more mighty way, by act and deed of life and
death. The great confession is not by word of mouth - it is by the
life, in the sense, not of mere conduct, but in the great personal
sense in which life contains conduct and transcends death. Christ
confessed not merely human sin - which in a certain sense, indeed,
He could not do - but He confessed God's holiness in reacting
mortally against human sin, in cursing human sin, in judging it to
its very death. He stood in the midst of human sin full of love to
man, such love as enabled Him to identify Himself in the most
profound, sympathetic way with the evil race; fuller still of love
to the God whose name He was hallowing; and, as with one mouth, as
if the whole race confessed through Him, as with one soul, as
though the whole race at last did justice to God through His soul,
He lifted up His face unto God and said, "Thou art holy in all Thy
judgments, even in this judgment which turns not aside even from
Me, but strikes the sinful spot if even I stand on it." The
dereliction upon the Cross, the sense of love's desertion by love,
was Christ's practical confession of the holy God's repulsion of
sin. He accepted the divine situation - the situation of the race
before God. By God's will He did so. By His own free consent He did
so. Remember the distinction between God's changeless love and
God's varying treatment of the soul. God made Him sin, treated Him
as if He were sin; He did not view Him as sinful. That is quite
another matter. God made Him to be sin - it does not say He made
Him sinful. God lovingly treated Him as human sin, and with His
consent judged human sin in Him and on Him. Personal guilt Christ
could never confess. There is that in guilt which can only be
confessed by the guilty. "I did it." That kind of confession Christ
could never make. That is the part of the confession that we make,
and we cannot make it effectually until we are in union with Christ
and His great lone work of perfectly and practically confessing the
holiness of God. There is a racial confession that can only be made
by the holy; and there is a personal confession that can only be
made by the guilty. That latter, I say, is a confession Christ
could never make. In that respect Christ did not die, and did not
suffer, did not confess, in our stead. We alone, the guilty, can
make that confession; but we cannot make it with Christian effect
without the Cross and the confession there. We say then not only "I
did this," but "I am guilty before the holiness confessed in the
Cross." The grand sin is not to sin against the law but against the
Cross. The sin of sins is not transgression, but unfaith.
So also of holiness, there is a
confession of holiness which can only be made by God, the Holy. If
God's holiness was to be fully confessed, in act and deed, in life,
and death, and love transcending both, it can only be done by
Godhead itself.
Therefore we press the words to
their fullness of meaning: "God was in Christ reconciling," not
reconciling through Christ, but actually present as Christ
reconciling, doing in Christ His own work of reconciliation. It was
done by Godhead itself, and not by the Son alone. The old
theologians were right when they insisted that the work of
redemption was the work of the whole Trinity - Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit; as we express it when we baptize into the new life of
reconcilement in the threefold name. The holiness of God was
confessed in man by Christ, and this holy confession of Christ's is
the source of the truest confession of our sin that we can make.
Our saving confession is not merely "I did so and so," but "I did
it against a holy, saving God." "I have sinned against heaven and
in thy sight," sinned before infinite holiness and forgiving grace.
God could not forgive until man confessed, and confessed not only
his own sin but confessed still more - God's holiness in the
judgment of sin. The confession also had to be made in life and
action, as the sin was done. That is to say, it had to be made
religiously and not theologically, by an experience and not an
utterance. A verbal confession, however sincere, could not fully
own an actual sin. If we sin by deed we must so confess. It is made
thus religiously, spiritually, experimentally, practically by Jesus
Christ's life, its crown of death, and His life eternal. The more
sinful man is, the less can he thus confess either his own sin or
God's holiness. Therefore God did it in man by a love which was as
great as it was holy, by an infinite love. That is to say, by a
love which was as closely and sympathetically identified with man
as it was identified with the power of the holy God.
So we have arrived at this. The
great confession was made not alone in the precise hour of Christ's
death, although it was consummated there. It had to be made in life
and act, and not in a mere feeling or statement; and for this
purpose death must be organically one with the whole life. You
cannot sever the death of Christ from the life of Christ. When you
think of the self-emptying which brought Christ to earth, His whole
life here was a living death. The death of Christ must be organic
with His whole personal life and action. And that means not only
His earthly life previous to the Cross, but His whole celestial
life from the beginning, and to this hour, and to all eternity. The
death of Christ is the central point of eternity as well as of
human history. His own eternal life revolves on it. And we shall
never be so good and holy at any point, even in eternity, that we
shall not look into the Cross of Christ as the center of all our
hope in earth or heaven. It is Christ that works out His own
redemption and reconciliation, from God's right hand, throughout
the course of history. I would gather that up in one phrase. Christ
is the perpetual providence of His own salvation. Christ, acting
through His Spirit, is the eternal providence of His own salvation.
The apostles never separated reconciliation in any age from the
Cross and blood of Jesus Christ. If ever we do that (and many are
doing it today) we throw the New Testament overboard. The bane of
so much that claims to be more spiritual religion at the present
day is that it simply jettisons the New Testament, and with it
historic Christianity. The extreme critics, people that live upon
monism and immanence, rationalist religion and spiritual
impressionism, are people who are deliberately throwing overboard
the New Testament as a whole, deeply as they prize it in parts.
They say that the apostolic views and interpretations of Christ's
work may have been all very well for people who knew no better than
men did at so early a period, but we are now a long way beyond
that, and we must re-edit the New Testament theology, especially as
to Christ's death. I keep urging, whatever we do let us do it
frankly, let us do it with our eyes open and with eyes competent to
take the measure of what we are doing. The trying thing is that
tremendous renunciations should be blandly made, without,
apparently, any sense of their appalling dimensions, and of the
huge thing that is being so ignorantly done. (See note at the end
of this lecture.)
The apostles, I say, never separated
reconciliation from the Cross and the blood of Jesus Christ. The
historic Church has never done so, with all its divisions. And what
the Cross meant for the apostles as Jews, with their history and
education, was something like this. If you go back to the Old
Testament, you find that the whole kingdom of God and destiny of
man turns on the treatment of sin. And either the sin was atoned or
the sinner was punished. But there were some sins that never could
be atoned for, what are described as sins with a high hand,
presumptuous sins, deliberate, defiant sins, as distinct from sins
of ignorance or weakness, when a man so identified himself with his
sin that he became inseparable from it. The man guilty of them was
put outside the camp, his communication was cut with the saved
community of Israel. He was committed to the outer darkness. There
remained only punishment and death. The punishment was expulsion
from the covenant, and so from life. And as there is little about
immortality in the Old Testament, it was death for good and all.
But in the Cross of Christ there is no sin excluded from atonement.
I know of course what you are thinking about - the sin against the
Holy Ghost. That is far too large a subject to enter on. I can only
say that I am not keeping it out of my survey. And I repeat, there
is no sin excluded from atonement. Death as punishment of sin was
absorbed in Christ's sacrifice. Such was its atoning work that the
judgment due to all mankind was absorbed, and the sin of sins now
was fixed refusal of that Grace. The Cross bought up all other
debts, so to say.
To return to my old point. The
objection to speaking of Christ's death as penalty is two-fold. God
could not punish One with whom He was always well pleased.
Consequently Christ could not suffer punishment in the true sense
of the word without having a guilty conscience. If the bearing of
punishment were the whole of Christ's work, there was something in
that way which He did not and could not do - He could not bear the
penalty of remorse. But the whole of His work, was not the bearing
of punishment; it was not the acceptance of suffering. It was the
recognition and justification of it, the "homologation" of God's
judgment and God's holiness in it.
The death and suffering of Christ
was something very much more than suffering - it was atoning
action. At various stages in the history of the Church - not the
Roman Catholic Church only but Protestantism also - exaggerated
stress has been laid upon the sufferings of Christ. But it is not a
case of what He suffered but what He did. Christ's suffering was so
divine a thing because He freely transmitted it into a great act.
It was suffering accepted and transfigured by holy obedience under
the conditions of curse and blight which sin and brought upon man
according to the holiness of God. The suffering was a sacrifice to
God's holiness. In so far it was penalty. But the atoning thing was
not its amount or acuteness, but its obedience, its sanctity.
There are pathetic ways of thinking
about Christ regard Him too much as a mere individual before God.
They do not satisfy if Christ's relation with man was a racial one
and He represented Humanity. Especially they do not hold good if
that relationship was no mere blood relationship, natural
relationship, but a supernatural relationship - blood relationship
only in the mystic Christian sense. We are blood relations of
Christ, but not in the natural sense of that term, only in the
supernatural sense, as those who are related to Him in His blood,
in His death, and in His Spirit. The value of Christ's unity and
sympathy with us was not simply that He was continuous with the
race at its head. It was not a relation of identity. The
race was not prolonged into Him. The value consists in that
life-act of self-identification by which Christ the eternal
Son of God became man. We hear much about Christ's essential
identity with the human race. That is not true in the sense in
which other great men, like Shakespeare, for instance, were
identical with the human race, gathering up in consummation its
natural genius. Christ's identity was not natural or created
identity, but the self-identification of the Creator. Everything
turns upon this - whether Christ was a created being, however
grand, or whether He was of increate Godhead.
As Head of the human race by this
voluntary self-identification with it, Christ took the curse and
judgment, which did not belong to Himself as sinless. And what He
owned was not so much the depth of our misery as the depth of our
guilt; and He did it sympathetically, by the moral sympathy
possible only to the holy. Nor did He simply take the full measure
of our guilt. His owning it means very much more than that His
moral perceptions were so deep and piercing that He could measure
our guilt as a bystander of acute moral penetration could. He
carried it in His own moral experience as only divine sympathy
could. And in dumb action He spread it out as it is before God. He
felt sin and its horror as only the holy could as God did. We learn
in our measure to do that when we escape from the indifference of
our egotism and come under His Cross and near His heart; we learn
to do as Christ did as we enter into living union with Christ. And
we then rise above purity - for purity is only shamed by sin - we
rise to holiness, which is burdened with sin and all its load. How
much more than pure Christ was! How much fuller of meaning is such
a word as "holy" or "holiness" than either "pure" or "purity".
Purity is shamed by human sin. Holiness carries it as a load, and
carries it to its destruction. In the great desertion Christ could
not feel Himself a sinner whom God rejects. For the sinner cannot
carry sin; he collapses under it. Christ felt Himself treated as
the sin which God Recognizes and repels by His very holiness. It
covered and hid Him from God. He was made sin (not sinful, as I
say). The holiness of God becomes our salvation not by slackness of
demand but by completeness of judgment; not because He relaxes His
demand, not because He spends less condemnation on sin, lets us off
or lets sin off, or lets Christ off ("spared not"); but because in
Christ judgment becomes finished and final, because none but a holy
Christ could spread sin out in all its sinfulness for thorough
judgment. I have a way of putting it which startles some of my
friends. The last judgment is past. It took place on Christ's
Cross. What we talk about as the last judgment is simply the
working out of Christ's Cross in detail. The final judgment, the
absolute judgment, the crucial judgment for the race took place in
principle on the Cross of Christ. Sin has been judged finally
there. All judgment is given to the Son in virtue of His Cross. All
other debts are bought up there.
It is not simply that in the Cross
of Christ all punishment was shown to be corrective. A favorite
theme on the part of many of those who challenge the apostolic
position about the death of Christ is that it was only the crowning
exposition of the great principle that all punishment is really
corrective and education. We cannot say that. There is plenty of
punishment that hardens and hardens. That is why we are obliged to
leave such questions as universal restoration unsolved. Even when
we recognize the absolute power of God's salvation, we also
recognize that it is in the power of the human soul to harden
itself until it become shrunk into such a tough and irreducible
mass as it seems the very grace of God could do nothing with.
Certainly there are people here, in this life, who become so tough
in their sin that the grace of God is in vain. And I am not sure
that among those who are toughest are not some who are much
comforted by their religion. You can do something with a hardened
sinner. He can be broken to pieces. But I do not know what you can
do with a viscous saint, with those who are wrapped in the wool,
soaked in the comfort of their religion, and tanned to leather,
soft and tough as a glove, by its bitterest baptisms. I once used
an expression of these people which was somewhat criticized. I
called them "moral tabbies." Is there anything more comfortable,
and selfish, and hopeless than a really accomplished tabby? When
religion becomes perverted to be a means of mere comfort and dense
self-satisfaction, it becomes an integument so tough that even the
grace of God cannot get through it, or a substance so flaccid that
it cannot be handled.
I find it convenient, you observe,
to distinguish between punishment and penalty. A man who loses his
life in the fire-damp, where he is looking for the victims of an
accident, pays the penalty of sacrifice, but he does not receive
its punishment. And I think it useful to speak of Christ as taking
the penalty of sin, while I refuse to speak of His taking its
punishment. I would avoid every word that would suggest that He was
punished in connection with His salvation. It robs the whole act of
ethical value to say so. Penalty is made to honor God in the Cross
of Christ, and thus it becomes a blessing to us. Not that our
punishment is turned to good account in its subjective results upon
us, but that Christ's judgment has objective value to the honor of
God's holiness. He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He
offered. And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted.
His passive suffering became active obedience, and obedience to a
holy doom. He did not steel His face to the suffering He had to
endure, as though it were a fate to which He had to set His teeth
and go through it in a stoic way. He never regarded it as a mere
infliction. For Him, whoever inflicted it, it was the holiest thing
in all the world - it was the will and judgment of God. All the Old
Testament told Him that the Kingdom of God could never come without
the prior judgment of God; and He was prepared to force that
judgment in His impatience for the Kingdom.
I should, therefore, express the
difference between the old view and the new by saying that one
emphasizes substitutionary expiation and the other emphasizes
solidary reparation, consisting of due acknowledgment of God's
holiness, and the honoring of that and not of His honor.
Now let me pass as I close today to
two or three points I want specially to emphasize.
There is one quotation which I
wanted to make at a particular point and did not. The Reformers are
still on the whole, the maters of the great verities of experience
in connection with the work of Christ. They had an amazing insight
into the morbid psychology of the conscience. They did understand
what sin meant, and they said this - the sinner, beginning with
indifference, must keep flying from God until he actually hate God
as a persecutor, unless he grasp the pursuit as God's mercy.
Indifference could not stop at indifference, but goes on through
aversion to hate. Even if a man die indifferent in this life, he
comes into circumstances where he ceases to be indifferent. If we
believe about a future at all, it will be impossible for an
indifferent man to remain indifferent when he has passed on there.
Indifference is an unstable position. It changes either upward or
downward - downward into antagonism, into deadly hate against God,
something Satanic; or upwards it passes into acceptance of God's
mercy by faith, and all its blossom and fruit, its joy and peace in
the Holy Ghost. The Reformers were perfectly right. It is only our
dull experience and preoccupied vision which prevent us seeing that
it is so.
Then I should like to call attention
to this value in such a cross. It is only the judgment sacrifice of
the Son of God that assures the sinner of the deep changelessness
of grace. Forgiving is not forgetting. Popular theology too often
tends to pacify us by reducing the offense. But the Reformers put
the matter quite otherwise in saying that a justifying faith only
goes with a full sense of guilt. You cannot get a full, justifying
faith without a full sense and confession of guilt. We always have
mistrust in the background of our own self-extenuations. When
conscience begins to work and you begin to extenuate, when you try
your hand earnestly at justifying yourself to yourself, you have
some idea of how much more vast must be God's justification of you
before Himself. You cannot cease to ask what charge conscience has
against you. Then you magnify that to God's charge. If your heart
condemn you, His condemnation is greater than that of your
condemning heart. Do you consider His conscience? His conscience
has to be pacified as well as His heart indulged. And if His
conscience be not met, ours is not sure. Has His conscience been
met? Conscience has always mistrust in the background if grace is
mere remission. Mere remission of sin does not satisfy even us. If
conscience witnesses, against our extenuations, to the holy majesty
of moral claim, is it to be less severe and less changeless than
the claim of God Himself? Conscience has in trust God's law and its
majesty, which must be made good, as mere remission does not make
it. Suppose I transgress and I hear the message of grace, does it
tell me the accusing, irrepressible demand of conscience, the
haunting fear of judgment, was an illusion? It is doing me very ill
service if it does. True, there is now no condemnation for faith;
but if the message of grace ever teaches us that the judgment of
conscience is exaggeration, is illusion, it is not the true grace
of God. If a message of grace tell us there was and is no judgment
any more, and that God has simply put judgment on one side and has
not exercised it, that cannot be the true grace of God. Surely the
grace of God cannot stultify our human conscience like that! So we
are haunted by mistrust, unless conscience be drowned in a haze of
heart. We have always the feeling and fear that there is judgment
to follow. How may I be sure that I may take the grace of God
seriously and finally, how be sure that I have complete salvation,
that I may entirely trust it through the worst my conscience may
say? Only thus, that God is the Reconciler, that He reconciles in
Christ's Cross that the judgment of sin was there for good and all.
We are judged now by the Cross, and by the Cross we stand or fall.
The great sin is not something we do, but it is refusing to make
ourselves right with God in Christ's Cross. We are judged in the
end by our relation to the Cross of Christ. It is the principle of
our moral world. All judgment is committed to that Son. We stand
before God at last according as we are owned by Christ. We are
confessed by Him according to our confession of Him. Nemesis on us
is hallowed as a part of the judgment on Him to whose death we are
joined. There is no such thorough assertion of God's holy, loving
law anywhere as there, where in the Cross it was given its own, and
was perfected in judgment in Him who became a curse for us. His
prayer for His murderers, or the closing sigh of victory in the
midst of that judgment, vouches for ever to this, that it is the
same holy will which judges man's wickedness and also loves us and
gives His Son for a propitiation for us. Only that holiness which
is changeless in its judgment could be changeless also in grace.
His grace was so little to be foiled that He graciously took His
own judgment. Thus the severity of conscience becomes the certainty
of salvation.
But changeless in judgment! Does
that mean exacting the uttermost farthing of penalty, of suffering?
Does it mean that in the hour of His death Christ suffered,
compressed into one brief moment, all the pains of hell which the
human race deserved. We cannot think about things in that way. God
does not work by such equivalents. What is required is not an
equivalent penalty, but an adequate confession of His holiness. Let
us get rid of that materialist idea of equivalents. What Christ
gave to God was not an equivalent penalty, but an adequate
confession of God's holiness, rising from amid extreme conditions
of sin. God's holiness, then, was so little to be mocked, that He
actually took His own judgment to save it. He spared not His own
Son - His own self. His severity of conscience becomes at the same
moment our security of salvation. And the more conscience preaches
the changelessness of the judging God, the more it preaches the
same changelessness in the grace of Christ.
There is another consequence. Only
the eternal Reconciler, the High Priest, can guarantee us our full
redemption. "Take, my soul, thy full salvation." You cannot do it
except you do it in such a Cross. It is not enough to have in the
Cross a great demonstration of God's love, a forgiveness of the
past which leaves us to fend for ourselves in the future Is my
moral power so great after all, then, that, supposing I believe
past things were settled in Christ's Cross, I may now feel I can
run in my own strength? Can I be perfectly confident about meeting
temptation? Nay, we must depend daily upon the continued energy of
the crucified and risen One. We must depend daily upon the action
of that same Christ whose action culminated there but did not end
there. His death is as organic with His heavenly life as it was
with His earthly. What is the meaning of His perpetual intercession
if it does not mean that - the exhausted energy of His saving act?
It is by His work from heaven that we appropriate His work upon
earth. He guarantees our perfection as well as our redemption.
The last step. It is only the
atoning reconciliation of a whole world that guarantees the final
perfecting of that world by its Creator. How do we know that
creation is going to be perfected? How do we know that it is to be
to the glory of God who made it and called it good? How do we know
the world will not be a failure for God with all but the group of
people saved in an ark of some kind? We only know because we
believe in the reconciliation of the whole world in Christ's Cross.
There is a great deal of pessimism today, much doubt as to whether
perfection really remains for the whole world; and you find people
in the burdened West drawn to the Buddhistic idea of the human
soul's extinction. Some Christians content themselves with
individual salvation out of a world which is left in the lurch, or
they are satisfied with personal union with Christ securing their
own future. But the gospel deals with the world of men as a whole.
It argues the restoration of all things, a new heaven and a new
earth. It intends the regeneration of human society as a whole.
Christ is the Savior of the world, who was also the agent of its
creation. The Creator has not let His world get out of hand for
good and all. That is to say, our faith is social and communal in
its nature. We must have a social gospel. And this you cannot get
upon the basis of mere individual or sectional salvation. You can
only have a social gospel upon one basis, namely, that Christ
saved, reconciled the whole world as a unity, the whole of society
and history. The Object of our faith, Jesus Christ, is what our
fathers used to call a federal Person, a federal Savior, in a
federal act. All humanity is in Him and in His act. It is quite
true every man must believe for himself, but no man can believe by
himself or unto himself. The Christian faith fades away if it is
not nourished and built up in a community, in a Church. And the
Church fades away if it do not hold this faith in trust for the
whole world. Each one of us is saved only by the act and by the
Person that saved the whole world.
There is a popular impression about
both philosophy and theology that the history of their problems is
very sterile; that it is not a long development, carrying the
discussion on with growing insight from age to age, and passing
from thinker to thinker with growing depth, but rather a scene in
which each newcomer demolishes the work of his predecessor in order
to put in its place some theory doomed in turn to the same
fruitless fate. Truly, as Hegel says, if that were so with
philosophy, its history would become one of the saddest and
sorriest things, and it would have no right to go on. And if it
were so with theology, we should not only be distressed for
Humanity, but we should be skeptical about the Holy Spirit in the
Church. It could be the Church of no Holy Spirit if those who
translated its life into thought did not offer to posterity a
spectacle higher than dragons that tare each other in the slime, or
lions that bit and devoured one another.
As a matter of truth and fact, both
philosophy and theology have not only a chronicle but a history.
They register the highest spiritual evolution of the race. The wave
behind rolls on the wave before. The past is not devoured but lives
on, and comes to itself in the future. The new arrivals do not
consume their predecessors, and do not ignore them; they interpret
them and carry them forwards. They take their fertile place in the
great organic movement. They modulate what is behind upwards into
what is to come. They correct the past and enrich it; and they hand
on their corrected past to be a foundation for the workers yet to
be.
The amateur, or the self-taught,
therefore is at a great disadvantage. He does not take up the
problem where the scientific succession laid it down. He does not
come in where his great co-workers left off. He must start ab
ovo. He must do over again for himself what they have conspired
to do better. He risks "being a fool at first hand." He wants
himself criticizing what has long been dropped, and slaying the
long-time slain. He throws away effort in establishing what the
competent have agreed to accept. And he misses the right points to
attack or to strengthen, because he has not surveyed the ground.
Every now and then one meets the capable amateur, whose misfortune
it has been to have no schooling in the scientific history or
method of the subject, who applied to it a shrewd mother-wit or an
earnest but uninstructed conscience, and who perhaps publishes a
theory of Incarnation or Atonement which, for all its hints and
glimpses of truth, makes no real contribution either to the history
or the merits of the case. This is the misfortune of the
self-taught who goes straight to his Bible for the materials of his
theology, and ignores most of the treatment the problem has
received from the greatest minds in the history of the Church or
the soul. The Bible is enough for our saving faith, but it is not
enough for our scientific theology.
To make the most therefore of godly
and able men, who would else be wasted more or less, it is well
that we should teach them at the outset to take up the question
where they find it, to begin where their best predecessors left
off, to work upon results, and to carry forward the subject in the
train of its evolution from the great and growing past. Let us
couple up with the past, and repay its gifts by fructifying them
for the future. Let us call in our thought, and concentrate it upon
the precise question which previous thinkers have left us to
solve.
There is, thus, another thing we
have to do. We have to try to find a due place for those views
which, however one-sided, yet do compel attention to aspects that
the Church from time to time ignores. We have to meet, satisfy, and
exceed such views. Much, for instance, has been done in the
lifetime of most of us to correct and extend those views of
Christ's work which were so rigidly objective that they became
external. It has been urged that the Church long thought too much
of Christ's action on God and not enough of His action on man. And
what is called the moral theory of the Atonement has therefore been
pressed upon us, to replace the ultra-objective and satisfactionary
view. And the pressure has often been so hard that an objective
theory has been entirely denied as immoral, and denied sometimes
with a scorn unjustified by either the mental acumen or moral
dignity of the critic.
But in spite of this over-pressure,
and the occasional insolence that goes with ignorance, it remains
our duty to find a proper place in our view of the whole great
subject for that effect of Christ upon men which has meant so much
of the sanctity of the Church. We have to meet, satisfy, and
transcend those pleas which have been called into existence to
redress the balance of theological neglect, and to fill out that
which was behind in our grasp of the manifold work. Especially we
have to adjust our theology of Christ's work to those who observe
that the repentance of the guilty is an essential condition of
forgiveness, and who go on to ask how we can speak of a finished
reconciliation or atonement by a sinless Christ, who could not
possibly present before God a repentance of that kind.
There are certain results which, it
may be said, we have definitely reached in correction of what has
long been known as the popular view of Christ's death and work.
They are modern, and they owe much to Schleiermacher, Ritschl,
McLeod Campbell, Maurice and others; but they have also been shown
to be scriptural, by a new, objective and scientific investigation
of what the Bible has to say on the subject. When we have brought
the long history of the question up to date, balanced the books,
and taken account of the general agreement on the modern side, we
can then go on to ask where exactly the question now stands.
The modifications on which the best
authorities are substantially at one we have seen to be such as
these: -
1. Reconciliation is not the result
of a change in God from wrath to love. It flows from the changeless
will of a loving God. No other view could make the reconciliation
sure. If God changed to it, He might change from it.
And the sheet-anchor of the soul for Eternity would then have gone
by the board. Forgiveness arose at no point in time. Grace was
there before even creation. It abounded before sin did. The
holiness which makes sin sin, is one with the necessity to destroy
sin in gracious love.
2. Reconciliation rests on Christ's
person, and it is effected by His entire work, doing, and
suffering. This work does three things. (1) It reveals and puts
into historic action the changeless grace of God. (2) It reveals
and establishes His holiness, and therein also the sinfulness of
sin. And (3) it exhibits a Humanity in perfect tune with that will
of God. And it does more than exhibit these things - it sets
them up, grace, holiness, and the new Humanity in its Head.
3. This reconciling and redeeming
work of Christ culminates in His suffering unto death, which is
indeed more of an act than an experience. Here, in the Cross, is
the summit of His revelation of grace, of sin, and of Humanity. And
the central feature of this threefold revelation in the Cross is
the holiness of God's love. It is this holiness that deepens error
into sin, sin into guilt, and guilt into repentance; without which
any sense of forgiveness would be but an anodyne and not a grace, a
self-flattering unction to the soul and not the peace of God.
4. In this relation to God's
holiness and its satisfaction, nobody now thinks of the transfer of
our punishment to Christ in its entirety - including the worst
pains of hell in a sense of guilt. Christ experienced the world's
hate, and the curse of the Law in the sense of the suffering
entailed on man by sin; but a direct infliction of men's total
deserts upon Him by God is unthinkable. His penalty was not
punishment, because it was dissociated from the sense of desert.
Whatever we mean by atonement must be interpreted in that sense.
And judgment is a much better word than either penalty or
punishment.
5. What we have in Christ's work is
not the mere pre-requisite or condition of reconciliation, but the
actual and final effecting of it in principle. He was not making it
possible, He was doing it. We are spiritually in a reconciled
world, we are not merely in a world in process of empirical
reconciliation. Our experience of religion is experience of a thing
done once for all, for ever, and for the world. That is, it is more
than even experience, it is a faith. The same act as put God's
forgiveness on a moral foundation also revolutionized Humanity.
Hence we are not disposed to speak of substitution
6. Another thing may perhaps be
taken as recognized in some form by the main line of judicious
advance in our subject. The work of Christ was moral and not
official. It was the energy and victory of His own moral
personality, and not simply the filling of a position, the
discharge of an office He held. His victory was not due to His
rank, but to His will and conscience. It lay in His faithfulness to
the uttermost amid temptations morally real and psychologically
relevant to what He was. It was a work that drew on His whole
personality, and was built into the nature of that personality as a
moral necessity of it. What He did He did not do simply in the room
and stead of others, He did it as a necessity of His own person
also - though its effect for them was not what it was for Him. He
fulfilled an obligation under which His own personality lay; He did
not simply pay the debts of other people. He fulfilled a personal
vocation.
And His faithfulness was not only to
a vocation. It was to a special vocation, that of a Redeemer, not
merely a saint. The immediate source of His suffering was not the
sight of human sin, and it was not a general holiness in Him. It
was not the quivering of the saint's purity at the touch of evil.
But it was the suffering of One who touched sin as the
Redeemer. He would not have suffered for sin as He did, had He
not faced it as its destroyer. Not only was this His vocation as a
moral hero, but His special vocation as Savior. It was the work of
a moral personality at the heart of the race, of One who
concentrated on a special yet universal task - that of
Redemption.
His perfection was not that of a
paragon, one who could do better what every soul and genius of the
race could do well. He was not all the powers and excellencies of
mankind rolled into one superman. But His perfection was that of
the race's Redeemer. It was interior to all other powers and
achievements. It was central both for God and man. He made man's
center and God's coincide. He took mankind at its enter and laid it
on the center of God. His identification with man was not extensive
but intensive, it was not discursive and parallel, so to say. It
was morally central and creative. He was not Humanity on its divine
side; He was its new life from the inside. The problem He had to
solve was the supreme and central moral problem of guilt; and the
work could only be done by the native action of a personality moral
in its nature and methods, moral to the pitch of the Holy.
It is an immense gain thus to
construe Christ's work as that of a moral personality instead of a
heavenly functionary. It brings it into line with the modern mind
and into organic union with the moral problem of the race. It
enables us to realize that every step of the moral victory in His
life was a step also in the Redemption of the whole human
conscience. And we grasp with new power the idea that His crowning
victory of the Cross was the victory in principle of the whole race
in Him - that Justification is really one with Reconciliation, and
what He did before God contained all He was to do on man. It makes
possible for us what my last lecture will attempt to indicate - a
unitary view of His whole work and person.
7. After these great modifications
and gains, we have cleared the ground to ask with some exactness
just where the question at the moment stands. What was the divinest
thing, the atoning, satisfying thing, the thing offered to God, in
Christ; the thing, therefore, final and precious in what He did?
The permanent thing in Christianity must be that which gives it its
chief value to God. We are now beyond the crude alternative that so
easily besets us, "Did Christ's work bear upon God or on man?"
Neither alone would be true Reconciliation. Neither Orthodoxy nor
Socinianism has it. But we have to ask this: "Can we combine the
truth in each alternative? Can we reach the value of Christ's
saving work to God (i.e. its true and final value) if we
exclude its effect within man? Must we not take that in? Nihil
in effectu quod non prius in causa. Must we not include the
effect to get the full value of the cause, and give a full account
of it?"
Now, let us own at the outset that
the first things we must be sure about are the objective reality of
our religion, its finality, and its initiative in God's free grace
independent of act or desert of ours. But if we start there, it
looks as if we were shut up to the first of the crude alternatives,
as if the idea of Christ's work as acting on God only gave the best
effect to these conditions. It looks as if the old theory alone
guaranteed a salvation finished on the Cross, one wholly God's in
His grace, one that ensures a full and objective release of the
conscience. These things are not secured by what we do, but by
Christ's work on the Cross. Moreover, that work was done for the
whole of mankind, and was complete even for those who as yet make
no response. And, besides, that first alternative is a view that
seems to have the letter of Scripture with it. It does look as if
we could not have full security except by trust of an objective
something, done over our heads, and complete without any reference
to our response or our despite.
But the difficulties begin when we
ask what the objective something was. How describe it? For that
purpose the old doctrine used juridical forms. But these are not
large enough for the dimensions of a modern world, or for its
deepened ethical insight. How exactly could the obedience of Christ
stand for the obedience of all? It was the fulfilment of His own
personal vocation; how does it stand for the obedience of every
other person? Or how does the suffering of Christ restore the moral
order, especially one He never broke? If you treat it as
punishment, that punishment alone does not restore the moral order.
And, if we say He did not do that, He did not restore a moral
order, so much as acknowledge and confess the holiness of God in
His judgment, is not the value of that recognition still greatly
impaired by the fact that it is not made by the guilty but the
Guiltless, who is not directly affected by the connection between
sin and suffering. A finished religion would then be set up without
the main thing - the acknowledgment by the guilty. That
acknowledgment, that repentance, would then be outside the complete
act, and would be at best but a sequel of it; whereas we ought to
give a real place in a complete work of Reconciliation to our
repentance (which some extremists say is all that is required), or
to Christ's moral action on us. Do we not need to include in some
way the effect in the cause, in order to give the cause its full
and final value, i.e., its value to God. The thing of price
done by Christ for God, must it not already include the thing done
upon men? Does not Christ's confession of God's holiness include
man's confession of his sin?
Let us return to that idea of the
moral order which is at the bottom of this objective theory. We ask
whether the moral order is what the Bible means by the idea of the
righteousness of God. The righteousness of God is not only holy but
gracious, not only regulative and retributory, but also forgiving
and restoring. It seems, indeed, in the Gospels to need no other
condition of forgiveness than repentance. This is so; and it is all
very well, we have seen, for individual cases. But we have to deal,
as Christ at last had to deal, with the forgiveness of a world, the
pardon of solidary sin. And we need to be sure, as Christ alone
with His insight could be sure, that the repentance is true and
deep. There it is that we are carried into questions which the
Cross alone can answer. How shall I know how much repentance is
deep enough? Where find a repentance wide enough to cover the sin
of a guilty world? Could Christ offer that? No; directly, He could
not. He could not offer it as a pathos, a personal experience, for
He had no guilt. But, then, guilt is much more than a sense of
guilt. And the essence of repentance is not its intensity or
passion but the thing confessed. It is therefore the holiness more
even than the sin that holiness makes so sinful. It is the due and
understanding acknowledgment of the holiness offended. And this
only a sinless Christ could really do, who was also sympathetic
enough with men to do it from their side. And only the sinless
could realize what sin meant for God.
Farther, this acknowledgment is not
simply verbal, nor simply a matter of profound moral conviction and
admission, but it must be a practical confession, as practical as
the sin. It must place itself as if it were active sin under the
reaction of the Divine holiness; it must be made sin. That is, it
must accept judgment as the only adequate acknowledgment of the
holy God in a sinful world; it must allow His holy law to assert
itself in the Savior's person in the form forced on the sinner's
Friend. He bore this curse as God's judgment, praised it, hallowed
it, absorbed it; and His resurrection showed that He exhausted
it.
But would His acceptance of judgment
for us be possible, would it stand to our good, would it be of
value in God's sight for us, if He were not in moral solidarity
with us? How could it? What God sought was nothing so pagan as a
mere victim outside our conscience and over our heads. It was a
Confessor, a Priest, one taken from among men. But then this moral
solidarity is the very thing that also gives, and must give, Him
His mighty and revolutionary power on us. What makes it possible
for Him to be a Divine victim or a Divine priest for us also makes
Him a new Creator in us His offering of a holy obedience to God's
judgment is therefore valuable to God for us which also makes Him
such a moral power upon us and in us. His creative regenerative
action on us is a part of that same moral solidarity which also
makes His acceptance of judgment stand to our good, and His
confession of God's holiness to be the ground of ours. The same
stroke on the one Christ went upward to God's heart and downward to
ours.
Is this not clear? Christ could make
no due confession of holiness for us in judgment if He were outside
Humanity, if He were a third party satisfying God over our head.
The acknowledgment would not be really from the side of the
culprit, certainly not from his interior, his conscience. The
judgment would not really be the judgment of our sin, which
would therefore be still due. To be of final value the atoning
judgment must be also within the conscience of the guilty. But how
is the judgment, the self-condemnation, the confession within our
guilty conscience to be offered to God as an ingredient of Christ's
reconciling work and not its mere sequel? It is not yet there. Or
else it is nothing worth offering by way of atonement when it is
there. Is there any way of offering our self-condemnation as a
meritorious contribution to forgiveness? Can it be included in the
Divine ground of forgiveness in a guiltless Christ? Repentance is
certainly a condition of forgiveness. But Christ could not repent.
How then could He perfectly meet the conditions of salvation? The
answer is that our repentance was latent in that holiness of His
which alone could and must create it, as the effect is really part
of the cause - that part of the cause which is prolonged in a polar
unity into the sequential conditions of time.
Not only, generally, is there an
organic moral connection and a spiritual solidarity between Christ
and us, but also more particularly, there is such a moral effect on
Humanity included in the work of Christ, who causes it, that that
antedated action on us, judging, melting, changing us, is also part
of His offering to God. He comes bringing His sheaves with Him. In
presenting Himself He offers implicitly and proleptically the new
Humanity His holy work creates. The judgment we brought on Him
becomes our worst judgment when we arraign ourselves; and it makes
it so impossible for us to forgive ourselves that we are driven to
accept forgiveness from the hands of the very love which our sins
doomed to a curse.
What Christ offers to God is,
therefore, not simply an objective satisfaction outside His
revolutionary effect on the soul of man in the way of faith,
repentance, and our whole sanctification. As the very judgment He
bore for us is relevant to our sin by His moral solidarity with us,
so the value of His work to God includes also that value which it
has in acting on us through that same solidarity, and in presenting
us to God as the men it makes us to be. He represents before God
not a natural Humanity that produces Him as its spiritual classic,
but the new penitent Humanity that His influence creates. He calls
things that are not yet as though they were. In Him a goodness of
ours that is not yet rising from its antenatal spring, brings to
naught the sin that is. There was presented to God, in Christ's
holiness, also that repentance in us which it alone has power to
create. He stretches a hand through time and seizes the far-off
interest of our tears. The faith which He alone has power to wake
is already offered to God in the offering of all His powers and of
His finished work. That obedience of ours which Christ alone is
able to create, is already set out in Him before God, implicit in
that mighty and subduing holiness of His in which God is always
well-pleased. All His obedience and holiness is not only fair and
beloved of God, but it is also great with the penitent holiness of
the race He sanctifies. Our faith is already present in His
oblation. Our sanctification is already presented in our
justification. Our repentance is already acting in His confession.
The effect of His Cross is to draw us into a repentance which is a
dying with Him, and therefore a part of the offering in His death;
and then it raises us in newness of life to a fellowship of His
resurrection.
He is thus not only the pledge to us
of God's love but the pledge to God of our sure response to it in a
total change of will and life. We see now how organic, how central
to Christ's gospel of Atonement is Paul's idea of dying and rising
with Him, how vital to His work is this effect of it, this function
of it. For such a process, such an experience, is not a mere moral
sequel or echo of ours to the story of the Cross, it is no mere
imitation or repetition of its moral greatness; nor is it a
sensitive impression of its touching splendor. To die and rise with
Christ does not belong to Christian ethic, to the method of Jesus,
but it has a far deeper and more religious meaning. It is to be
taken into His secret life. It is a mystic incorporation into
Christ's death and resurrection as the standing act of spiritual
existence. We are baptized into His death, and not merely into
dying like Him. We do not echo His resurrection, we share it. As
His trophies we become part of Christ's offering to God; just as
the captives in his procession were part of the victor's
self-presentation to the divinity of Rome. God leadeth us in
triumph in Christ (
No martyrdom could do what the death
of Christ does for faith. No martyrdom could offer God in advance
the souls of a changed race. For no martyr as such is sure of the
future. It is easier to forget all the martyrs that the Savior; and
their power fades with time, while His grows with the ages. With
the martyr's death we can link many admirable reflections,
exhortations, and even inspirations. What it does not give us is
the new and Eternal Life. It is not the consummation of God's
saving purpose for the world.
There are three great aspects of the
work of Christ which have in turn held the attention of the Church,
and come home with special force to its spiritual situation at a
special time. There are:
1. Its triumphant aspect; 2. Its satisfactionary aspect; 3. Its regenerative aspect.
The first emphasizes the finality of
our Lord's victory over the evil power of devil; the second, the
finality of His satisfaction, expiation, or atonement presented to
the holy power of God; and the third the finality of His
sanctifying or new-creative influence on the soul of man. The first
marked the Early Church, the second the Medieval and Reformation
Church, while the third marks the Modern Church.
And if you fall back upon the New
Testament, where all the subsequent development of the Church is in
the germ, as a philosophy might be packed in a phrase, you will
find those three strands wonderfully and prophetically entwined in
Now, it is not meant that in the
period specially marked by one of these aspects the other two were
absent. In various of the medieval theologians you find all three.
And it is a good test of the native aptitude of any theologian, and
of his evangelical grasp, that he should find them all necessary to
express the fullness of the vast work, and its adequacy to anything
so great and manifold as the soul. But what we do not find in the
classic theologians of the past is the co-ordination of the three
aspects under one comprehensive idea, one organic principle,
corresponding to the complete unity of Christ's person, who did the
work. We do not find such a unitary view of the work as we should
expect when we reflect that it was the work of a personality so
complete as Christ, and so absolute as the God who acted in Christ.
Yet we must strive after such a view, by the very nature of our
faith. A mere composite or eclectic theology means a distracted
faith. A creed just nailed together means Churches that cannot draw
together. We cannot, at least the Church cannot, rest healthily
upon medley and mortised aspects of the one thing which connects
our one soul with the one God in one moral world. We cannot rest in
unresolved views of reconciliation. As the reconciliation comes to
pervade our whole being, and as we answer it with heart and
strength and mind, we become more and more impatient of fragmentary
ways of understanding it. We crave, and we move, to see that the
first aspect is the condition of the second, and the second of the
third, and that they all condition each other in a living
interaction.
Now the object I have in view in
this lecture is to press a former point as furnishing this unity -
that the active and effective principle in the work of Christ was
the perfect obedience of holy love which He offered amidst the
conditions of sin, death, and judgment. The potent thing was not
the suffering but the sanctify, and not they sympathetic confession
of our sin so much as the practical confession of God's holiness.
This principle (I hope to show) co-ordinates the various aspects
which have been distorted by isolation. This one action of the holy
Savior's total person was, on its various sides, the destruction of
evil, the satisfaction of God, and the sanctification of men. And
it is in this moral medium of holiness (if I may so say) that these
three effects pass and play into each other with a spiritual
interpenetration.
Thus Christ's complete victory over
the evil power or principle. His redemption (1), is the obverse of
His regenerating and sanctifying effect on us (3). To deliver us
from evil is not simply to take us out of hell, it is to take us
into heaven. Christ does not simply pluck us out of the hands of
Satan, He does so by giving us to God. He does not simply release
us from slavery, He commits us in the act to a positive liberty. He
does not simply cancel the charge against us in court and bid us
walk out of jail, He meets us at the prison-door and puts us in a
new way of life. His forgiveness is not simply retrospective, it
is, in the same act, the gift of eternal life. Our evil is overcome
by good. We are won from sin by an act which at the same time makes
us not simply innocent but holy.
So also we must see that the third -
our regenerate sanctification - is the condition of the second -
the complete satisfaction of God. The only complete satisfaction
that can be made to a holy God from the sinful side is the sinner's
restored obedience, his return to holiness. Now, the cheap and
superficial way of putting that is to say that penitent amendment
is the only satisfaction we can give to a grieved God. But future
amendment does no more than the duty of the future hour. And rivers
of water from our eyes will not wash out the guilt of the past; nor
will they undo the evil we have set afloat in souls far gone beyond
our reach or control. Yet it remains true that nothing can atone to
holiness but holiness. And it must be the holiness of the sinner.
It must also be an obedience of the kind required by the whole
situation, moral and spiritual. It must be the obedience not of
improvement but of reconciliation, not of laborious amendment but
of regenerated faith. But faith in what? Faith in One who alone
contains in Himself a holy obedience so perfect as to meet the
holiness of God on the scale of our sin; but One also who, by the
same obedience, has the power to reproduce in man the kind of
holiness which alone can please God after all that has come and
gone. No suffering can atone. No pain can satisfy a holy God; no
death, as death. Yet satisfied He must be; else the freedom of
grace becomes but an arbitrary and non-holy thing, a thing
instinctive to the divine nature instead of a victory of the divine
will. Also consider this: much of your difficulty in connection
with satisfaction will yield if you keep in view that what we are
concerned with is not the satisfaction of a demand but of a Person,
not of a claim by God but of the heart and soul of God. I know it
is easier to discuss and adjust statutory claims than to grasp the
manifold action of a living and eternal Person. So I am afraid I
must be very theological for a moment and tax you accordingly. The
chief reason why so many hate theology is because it taxes; and
there is nothing we shrink from like spiritual toil. But let the
choice and earnest spirit consider this.
The essence of holiness is God's
perfect satisfaction, His perfect repose in eternal fullness. And
the Christian plea is that this is Self-satisfaction, in the
sublimest sense of the phrase. For us, mostly, the word has an
ignoble sense. But that is only because what we meet most is an
exclusive self-satisfaction, an individual self-sufficiency. But
when we have an entirely inclusive self-satisfaction, an eternal
and compete adequate to Himself in the most critical situation, we
have the whole native fullness of God blessed for ever, with men
beneath the shadow of His wing. The perpetual act of holy God is a
perpetual satisfaction or accord between His nature and His will at
every juncture, and a satisfaction from His own infinite holy
resource - a Self-satisfaction. God is always the author of His own
satisfaction; that is to say, His holiness is always equal to its
own atonement. God in the Son is the perfect satisfaction and joy
of God in the Father; and God holy in the sinful Cross is the
perfect satisfaction of God the holy in the sinless heavens.
Satisfaction there must be in God's own nature, whether under the
conditions of perfect obedience in a harmonious world, or under
those of obedience jarred and a world distraught. God has power to
secure that the perfect holy obedience of heaven shall not be
eternally destroyed by the disobedience of earth. He has power to
satisfy Himself, and maintain His holiness infrangible, even in
face of a world in arms. But satisfied He must be. For an
unsatisfied God, a dissatisfied God, would be no God. He would
reflect the distraction of the world, and so succumb to it.
But a holy God could be satisfied by
neither pain nor death, but by holiness alone. The atoning thing is
not obedient suffering but suffering obedience. He could be
satisfied and rejoiced only by hallowing of His name, by perfect
and obedient answer to His holy heart from amid conditions of pain,
death, and judgment. Holy obedience alone, unto death, can satisfy
the Holy Lord.
Now as to this obedience mark two
things.
1. It includes (we saw) the idea
that in obedience Christ accepted the judgment holiness must pass
upon sin, and did so in a way that confessed it as holy from amidst
the deepest experience of it, the experience not of a spectator but
a victim. His obedience was not merely a fine, perfect, and mighty
harmony of His own with God's blessed will; but it was the
acceptance on man's behalf of that judgment which sin had entailed,
and the confession on man's behalf in a tremendous act that the
judgment was good and holy. For the holiness of God makes two
demands; first, for an answering holiness in love, and second, for
a judgment on those who do not answer but defy. And Christ met
both, in one and the same act. He was judged as one who, being made
sin, was never sinful, but absolutely well-pleasing to God.
2. And the second point is this: The
satisfactory obedience must be obedience from the race that
rebelled. Its holiness must atone for its sin. But how can that
possibly be? Can it be by mere amendment from us? Can we bring any
amendment to atone for the past and secure its remission? Could the
race do it? Solidary in its sin by its moral unity, could the race
earn a solidary salvation? Could you conceive of mankind as one
vast sinful soul repenting with a like unity, turning like the
prodigal, and deputing the most illustrious spiritual hero of its
number to offer its repentance to God in Jesus Christ? If the
supposition were possible, that might indeed be a certain welcome
offering made to God's holiness; but it would not be made
by it. It would be something beyond the resources of
holiness, and God would not be the Savior. He would accept more
sacrifice than He had power to make. And it would make the action
of Christ a power conferred on Him by self-saved man instead of
inherent in Him from God. His commission would be but to God, not
from God. And how should a sinful race offer from its own damaged
resources what would satisfy the holiness of God? Or, if repentance
could satisfy holiness, how are we to know how much, how deep,
repentance would do it, and leave us sure it was done?
The holiness that atones, though it
return from the race that rebelled, must therefore be the gift of
the holiness atoned. For if holiness cold be satisfied by anything
outside itself it would not be absolutely holly. So if holiness can
be satisfied with nothing but holiness it can only be with a
holiness which itself creates. God alone can create in us the
holiness that will please Him. And this He has done in Jesus Christ
incarnate. But it is in Jesus Christ as the creator of man's
holiness, not as the organ of it, as man's sanctifier, and nor
merely man's delegate. Christ is our reconciler because on the
Cross He was our redeemer from sin's power into no mere
independence or courage or safety, but into real holiness; because
the same act that redeems us produces holiness, and presents us in
this holiness to God and His communion. The holiness of Christ is
the satisfying thing to God, yet not because of the beauty of
holiness offered to His sight in the perfect character of Christ.
We are not saved either by Christ's ethical character or our own,
but by His person's creative power and work on us. Christ's
holiness is the satisfying thing to God, because it is not only the
means but also the anticipation of our holiness, because it carries
all our future holiness latent in it and to God's eye patent;
because in His saving act He is the creative power of which our new
life is the product. It is not only that Christ conquered for
Himself and emerged with His soul for a prey, but, He being what He
was, His victory contained ours. If He died all died. It was not
only that all the sin of the world, pointed to its worst, could not
make Him a sinner. It was that by all the holiness of eternity He
had power to make the worst sinners saints. Of course, there is no
way to sanctification but by deliverance from sin, by being
"unsinned." But no sinful man can "unsin" himself, however he
amend.
It can only be done by the creation
in him of a new life. It can only be done by the sinless Son of
God, who lived from eternity in God's holiness, entered man, lived
that holiness out in the face of sin, and thus not only broke the
evil power by living it down but created that holiness in us by
living it in. What is our redemption is thus also our
reconciliation. If the atoning thing is holiness (which it is), and
not suffering (which it is not), then Christ atoned by an act which
created a new holiness in us and not a new suffering. The act which
overcame the world intensively for good and all was also the act
which slowly masters the world in the extensive sense. His moral
and spiritual victory was so deep and thorough that it gives Him
power to subdue other consciences to His holy self, world without
end.
There is an old word used in this
connection which there is much disposition at the present to recall
and reclaim. It is the word surety, of which some of our
fathers were so fond. The word substitute has unfortunate and
misleading suggestions, and it has practically been dropped in
favor of a word more ethical and more constitutional, like
representative. But even that word misleads us to think of Christ
as the spiritual protagonist of a democracy, drawing His power from
those He represents; and it muffles the truth that His relation to
us is royal and not elective, that it is creative and not merely
expository. He does not express the natural repentance of the old
humanity but creates the penitent faith of the new - "the new man
created unto holiness." It is not easy to find a word that has no
defect, since all words, even the greatest, are made from the dust
and spring from our sandy passions, earthly needs, and fleeting
thoughts; and they are hard to stretch to the measure of eternal
things without breaking under us somewhere. The word surety itself
gives way at a great strain - as does guarantee. Christ's function
for us was not simply an assurance to God, from one who knew us
well, that for all our aberrations we were sound and could be
trusted at bottom. His confession of us was not simply His
expression of His conviction, as deep as life, that man, though
tough and slow, would in the long-run turn, obey, and confess if
properly treated from above. It was not a pledge to God, or an
encouragement to man, that Humanity would come right when
experience had done its work on his native goodness and his
spiritual nature, so much deeper than his sin. It was not a
warranty to God that human nature would at last recover its
spiritual balance, of which recovery Christ might point to Himself
as being an earnest, a prelude, a classic illustration. It was not
that Christ staked His insight into the deep nature of this most
excellent creature man that he would one day rise from his swine,
and return from his rebellion, and fall into the Father's arms.
Such poor suggestions as these spring from our common and
commercial use of a word like surety or guarantee. As if Christ
were a third party between two who did not quite believe in each
other. As if God by this aid might be led to foresee that man would
come to himself in a faith and repentance distant but certain,
might credit it to him in advance, but might pardon on that ground.
That would destroy grace. And it would give man the satisfaction of
satisfying God if He would but give him time to collect the
wherewithal.
Christ is no third party, no
arbitrator, no moral broker. And He is not the first installment of
man's return to God, its harbinger. In no such sense is He our
surety before God. Because His work is not one of insight but of
regeneration. It did not turn on His genius for reading us, but His
power to create us anew. He Himself is the creator in us of what He
promises for us. Any surety that Christ gives to God for man is
really God swearing by Himself; it is the Creator's self-assurance
of His own regenerative power. Christ, as the Eternal Son of Holy
God, can offer Him a holiness which creates and includes that of
the race, and does not simply prophesy it.
We might put it thus: Christ alone
in His sinless perfection can feel all God's holiness in judging
sin; and therefore He alone could confess and honor it. No sinful
man could do that; and therefore no sinful man could duly repent.
The value of repentance is always in proportion to the sense of
God's holiness. To confess that holiness is the great postulate in
order to confess sin. And the race cold duly confess its sin and
repent only if there arose in it One who by a perfect and
impenitent holiness in Himself, and by His organic unity with us,
could create such holiness in the sinful as should make the new
life one long repentance transcended by faith and thankful joy.
This was and is Christ's work. And the satisfaction to God, as it
was certainly not His suffering, was also more than the spectacle
of His own holy soul presented to God. It was that holy soul (the
holier as He faced and conquered evil ever growing more black and
bitter) - it was that holy soul seen by God as the cause and
creator of the race's confession, both of holiness and of sin, in a
Church of the reborn. The satisfaction to God was Christ, not as an
isolated character, or in an act wholly outside us and our
responsive union with Him; but it was Christ as the author of our
sanctification and repentance. Our repentance and our sanctity are
of saving value before God only as produced by the creative
holiness of Christ. Christ creates our holiness because of His own
sanctification of Himself -
You wish perhaps here to ask me this
question: Is then the sanctity of a Unitarian who rejects any
satisfaction by Christ, any atonement, as the ground of man's
holiness, is that sanctity of no account before God? Is the true
repentance of those who do not know of an atoning Christianity of
little price with Him? Far from it. But from our point of view we
must regard them as incomplete stages, which draw their value with
God from a subliminal union with that completed and holy offering
of Christ which He never ceases to see, however far it be beneath
our conscious light.
When therefore we speak of Christ as
our Surety, we mean much more than would be meant by a mere
sponsorship. We suppose a solidary union of faith created by the
Savior in the sinner, which not only impresses him but incorporates
him with Christ. All turns upon that spiritual solidarity. All
turns upon the reality of that new life for which Paul had to
invent a new phrase - "in Christ." A tremendous phrase, like that
other, "the New Creation" - and hardly intelligible to a youthful
or impressionist Christianity. The real ground of our forgiveness
is not our confession of sin, and not even Christ's confession of
our sin, but His agonized confession of God's holiness, and its
absorbing effect on us. To be in grace we must be found in Him. Our
new penitent life is His creation. He contains the principle and
power of our forgiveness. And it comes home to us only as we abide
in Him. In Him, and only in Him, the normal holy man, the man holy
with all the holiness of God, have we the living power of release
from guilt, escape from sin, repentance, faith, and newness of
life. We are justified only as we are incorporate (not clothed) in
the perfect righteousness of Christ, our Regenerator, and not in
proportion as the righteousness of Christ has made palpable way in
us. It is not as Christ is in us that we are saved, but as we are
in Christ. It is this being in Christ for our justification that
makes justification necessarily work out to sanctification, and
forgiveness be one with eternal life.
We shall be misled even by what is
true in the representative aspect of Christ unless we grasp how
much more He is, how creative He is, how the solidarity involved in
His representation is due to His own act of self-identification and
not to natural identity with us. We must take quite seriously that
supreme word of a "new creation in Jesus Christ." We need not get
lost in discussing the metaphysic of it; but we must have so tasted
the new life that nothing but the strongest word possible is just
to it.
Christ our New Creator! He was not
simply a new departure n the history of ethical
civilization, by the introduction of an exalted morality. If
that was what He came with, He brought much less than the
conscience needs; and on countless points He has left us without
guidance today. Nor was He simply a great new departure in the
history of religious ideas. He did much more than bring us a
new idea of God. If that was all, again it was not what we need.
For we have more and higher ideas of God than we know what to do
with, more than we have power to realize. But He stands for a new
departure in the history of Creation. His work in so far is
cosmic. It is a new story added to the world. It is a new departure
in the action which made the universe. It is an entirely new stage
in the elevation of human nature, so imperfect in our first
creation, to its divine height in holiness. By His moral treatment
of our sinful case, which is our actual historic case, we are taken
into a share of His superhuman life. That is our salvation. It is
life and power we need. It is to be made over again by the Maker's
redeeming hand. We are redeemed from the ban of sin's magic
circle by the only One who has the secret of the unseen powers; we
are joined with the sin-destroying life of Christ. And we are
redeemed, by the very nature of that redemption, into the
fellowship of His eternal and blessed peace. And that is our
Reconciliation. The act that justified sanctifies and reconciles.
And that totality of Christ in His Church is what God looks on and
is satisfied. We are, as a believing race, in the Son in whom He is
always well pleased.
Now what is it that has created so
much difficulty for the old Protestant doctrine? I mean difficulty
in the mind of Christian believers, and still more in their
experience. For we need not trouble here about difficulty from the
side of the worldlings or the ethical sentimentalists. But
difficulty arose within the pale of the most devout and devoted
evangelical experience. Perhaps it has arisen in your own minds.
Well, the old Protestantism, as you know, was greatly exercised
about the true relation between faith and works. And it had to
insist so strongly on the sole value of faith in order to cope with
Rome that its later years fell into an excessive dread of good
works, lest there should be ascribed to them saving effect. As a
result faith was credited with a merely receptive power, or no more
beyond that than a power of assent. Men lost hold of the great
Lutheran fact that faith is the most mighty and active thing in the
soul, that our faith is our all before God, that it is an energy of
the whole person, that good works are done by this whole believing
person, and that faith by its very nature, as trust in God's love,
is bound to work out in love. They misread the moral impulse in
faith, its power to recast personality and refashion life. They did
not, of course, overlook the necessity of such renovation; but they
put it down to a subsequent action of the Spirit over and above
faith - almost as if the Spirit and His sanctification were a
second revelation, a new dispensation. Which indeed many of the
mystics thought it was - like many rationalist mystics today, who
think we have outgrown historic Christianity and the historic
Christ through our modern light. The old Protestant orthodoxy did
not realize that the real source of the Spirit is the Cross. It
therefore detached faith from life in a way that has produced the
most unfortunate results, both in an antinomianism within the
Church, and in a Socinian protest without, which was inevitable,
and so far valuable, but was equally extreme. Faith was treated by
the positive school then as a mystic power, or an intellectual, but
not as a moral. It was not the renovating power in life, but only
prepared the ground for the renovating power to come in. It had not
in itself the transforming power either individually or socially.
Its connection with love was accidental and not necessary - as it
must be, being faith in love.
Now, if we translate this
experimental language into theological, it means that they did not
connect up justification and sanctification. Forgiveness of sin was
not identified closely enough with eternal life. Eternal life was
detached from identity with that which was the true eternal in
life, from faith's practical (i.e., experimental) godliness.
Forgiveness did not go, as it should, with renewal of heart and
conduct in one act. It delivered from an old world without opening
a new and planting us in its revolutionized principles. Faith had,
indeed, the power to do works of love, but it was not driven to
them so that it could do no other. And this flaw in faith
corresponded to a like flaw in the reading of Christ's act which
was the object of faith. They treated the work of Christ in a way
far too objective. It was something done wholly over our heads.
There was not a solidary connection between Christ's work and the
Church it created. Attention was concentrated upon one aspect of
Christ's work - its action on God. That is quite an essential
aspect (perhaps the chief), but it must not be isolated. No aspect
of that work must be isolated, as I began by saying. It is the
service an accomplished theology does for the Church to keep all
aspects in one purview, in the proportion of a great and
comprehensive faith. We have today gone to another extreme, and
isolated another aspect - the moral effect of Christ on man. So we
need not give ourselves any airs of superiority to the old
orthodoxy in that respect of one-sidedness. And we must also
remember that the whole secret of truth in this matter is not what
we are sometimes told - a change of emphasis. We have changed the
emphasis, and yet we are short of the truth; and the state of the
Church's piety shows it. We have moved the accent from the
objective to the subjective work of Christ; and we fall victims
more and more to a weak religious subjectivism which has the
ethical interest but no the moral note. We fall into a subjectivism
which is reflected in one aspect of Pragmatism and overworks the
principle contained in the words, "By their fruits shall y know
them" (know them, whether they are true to the Gospel, not
the Gospel and whether it is true to God and reality). So that
people say, "I will believe whatever I feel does me good. My soul
will eat what I enjoy, and drink what makes me happy." They are
their own test of truth, and "their own Holy Ghost." The secret,
therefore, is not change of accent but balance of aspects. And the
true and competent theology is not only one which regards the
Church's whole history and outlook (thinking in centuries, I called
it), but it is one disciplined to think in proportion, to think
together the various aspects of the Cross, and make them enrich and
not exclude one another.
The defect of the old view was,
then, as I have said, that it could not couple up justification and
sanctification. It could not show how the same act of Christ which
delivered from the guilt of sin delivered also from its power. And
this was because in the justification too much stress was laid upon
the suffering; and suffering in itself has no sanctifying power.
You see how our practical experience, when it is well noted,
provides our theological principles. We do find that suffering by
itself debases, and even imbrutes, instead of purifying; that pain
is an occasion rather than a cause of profit. That is a moral
principle of spiritual experience. Consequently when excessive
attention was given to the suffering of Christ, and the atoning
value was supposed to reside there instead of in the holy
obedience, the work of Christ lost in purifying and sanctifying
effect, whatever it may have done in pacifying or converting. The
atoning thing being the holy obedience to the Holy, the same
holiness which satisfied God sanctifies us. That is the idea the
Reformers did not grasp through their preoccupation with Christ's
sufferings. But it is the only idea which unites justification and
sanctification and both with redemption. For the holiness which
satisfied God and sanctifies us also destroyed the evil power in
the world and its hold on us. It was the moral conquest of the
world's evil, amid the extreme conditions of sin and suffering, by
a Victor who had a capital solidarity with the race, and not merely
an individual connection with it as a member. So that it has been
said that we must explain and correct current ideas of
substitutionary expiation by the idea of solidary reparation. The
curse on man was the guilty power of sin and its train - hitherto
invincible. There was but one way in which this could be mastered.
A moral curse could be mastered only in a purely moral way, the
world-curse by the world-conscience. It could be mastered but by
One whose sinlessness was not only negatively proof against all
that sin could do, but positively holy; and He was thus deadly to
sin, satisfactory to God's loving judgment, and creative of a new
humanity in the heart of the old. This was a task beyond mere
substitutionary penal suffering as that phrase is now so poorly
understood. For that would have been just and effectual only if it
had fallen on the arch-rebel, who, with the nobility of Milton's
Satan in his first stage, assumed himself all the worst
consequences of his revolt to spare the other souls whom he had
misled.
The truth is that Anselm, in spite
of the unspeakable service he did both to the faith and thought of
his time and all time, yet put theology on a false track in this
matter. He had too much to say of a superethical tribute paid to
God's honor by the composition of a voluntary suffering. Our
sin was compounded rather than really atoned. He did not grasp the
sacrifice of Christ as made to God's holiness; as one
therefore which could only be ethical in its nature, by way of holy
obedience. This obedience was the Holy Father's joy and
satisfaction. He found Himself in it. And it was also the foiling
and destruction of the evil power. And it was farther the creative
source of holiness in a race not only impressed by the spectacle of
its tragic hero victorious, but regenerate by the solidarity of a
new life from its creative Head. The work of Christ was thus in the
same act triumphant on evil, satisfying to the heart of God, and
creative to the conscience of man by virtue of His solidarity with
God on the one side, and on the other with the race. He subdued
Satan, rejoiced the Father, and set up in Humanity the kingdom -
all in one supreme and consummate act of His one person. He
destroyed the kingdom of evil, not by way of preparation for the
kingdom of God, but by actually establishing God's kingdom in the
heart of it. And He rejoiced, filled, and satisfied the heart of
God, not by a statutory obedience, or by one private to Himself,
which spectacle disposed God to bless and sanctify man; but by
presenting in the compendious compass of His own person a Humanity
presanctified by the irresistible power of His own creative and
timeless work.
The holy demand of God is always
couched in a false form when it is made to call for the expiation
of an equivalent suffering instead of a confession of God's
holiness, adequately holy, from the side of the sinner under
judgment. Heaven and its happiness are wrongly conceived as
immunity from judgment instead of joy in the consummation of
judgment in righteousness and holiness for ever. It was not clear
to the old view that the very nature of justification was
sanctification, that the Justifier was so only as One who always
perfectly sanctified Himself, and was organic, in the act, with the
race in its new life. It appeared to our fathers as if
sanctification were only a facultative sequel of justification.
Whatever we mean, therefore, by
substitution, it is something more than merely vicarious. It is
certainly not something done over our heads. It is representative.
Yet not by the will of man choosing Christ, but by the will of
Christ choosing man, and freely identifying Himself with man. It is
a matter not so much of substitutionary expiation (which, as these
words are commonly understood, leaves us too little committed), but
of solidary confession and praise from amid the judgment fires,
where the Son of God walks with the creative sympathy of the holy
among the sinful sons of men. It is not as if Christ were our
changeling, as if His lot and ours were transposed on the Cross.
But He was our self-appointed plenipotentiary, and what He engaged
for we must implement by an organic spiritual entail. So far His
work was as objective as our creation, as independent of our leave;
and it committed us without reference to our consent but to our
need. When He died for all, all implicitly died. The great
transaction was done for the race. But objective as it was, gift as
it was to us from pure grace, it was so in its initiative rather
than in its method. Essentially it was a new creation of us, but
practically the new creator was in us, and the word was flesh. In
such a way that He and His are one by faith in a solidarity
corresponding from beneath, mutatis mutandis, to the
solidarity between Father and Son from above.
He and His form an organic spiritual
unity - one will in two parties or persons. Mere substitution is
mere exchange of parts, in which one is excluded and immune. But
the work of Christ is inclusive and committal, by our continuity of
life with Him through the spirit in a Church.
It was as our self-appointed
representative that Christ died. He died as the result, as the
finale, of the act by which He identified Himself with us and
emptied Himself from heaven. He is our Head by divine right and not
by election of ours. Our representative, our surety He was - not
our choice illustration, not our mandatory champion, not our moral
deputy, not our friendly sponsor promising that we should one day
pay our debt because of His optimistic faith in us. It was not in
us that He had faith so much as in Himself as the power and grace
of God. He did not promise that we would pay (if the metaphor may
be allowed); He paid for us, knowing that in Himself alone could we
raise the vast advance. What was presented to God was not only
Christ's perfection, nor was it His confidence in us, but also His
antedated action on us, His confidence in Himself for us. That was
what stood to our good. There was offered to God a racial obedience
which was implicit in the creative power of His, and not merely
parallel with His, as if He were our first fruits instead of our
Sun.
The juristic aspect is a real
element in Christ's death. It has a moral core; and we cannot
discard it without discarding the moral order of the world as one
revelation of that irrefragable holiness of God which must be
expressed in judgment and confessed from its midst. The chief
defect of the great revolution which began in Schleiermacher and
ended in Ritschl has been that it allowed no place to that side of
Christ's work. And it is a defect that much impoverishes the
current type of religion, beclouds it, and robs it of the power of
moral conviction by reducing the idea of sin and dismissing the
note of guilt. It makes grace not so much free as arbitrary,
because it does not regard in its revelation what is due to the
holiness of God. It banishes from our Christian faith the one note
which more than any other we have today come to need restored - the
note of judgment. When properly construed the juristic element is a
great power to life faith from the mere ethicism to which Ritschl
tends into the mystic region which is so essential to make a moral
power a religious, to provide a home for the soul as well as a lamp
to our feet, and to secure for believers a hidden communion with
Christ. It also saves the grace of God from being a mere favoritism
to believers, or a mere concession to misery.
There is no doubt we are in reaction
from a time when that side of things was overdone. The juristic
aspect taken alone, and taken in relation to legal demand rather
than personal holiness - such satisfaction, when isolated,
does not do justice to the aspect in which Christ was triumphant
over evil (redemption) nor to the aspect in which His work
is regenerative for mankind (sanctification). And it tended
to promote the fatal notion that holiness could be satisfied with
suffering and death, or with anything short of an answering
holiness effected and guaranteed. The satisfaction in it was
offered to a distributive justice rather than to a personal
holiness, to a claim rather than a person, to a regulative law
rather than to a constitutive life. All that and more is quite
true.
But I must ask you to deal
sympathetically with those juristic views, to treat them with
spiritual insight. It was the vice of Socinianism, and it is the
vice of the Rationalism which is its legatee, that it criticized
orthodoxy by the fierce light of the natural conscience instead of
by the inner nature and better knowledge of the relation on which
orthodoxy founded all. It criticized theology by the natural reason
and not by the supernatural Gospel. There is nothing more vulgar
than slashing criticism in such a matter. You cannot slash here
without cutting the face of some great and true saints to whom
these views are dearer than life because bound up with their
entrusted Gospel and their life eternal. One of the most damnatory
features of popular theological liberalism is the violent handling
of what it calls orthodoxy, and its total lack of spiritual
flexibility and interpretative sympathy - caused largely by the
prior lack of theological knowledge and culture. That some
orthodoxy is also shallow and insolent is no justification for
those whose plea is that they know better. I pray you to listen to
the old theology not as fools but as wise, as evolutionists and
reformers, not as dynamitards. Consider what was gained for us in
it. True, it sometimes presented its gain in false forms, as when
it spoke of the equivalence of Christ's suffering to what we all
deserved. That was but the form, and the Socinians did good work in
the correction of such things. But this at least had been gained -
the conviction that it was not the touchy honor of a feudal monarch
that was to be dealt with at the had of the world, but the love of
a just God. The conviction behind all was the grandest moral
conviction possible - that all things are by Christ in the hands of
infinite righteousness and holy love. This vast moral step had been
taken. Men had come to realize that the result of Christ's work was
eternal right; and especially that it was right, not in
reference to the claims of an evil will, but in regard to those of
a will perfectly good. The days were certainly outgrown by this
juristic theology when there could be any such talk as filled the
early Church about dealing with the rights Satan had won over man.
Evil has no rights in the soul. From that, indeed, it was a great
advance even to Anselm's apotheosis of God's honor. And it was a
further advance still beyond feudal dignity when the great and
noble categories of juris-prudence were invoked to replace the
notion of courtly or military honor which made God and man duelists
rather than ought else. It was a vast step in the moralizing of
theology when its grand concern came to be the establishment of men
before a righteous and social judge. Do not speak contemptuously of
that step. It is one of our own stages. It gave us rest and
uplifting on our journey to where we now stand. We have only had to
carry further that moralizing of the nature of justice. The whole
idea was ethical and social compared with what went before it - at
least as much so as ours now marks a farther advance. It was
ethical as regards claims by an evil power which can have no moral
rights. And it was social in that it brought Christian belief into
line with the ruling principles of society as it then was. It is a
view, moreover, which has shown itself capable of inspiring some of
the deepest, sweetest, and most beneficent piety the world has ever
seen. Moreover, it had in it active conditions of moral growth
which broke through the packthreads of its own time. We today have
only had to carry forward that process of moralizing the idea of
our relation to God which the jurists began. Their theology had a
moral passion which shed the features in it that were ethically
defective, and assimilated the moral idea of the Gospel as we are
now taught to read it in a Bible rediscovered and reconstrued by
the Spirit's action both in the faith and the criticism of the
day.
Among these three aspects of
Christ's work some minds will be drawn by preference to one, some
to another, just as different ages have been. Some souls, according
to their experience, will gravitate to the great Deliverance, some
to the great Atonement, and some to the great Regeneration. Some
ministries will be marked by the influence of one, some of another.
That is all within the free affinities of the spiritual life, and
the preferential sympathies of the moral idiosyncrasy. And the
Church is enriched by the complementary action of such diversities
of ministry. But what ought not to be encouraged is any tendency on
the part of those who prefer the one line to deny the equal right
of the others. And what ought not to be tolerated is the habit of
denunciation, by those who see the one side, of the sides they find
nothing in; and especially the habit of assuming that the sides
they are blind to represent a lower Christian level. Where this is
possible there has really been little done for the conscience by
the view that is adopted. And it is both absurd and overweening to
ask us to believe that those sections of the Church, and those
lights of piety, who held to views at present in the background
were all theological bigots and moral inepts; that real moral
aptitude and theological faculty did not arise till now; that a
like devotion obscures such questions; that babes and suckling
perfect theological praise; that wisdom is justified by children;
and that it is now the monopoly of those who detach theology from
religion, and dismiss it to a historical museum.
If Christ by the Savior of the world
in any sense, the thing He did must be at least as great as the
world. And if as great, then no less manifold, and no less the
object for first-rate intelligence than the lower objects of
experience. Faith in such a Savior cannot continue to live for
either heart or conscience if it is detached from mind. Nor can
mind submit to be warned off the supreme object of the soul's
concern if that object is loved and sought with all our heart and
soul and strength. The very type of prayer in the non-theological
forms which claim to be Christian shows to what we can sink when
faith is stripped of mind and strength. It is only a poor Christ
that can be housed in a poor creed, and a feeble prophet that is
canonized when a sentimentalized ethic is offered as religion.
There is a point in chapter iv
where, in speaking freely, I have spoken loosely, and I have
expressed myself with some want of caution likely to cause
misunderstanding of my full meaning. I there say that the wrath of
God is not to be taken as a pathos or affection, but as the working
out of His judgment in a moral order. My intention was to
discourage the idea that it was a mood or temper, and to connect it
with the sure changelessness of God's moral nature. But on
reviewing the passage I find I have so put it that I might easily
suggest that the anger of God was simply the automatic recoil of
His moral order upon the transgressor, the nemesis which dogs him
and makes hard his way, his self-hardening; as if there were no
personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin, and no
infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner. This is an
impression I should be sorry to leave; for it is one that would
take much of its most holy significance and solemn mystery out of
the work of Christ.
Was Christ's bearing of God's wrath
just His exposure to the action of the vast moral machine? Did He
just become involved, as our rescuer, in the mechanism which
regulates ethical Humanity, using at times man's anger as its
agent? This mechanism might be there possibly without the ordinance
of a God that it should be so, or possibly as the institution of a
deist and distant God who calmly watches His world spin with the
motion He gave it. But is God not personally immanent and active in
His own moral order? Did Christ just incur the automatic penalty of
that order as He strove to save its victims? Was He just caught in
the works? Or was there implied, and felt, also the element of
personal displeasure acting through that order - the element that
would differentiate wrath from mere nemesis, and infliction from
mere recoil?
Granting then that there was in
Christ's suffering the element of personal displeasure and
infliction, was it man's or God's? Was His treatment simply the
reaction of sinful man against holiness, or was it the reaction of
a holy God against sin? Did He Himself feel He was yielding to
man's dark will, or God's will, darker, but higher and surer? Did
He suffer, just as the holiest saint might in a wicked world, the
extreme hate of men; or was God's displeasure also upon Him? We
have abundantly seen that this could not be upon Him as His own
desert, not as it lies upon a guilty conscience. If He was made sin
He was not made sinful; if He was made a curse He was not accursed.
And have we not also seen that He who acted in our stead could act
with no fitness and no precision if He took on Him the mere
equivalent of what the guilty would have paid had they never been
redeemed (that would have needed a generous arch-rebel), but only
if he paid what was appointed as the price of their redemption? The
uttermost farthing is not the last mite of their desert but of
God's ransom price. But the curse of sin's sequel is most real
whatever the amount. And it was certainly on Christ, by His freely
putting Himself under it beside the men on whom it lay. That curse
then - was it an infliction from God, which did not lift, did not
cease to be inflicted, even when the Son put Himself in its way; or
was it something that struck Him only from men below and not from
God above at all?
Surely as it falls on man at least
it is God's infliction. We do not only grieve God but we provoke
His anger. There is nothing we need more to recall into our sense
of sin at present than this (though we must extend it, as we must
extend our redemption, to a racial and solidary wrath of God in
which we share). Its absence has slackened and flattened the whole
tone and level of Christian life. The love of God becomes real
anger to our sin, and to us as we identify ourselves with the sin,
to us while, outside Christ, we are no more than members of a
sinful race. Is not our satisfaction and increase in well-doing the
personal blessing of God? Then surely our misery and infatuation on
the other path is His personal anger. If a true evolution carries
with it the personal and joyful action of God in blessing its
results, is the result of degeneration a mere natural process in
the moral region, secluded from God's displeased action and
infliction? Is it all His will only as a thing willed, and not as
His action in willing it?
Weigh, as men of real moral
experience, what is involved in the hardening of the sinner. That
is the worst penalty upon sin, its cumulative and deadening
history. Well, is it simply self-hardening? Is it simply the reflex
action of sin upon character, sin going in, settling in, and
reproducing itself there? Is it no part of God's positive procedure
in judging sin, and bringing it, for salvation, to a crisis of
judgment grace? When Pharaoh hardens his heart, is that in no sense
God hardening Pharaoh's heart? When a man hardens himself against
God, is there nothing in the action and purpose of God that takes
part in that induration? Is that anger not as really as the
superabounding grace? Are not both bound up in one complex
treatment of the moral world? When a man piles up his sin and
rejoices in iniquity, is God simply a bystander and spectator of
the process? Does not God's pressure on the man blind him, urge
him, stiffen him, shut him up into sin, if only that he might be
shut up to mercy alone? Is it enough to say that this is but the
action of a process which God simply watches in a permissive way?
Is He but passive and not positive to the situation? Can the
Absolute be passive to anything? If so, where is the inner action
of the personal god whose immanence in things is one of His great
modern revelations? Everything you call absolute is in active
relation to the whole creation. Go into the psychology of sin as it
is understood, not indeed today, but by those in the long, deep
history of the moral soul whose experience coincided with a real
genius for reading it - true sons of him of
The love of God is not more real
than the wrath of God. For He can be really angry only with those
He loves. And how can Absolute Love love without acting to
save?
Well, if it be so, that God's direct
displeasure and infliction is the worst thing in sin's penalty, did
the displeasure totally vanish from the infliction when Christ
stood under it? Would He have really borne the true judgment on sin
if it had? Was Christ's great work not the meeting of that judgment
and hallowing it? Did the complete acceptance of God's displeasure
as an essential factor in the curse? A holy God could not look on
sin without acting on it; nor could He do either but to adhor and
curse it, even when His Son was beneath it. Wherein is guilt
different from sin but in this - that it is sin, not cut adrift
from God and let go its own way and go to pieces, but sin placed
under the anger of God, under the personal reaction of that
Absolute Holy God which no creature, no situation, can escape? And
could Christ bear our guilt and take it away if He did not carry it
there, and bear it there, and hallow its judgment there? Did He
just throw it down there, leave it, and rid Himself of it? Does not
the best of sons suffer from the angry gloom that spreads from the
father over the whole house at the prodigal's shameless shame? Did
God not lay on Him the iniquity of us all, and inflict that veiling
of His face which darkened to dereliction even the Redeemer's soul?
It is not desert that is the worst thing in judgment, but desertion
- the sense of desert forsaken by God. The forsakenness is the
worst judgment. For with God's presence my sense of desert may be
my sanctification. What Christ bore was not simply a sense of the
connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of
sin, but a sense of the sinner's relation to the personal
vis-a-vis of an angry God. God never left Him, but He did
refuse Him His face. The communion was not broken but its light was
withdrawn. He was forsaken but not disjoined. He was insolubly
bound to the very Father who turned away and could not look on sin
but to abhor and curse it even when His Son was beneath it. How
could He feel the grief of being forsaken by God if He was not at
bottom one with Him? Neglect by one to whom we have no link makes
no trouble.
Even a theologian so little orthodox
as Weizsacker says: -
"The moral experience of guilt is too strong to let me say that it can be met by any mere manifestation of grace or of love from God to man - even when that manifestation carries in it the sympathetic suffering of sin's curse, borne merely in the way of confirming the manifestation and pressing the object-lesson." "When repentance helps the believer to peace it is not ex opere operato, because he has repented and may now trust grace; but it is because in his repentance he has part and lot in the infinite pain and confession of Christ."