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+Project Gutenberg's The Atonement and the Modern Mind, by James Denney
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atonement and the Modern Mind
+
+Author: James Denney
+
+Release Date: March 5, 2008 [EBook #24757]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATONEMENT AND THE MODERN MIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ATONEMENT
+
+AND
+
+THE MODERN MIND
+
+
+BY
+
+JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
+
+
+PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY
+
+UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW
+
+
+
+_WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+  THE DEATH OF CHRIST
+  STUDIES IN THEOLOGY
+  THE EPISTLES TO THE THESSALONIANS
+  THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS
+  GOSPEL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
+
+
+
+
+
+LONDON
+
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+
+27 PATERNOSTER ROW
+
+MCMIII
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+The three chapters which follow have already appeared in _The
+Expositor_, and may be regarded as a supplement to the writer's work on
+_The Death of Christ: its place and interpretation in the New
+Testament_.  It was no part of his intention in that study to ask or to
+answer all the questions raised by New Testament teaching on the
+subject; but, partly from reviews of _The Death of Christ_, and still
+more from a considerable private correspondence to which the book gave
+rise, he became convinced that something further should be attempted to
+commend the truth to the mind and conscience of the time.  The
+difficulties and misunderstandings connected with it spring, as far as
+they can be considered intellectual, mainly from two sources.  Either
+the mind is preoccupied with a conception of the world which, whether
+men are conscious of it or not, forecloses all the questions which are
+raised by any doctrine of atonement, and makes them unmeaning; or it
+labours under some misconception as to what the New Testament actually
+teaches.  Broadly speaking, the first of these conditions is considered
+in the first two chapters, and the second in the last.  The title--_The
+Atonement and the Modern Mind_--might seem to promise a treatise, or
+even an elaborate system of theology; but though it would cover a work
+of vastly larger scope than the present, it is not inappropriate to any
+attempt, however humble, to help the mind in which we all live and move
+to reach a sympathetic comprehension of the central truth in the
+Christian religion.  The purpose of the writer is evangelic, whatever
+may be said of his method; it is to commend the Atonement to the human
+mind, as that mind has been determined by the influences and
+experiences of modern times, and to win the mind for the truth of the
+Atonement.
+
+With the exception of a few paragraphs, these pages were delivered as
+lectures to a summer school of Theology which met in Aberdeen, in June
+of this year.  The school was organised by a committee of the
+Association of Former Students of the United Free Church College,
+Glasgow; and the writer, as a member and former President of the
+Association, desires to take the liberty of inscribing his work to his
+fellow-students.
+
+
+GLASGOW, _September_ 1903.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT
+
+It will be admitted by most Christians that if the Atonement, quite
+apart from precise definitions of it, is anything to the mind, it is
+everything.  It is the most profound of all truths, and the most
+recreative.  It determines more than anything else our conceptions of
+God, of man, of history, and even of nature; it determines them, for we
+must bring them all in some way into accord with it.  It is the
+inspiration of all thought, the impulse and the law of all action, the
+key, in the last resort, to all suffering.  Whether we call it a fact
+or a truth, a power or a doctrine, it is that in which the
+_differentia_ of Christianity, its peculiar and exclusive character, is
+specifically shown; it is the focus of revelation, the point at which
+we see deepest into the truth of God, and come most completely under
+its power.  For those who recognise it at all it is Christianity in
+brief; it concentrates in itself, as in a germ of infinite potency, all
+that the wisdom, power and love of God mean in relation to sinful men.
+
+Accordingly, when we speak of the Atonement and the modern mind, we are
+really speaking of the modern mind and the Christian religion.  The
+relation between these two magnitudes may vary.  The modern mind is no
+more than a modification of the human mind as it exists in all ages,
+and the relation of the modern mind to the Atonement is one phase--it
+may be a specially interesting or a specially well-defined phase--of
+the perennial relation of the mind of man to the truth of God.  There
+is always an affinity between the two, for God made man in His own
+image, and the mind can only rest in truth; but there is always at the
+same time an antipathy, for man is somehow estranged from God, and
+resents Divine intrusion into his life.  This is the situation at all
+times, and therefore in modern times; we only need to remark that when
+the Atonement is in question, the situation, so to speak, becomes
+acute.  All the elements in it define themselves more sharply.  If
+there is sympathy between the mind and the truth, it is a profound
+sympathy, which will carry the mind far; if there are lines of
+approach, through which the truth can find access to the mind, they are
+lines laid deep in the nature of things and of men, and the access
+which the truth finds by them is one from which it will not easily be
+dislodged.  On the other hand, if it is antagonism which is roused in
+the mind by the Atonement, it is an antagonism which feels that
+everything is at stake.  The Atonement is a reality of such a sort that
+it can make no compromise.  The man who fights it knows that he is
+fighting for his life, and puts all his strength into the battle.  To
+surrender is literally to give up himself, to cease to be the man he
+is, and to become another man.  For the modern mind, therefore, as for
+the ancient, the attraction and the repulsion of Christianity are
+concentrated at the same point; the cross of Christ is man's only
+glory, or it is his final stumbling-block.
+
+What I wish to do in these papers is so to present the facts as to
+mediate, if possible, between the mind of our time and the
+Atonement--so to exhibit the specific truth of Christianity as to bring
+out its affinity for what is deepest in the nature of man and in human
+experience--so to appreciate the modern mind itself, and the influences
+which have given it its constitution and temper, as to discredit what
+is false in it, and enlist on the side of the Atonement that which is
+profound and true.  And if any one is disposed to marvel at the
+ambition or the conceit of such a programme, I would ask him to
+consider if it is not the programme prescribed to every Christian, or
+at least to every Christian minister, who would do the work of an
+evangelist.  To commend the eternal truth of God, as it is finally
+revealed in the Atonement, to the mind in which men around us live and
+move and have their being, is no doubt a difficult and perilous task;
+but if we approach it in a right spirit, it need not tempt us to any
+presumption; it cannot tempt us, as long as we feel that it is our
+duty.  '_Who is sufficient for these things! . . .  Our sufficiency is
+of God._'
+
+The Christian religion is a historical religion, and whatever we say
+about it must rest upon historical ground.  We cannot define it from
+within, by reference merely to our individual experience.  Of course it
+is equally impossible to define it apart from experience; the point is
+that such experience itself must be historically derived; it must come
+through something outside of our individual selves.  What is true of
+the Christian religion as a whole is pre-eminently true of the
+Atonement in which it is concentrated.  The experience which it brings
+to us, and the truth which we teach on the basis of it, are
+historically mediated.  They rest ultimately on that testimony to
+Christ which we find in the Scriptures and especially in the New
+Testament.  No one can tell what the Atonement is except on this basis.
+No one can consciously approach it--no one can be influenced by it to
+the full extent to which it is capable of influencing human
+nature--except through this medium.  We may hold that just because it
+is Divine, it must be eternally true, omnipresent in its gracious
+power; but even granting this, it is not known as an abstract or
+eternal somewhat; it is historically, and not otherwise than
+historically, revealed.  It is achieved by Christ, and the testimony to
+Christ, on the strength of which we accept it, is in the last resort
+the testimony of Scripture.
+
+In saying so, I do not mean that the Atonement is merely a problem of
+exegesis, or that we have simply to accept as authoritative the
+conclusions of scholars as to the meaning of New Testament texts.  The
+modern mind here is ready with a radical objection.  The writers of the
+New Testament, it argues, were men like ourselves; they had personal
+limitations and historical limitations; their forms of thought were
+those of a particular age and upbringing; the doctrines they preached
+may have had a relative validity, but we cannot benumb our minds to
+accept them without question.  The intelligence which has learned to be
+a law to itself, criticising, rejecting, appropriating, assimilating,
+cannot deny its nature and suspend its functions when it opens the New
+Testament.  It cannot make itself the slave of men, not even though the
+men are Peter and Paul and John; no, not even though it were the Son of
+Man Himself.  It resents dictation, not wilfully nor wantonly, but
+because it must; and it resents it all the more when it claims to be
+inspired.  If, therefore, the Atonement can only be received by those
+who are prepared from the threshold to acknowledge the inspiration and
+the consequent authority of Scripture, it can never be received by
+modern men at all.
+
+This line of remark is familiar inside the Church as well as outside.
+Often it is expressed in the demand for a historical as opposed to a
+dogmatic interpretation of the New Testament, a historical
+interpretation being one to which we can sit freely, because the result
+to which it leads us is the mind of a time which we have survived and
+presumably transcended; a dogmatic interpretation, on the other hand,
+being one which claims to reach an abiding truth, and therefore to have
+a present authority.  A more popular and inconsistent expression of the
+same mood may be found among those who say petulant things about the
+rabbinising of Paul, but profess the utmost devotion to the words of
+Jesus.  Even in a day of overdone distinctions, one might point out
+that interpretations are not properly to be classified as historical or
+dogmatic, but as true or false.  If they are false, it does not matter
+whether they are called dogmatic or historical; and if they are true,
+they may quite well be both.  But this by the way.  For my own part, I
+prefer the objection in its most radical form, and indeed find nothing
+in it to which any Christian, however sincere or profound his reverence
+for the Bible, should hesitate to assent.  Once the mind has come to
+know itself, there can be no such thing for it as blank authority.  It
+cannot believe things--the things by which it has to live--simply on
+the word of Paul or John.  It is not irreverent, it is simply the
+recognition of a fact, if we add that it can just as little believe
+them simply on the word of Jesus.[1]  This is not the sin of the mind,
+but the nature and essence of mind, the being which it owes to God.  If
+we are to speak of authority at all in this connection, the authority
+must be conceived as belonging not to the speaker but to that which he
+says, not to the witness but to the truth.  Truth, in short, is the
+only thing which has authority for the mind, and the only way in which
+truth finally evinces its authority is by taking possession of the mind
+for itself.  It may be that any given truth can only be reached by
+testimony--that is, can only come to us by some historical channel; but
+if it is a truth of eternal import, if it is part of a revelation of
+God the reception of which is eternal life, then its authority lies in
+itself and in its power to win the mind, and not in any witness however
+trustworthy.
+
+Hence in speaking of the Atonement, whether in preaching or in
+theologising, it is quite unnecessary to raise any question about the
+inspiration of Scripture, or to make any claim of 'authority' either
+for the Apostles or for the Lord.  Belief in the inspiration of
+Scripture is neither the beginning of the Christian life nor the
+foundation of Christian theology; it is the last conclusion--a
+conclusion which becomes every day more sure--to which experience of
+the truth of Scripture leads.  When we tell, therefore, what the
+Atonement is, we are telling it not on the authority of any person or
+persons whatever, but on the authority of the truth in it by which it
+has won its place in our minds and hearts.  We find this truth in the
+Christian Scriptures undoubtedly, and therefore we prize them; but the
+truth does not derive its authority from the Scriptures, or from those
+who penned them.  On the contrary, the Scriptures are prized by the
+Church because through them the soul is brought into contact with this
+truth.  No doubt this leaves it open to any one who does not see in
+Scripture what we see, or who is not convinced as we are of its truth,
+to accuse us here of subjectivity, of having no standard of truth but
+what appeals to us individually, but I could never feel the charge a
+serious one.  It is like urging that a man does not see at all, or does
+not see truly, because he only sees with his own eyes.  This is the
+only authentic kind of seeing yet known to mankind.  We do not judge at
+all those who do not see what we do.  We do not know what hinders them,
+or whether they are at all to blame for it; we do not know how soon the
+hindrance is going to be put out of the way.  To-day, as at the
+beginning, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
+comprehends it not.  But that is the situation which calls for
+evangelists; not a situation in which the evangelist is called to
+renounce his experience and his vocation.
+
+What, then, is the Atonement, as it is presented to us in the
+Scriptures, and vindicates for itself in our minds the character of
+truth, and indeed, as I have said already, the character of the
+ultimate truth of God?
+
+The simplest expression that can be given to it in words is: Christ
+died for our sins.  Taken by itself, this is too brief to be
+intelligible; it implies many things which need to be made explicit
+both about Christ's relation to us and about the relation of sin and
+death.  But the important thing, to begin with, is not to define these
+relations, but to look through the words to the broad reality which is
+interpreted in them.  What they tell us, and tell us on the basis of an
+incontrovertible experience, is that the forgiveness of sins is for the
+Christian mediated through the death of Christ.  In one respect,
+therefore, there is nothing singular in the forgiveness of sins: it is
+in the same position as every other blessing of which the New Testament
+speaks.  It is the presence of a Mediator, as Westcott says in one of
+his letters, which makes the Christian religion what it is; and the
+forgiveness of sins is mediated to us through Christ, just as the
+knowledge of God as the Father is mediated, or the assurance of a life
+beyond death.  But there is something _specific_ about the mediation of
+forgiveness; the gift and the certainty of it come to us, not simply
+through Christ, but through the blood of His Cross.  The sum of His
+relation to sin is that He died for it.  God forgives, but this is the
+way in which His forgiveness comes.  He forgives freely, but it is at
+this cost to Himself and to the Son of His love.
+
+This, it seems to me, is the simplest possible statement of what the
+New Testament means by the Atonement, and probably there are few who
+would dispute its correctness.  But it is possible to argue that there
+is a deep cleft in the New Testament itself, and that the teaching of
+Jesus on the subject of forgiveness is completely at variance with that
+which we find in the Epistles, and which is implied in this description
+of the Atonement.  Indeed there are many who do so argue.  But to
+follow them would be to forget the place which Jesus has in His own
+teaching.  Even if we grant that the main subject of that teaching is
+the Kingdom of God, it is as clear as anything can be that the Kingdom
+depends for its establishment on Jesus, or rather that in Him it is
+already established in principle; and that all participation in its
+blessings depends on some kind of relation to Him.  All things have
+been delivered to Him by the Father, and it is by coming under
+obligation to Him, and by that alone, that men know the Father.  It is
+by coming under obligation to Him that they know the pardoning love of
+the Father, as well as everything else that enters into Christian
+experience and constitutes the blessedness of life in the Kingdom of
+God.  Nor is it open to any one to say that he knows this simply
+because Christ has told it.  We are dealing here with things too great
+to be simply told.  If they are ever to be known in their reality, they
+must be revealed by God, they must rise upon the mind of man
+experimentally, in their awful and glorious truth, in ways more
+wonderful than words.  They can be spoken about afterwards, but hardly
+beforehand.  They can be celebrated and preached--that is, declared as
+the speaker's experience, delivered as his testimony--but not simply
+told.  It was enough if Jesus made His disciples feel, as surely He did
+make them feel, not only in every word He spoke, but more emphatically
+still in His whole attitude toward them, that He was Himself the
+Mediator of the new covenant, and that all the blessings of the
+relation between God and man which we call Christianity were blessings
+due to Him.  If men knew the Father, it was through Him.  If they knew
+the Father's heart to the lost, it was through Him.  Through Him, be it
+remembered, not merely through the words that He spoke.  There was more
+in Christ than even His own wonderful words expressed, and all that He
+was and did and suffered, as well as what He said, entered into the
+convictions He inspired.  But He knew this as well as His disciples,
+and for this very reason it is beside the mark to point to what He
+said, or rather to what He did not say, in confutation of their
+experience.  For it is their experience--the experience that the
+forgiveness of sins was mediated to them through His cross--that is
+expressed in the doctrine of Atonement: He died for our sins.
+
+The objection which is here in view is most frequently pointed by
+reference to the parable of the prodigal son.  There is no Atonement
+here, we are told, no mediation of forgiveness at all.  There is love
+on the one side and penitence on the other, and it is treason to the
+pure truth of this teaching to cloud and confuse it with the thoughts
+of men whose Master was over their heads often, but most of all here.
+Such a statement of the case is plausible, and judging from the
+frequency with which it occurs must to some minds be very convincing,
+but nothing could be more superficial, or more unjust both to Jesus and
+the apostles.  A parable is a comparison, and there is a point of
+comparison in it on which everything turns.  The more perfect the
+parable is, the more conspicuous and dominating will the point of
+comparison be.  The parable of the prodigal illustrates this.  It
+brings out, through a human parallel, with incomparable force and
+beauty, the one truth of the freeness of forgiveness.  God waits to be
+gracious.  His pardoning love rushes out to welcome the penitent.  But
+no one who speaks of the Atonement ever dreams of questioning this.
+The Atonement is concerned with a different point--not the freeness of
+pardon, about which all are agreed, but the cost of it; not the
+spontaneity of God's love, which no one questions, but the necessity
+under which it lay to manifest itself in a particular way if God was to
+be true to Himself, and to win the heart of sinners for the holiness
+which they had offended.  The Atonement is not the denial that God's
+love is free; it is that specific manifestation or demonstration of
+God's free love which is demanded by the situation of men.  One can
+hardly help wondering whether those who tell us so confidently that
+there is no Atonement in the parable of the prodigal have ever noticed
+that there is no Christ in it either--no elder brother who goes out to
+seek and to save the lost son, and to give his life a ransom for him.
+Surely we are not to put the Good Shepherd out of the Christian
+religion.  Yet if we leave Him His place, we cannot make the parable of
+the prodigal the measure of Christ's mind about the forgiveness of
+sins.  One part of His teaching it certainly contains--one part of the
+truth about the relation of God the Father to His sinful children; but
+another part of the truth was present, though not on that occasion
+rendered in words, in the presence of the Speaker, when 'all the
+publicans and sinners drew near to Him for to hear Him.' The love of
+God to the sinful was apprehended in Christ Himself, and not in what He
+said as something apart from Himself; on the contrary, it was in the
+identity of the speaker and the word that the power of the word lay;
+God's love evinced itself to men as a reality in Him, in His presence
+in the world, and in His attitude to its sin; it so evinced itself,
+finally and supremely, in His death.  It is not the idiosyncrasy of one
+apostle, it is the testimony of the Church, a testimony in keeping with
+the whole claim made by Christ in His teaching and life and death: '_in
+Him_ we have our redemption, _through His blood_, even the forgiveness
+of our trespasses.'  And this is what the Atonement means: it means the
+mediation of forgiveness through Christ, and specifically through His
+death.  Forgiveness, in the Christian sense of the term, is only
+realised as we believe in the Atonement: in other words, as we come to
+feel the cost at which alone the love of God could assert itself as
+Divine and holy love in the souls of sinful men.  We may say, if we
+please, that forgiveness is bestowed freely upon repentance; but we
+must add, if we would do justice to the Christian position, that
+repentance in its ultimate character is the fruit of the Atonement.
+Repentance is not possible apart from the apprehension of the mercy of
+God _in Christ_.  It is the experience of the regenerate--_poenitentiam
+interpretor regenerationem_, as Calvin says--and it is the Atonement
+which regenerates.
+
+This, then, in the broadest sense, is the truth which we wish to
+commend to the modern mind: the truth that there is forgiveness with
+God, and that this forgiveness comes to us only through Christ, and
+signally or specifically through His death.  Unless it becomes true to
+us that _Christ died for our sins_ we cannot appreciate forgiveness at
+its specifically Christian value.  It cannot be for us that kind of
+reality, it cannot have for us that kind of inspiration, which it
+unquestionably is and has in the New Testament.
+
+But what, we must now ask, is the modern mind to which this primary
+truth of Christianity has to be commended?  Can we diagnose it in any
+general yet recognisable fashion, so as to find guidance in seeking
+access to it for the gospel of the Atonement?  There may seem to be
+something presumptuous in the very idea, as though any one making the
+attempt assumed a superiority to the mind of his time, an exemption
+from its limitations and prejudices, a power to see over it and round
+about it.  All such presumption is of course disclaimed here; but even
+while we disclaim it, the attempt to appreciate the mind of our time is
+forced upon us.  Whoever has tried to preach the gospel, and to
+persuade men of truth as truth is in Jesus, and especially of the truth
+of God's forgiveness as it is in the death of Jesus for sin, knows that
+there is a state of mind which is somehow inaccessible to this truth,
+and to which the truth consequently appeals in vain.  I do not speak of
+unambiguous moral antipathy to the ideas of forgiveness and atonement,
+although antipathy to these ideas in general, as distinct from any
+given presentation of them, cannot but have a moral character, just as
+a moral character always attaches to the refusal to acknowledge Christ
+or to become His debtor; but of something which, though vaguer and less
+determinate, puts the mind wrong, so to speak, with Christianity from
+the start.  It is clear, for instance, in all that has been said about
+forgiveness, that certain relations are presupposed as subsisting
+between God and man, relations which make it possible for man to sin,
+and possible for God, not indeed to ignore his sin, but in the very act
+of recognising it as all that it is to forgive it, to liberate man from
+it, and to restore him to Himself and righteousness.  Now if the latent
+presuppositions of the modern mind are to any extent inconsistent with
+such relations, there will be something to overcome before the
+conceptions of forgiveness or atonement can get a hearing.  These
+conceptions have their place in a certain view of the world as a whole,
+and if the mind is preoccupied with a different view, it will have an
+instinctive consciousness that it cannot accommodate them, and a
+disposition therefore to reject them _ab initio_.  This is, in point of
+fact, the difficulty with which we have to deal.  And let no one say
+that it is transparently absurd to suggest that we must get men to
+accept a true philosophy before we can begin to preach the gospel to
+them, as though that settled the matter or got over the difficulty.  We
+have to take men as we find them; we have to preach the gospel to the
+mind which is around us; and if that mind is rooted in a view of the
+world which leaves no room for Christ and His work as Christian
+experience has realised them, then that view of the world must be
+appreciated by the evangelist, it must be undermined at its weak
+places, its inadequacy to interpret all that is present even in the
+mind which has accepted it--in other words, its inherent
+inconsistency--must be demonstrated; the attempt must be made to
+liberate the mind, so that it may be open to the impression of
+realities which under the conditions supposed it could only encounter
+with instinctive antipathy.  It is necessary, therefore, at this point
+to advert to the various influences which have contributed to form the
+mind of our time, and to give it its instinctive bias in one direction
+or another.  Powerful and legitimate as these influences have been,
+they have nevertheless been in various ways partial, and because of
+their very partiality they have, when they absorbed the mind, as new
+modes of thought are apt to do, prejudiced it against the consideration
+of other, possibly of deeper and more far-reaching, truths.
+
+First, there is the enormous development of physical science.  This has
+engrossed human intelligence in our own times to an extent which can
+hardly be over-estimated.  Far more mind has been employed in
+constructing the great fabric of knowledge, which we call science, than
+in any other pursuit of men.  Far more mind has had its characteristic
+qualities and temper imparted to it by scientific study than by study
+in any other field.  It is of science--which to all intents and
+purposes means physical science--of science and its methods and results
+that the modern mind is most confident, and speaks with the most
+natural and legitimate pride.  Now science, even in this restricted
+sense, covers a great range of subjects; it may be physics in the
+narrowest meaning of the word, or chemistry, or biological science.
+The characteristic of our own age has been the development of the last,
+and in particular its extension to man.  It is impossible to dispute
+the legitimacy of this extension.  Man has his place in nature; the
+phenomena of life have one of their signal illustrations in him, and he
+is as proper a subject of biological study as any other living being.
+But the intense preoccupation of much of the most vigorous intelligence
+of our time with the biological study of man is not without effects
+upon the mind itself, which we need to consider.  It tends to produce a
+habit of mind to which certain assumptions are natural and inevitable,
+certain other assumptions incredible from the first.  This habit of
+mind is in some ways favourable to the acceptance of the Atonement.
+For example, the biologist's invincible conviction of the unity of
+life, and of the certainty and power with which whatever touches it at
+one point touches it through and through, is in one way entirely
+favourable.  Many of the most telling popular objections to the idea of
+Atonement rest on an atomic conception of personality--a conception
+according to which every human being is a closed system, incapable in
+the last resort of helping or being helped, of injuring or being
+injured, by another.  This conception has been finally discredited by
+biology, and so far the evangelist must be grateful.  The Atonement
+presupposes the unity of human life, and its solidarity; it presupposes
+a common and universal responsibility.  I believe it presupposes also
+such a conception of the unity of man and nature as biology proceeds
+upon; and in all these respects its physical presuppositions, if we may
+so express ourselves, are present to the mind of to-day, thanks to
+biology, as they were not even so lately as a hundred years ago.
+
+But this is not all that we have to consider.  The mind has been
+influenced by the movement of physical and even of biological science,
+not only in a way which is favourable, but in ways which are
+prejudicial to the acceptance of the Atonement.  Every physical science
+seems to have a boundless ambition; it wants to reduce everything to
+its own level, to explain everything in the terms and by the categories
+with which it itself works.  The higher has always to fight for its
+life against the lower.  The physicist would like to reduce chemistry
+to physics; the chemist has an ambition to simplify biology into
+chemistry; the biologist in turn looks with suspicion on anything in
+man which cannot be interpreted biologically.  He would like to give,
+and is sometimes ready to offer, a biological explanation of
+self-consciousness, of freedom, of religion, morality, sin.  Now a
+biological explanation, when all is done, is a physical explanation,
+and a physical explanation of self-consciousness or the moral life is
+one in which the very essence of the thing to be explained is either
+ignored or explained away.  Man's life is certainly rooted in nature,
+and therefore a proper subject for biological study; but unless it
+somehow transcended nature, and so demanded other than physical
+categories for its complete interpretation, there could not be any
+study or any science at all.  If there were nothing but matter, as M.
+Naville has said, there would be no materialism; and if there were
+nothing but life, there would be no biology.  Now it is in the higher
+region of human experience, to which all physical categories are
+unequal, that we encounter those realities to which the Atonement is
+related, and in relation to which it is real; and we must insist upon
+these _higher_ realities, in their specific character, against a strong
+tendency in the scientifically trained modern mind, and still more in
+the general mind as influenced by it, to reduce them to the merely
+physical level.
+
+Take, for instance, the consciousness of sin.  Evidently the Atonement
+becomes incredible if the consciousness of sin is extinguished or
+explained away.  There is nothing for the Atonement to do; there is
+nothing to relate it to; it is as unreal as a rock in the sky.  But
+many minds at the present time, under the influence of current
+conceptions in biology, do explain it away.  All life is one, they
+argue.  It rises from the same spring, it runs the same course, it
+comes to the same end.  The life of man is rooted in nature, and that
+which beats in my veins is an inheritance from an immeasurable past.
+It is absurd to speak of my responsibility for it, or of my guilt
+because it manifests itself in me, as it inevitably does, in such and
+such forms.  There is no doubt that this mode of thought is widely
+prevalent, and that it is one of the most serious hindrances to the
+acceptance of the gospel, and especially of the Atonement.  How are we
+to appreciate it?  We must point out, I think, the consequence to which
+it leads.  If a man denies that he is responsible for the nature which
+he has inherited--denies responsibility for it on the ground that it
+_is_ inherited--it is a fair question to ask him for what he _does_
+accept responsibility.  When he has divested himself of the inherited
+nature, what is left?  The real meaning of such disowning of
+responsibility is that a man asserts that his life is a part of the
+physical phenomena of the universe, and nothing else; and he forgets,
+in the very act of making the assertion, that if it were true, it could
+not be so much as made.  The merely physical is transcended in every
+such assertion; and the man who has transcended it, rooted though his
+life be in nature, and one with the life of the whole and of all the
+past, must take the responsibility of living that life out on the high
+level of self-consciousness and morality which his very disclaimer
+involves.  The sense of sin which wakes spontaneously with the
+perception that he is not what he ought to have been must not be
+explained away; at the level which life has reached in him, this is
+unscientific as well as immoral; his sin--for I do not know another
+word for it--must be realised as all that it is in the moral world if
+he is ever to be true to himself, not to say if he is ever to welcome
+the Atonement, and leave his sin behind.  We have no need of words like
+sin and atonement--we could not have the experiences which they
+designate--unless we had a higher than merely natural life; and one of
+the tendencies of the modern mind which has to be counteracted by the
+evangelist is the tendency induced by physical and especially by
+biological science to explain the realities of personal experience by
+sub-personal categories.  In conscience, in the sense of personal
+dignity, in the ultimate inability of man to deny the self which he is,
+we have always an appeal against such tendencies, which cannot fail;
+but it needs to be made resolutely when conscience is lethargic and the
+whole bias of the mind is to the other side.
+
+Passing from physical science, the modern mind has perhaps been
+influenced most by the great idealist movement in philosophy--the
+movement which in Germany began with Kant and culminated in Hegel.
+This idealism, just like physical science, gives a certain stamp to the
+mind; when it takes possession of intelligence it casts it, so to
+speak, into a certain mould; even more than physical science it
+dominates it so that it becomes incapable of self-criticism, and very
+difficult to teach.  Its importance to the preacher of Christianity is
+that it assumes certain relations between the human and the divine,
+relations which foreclose the very questions which the Atonement
+compels us to raise.  To be brief, it teaches the essential unity of
+God and man.  God and man, to speak of them as distinct, are necessary
+to each other, but man is as necessary to God as God is to man.  God is
+the truth of man, but man is the reality of God.  God comes to
+consciousness of Himself in man, and man in being conscious of himself
+is at the same time conscious of God.  Though many writers of this
+school make a copious use of Christian phraseology, it seems to me
+obvious that it is not in an adequate Christian sense.  Sin is not
+regarded as that which ought not to be, it is that which is to be
+transcended.  It is as inevitable as anything in nature; and the sense
+of it, the bad conscience which accompanies it, is no more than the
+growing pains of the soul.  On such a system there is no room for
+atonement in the sense of the mediation of God's forgiveness through
+Jesus Christ.  We may consistently speak in it of a man being
+reconciled to himself, or even reconciled to his sins, but not, so far
+as I can understand, of his being reconciled to God, and still less,
+reconciled to God through the death of His Son.  The penetration of
+Kant saw from the first all that could be made of atonement on the
+basis of any such system.  What it means to the speculative mind is
+that the new man bears the sin of the old.  When the sinner repents and
+is converted, the weight of what he has done comes home to him; the new
+man in him--the Son of God in him--accepts the responsibility of the
+old man, and so he has peace with God.  Many whose minds are under the
+influence of this mode of thought do not see clearly to what it leads,
+and resent criticism of it as if it were a sort of impiety.  Their
+philosophy is to them a surrogate for religion, but they should not be
+allowed to suppose (if they do suppose) that it is the equivalent of
+Christianity.  There can be no Christianity without Christ; it is the
+presence of the Mediator which makes Christianity what it is.  But a
+unique Christ, without Whom our religion disappears, is frankly
+disavowed by the more candid and outspoken of our idealist
+philosophers.  Christ, they tell us, was certainly a man who had an
+early and a magnificently strong faith in the unity of the human and
+the Divine; but it was faith in a fact which enters into the
+constitution of every human consciousness, and it is absurd to suppose
+that the recognition of the fact, or the realisation of it, is
+essentially dependent on Him.  He was not sinless--which is an
+expression without meaning, when we think of a human being which has to
+rise by conflict and self-suppression out of nature into the world of
+self-consciousness and right and wrong; He was not in any sense unique
+or exceptional; He was only what we all are in our degree; at best, He
+was only one among many great men who have contributed in their place
+and time to the spiritual elevation of the race.  Such, I say, is the
+issue of this mode of thought as it is frankly avowed by some of its
+representative men; but the peculiarity of it, when it is obscurely
+fermenting as a leaven in the mind, is, that it appeals to men as
+having special affinities to Christianity.  In our own country it is
+widely prevalent among those who have had a university education, and
+indeed in a much wider circle, and it is a serious question how we are
+to address our gospel to those who confront it in such a mental mood.
+
+I have no wish to be unsympathetic, but I must frankly express my
+conviction that this philosophy only lives by ignoring the greatest
+reality of the spiritual world.  There is something in that
+world--something with which we can come into intelligible and vital
+relations--something which can evince to our minds its truth and
+reality, for which this philosophy can make no room: Christ's
+consciousness of Himself.  It is a theory of the universe which (on
+principle) cannot allow Christ to be anything else than an additional
+unit in the world's population; but if this were the truth about Him,
+no language could be strong enough to express the self-delusion in
+which He lived and died.  That He was thus self-deluded is a hypothesis
+I do not feel called to discuss.  One may be accused of subjectivity
+again, of course, though a subjective opinion which has the consent of
+the Christian centuries behind it need not tremble at hard names; but I
+venture to say that there is no reality in the world which more
+inevitably and uncompromisingly takes hold of the mind as a reality
+than our Lord's consciousness of Himself as it is attested to us in the
+Gospels.  But when we have taken this reality for all that it is worth,
+the idealism just described is shaken to the foundation.  What seemed
+to us so profound a truth--the essential unity of the human and the
+divine--may come to seem a formal and delusive platitude; in what we
+once regarded as the formula of the perfect religion--the divinity of
+man and the humanity of God--we may find quite as truly the formula of
+the first, not to say the final, sin.  To see Christ not in the light
+of this speculative theorem, but in the light of His own consciousness
+of Himself, is to realise not only our kinship to God, but our
+remoteness from Him; it is to realise our incapacity for
+self-realisation when we are left to ourselves; it is to realise the
+need of the Mediator if we would come to the Father; it is to realise,
+in principle, the need of the Atonement, the need, and eventually the
+fact.  When the modern mind therefore presents itself to us in this
+mood of philosophical competence, judging Christ from the point of view
+of the whole, and showing Him His place, we can only insist that the
+place is unequal to His greatness, and that His greatness cannot be
+explained away.  The mind which is closed to the fact of His unique
+claims, and the unique relation to God on which they rest, is closed
+inevitably to the mediation of God's forgiveness through His death.
+
+There is one other modification of mind, characteristic of modern
+times, of which we have yet to take account--I mean that which is
+produced by devotion to historical study.  History is, as much as
+science, one of the achievements of our age; and the historical temper
+is as characteristic of the men we meet as the philosophical or the
+scientific.  The historical temper, too, is just as apt as these
+others, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps quite consciously, but under the
+engaging plea of modesty, to pronounce absolute sentences which strike
+at the life of the Christian religion, and especially, therefore, at
+the idea of the Atonement.  Sometimes this is done broadly, so that
+every one sees what it means.  If we are told, for example, that
+everything historical is relative, that it belongs of necessity to a
+time, and is conditioned in ways so intricate that no knowledge can
+ever completely trace them; if we are told, further, that for this very
+reason nothing historical can have absolute significance, or can
+condition the eternal life of man, it is obvious that the Christian
+religion is being cut at the root.  It is no use speaking about the
+Atonement--about the mediation of God's forgiveness to the soul through
+a historical person and work--if this is true.  The only thing to be
+done is to raise the question whether it _is_ true.  It is no more for
+historical than for physical science to exalt itself into a theory of
+the universe, or to lay down the law with speculative absoluteness as
+to the significance and value which shall attach to facts.  When we
+face the fact with which we are here concerned--the fact of Christ's
+consciousness of Himself and His vocation, to which reference has
+already been made--are we not forced to the conclusion that here a new
+spiritual magnitude has appeared in history, the very _differentia_ of
+which is that it _has_ eternal significance, and that it is eternal
+life to know it?  If we are to preach the Atonement, we cannot allow
+either history or philosophy to proceed on assumptions which ignore or
+degrade the fact of Christ.  Only a person in whom the eternal has
+become historical can be the bearer of the Atonement, and it must be
+our first concern to show, against all assumptions whether made in the
+name of history or of philosophy, that in point of fact there is such a
+person here.
+
+This consideration requires to be kept in view even when we are dealing
+with the modern mind inside the Church.  Nothing is commoner than to
+hear those who dissent from any given construction of the Atonement
+plead for a historical as opposed to a dogmatic interpretation of
+Christ.  It is not always clear what is meant by this distinction, nor
+is it clear that those who use it are always conscious of what it would
+lead to if it were made absolute.  Sometimes a dogmatic interpretation
+of the New Testament means an interpretation vitiated by dogmatic
+prejudice, an interpretation in which the meaning of the writers is
+missed because the mind is blinded by prepossessions of its own: in
+this sense a dogmatic interpretation is a thing which no one would
+defend.  Sometimes, however, a dogmatic interpretation is one which
+reveals or discovers in the New Testament truths of eternal and divine
+significance, and to discredit such interpretation in the name of the
+historical is another matter.  The distinction in this case, as has
+been already pointed out, is not absolute.  It is analogous to the
+distinction between fact and theory, or between thing and meaning, or
+between efficient cause and final cause.  None of these distinctions is
+absolute, and no intelligent mind would urge either side in them to the
+disparagement of the other.  If we are to apprehend the whole reality
+presented to us, we must apprehend the theory as well as the fact, the
+meaning as well as the thing, the final as well as the efficient cause.
+In the subject with which we are dealing, this truth is frequently
+ignored.  It is assumed, for example, that because Christ was put to
+death by His enemies, or because He died in the faithful discharge of
+His calling, therefore He did not die, in the sense of the Atonement,
+for our sins: the historical causes which brought about His death are
+supposed to preclude that interpretation of it according to which it
+mediates to us the divine forgiveness.  But there is no incompatibility
+between the two things.  To set aside an interpretation of Christ's
+death as dogmatic, on the ground that there is another which is
+historical, is like setting aside the idea that a watch is made to
+measure time because you know it was made by a watchmaker.  It was both
+made by a watchmaker and made to measure time.  Similarly it may be
+quite true both that Christ was crucified and slain by wicked men, and
+that He died for our sins.  But without entering into the questions
+which this raises as to the relation between the wisdom of God and the
+course of human history, it is enough to be conscious of the prejudice
+which the historical temper is apt to generate against the recognition
+of the eternal in time.  Surely it is a significant fact that the New
+Testament contains a whole series of books--the Johannine books--which
+have as their very burden the eternal significance of the historical:
+eternal life in Jesus Christ, come in flesh, the propitiation for the
+whole world.  Surely also it is a significant fact of a different and
+even an ominous kind that we have at present in the Church a whole
+school of critics which is so far from appreciating the truth in this
+that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it has devoted itself to
+a paltry and peddling criticism of these books in which the impression
+of the eternal is lost.  But whether we are to be indebted to John's
+eyes, or to none but our own, if the eternal is not to be seen in
+Jesus, He can have no place in our religion; if the historical has no
+dogmatic content, it cannot be essential to eternal life.  Hence if we
+believe and know that we have eternal life in Jesus, we must assert the
+truth which is implied in this against any conception of history which
+denies it.  Nor is it really difficult to do so.  With the experience
+of nineteen centuries behind us, we have only to confront this
+particular historical reality, Jesus Christ, without prejudice; in
+evangelising, we have only to confront others with Him; and we shall
+find it still possible to see God in Him, the Holy Father who through
+the Passion of His Son ministers to sinners the forgiveness of their
+sins.
+
+In what has been said thus far by way of explaining the modern mind,
+emphasis may seem to have fallen mainly on those characteristics which
+make it less accessible than it might be to Christian truth, and
+especially to the Atonement.  I have tried to point out the assailable
+side of its prepossessions, and to indicate the fundamental truths
+which must be asserted if our intellectual world is to be one in which
+the gospel may find room.  But the modern mind has other
+characteristics.  Some of these may have been exhibited hitherto mainly
+in criticising current representations of the Atonement; but in
+themselves they are entirely legitimate, and the claims they put
+forward are such as we cannot disown.  Before proceeding to a further
+statement of the Atonement, I shall briefly refer to one or two of
+them: a doctrine of Atonement which did not satisfy them would
+undoubtedly stand condemned.
+
+(1) The modern mind requires that everything shall be based on
+experience.  Nothing is true or real to it which cannot be
+experimentally verified.  This we shall all concede.  But there is an
+inference sometimes drawn from it at which we may look with caution.
+It is the inference that, because everything must be based on
+experience, no appeal to Scripture has any authority.  I have already
+explained in what sense it is possible to speak of the authority of
+Scripture, and here it is only necessary to make the simple remark that
+there is no proper contrast between Scripture and experience.
+Scripture, so far as it concerns us here, is a record of experience or
+an interpretation of it.  It was the Church's experience that it had
+its redemption in Christ; it was the interpretation of that experience
+that Christ died for our sins.  Yet in emphasising experience the
+modern mind is right, and Scripture would lose its authority if the
+experience it describes were not perpetually verified anew.
+
+(2) The modern mind desires to have everything in religion ethically
+construed.  As a general principle this must command our unreserved
+assent.  Anything which violates ethical standards, anything which is
+immoral or less than moral, must be excluded from religion.  It may be,
+indeed, that ethical has sometimes been too narrowly defined.  Ideas
+have been objected to as unethical which are really at variance not
+with a true perception of the constitution of humanity, and of the laws
+which regulate moral life, but with an atomic theory of personality
+under which moral life would be impossible.  Persons are not atoms; in
+a sense they interpenetrate, though individuality has been called the
+true impenetrability.  The world has been so constituted that we do not
+stand absolutely outside of each other; we can do things for each
+other.  We can bear each other's burdens, and it is not unethical to
+say so, but the reverse.  And again, it need not be unethical, though
+it transcends the ordinary sphere and range of ethical action, if we
+say that God in Christ is able to do for us what we cannot do for one
+another.  With reference to the Atonement, the demand for ethical
+treatment is usually expressed in two ways.  (_a_) There is the demand
+for analogies to it in human life.  The demand is justifiable, in so
+far as God has made man in His own image; but, as has been suggested
+above, it has a limit, in so far as God is God and not man, and must
+have relations to the human race which its members do not and cannot
+have to each other.  (_b_) There is the demand that the Atonement shall
+be exhibited in vital relation to a new life in which sin is overcome.
+This demand also is entirely legitimate, and it touches a weak point in
+the traditional Protestant doctrine.  Dr. Chalmers tells us that he was
+brought up--such was the effect of the current orthodoxy upon him--in a
+certain distrust of good works.  Some were certainly wanted, but not as
+being themselves salvation; only, as he puts it, as tokens of
+justification.  It was a distinct stage in his religious progress when
+he realised that true justification sanctifies, and that the soul can
+and ought to abandon itself spontaneously and joyfully to do the good
+that it delights in.  The modern mind assumes what Dr. Chalmers
+painfully discovered.  An atonement that does not regenerate, it truly
+holds, is not an atonement in which men can be asked to believe.  Such
+then, in its prejudices good and bad, is the mind to which the great
+truth of the Christian religion has to be presented.
+
+
+
+[1] Of course this does not touch the fact that the whole 'authority'
+of the Christian religion is in Jesus Himself--in His historical
+presence in the world, His words and works, His life and death and
+resurrection.  He _is_ the truth, the acceptance of which by man is
+life eternal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT
+
+We have now seen in a general way what is meant by the Atonement, and
+what are the characteristics of the mind to which the Atonement has to
+make its appeal.  In that mind there is, as I believe, much which falls
+in with the Atonement, and prepares a welcome for it; but much also which
+creates prejudice against it, and makes it as possible still as in the
+first century to speak of the offence of the cross.  No doubt the
+Atonement has sometimes been presented in forms which provoke antagonism,
+which challenge by an ostentation of unreason, or by a defiance of
+morality, the reason and conscience of man; but this alone does not
+explain the resentment which it often encounters.  There is such a thing
+to be found in the world as the man who will have nothing to do with
+Christ on any terms, and who will least of all have anything to do with
+Him when Christ presents Himself in the character which makes man His
+debtor for ever.  All men, as St. Paul says, have not faith: it is a
+melancholy fact, whether we can make anything of it or not.  Discounting,
+however, this irrational or inexplicable opposition, which is not
+expressed in the mind but in the will, how are we to present the
+Atonement so that it shall excite the least prejudice, and find the most
+unimpeded access to the mind of our own generation?  This is the question
+to which we have now to address ourselves.
+
+To conceive the Atonement, that is, the fact that forgiveness is mediated
+to us through Christ, and specifically through His death, as clearly and
+truly as possible, it is necessary for us to realise the situation to
+which it is related.  We cannot think of it except as related to a given
+situation.  It is determined or conditioned by certain relations
+subsisting between God and man, as these relations have been affected by
+sin.  What we must do, therefore, in the first instance, is to make clear
+to ourselves what these relations are, and how sin affects them.
+
+To begin with, they are personal relations; they are relations the truth
+of which cannot be expressed except by the use of personal pronouns.  We
+need not ask whether the personality of God can be proved antecedent to
+religion, or as a basis for a religion yet to be established; in the only
+sense in which we can be concerned with it, religion is an experience of
+the personality of God, and of our own personality in relation to it.  'O
+Lord, _Thou_ hast searched _me_ and known _me_.'  '_I_ am continually
+with _Thee_!  No human experience can be more vital or more normal than
+that which is expressed in these words, and no argument, be it ever so
+subtle or so baffling, can weigh a feather's-weight against such
+experience.  The same conception of the relations of God and man is
+expressed again as unmistakably in every word of Jesus about the Father
+and the Son and the nature of their communion with each other.  It is
+only in such personal relations that the kind of situation can emerge,
+and the kind of experience be had, with which the Atonement deals; and
+antecedent to such experience, or in independence of it, the Atonement
+must remain an incredible because an unrealisable thing.
+
+But to say that the relations of God and man are personal is not enough.
+They are not only personal, but universal.  _Personal_ is habitually used
+in a certain contrast with _legal_, and it is very easy to lapse into the
+idea that personal relations, because distinct from legal ones, are
+independent of law; but to say the least of it, that is an ambiguous and
+misleading way of describing the facts.  The relations of God and man are
+not lawless, they are not capricious, incalculable, incapable of moral
+meaning; they are personal, but determined by something of universal
+import; in other words, they are not merely personal but ethical.  That
+is ethical which is at once personal and universal.  Perhaps the simplest
+way to make this evident is to notice that the relations of man to God
+are the relations to God not of atoms, or of self-contained individuals,
+each of which is a world in itself, but of individuals which are
+essentially related to each other, and bound up in the unity of a race.
+The relations of God to man, therefore, are not capricious though they
+are personal: they are reflected or expressed in a moral constitution to
+which all personal beings are equally bound, a moral constitution of
+eternal and universal validity, which neither God nor man can ultimately
+treat as anything else than what it is.
+
+This is a point at which some prejudice has been raised against the
+Atonement by theologians, and more, perhaps, by persons protesting
+against what they supposed theologians to mean.  If one may be excused a
+personal reference, few things have astonished me more than to be charged
+with teaching a 'forensic' or 'legal' or 'judicial' doctrine of
+Atonement, resting, as such a doctrine must do, on a 'forensic' or
+'legal' or 'judicial' conception of man's relation to God.  It is all the
+more astonishing when the charge is combined with what one can only
+decline as in the circumstances totally unmerited compliments to the
+clearness with which he has expressed himself.  There is nothing which I
+should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which
+is expressed by these words.  To say that the relations of God and man
+are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statute--that sin is a
+breach of statute--that the sinner is a criminal--and that God
+adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his
+case.  Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth, and it is
+surprising that any one should be charged with teaching it, or that any
+one should applaud himself, as though he were in the foremost files of
+time, for not believing it.  It is superfluously apparent that the
+relations of God and man are not those of a magistrate on the bench
+pronouncing according to the act on the criminal at the bar.  To say
+this, however, does not make these relations more intelligible.  In
+particular, to say that they are personal, as opposed to forensic, does
+not make them more intelligible.  If they are to be rational, if they are
+to be moral, if they are to be relations in which an ethical life can be
+lived, and ethical responsibilities realised, they must be not only
+personal, but universal; they must be relations that in some sense are
+determined by law.  Even to say that they are the relations, not of judge
+and criminal, but of Father and child, does not get us past this point.
+The relations of father and child are undoubtedly more adequate to the
+truth than those of judge and criminal; they are more adequate, but so
+far as our experience of them goes, they are not equal to it.  If the
+sinner is not a criminal before his judge, neither is he a naughty child
+before a parent whose own weakness or affinity to evil introduces an
+incalculable element into his dealing with his child's fault.  I should
+not think of saying that it is the desire to escape from the
+inexorableness of law to a God capable of indulgent human tenderness that
+inspires the violent protests so often heard against 'forensic' and
+'legal' ideas: but that is the impression which one sometimes
+involuntarily receives from them.  It ought to be apparent to every one
+that even the relation of parent and child, if it is to be a moral
+relation, must be determined in a way which has universal and final
+validity.  It must be a relation in which--ethically speaking--some
+things are for ever obligatory, and some things for ever impossible; in
+other words, it must be a relation determined by law, and law which
+cannot deny itself.  But law in this sense is not 'legal.'  It is not
+'judicial,' or 'forensic,' or 'statutory.'  None the less it is real and
+vital, and the whole moral value of the relation depends upon it.  When a
+man says--as some one has said--'There are many to whom the conception of
+forgiveness resting on a judicial transaction does not appeal at all,' I
+entirely agree with him; it does not appeal at all to me.  But what would
+be the value of a forgiveness which did not recognise in its eternal
+truth and worth that universal law in which the relations of God and man
+are constituted?  Without the recognition of that law--that moral order
+or constitution in which we have our life in relation to God and each
+other--righteousness and sin, atonement and forgiveness, would all alike
+be words without meaning.
+
+In connection with this, reference may be made to an important point in
+the interpretation of the New Testament.  The responsibility for what is
+called the forensic conception of the Atonement is often traced to St.
+Paul, and the greatest of all the ministers of grace is not infrequently
+spoken of as though he had deliberately laid the most insuperable of
+stumbling-blocks in the way to the gospel.  Most people, of course, are
+conscious that they do not look well talking down to St.  Paul, and
+occasionally one can detect a note of misgiving in the brave words in
+which his doctrine is renounced, a note of misgiving which suggests that
+the charitable course is to hear such protests in silence, and to let
+those who utter them think over the matter again.  But there is what
+claims to be a scientific way of expressing dissent from the apostle, a
+way which, equally with the petulant one, rests, I am convinced, on
+misapprehension of his teaching.  This it would not be fair to ignore.
+It interprets what the apostle says about law solely by reference to the
+great question at issue between the Jewish and the Christian religions,
+making the word law mean the statutory system under which the Jews lived,
+and nothing else.  No one will deny that Paul does use the word in this
+sense; the law often means for him specifically the law of Moses.  The
+law of Moses, however, never means for him anything less than the law of
+God; it is one specific form in which the universal relations subsisting
+between God and man, and making religion and morality possible, have
+found historical expression.  But Paul's mind does not rest in this one
+historical expression.  He generalises it.  He has the conception of a
+universal law, to which he can appeal in Gentile as well as in Jew--a law
+in the presence of which sin is revealed, and by the reaction of which
+sin is judged--a law which God could not deny without denying Himself,
+and to which justice is done (in other words, which is maintained in its
+integrity), even when God justifies the ungodly.  But when law is thus
+universalised, it ceases to be legal; it is not a statute, but the moral
+constitution of the world.  Paul preached the same gospel to the Gentiles
+as he did to the Jews; he preached in it the same relation of the
+Atonement and of Christ's death to divine law.  But he did not do this by
+extending to all mankind a Pharisaic, legal, forensic relation to God: he
+did it by rising above such conceptions, even though as a Pharisee he may
+have had to start from them, to the conception of a relation of all men
+to God expressing itself in a moral constitution--or, as he would have
+said, but in an entirely unforensic sense, in a law--of divine and
+unchanging validity.  The maintenance of this law, or of this moral
+constitution, in its inviolable integrity was the signature of the
+forgiveness Paul preached.  The Atonement meant to him that forgiveness
+was mediated through One in whose life and death the most signal homage
+was paid to this law: the very glory of the Atonement was that it
+manifested the righteousness of God; it demonstrated God's consistency
+with His own character, which would have been violated alike by
+indifference to sinners and by indifference to that universal moral
+order--that law of God--in which alone eternal life is possible.
+
+Hence it is a mistake to say--though this also has been said--that
+'Paul's problem was not that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was
+the Jewish law, the Old Testament dispensation: how to justify his breach
+with it, how to demonstrate that the old order had been annulled and a
+new order inaugurated.'  There is a false contrast in all such
+propositions.  Paul's problem was that of the Jewish law, and it was also
+that of the possibility of forgiveness; it was that of the Jewish law,
+and it was also that of a revelation of grace, in which God should
+justify the ungodly, Jew or Gentile, and yet maintain inviolate those
+universal moral relations between Himself and man for which law is the
+compendious expression.  It does not matter whether we suppose him to
+start from the concrete instance of the Jewish law, and to generalise on
+the basis of it; or to start from the universal conception of law, and to
+recognise in existing Jewish institutions the most available and definite
+illustration of it: in either case, the only Paul whose mind is known to
+us has completely transcended the forensic point of view.  The same false
+contrast is repeated when we are told that, 'That doctrine (Paul's
+"juristic doctrine") had its origin, not so much in his religious
+experience, as in apologetic necessities.'  The only apologetic
+necessities which give rise to fundamental doctrines are those created by
+religious experience.  The apologetic of any religious experience is just
+the definition of it as real in relation to other acknowledged realities.
+Paul had undoubtedly an apologetic of forgiveness--namely, his doctrine
+of atonement.  But the acknowledged reality in relation to which he
+defined forgiveness--the reality with which, by means of his doctrine of
+atonement, he showed forgiveness to be consistent--was not the law of the
+Jews (though that was included in it, or might be pointed to in
+illustration of it): it was the law of God, the universal and inviolable
+order in which alone eternal life is possible, and in which all men, and
+not the Jews only, live and move and have their being.  It was the
+perception of this which made Paul an apostle to the Gentiles, and it is
+this very thing itself, which some would degrade into an awkward,
+unintelligent, and outworn rag of Pharisaic apologetic, which is the very
+heart and soul of Paul's Gentile gospel.  Paul himself was perfectly
+conscious of this; he could not have preached to the Gentiles at all
+unless he had been.  But there is nothing in it which can be
+characterised as 'legal,' 'judicial,' or 'forensic'; and of this also, I
+have no doubt, the apostle was well aware.  Of course he occupied a
+certain historical position, had certain historical questions to answer,
+was subject to historical limitations of different kinds; but I have not
+the courage to treat him, nor do his words entitle any one to do so, as a
+man who in the region of ideas could not put two and two together.
+
+But to return to the point from which this digression on St. Paul
+started.  We have seen that the relations of God and man are personal,
+and also that they are universal, that is, there is a law of them, or, if
+we like to say so, a law in them, on the maintenance of which their whole
+ethical value depends.  The next point to be noticed is that these
+relations are deranged or disordered by sin.  Sin is, in fact, nothing
+else than this derangement or disturbance: it is that in which wrong is
+done to the moral constitution under which we live.  And let no one say
+that in such an expression we are turning our back on the personal world,
+and lapsing, or incurring the risk of lapsing, into mere legalism again.
+It cannot be too often repeated that if the universal element, or law, be
+eliminated from personal relations, there is nothing intelligible left:
+no reason, no morality, no religion, no sin or righteousness or
+forgiveness, nothing to appeal to mind or conscience.  In the widest
+sense of the word, sin, as a disturbance of the personal relations
+between God and man, is a violence done to the constitution under which
+God and man form one moral community, share, as we may reverently express
+it, one life, have in view the same moral ends.
+
+It is no more necessary in connection with the Atonement than in any
+other connection that we should have a doctrine of the origin of sin.  We
+do not know its origin, we only know that it is here.  We cannot observe
+the genesis of the bad conscience any more than we can observe the
+genesis of consciousness in general.  We see that consciousness does
+stand in relief against the background of natural life; but though we
+believe that, as it exists in us, it has emerged from that background, we
+cannot see it emerge; it is an ultimate fact, and is assumed in all that
+we can ever regard as its physical antecedents and presuppositions.  In
+the same way, the moral consciousness is an ultimate fact, and
+irreducible.  The physical theory of evolution must not be allowed to
+mislead us here, and in particular it must not be allowed to discredit
+the conception of moral responsibility for sin which is embodied in the
+story of the Fall.  Each of us individually has risen into moral life
+from a mode of being which was purely natural; in other words, each of
+us, individually, has been a subject of evolution; but each of us also
+has fallen--fallen, presumably, in ways determined by his natural
+constitution, yet certainly, as conscience assures us, in ways for which
+we are morally answerable, and to which, in the moral constitution of the
+world, consequences attach which we must recognise as our due.  They are
+not only results of our action, but results which that action has
+merited, and there is no moral hope for us unless we accept them as such.
+Now what is true of any, or rather of all, of us, without compromise of
+the moral consciousness, may be true of the race, or of the first man, if
+there was a first man.  Evolution and a Fall cannot be inconsistent, for
+both enter into every moral experience of which we know anything; and no
+opinion we hold about the origin of sin can make it anything else than it
+is in conscience, or give its results any character other than that which
+they have to conscience.  Of course when one tries to interpret sin
+outside of conscience, as though it were purely physical, and did not
+have its being in personality, consciousness, and will, it disappears;
+and the laborious sophistries of such interpretations must be left to
+themselves.  The point for us is that no matter how sin originated, in
+the moral consciousness in which it has its being it is recognised as a
+derangement of the vital relations of man, a violation of that universal
+order outside of which he has no true good.
+
+In what way, now, let us ask, does the reality of sin come home to the
+sinner?  How does he recognise it as what it is?  What is the reaction
+against the sinner, in the moral order under which he lives, which
+reveals to him the meaning of his sinful act or state?
+
+In the first place, there is that instantaneous but abiding reaction
+which is called the bad conscience--the sense of guilt, of being
+answerable to God for sin.  The sin may be an act which is committed in a
+moment, but in this aspect of it, at least, it does not fade into the
+past.  An animal may have a past, for anything we can tell, and
+naturalistic interpreters of sin may believe that sin dies a natural
+death with time, and need not trouble us permanently; but this is not the
+voice of conscience, in which alone sin exists, and which alone can tell
+us the truth about it.  The truth is that the spiritual being has no
+past.  Just as he is continually with God, his sin is continually with
+him.  He cannot escape it by not thinking.  When he keeps silence, as the
+Psalmist says--and that is always his first resource, as though, if he
+were to say nothing about it, God might say nothing about it, and the
+whole thing blow over--it devours him like a fever within: his bones wax
+old with his moaning all day long.  This sense of being wrong with God,
+under His displeasure, excluded from His fellowship, afraid to meet Him
+yet bound to meet Him, is the sense of guilt.  Conscience confesses in it
+its liability to God, a liability which in the very nature of the case it
+can do nothing to meet, and which therefore is nearly akin to despair.
+
+But the bad conscience, real as it is, may be too abstractly interpreted.
+Man is not a pure spirit, but a spiritual being whose roots strike to the
+very depths of nature, and who is connected by the most intimate and
+vital relations not only with his fellow-creatures of the same species,
+but with the whole system of nature in which he lives.  The moral
+constitution in which he has his being comprehends, if we may say so,
+nature in itself: the God who has established the moral order in which
+man lives, has established the natural order also as part of the same
+whole with it.  In some profound way the two are one.  We distinguish in
+man, legitimately enough, between the spiritual and the physical; but man
+is one, and the universe in which he lives is one, and in man's relation
+to God the distinction of physical and spiritual must ultimately
+disappear.  The sin which introduces disorder into man's relations to God
+produces reactions affecting man as a whole--not reactions that, as we
+sometimes say, are purely spiritual, but reactions as broad as man's
+being and as the whole divinely constituted environment in which it
+lives.  I am well aware of the difficulty of giving expression to this
+truth, and of the hopelessness of trying to give expression to it by
+means of those very distinctions which it is its nature to transcend.
+The distinctions are easy and obvious; what we have to learn is that they
+are not final.  It seems so conclusive to say, as some one has done in
+criticising the idea of atonement, that spiritual transgressing brings
+spiritual penalty, and physical brings physical; it seems so conclusive,
+and it is in truth so completely beside the mark.  We cannot divide
+either man or the universe in this fashion into two parts which move on
+different planes and have no vital relations; we cannot, to apply this
+truth to the subject before us, limit the divine reaction against sin, or
+the experiences through which, in any case whatever, sin is brought home
+to man as what it is, to the purely spiritual sphere.  Every sin is a sin
+of the indivisible human being, and the divine reaction against it
+expresses itself to conscience through the indivisible frame of that
+world, at once natural and spiritual, in which man lives.  We cannot
+distribute evils into the two classes of physical and moral, and
+subsequently investigate the relation between them: if we could, it would
+be of no service here.  What we have to understand is that when a man
+sins he does something in which his whole being participates, and that
+the reaction of God against his sin is a reaction in which he is
+conscious, or might be conscious, that the whole system of things is in
+arms against him.
+
+There are those, no doubt, to whom this will seem fantastic, but it is a
+truth, I am convinced, which is presupposed in the Christian doctrine of
+Atonement, as the mediation of forgiveness through the suffering and
+death of Christ: and it is a truth also, if I am not much mistaken, to
+which all the highest poetry, which is also the deepest vision of the
+human mind, bears witness.  We may distinguish natural law and moral law
+as sharply as we please, and it is as necessary sometimes as it is easy
+to make these sharp and absolute distinctions; but there is a unity in
+experience which makes itself felt deeper than all the antitheses of
+logic, and in that unity nature and spirit are no more defined by
+contrast with each other: on the contrary, they interpenetrate and
+support each other: they are aspects of the same whole.  When we read in
+the prophet Amos, 'Lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the
+wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning
+darkness and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, the Lord, the
+God of hosts, is His name,' this is the truth which is expressed.  The
+power which reveals itself in conscience--telling us all things that ever
+we did, declaring unto us what is our thought--is the same which reveals
+itself in nature, establishing the everlasting hills, creating the winds
+which sweep over them, turning the shadow of death into the morning and
+making the day dark with night, calling for the waters of the sea, and
+pouring them out on the face of the earth.  Conscience speaks in a still
+small voice, but it is no impotent voice; it can summon the thunder to
+give it resonance; the power which we sometimes speak of as if it were
+purely spiritual is a power which clothes itself spontaneously and of
+right in all the majesty and omnipotence of nature.  It is the same
+truth, again, in another aspect of it, which is expressed in Wordsworth's
+sublime lines to Duty:
+
+  'Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong,
+  And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.'
+
+When the mind sees deepest, it is conscious that it needs more than
+physical astronomy, more than spectrum analysis, to tell us everything
+even about the stars.  There is a moral constitution, it assures us, even
+of the physical world; and though it is impossible for us to work it out
+in detail, the assumption of it is the only assumption on which we can
+understand the life of a being related as man is related both to the
+natural and the spiritual.  I do not pretend to prove that there is
+articulate or conscious reflection on this in either the Old Testament or
+the New; I take it for granted, as self-evident, that this sense of the
+ultimate unity of the natural and the spiritual--which is, indeed, but
+one form of belief in God--pervades the Bible from beginning to end.  It
+knows nothing of our abstract and absolute distinctions; to come to the
+matter in hand, it knows nothing of a sin which has merely spiritual
+penalties.  Sin is the act or the state of man, and the reaction against
+it is the reaction of the whole order, at once natural and spiritual, in
+which man lives.
+
+Now the great difficulty which the modern mind has with the Atonement, or
+with the representation of it in the New Testament, is that it assumes
+some kind of connection between sin and death.  Forgiveness is mediated
+through Christ, but specifically through His death.  He died for our
+sins; if we can be put right with God apart from this, then, St. Paul
+tells us, He died for nothing.  One is almost ashamed to repeat that this
+is not Paulinism, but the Christianity of the whole Apostolic Church.
+What St. Paul made the basis of his preaching, that Christ died for our
+sins, according to the Scriptures, he had on his own showing received as
+the common Christian tradition.  But is there anything in it?  Can we
+receive it simply on the authority of the primitive Church?  Can we
+realise any such connection between death and sin as makes it a truth to
+us, an intelligible, impressive, overpowering thought, that Christ died
+for our sins?
+
+I venture to say that a great part of the difficulty which is felt at
+this point is due to the false abstraction just referred to.  Sin is put
+into one world--the moral; death is put into another world--the natural;
+and there is no connection between them.  This is very convincing if we
+find it possible to believe that we live in two unconnected worlds.  But
+if we find it impossible to believe this--and surely the impossibility is
+patent--its plausibility is gone.  It is a shining example of this false
+abstraction when we are told, as though it were a conclusive objection to
+all that the New Testament has to say about the relation of sin and
+death, that 'the specific penalty of sin is not a fact of the natural
+life, but of the moral life.'  What right has any one, in speaking of the
+ultimate realities in human life, of those experiences in which man
+becomes conscious of all that is involved in his relations to God and
+their disturbance by sin, to split that human life into 'natural' and
+'moral,' and fix an impassable gulf between?  The distinction is
+legitimate, as has already been remarked, within limits, but it is not
+final; and what the New Testament teaches, or rather assumes, about the
+relation of sin and death, is one of the ways in which we are made
+sensible that it is not final.  Sin and death do not belong to unrelated
+worlds.  As far as man is concerned, the two worlds, to use an inadequate
+figure, intersect; and at one point in the line of their intersection sin
+and death meet and interpenetrate.  In the indivisible experience of man
+he is conscious that they are parts or aspects of the same thing.
+
+That this is what Scripture means when it assumes the connection of death
+and sin is not to be refuted by pointing either to the third chapter of
+Genesis or to the fifth of Romans.  It does not, for example, do justice
+either to Genesis or to St. Paul to say, as has been said, that according
+to their representation, 'Death--not spiritual, but natural death--is the
+direct consequence of sin and its specific penalty.'  In such a dictum,
+the distinctions again mislead.  To read the third chapter of Genesis in
+this sense would mean that what we had to find in it was a mythological
+explanation of the origin of physical death.  But does any one believe
+that any Bible writer was ever curious about this question? or does any
+one believe that a mythological solution of the problem, how death
+originated--a solution which _ex hypothesi_ has not a particle of truth
+or even of meaning in it--could have furnished the presupposition for the
+fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, that Christ died for our
+sins, and that in Him we have our forgiveness through His blood?  A truth
+which has appealed so powerfully to man cannot be sustained on a
+falsehood.  That the third chapter of Genesis is mythological in form, no
+one who knows what mythology is will deny; but even mythology is not made
+out of nothing, and in this chapter every atom is 'stuff o' the
+conscience.'  What we see in it is conscience, projecting as it were in a
+picture on a screen its own invincible, dear-bought, despairing
+conviction that sin and death are indissolubly united--that from death
+the sinful race can never get away--that it is part of the indivisible
+reality of sin that the shadow of death darkens the path of the sinner,
+and at last swallows him up.  It is this also which is in the mind of St.
+Paul when he says that by one man sin entered into the world and death by
+sin.  It is not the origin of death he is interested in, nor the origin
+of sin either, but the fact that sin and death hang together.  And just
+because sin is sin, this is not a fact of natural history, or a fact
+which natural history can discredit.  Scripture has no interest in
+natural history, nor does such an interest help us to understand it.  It
+is no doubt perfectly true that to the biologist death is part of the
+indispensable machinery of nature; it is a piece of the mechanism without
+which the movement of the whole would be arrested; to put it so, death to
+the biologist is part of the same whole as life, or life and death are
+for him aspects of one thing.  One can admit this frankly without
+compromising, because without touching, the other and deeper truth which
+is so interesting and indeed so vital alike in the opening pages of
+revelation and in its consummation in the Atonement.  The biologist, when
+he deals with man, and with his life and death, deliberately deals with
+them in abstraction, as merely physical phenomena; to him man is a piece
+of nature, and he is nothing more.  But the Biblical writers deal with
+man in the integrity of his being, and in his relations to God; they
+transcend the distinction of natural and moral, because for God it is not
+final: they are sensible of the unity in things which the everyday mind,
+for practical purposes, finds it convenient to keep apart.  It is one
+great instance of this that they are sensible of the unity of sin and
+death.  We may call sin a spiritual thing, but the man who has never felt
+the shadow of death fall upon it does not know what that spiritual thing
+is: and we may call death a natural thing, but the man who has not felt
+its natural pathos deepen into tragedy as he faced it with the sense of
+sin upon him does not know what that natural thing is.  We are here, in
+short, at the vanishing point of this distinction--God is present, and
+nature and spirit interpenetrate in His presence.  We hear much in other
+connections of the sacramental principle, and its importance for the
+religious interpretation of nature.  It is a sombre illustration of this
+principle if we say that death is a kind of sacrament of sin.  It is in
+death, ultimately, that the whole meaning of sin comes home to the
+sinner; he has not sounded it to its depths till he has discovered that
+this comes into it at last.  And we must not suppose that when Paul read
+the third chapter of Genesis he read it as a mythological explanation of
+the origin of physical death, and accepted it as such on the authority of
+inspiration.  With all his reverence for the Old Testament, Paul accepted
+nothing from it that did not speak to his conscience, and waken echoes
+there; and what so spoke to him from the third chapter of Genesis was not
+a mythical story of how death invaded Paradise, but the profound
+experience of the human race expressed in the story, an experience in
+which sin and death inter-penetrate, interpret, and in a sense constitute
+each other.  To us they are what they are only in relation to each other,
+and when we deny the relation we see the reality of neither.  This is the
+truth, as I apprehend it, of all we are taught either in the Old
+Testament or in the New about the relation of sin and death.  It is part
+of the greater truth that what we call the physical and spiritual worlds
+are ultimately one, being constituted with a view to each other; and most
+of the objections which are raised against it are special cases of the
+objections which are raised against the recognition of this ultimate
+unity.  So far as they are such, it is not necessary to discuss them
+further; and so far as the ultimate unity of the natural and the
+spiritual is a truth rather to be experienced than demonstrated, it is
+not probable that much can be done by argument to gain acceptance for the
+idea that sin and death have essential relations to each other.  But
+there are particular objections to this idea to which it may be worth
+while to refer.
+
+There is, to begin with, the undoubted fact that many people live and die
+without, consciously at least, recognising this relation.  The thought of
+death may have had a very small place in their lives, and when death
+itself comes it may, for various reasons, be a very insignificant
+experience to them.  It may come in a moment, suddenly, and give no time
+for feeling; or it may come as the last step in a natural process of
+decay, and arrest life almost unconsciously; or it may come through a
+weakness in which the mind wanders to familiar scenes of the past, living
+these over again, and in a manner escaping by so doing the awful
+experience of death itself; or it may come in childhood before the moral
+consciousness is fully awakened, and moral reflection and experience
+possible.  This last case, properly speaking, does not concern us; we do
+not know how to define sin in relation to those in whom the moral
+consciousness is as yet undeveloped: we only know that somehow or other
+they are involved in the moral as well as in the natural unity of the
+race.  But leaving them out of account, is there any real difficulty in
+the others? any real objection to the Biblical idea that sin and death in
+humanity are essentially related?  I do not think there is.  To say that
+many people are unconscious of the connection is only another way of
+saying that many people fail to realise in full and tragic reality what
+is meant by death and sin.  They think very little about either.  The
+third chapter of Genesis could never have been written out of their
+conscience.  Sin is not for them all one with despair: they are not,
+through fear of death, all their lifetime subject to bondage.  Scripture,
+of course, has no difficulty in admitting this; it depicts, on the
+amplest scale, and in the most vivid colours, the very kind of life and
+death which are here supposed.  But it does not consider that such a life
+and death are _ipso facto_ a refutation of the truth it teaches about the
+essential relations of death and sin.  On the contrary, it considers them
+a striking demonstration of that moral dulness and insensibility in man
+which must be overcome if he is ever to see and feel his sin as what it
+is to God, or welcome the Atonement as that in which God's forgiveness of
+sin is mediated through the tremendous experience of death.  I know there
+are those who will call this arrogant, or even insolent, as though I were
+passing a moral sentence on all who do not accept a theorem of mine; but
+I hope I do not need here to disclaim any such unchristian temper.  Only,
+it is necessary to insist that the connection of sin and death in
+Scripture is neither a fantastic piece of mythology, explaining, as
+mythology does, the origin of a physical law, nor, on the other hand, a
+piece of supernaturally revealed history, to be accepted on the authority
+of Him who has revealed it; in such revelations no one believes any
+longer; it is a profound conviction and experience of the human
+conscience, and all that is of interest is to show that such a conviction
+and experience can never be set aside by the protest of those who aver
+that they know nothing about it.  One must insist on this, however it may
+expose him to the charge of judging.  Can we utter any truth at all, in
+which conscience is concerned, and which is not universally acknowledged,
+without seeming to judge?
+
+Sometimes, apart from the general denial of any connection between death
+and sin, it is pointed out that death has another and a totally different
+character.  Death in any given case may be so far from coming as a
+judgment of God, that it actually comes as a gracious gift from Him; it
+may even be an answer to prayer, a merciful deliverance from pain, an
+event welcomed by suffering human nature, and by all who sympathise with
+it.  This is quite true, but again, one must point out, rests on the
+false abstraction so often referred to.  Man is regarded in all this
+simply in the character of a sufferer, and death as that which brings
+suffering to an end; but that is not all the truth about man, nor all the
+truth about death.  Physical pain may be so terrible that consciousness
+is absorbed and exhausted in it, sometimes even extinguished, but it is
+not to such abnormal conditions we should appeal to discover the deepest
+truths in the moral consciousness of man.  If the waves of pain subsided,
+and the whole nature collected its forces again, and conscience was once
+more audible, death too would be seen in a different light.  It might not
+indeed be apprehended at once, as Scripture apprehends it, but it would
+not be regarded simply as a welcome relief from pain.  It would become
+possible to see in it something through which God spoke to the
+conscience, and eventually to realise its intimate relation to sin.
+
+The objections we have just considered are not very serious, because they
+practically mean that death has no moral character at all; they reduce it
+to a natural phenomenon, and do not bring it into any relation to the
+conscience.  It is a more respectable, and perhaps a more formidable
+objection, when death is brought into the moral world, and when the plea
+is put forward that so far from being God's judgment upon sin, it may be
+itself a high moral achievement.  A man may die greatly; his death may be
+a triumph; nothing in his life may become him like the leaving it.  Is
+not this inconsistent with the idea that there is any peculiar connection
+between death and sin?  From the Biblical point of view the answer must
+again be in the negative.  There is no such triumph over death as makes
+death itself a noble ethical achievement, which is not at the same time a
+triumph over sin.  Man vanquishes the one only as in the grace of God he
+is able to vanquish the other.  The doom that is in death passes away
+only as the sin to which it is related is transcended.  But there is more
+than this to be said.  Death cannot be so completely an action that it
+ceases to be a passion; it cannot be so completely achieved that it
+ceases to be accepted or endured.  And in this last aspect of it the
+original character which it bore in relation to sin still makes itself
+felt.  Transfigure it, as it may be transfigured, by courage, by
+devotion, by voluntary abandonment of life for a higher good, and it
+remains nevertheless the last enemy.  There is something in it monstrous
+and alien to the spirit, something which baffles the moral intelligence,
+till the truth dawns upon us that for all our race sin and death are
+aspects of one thing.  If we separate them, we understand neither; nor do
+we understand the solemn greatness of martyrdom itself if we regard it as
+a triumph only, and eliminate from the death which martyrs die all sense
+of the universal relation in humanity of death and sin.  No one knew the
+spirit of the martyr more thoroughly than St. Paul.  No one could speak
+more confidently and triumphantly of death than he.  No one knew better
+how to turn the passion into action, the endurance into a great spiritual
+achievement.  But also, no one knew better than he, in consistency with
+all this, that sin and death are needed for the interpretation of each
+other, and that fundamentally, in the experience of the race, they
+constitute one whole.  Even when he cried, 'O death, where is thy sting?'
+he was conscious that 'the sting of death is sin.' Each, so to speak, had
+its reality in the other.  No one could vanquish death who had not
+vanquished sin.  No one could know what sin meant without tasting death.
+These were not mythological fancies in St.  Paul's mind, but the
+conviction in which the Christian conscience experimentally lived, and
+moved, and had its being.  And these convictions, I repeat, furnish the
+point of view from which we must appreciate the Atonement, _i.e._ the
+truth that forgiveness, as Christianity preaches it, is specifically
+mediated through Christ's death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT
+
+What has now been said about the relations subsisting between God and
+man, about the manner in which these relations are affected by sin, and
+particularly about the Scripture doctrine of the connection between sin
+and death, must determine, to a great extent, our attitude to the
+Atonement.  The Atonement, as the New Testament presents it, assumes
+the connection of sin and death.  Apart from some sense and recognition
+of such connection, the mediation of forgiveness through the death of
+Christ can only appear an arbitrary, irrational, unacceptable idea.
+But leaving the Atonement meanwhile out of sight, and looking only at
+the situation created by sin, the question inevitably arises, What can
+be done with it?  Is it possible to remedy or to reverse it?  It is an
+abnormal and unnatural situation; can it be annulled, and the relations
+of God and man put upon an ideal footing?  Can God forgive sin and
+restore the soul?  Can we claim that He shall?  And if it is possible
+for Him to do so, can we tell how or on what conditions it is possible?
+
+When the human mind is left to itself, there are only two answers which
+it can give to these questions.  Perhaps they are not specially
+characteristic of the modern mind, but the modern mind in various moods
+has given passionate expression to both of them.  The first says
+roundly that forgiveness is impossible.  Sin is, and it abides.  The
+sinner can never escape from the past.  His future is mortgaged to it,
+and it cannot be redeemed.  He can never get back the years which the
+locust has eaten.  His leprous flesh can never come again like the
+flesh of a little child.  Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
+reap, and reap for ever and ever.  It is not eternal punishment which
+is incredible; nothing else has credibility.  Let there be no illusion
+about this: forgiveness is a violation, a reversal, of law, and no such
+thing is conceivable in a world in which law reigns.
+
+The answer to this is, that sin and its consequences are here conceived
+as though they belonged to a purely physical world, whereas, if the
+world were only physical, there could be no such thing as sin.  As soon
+as we realise that sin belongs to a world in which freedom is real--a
+world in which reality means the personal relations subsisting between
+man and God, and the experiences realised in these relations--the
+question assumes a different aspect.  It is not one of logic or of
+physical law, but of personality, of character, of freedom.  There is
+at least a possibility that the sinner's relation to his sin and God's
+relation to the sinner should change, and that out of these changed
+relations a regenerative power should spring, making the sinner, after
+all, a new creature.  The question, of course, is not decided in this
+sense, but it is not foreclosed.
+
+At the opposite extreme from those who pronounce forgiveness impossible
+stand those who give the second answer to the great question, and
+calmly assure us that forgiveness may be taken for granted.  They
+emphasise what the others overlooked--the personal character of the
+relations of God and man.  God is a loving Father; man is His weak and
+unhappy child; and of course God forgives.  As Heine put it, _c'est mon
+metier_, it is what He is for.  But the conscience which is really
+burdened by sin does not easily find satisfaction in this cheap pardon.
+There is something in conscience which will not allow it to believe
+that God can simply condone sin: to take forgiveness for granted, when
+you realise what you are doing, seems to a live conscience impious and
+profane.  In reality, the tendency to take forgiveness for granted is
+the tendency of those who, while they properly emphasise the personal
+character of the relations of God and man, overlook their universal
+character--that is, exclude from them that element of law without which
+personal relations cease to be ethical.  But a forgiveness which
+ignores this stands in no relation to the needs of the soul or the
+character of God.
+
+What the Christian religion holds to be the truth about forgiveness--a
+truth embodied in the Atonement--is something quite distinct from both
+the propositions which have just been considered.  The New Testament
+does not teach, with the naturalistic or the legal mind, that
+forgiveness is impossible; neither does it teach, with the sentimental
+or lawless mind, that it may be taken for granted.  It teaches that
+forgiveness is mediated to sinners through Christ, and specifically
+through His death: in other words, that it is possible for God to
+forgive, but possible for God only through a supreme revelation of His
+love, made at infinite cost, and doing justice to the uttermost to
+those inviolable relations in which alone, as I have already said, man
+can participate in eternal life, the life of God Himself--doing justice
+to them as relations in which there is an inexorable divine reaction
+against sin, finally expressing itself in death.  It is possible on
+these terms, and it becomes actual as sinful men open their hearts in
+penitence and faith to this marvellous revelation, and abandon their
+sinful life unreservedly to the love of God in Christ who died for them.
+
+From this point of view it seems to me possible to present in a
+convincing and persuasive light some of the truths involved in the
+Atonement to which the modern mind is supposed to be specially averse.
+
+Thus it becomes credible--we say so not _a priori_, but after
+experience--that there is a _divine necessity_ for it; in other words,
+there is no forgiveness possible to God without it: if He forgives at
+all, it must be in this way and in no other.  To say so beforehand
+would be inconceivably presumptuous, but it is quite another thing to
+say so after the event.  What it really means is that in the very act
+of forgiving sin--or, to use the daring word of St. Paul, in the very
+act of justifying the ungodly--God must act in consistency with His
+whole character.  He must demonstrate Himself to be what He is in
+relation to sin, a God with whom evil cannot dwell, a God who maintains
+inviolate the moral constitution of the world, taking sin as all that
+it is in the very process through which He mediates His forgiveness to
+men.
+
+It is the recognition of this divine necessity--not to forgive, but to
+forgive in a way which shows that God is irreconcilable to evil, and
+can never treat it as other or less than it is--it is the recognition
+of this divine necessity, or the failure to recognise it, which
+ultimately divides interpreters of Christianity into evangelical and
+non-evangelical, those who are true to the New Testament and those who
+cannot digest it.
+
+No doubt the forms in which this truth is expressed are not always
+adequate to the idea they are meant to convey, and if we are only
+acquainted with them at second hand they will probably appear even less
+adequate than they are.  When Athanasius, _e.g._, speaks of God's
+_truth_ in this connection, and then reduces God's truth to the idea
+that God must keep His word--the word which made death the penalty of
+sin--we may feel that the form only too easily loses contact with the
+substance.  Yet Athanasius is dealing with the essential fact of the
+case, that God must be true to Himself, and to the moral order in which
+men live, in all His dealings with sin for man's deliverance from it;
+and that He has been thus true to Himself in sending His Son to live
+our life and to die our death for our salvation.  Or again, when Anselm
+in the _Cur Deus Homo_ speaks of the satisfaction which is rendered to
+God for the infringement of His honour by sin--a satisfaction apart
+from which there can be no forgiveness--we may feel again, and even
+more strongly, that the form of the thought is inadequate to the
+substance.  But what Anselm means is that sin makes a real difference
+to God, and that even in forgiving God treats that difference _as_
+real, and cannot do otherwise.  He cannot ignore it, or regard it as
+other or less than it is; if He did so, He would not be more gracious
+than He is in the Atonement, He would cease to be God.  It is Anselm's
+profound grasp of this truth which, in spite of all its inadequacy in
+form, and of all the criticism to which its inadequacy has exposed it,
+makes the _Cur Deus Homo_ the truest and greatest book on the Atonement
+that has ever been written.  It is the same truth of a divine necessity
+for the Atonement which is emphasised by St. Paul in the third chapter
+of Romans, where he speaks of Christ's death as a demonstration of
+God's righteousness.  Christ's death, we may paraphrase his meaning, is
+an act in which (so far as it is ordered in God's providence) God does
+justice to Himself.  He does justice to His character as a gracious
+God, undoubtedly, who is moved with compassion for sinners: if He did
+not act in a way which displayed His compassion for sinners, He would
+_not_ do justice to Himself; there would be no [Greek] _endeixis_ of
+His [Greek] _dikaiosune_: it would be in abeyance: He would do Himself
+an injustice, or be untrue to Himself.  It is with this in view that we
+can appreciate the arguments of writers like Diestel and Ritschl, that
+God's righteousness is synonymous with His grace.  Such arguments are
+true to this extent, that God's righteousness includes His grace.  He
+could not demonstrate it, He could not be true to Himself, if His grace
+remained hidden.  We must not, however, conceive of this as if it
+constituted on our side a claim upon grace or upon forgiveness: such a
+claim would be a contradiction in terms.  All that God does in Christ
+He does in free love, moved with compassion for the misery and doom of
+men.  But though God's righteousness as demonstrated in Christ's
+death--in other words, His action in consistency with His
+character--includes, and, if we choose to interpret the term properly,
+even necessitates, the revelation of His grace, it is not this only--I
+do not believe it is this primarily--which St. Paul has here in mind.
+God, no doubt, would not do justice to Himself if He did not show His
+compassion for sinners; but, on the other hand--and here is what the
+apostle is emphasising--He would not do justice to Himself if He
+displayed His compassion for sinners in a way which made light of sin,
+which ignored its tragic reality, or took it for less than it is.  In
+this case He would again be doing Himself injustice; there would be no
+demonstration that He was true to Himself as the author and guardian of
+the moral constitution under which men live; as Anselm put it, He would
+have ceased to be God.  The apostle combines the two sides.  In Christ
+set forth a propitiation in His blood--in other words, in the Atonement
+in which the sinless Son of God enters into the bitter realisation of
+all that sin means for man, yet loves man under and through it all with
+an everlasting love--there is an [Greek] _endeixis_ of God's
+righteousness, a demonstration of His self-consistency, in virtue of
+which we can see how He is at the same time just Himself and the
+justifier of him who believes on Jesus, a God who is irreconcilable to
+sin, yet devises means that His banished be not expelled from Him.  We
+may say reverently that this was the only way in which God could
+forgive.  He cannot deny Himself, means at the same time He cannot deny
+His grace to the sinful, and He cannot deny the moral order in which
+alone He can live in fellowship with men; and we see the inviolableness
+of both asserted in the death of Jesus.  Nothing else in the world
+demonstrates how real is God's love to the sinful, and how real the sin
+of the world is to God.  And the love which comes to us through such an
+expression, bearing sin in all its reality, yet loving us through and
+beyond it, is the only love which at once forgives and regenerates the
+soul.
+
+It becomes credible also that there is a _human necessity_ for the
+Atonement: in other words, that apart from it the conditions of being
+forgiven could no more be fulfilled by man than forgiveness could be
+bestowed by God.
+
+There are different tendencies in the modern mind with regard to this
+point.  On the one hand, there are those who frankly admit the truth
+here asserted.  Yes, they say, the Atonement is necessary for us.  If
+we are to be saved from our sins, if our hearts are to be touched and
+won by the love of God, if we are to be emancipated from distrust and
+reconciled to the Father whose love we have injured, there must be a
+demonstration of that love so wonderful and overpowering that all
+pride, alienation and fear shall be overcome by it; and this is what we
+have in the death of Christ.  It is a demonstration of love powerful
+enough to evoke penitence and faith in man, and it is through penitence
+and faith alone that man is separated from his sins and reconciled to
+God.  A demonstration of love, too, must be given in act; it is not
+enough to be told that God loves: the reality of love lies in another
+region than that of words.  In Christ on His cross the very thing
+itself is present, beyond all hope of telling wonderful, and without
+its irresistible appeal our hearts could never have been melted to
+penitence, and won for God.  On the other hand, there are those who
+reject the Atonement on the very ground that for pardon and
+reconciliation nothing is required but repentance, the assumption being
+that repentance is something which man can and must produce out of his
+own resources.
+
+On these divergent tendencies in the modern mind I should wish to make
+the following remarks.
+
+First, the idea that man can repent as he ought, and whenever he will,
+without coming under any obligation to God for his repentance, but
+rather (it might almost be imagined) putting God under obligation by
+it, is one to which experience lends no support.  Repentance is an
+adequate sense not of our folly, nor of our misery, but of our sin: as
+the New Testament puts it, it is repentance _toward God_.  It is the
+consciousness of what our sin is to Him: of the wrong it does to His
+holiness, of the wound which it inflicts on His love.  Now such a
+consciousness it is not in the power of the sinner to produce at will.
+The more deeply he has sinned, the more (so to speak) repentance is
+needed, the less is it in his power.  It is the very nature of sin to
+darken the mind and harden the heart, to take away the knowledge of God
+alike in His holiness and in His love.  Hence it is only through a
+revelation of God, and especially of what God is in relation to sin,
+that repentance can be evoked in the soul.  Of all terms in the
+vocabulary of religion, repentance is probably the one which is most
+frequently misused.  It is habitually applied to experiences which are
+not even remotely akin to true penitence.  The self-centred regret
+which a man feels when his sin has found him out--the wish, compounded
+of pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable folly, that he had
+not done it: these are spoken of as repentance.  But they are not
+repentance at all.  They have no relation to God.  They constitute no
+fitness for a new relation to Him.  They are no opening of the heart in
+the direction of His reconciling love.  It is the simple truth that
+that sorrow of heart, that healing and sanctifying pain in which sin is
+really put away, is not ours in independence of God; it is a saving
+grace which is begotten in the soul under that impression of sin which
+it owes to the revelation of God in Christ.  A man can no more repent
+than he can do anything else without a motive, and the motive which
+makes evangelic repentance possible does not enter into his world till
+he sees God as God makes Himself known in the death of Christ.  All
+true penitents are children of the Cross.  Their penitence is not their
+own creation: it is the reaction towards God produced in their souls by
+this demonstration of what sin is to Him, and of what His love does to
+reach and win the sinful.
+
+The other remark I wish to make refers to those who admit the death of
+Christ to be necessary _for us_--necessary, in the way I have just
+described, to evoke penitence and trust in God--but who on this very
+ground deny it to be _divinely_ necessary.  It had to be, because the
+hard hearts of men could not be touched by anything less moving: but
+that is all.  This, I feel sure, is another instance of those false
+abstractions to which reference has already been made.  There is no
+incompatibility between a _divine_ necessity and a necessity _for us_.
+It may very well be the case that nothing less than the death of Christ
+could win the trust of sinful men for God, and at the same time that
+nothing else than the death of Christ could fully reveal the character
+of God in relation at once to sinners and to sin.  For my own part I am
+persuaded, not only that there is no incompatibility between the two
+things, but that they are essentially related, and that only the
+acknowledgment of the divine necessity in Christ's death enables us to
+conceive in any rational way the power which it exercises over sinners
+in inducing repentance and faith.  It would not evoke a reaction
+Godward unless God were really present in it, that is, unless it were a
+real revelation of His being and will: but in a real revelation of
+God's being and will there can be nothing arbitrary, nothing which is
+determined only from without, nothing, in other words, that is not
+divinely necessary.  The demonstration of what God is, which is made in
+the death of Christ, is no doubt a demonstration singularly suited to
+call forth penitence and faith in man, but the necessity of it does not
+lie simply in the desire to call forth penitence and faith.  It lies in
+the divine nature itself.  God could not do justice to Himself, in
+relation to man and sin, in any way less awful than this; and it is the
+fact that He does not shrink even from this--that in the Person of His
+Son He enters, if we may say so, into the whole responsibility of the
+situation created by sin--which constitutes the death of Jesus a
+demonstration of divine love, compelling penitence and faith.  Nothing
+less would have been sufficient to touch sinful hearts to their
+depths--in that sense the Atonement is humanly necessary; but neither
+would anything else be a sufficient revelation of what God is in
+relation to sin and to sinful men--in that sense it is divinely
+necessary.  And the divine necessity is the fundamental one.  The power
+exercised over us by the revelation of God at the Cross is dependent on
+the fact that the revelation is true--in other words, that it exhibits
+the real relation of God to sinners and to sin.  It is not by
+calculating what will win us, but by acting in consistency with
+Himself, that God irresistibly appeals to men.  We dare not say that He
+must be gracious, as though grace could cease to be free: but we may
+say that He must be Himself, and that it is because He is what we see
+Him to be in the death of Christ, understood as the New Testament
+understands it, that sinners are moved to repentance and to trust in
+Him.  That which the eternal being of God made necessary to Him in the
+presence of sin is the very thing which is necessary also to win the
+hearts of sinners.  Nothing but what is divinely necessary could have
+met the necessities of sinful men.
+
+When we admit this twofold necessity for the Atonement, we can tell
+ourselves more clearly how we are to conceive Christ in it, in relation
+to God on the one hand and to man on the other.  The Atonement is God's
+work.  It is God who makes the Atonement in Christ.  It is God who
+mediates His forgiveness of sins to us in this way.  This is one aspect
+of the matter, and probably the one about which there is least dispute
+among Christians.  But there is another aspect of it.  The Mediator
+between God and man is Himself man, Christ Jesus.  What is the relation
+of the man Christ Jesus to those for whom the Atonement is made?  What
+is the proper term to designate, in this atoning work, what He is in
+relation to them?  The doctrine of Atonement current in the Church in
+the generation preceding our own answered frankly that in His atoning
+work Christ is our substitute.  He comes in our nature, and He comes
+into our place.  He enters into all the responsibilities that sin has
+created for us, and He does justice to them in His death.  He does not
+deny any of them: He does not take sin as anything less or else than it
+is to God; in perfect sinlessness He consents even to die, to submit to
+that awful experience in which the final reaction of God's holiness
+against sin is expressed.  Death was not _His_ due: it was something
+alien to One Who had nothing amiss; but it was our due, and because it
+was ours He made it His.  It was thus that He made Atonement.  _He_
+bore _our_ sins.  He took to Himself all that they meant, all in which
+they had involved the world.  He died for them, and in so doing
+acknowledged the sanctity of that order in which sin and death arc
+indissolubly united.  In other words, He did what the human race could
+not do for itself, yet what had to be done if sinners were to be saved:
+for how could men be saved if there were not made in humanity an
+acknowledgment of all that sin is to God, and of the justice of all
+that is entailed by sin under God's constitution of the world?  Such an
+acknowledgment, as we have just seen, is divinely necessary, and
+necessary, too, for man, if sin is to be forgiven.
+
+This was the basis of fact on which the substitutionary character of
+Christ's sufferings and death in the Atonement was asserted.  It may be
+admitted at once that when the term substitute is interpreted without
+reference to this basis of fact it lends itself very easily to
+misconstruction.  It falls in with, if it does not suggest, the idea of
+a transference of merit and demerit, the sin of the world being carried
+over to Christ's account, and the merit of Christ to the world's
+account, as if the reconciliation of God and man, or the forgiveness of
+sins and the regeneration of souls, could be explained without the use
+of higher categories than are employed in bookkeeping.  It is surely
+not necessary at this time of day to disclaim an interpretation of
+personal relations which makes use only of sub-personal categories.
+Merit and demerit cannot be mechanically transferred like sums in an
+account.  The credit, so to speak, of one person in the moral sphere
+cannot become that of another, apart from moral conditions.  It is the
+same truth, in other words, if we say that the figure of paying a debt
+is not in every respect adequate to describe what Christ does in making
+the Atonement.  The figure, I believe, covers the truth; if it did not,
+we should not have the kind of language which frequently occurs in
+Scripture; but it is misread into falsehood and immorality whenever it
+is pressed as if it were exactly equivalent to the truth.  But granting
+these drawbacks which attach to the word, is there not something in the
+work of Christ, as mediating the forgiveness of sins, which no other
+word can express?  No matter on what subsequent conditions its virtue
+for us depends, what Christ did had to be done, or we should never have
+had forgiveness; we should never have known God, and His nature and
+will in relation to sin; we should never have had the motive which
+alone could beget real repentance; we should never have had the spirit
+which welcomes pardon and is capable of receiving it.  We could not
+procure these things for ourselves, we could not produce them out of
+our own resources: but He by entering into our nature and lot, by
+taking on Him our responsibilities and dying our death, has so revealed
+God to us as to put them within our reach.  We owe them to Him; in
+particular, and in the last resort, we owe them to the fact that He
+bore our sins in His own body to the tree.  If we are not to say that
+the Atonement, as a work carried through in the sufferings and death of
+Christ, sufferings and death determined by our sin, is vicarious or
+substitutionary, what are we to call it?
+
+The only answer which has been given to this question, by those who
+continue to speak of Atonement at all, is that we must conceive Christ
+not as the substitute but as the representative of sinners.  I venture
+to think that, with some advantages, the drawbacks of this word are
+quite as serious as those which attach to substitute.  It makes it less
+easy, indeed, to think of the work of Christ as a finished work which
+benefits the sinner _ipso facto_, and apart from any relation between
+him and the Saviour: but of what sort is the relation which it does
+suggest?  It suggests that the sinners who are to be saved by Christ
+can put Christ forward in their name: they are not in the utterly
+hopeless case that has hitherto been supposed; they can present
+themselves to God in the person and work of One on whom God cannot but
+look with approval.  The boldest expression of this I have ever seen
+occurs in some remarks in the _Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review_ on
+the doctrine of St. Paul.  The reviewer is far from saying that a
+writer who finds a substitutionary doctrine throughout the New
+Testament is altogether wrong.  He goes so far as to admit that 'if we
+look at the matter from what may be called an external point of view,
+no doubt we may speak of the death of Christ as in a certain sense
+substitutionary.'  What this 'certain sense' is, he does not define.
+But no one, he tells us, can do justice to Paul who fails to recognise
+that the death of Christ was a racial act; and 'if we place ourselves
+at Paul's point of view, we shall see that to the eye of God the death
+of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race
+than as an act which the race does in Christ.'  In plain English, Paul
+teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly, than that the ungodly in
+Christ died for themselves.  This is presented to us as something
+profound, a recognition of the mystical depths in Paul's teaching: I
+own I can see nothing profound in it except a profound misapprehension
+of the apostle.  Nevertheless, it brings out the logic of what
+representative means when representative is opposed to substitute.  The
+representative is ours, we are in Him, and we are supposed to get over
+all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just
+because He is ours, and because we are one with Him.  But the
+fundamental fact of the situation is that, to begin with, Christ is
+_not_ ours, and we are _not_ one with Him.  In the apostle's view, and
+in point of fact, we are 'without Christ' ([Greek] _choris Christou_).
+It is not we who have put Him there.  It is not to us that His presence
+and His work in the world are due.  If we had produced Him and put Him
+forward, we might call Him our representative in the sense suggested by
+the sentences just quoted; we might say it is not so much He who dies
+for us, as we who die in Him; but a representative not produced by us,
+but given to us--not chosen by us, but the elect of God--is not a
+representative at all, but in that place a substitute.  He stands in
+our stead, facing all our responsibilities for us as God would have
+them faced; and it is what He does for us, and not the effect which
+this produces in us, still less the fantastic abstraction of a 'racial
+act,' which is the Atonement in the sense of the New Testament.  To
+speak of Christ as our representative, in the sense that His death is
+to God less an act which He does for the race than an act which the
+race does in Him, is in principle to deny the whole grace of the
+gospel, and to rob it of every particle of its motive power.
+
+To do justice to the truth here, both on its religious and its ethical
+side, it is necessary to put in their proper relation to one another
+the aspects of reality which the terms substitute and representative
+respectively suggest.  The first is fundamental.  Christ is God's gift
+to humanity.  He stands in the midst of us, the pledge of God's love,
+accepting our responsibilities as God would have them accepted,
+offering to God, under the pressure of the world's sin and all its
+consequences, that perfect recognition of God's holiness in so visiting
+sin which men should have offered but could not; and in so doing He
+makes Atonement for us.  In so doing, also, He is our substitute, not
+yet our representative.  But the Atonement thus made is not a
+spectacle, it is a motive.  It is not a transaction in business, or in
+book-keeping, which is complete in itself; in view of the relations of
+God and man it belongs to its very nature to be a moral appeal.  It is
+a divine challenge to men, which is designed to win their hearts.  And
+when men are won--when that which Christ in His love has done for them
+comes home to their souls--when they are constrained by His infinite
+grace to the self-surrender of faith, then we may say He becomes their
+representative.  They begin to feel that what He has done for them must
+not remain outside of them, but be reproduced somehow in their own
+life.  The mind of Christ in relation to God and sin, as He bore their
+sins in His own body to the tree, must become their mind; this and
+nothing else is the Christian salvation.  The power to work this change
+in them is found in the death of Christ itself; the more its meaning is
+realised as something there, in the world, outside of us, the more
+completely does it take effect within us.  In proportion as we see and
+feel that out of pure love to us He stands in our place--our
+substitute--bearing our burden--in that same proportion are we drawn
+into the relation to Him that makes Him our representative.  But we
+should be careful here not to lose ourselves in soaring words.  The New
+Testament has much to say about union with Christ, but I could almost
+be thankful that it has no such expression as mystical union.  The only
+union it knows is a moral one--a union due to the moral power of
+Christ's death, operating morally as a constraining motive on the human
+will, and begetting in believers the mind of Christ in relation to sin;
+but this moral union remains the problem and the task, as well as the
+reality and the truth, of the Christian life.  Even when we think of
+Christ as our representative, and have the courage to say we died with
+Him, we have still to _reckon_ ourselves to be dead to sin, and to _put
+to death_ our members which are upon the earth; and to go past this,
+and speak of a mystical union with Christ in which we are lifted above
+the region of reflection and motive, of gratitude and moral
+responsibility, into some kind of metaphysical identity with the Lord,
+does not promote intelligibility, to say the least.  If the Atonement
+were not, to begin with, outside of us--if it were not in that sense
+objective, a finished work in which God in Christ makes a final
+revelation of Himself in relation to sinners and sin--in other words,
+if Christ could not be conceived in it as our substitute, given by God
+to do in our place what we could not do for ourselves, there would be
+no way of recognising or preaching or receiving it as a motive; while,
+on the other hand, if it did not operate as a motive, if it did not
+appeal to sinful men in such a way as to draw them into a moral
+fellowship with Christ--in other words, if Christ did not under it
+become representative of us, our surety to God that we should yet be
+even as He in relation to God and to sin, we could only say that it had
+all been vain.  Union with Christ, in short, is not a presupposition of
+Christ's work, which enables us to escape all the moral problems raised
+by the idea of a substitutionary Atonement; it is not a presupposition
+of Christ's work, it is its fruit.  To see that it is its fruit is to
+have the final answer to the objection that substitution is immoral.
+If substitution, in the sense in which we must assert it of Christ, is
+the greatest moral force in the world--if the truth which it covers,
+when it enters into the mind of man, enters with divine power to
+assimilate him to the Saviour, uniting him to the Lord in a death to
+sin and a life to God--obviously, to call it immoral is an abuse of
+language.  The love which can literally go out of itself and make the
+burden of others its own is the radical principle of all the genuine
+and victorious morality in the world.  And to say that love cannot do
+any such thing, that the whole formula of morality is, every man shall
+bear his own burden, is to deny the plainest facts of the moral life.
+
+Yet this is a point at which difficulty is felt by many in trying to
+grasp the Atonement.  On the one hand, there do seem to be analogies to
+it, and points of attachment for it, in experience.  No sin that has
+become real to conscience is ever outlived and overcome without
+expiation.  There are consequences involved in it that go far beyond
+our perception at the moment, but they work themselves inexorably out,
+and our sin ceases to be a burden on conscience, and a fetter on will,
+only as we 'accept the punishment of our iniquity,' and become
+conscious of the holy love of God behind it.  But the consequences of
+sin are never limited to the sinner.  They spread beyond him in the
+organism of humanity, and when they strike visibly upon the innocent,
+the sense of guilt is deepened.  We see that we have done we know not
+what, something deeply and mysteriously bad beyond all our reckoning,
+something that only a power and goodness transcending our own avail to
+check.  It is one of the startling truths of the moral life that such
+consequences of sin, striking visibly upon the innocent, have in
+certain circumstances a peculiar power to redeem the sinful.  When they
+are accepted, as they sometimes are accepted, without repining or
+complaint--when they are borne, as they sometimes are borne, freely and
+lovingly by the innocent, because to the innocent the guilty are
+dear--then something is appealed to in the guilty which is deeper than
+guilt, something may be touched which is deeper than sin, a new hope
+and faith may be born in them, to take hold of love so wonderful, and
+by attaching themselves to it to transcend the evil past.  The
+suffering of such love (they are dimly aware), or rather the power of
+such love persisting through all the suffering brought on it by sin,
+opens the gate of righteousness to the sinful in spite of all that has
+been; sin is outweighed by it, it is annulled, exhausted, transcended
+in it.  The great Atonement of Christ is somehow in line with this, and
+we do not need to shrink from the analogy.  'If there were no witness,'
+as Dr. Robertson Nicoll puts it, 'in the world's deeper literature'--if
+there were no witness, that is, in the universal experience of man--'to
+the fact of an Atonement, the Atonement would be useless, since the
+formula expressing it would be unintelligible.'  It is the analogy of
+such experiences which makes the Atonement credible, yet it must always
+in some way transcend them.  There is something in it which is
+ultimately incomparable.  When we speak of others as innocent, the term
+is used only in a relative sense; there is no human conscience pure to
+God.  When we speak of the sin of others coming in its consequences on
+the innocent, we speak of something in which the innocent are purely
+passive; if there is moral response on their part, the situation is not
+due to moral initiative of theirs.  But with Christ it is different.
+He knew _no_ sin, and He entered _freely_, deliberately, and as the
+very work of His calling, into all that sin meant for God and brought
+on man.  Something that I experience in a particular relation, in which
+another has borne my sin and loved me through it, may help to open my
+eyes to the meaning of Christ's love; but when they are opened, what I
+see is the propitiation for the whole world.  There is no guilt of the
+human race, there is no consequence in which sin has involved it, to
+which the holiness and love made manifest in Christ are unequal.  He
+reveals to all sinful men the whole relation of God to them and to
+their sins--a sanctity which is inexorable to sin, and cannot take it
+as other than it is in all its consequences, and a love which through
+all these consequences and under the weight of them all, will not let
+the sinful go.  It is in this revelation of the character of God and of
+His relation to the sin of the world that the forgiveness of sins is
+revealed.  It is not intimated in the air; it is preached, as St. Paul
+says, 'in this man'; it is mediated to the world through Him and
+specifically through His death, because it is through Him, and
+specifically through His death, that we get the knowledge of God's
+character which evokes penitence and faith, and brings the assurance of
+His pardon to the heart.
+
+From this point of view we may see how to answer the question that is
+sometimes asked about the relation of Christ's life to His death, or
+about the relation of both to the Atonement.  If we say that what we
+have in the Atonement is an assurance of God's character, does it not
+follow at once that Christ's teaching and His life contribute to it as
+directly as His death?  Is it not a signal illustration of the false
+abstractions which we have so often had cause to censure, when the
+death of Christ is taken as if it had an existence or a significance
+apart from His life, or could be identified with the Atonement in a way
+in which His life could not?  I do not think this is so clear.  Of
+course it is Christ Himself who is the Atonement or propitiation--He
+Himself, as St. John puts it, and not anything, not even His death,
+into which He does not enter.  But it is He Himself, as making to us
+the revelation of God in relation to sin and to sinners; and apart from
+death, as that in which the conscience of the race sees the final
+reaction of God against evil, this revelation is not fully made.  If
+Christ had done less than die for us, therefore--if He had separated
+Himself from us, or declined to be one with us, in the solemn
+experience in which the darkness of sin is sounded and all its
+bitterness tasted,--there would have been no Atonement.  It is
+impossible to say this of any particular incident in His life, and in
+so far the unique emphasis laid on His death in the New Testament is
+justified.  But I should go further than this, and say that even
+Christ's life, taking it as it stands in the Gospels, only enters into
+the Atonement, and has reconciling power, because it is pervaded from
+beginning to end by the consciousness of His death.  Instead of
+depriving His death of the peculiar significance Scripture assigns to
+it, and making it no more than the termination, or at least the
+consummation, of His life, I should rather argue that the Scriptural
+emphasis is right, and that His life attains its true interpretation
+only as we find in it everywhere the power and purpose of His death.
+There is nothing artificial or unnatural in this.  There are plenty of
+people who never have death out of their minds an hour at a time.  They
+are not cowards, nor mad, nor even sombre: they may have purposes and
+hopes and gaieties as well as others; but they see life steadily and
+see it whole, and of all their thoughts the one which has most
+determining and omnipresent power is the thought of the inevitable end.
+There is death in all their life.  It was not, certainly, as the
+inevitable end, the inevitable 'debt of nature,' that death was present
+to the mind of Christ; but if we can trust the Evangelists at all, from
+the hour of His baptism it was present to His mind as something
+involved in His vocation; and it was a presence so tremendous that it
+absorbed everything into itself.  'I have a baptism to be baptized
+with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.'  Instead of
+saying that Christ's life as well as His death contributed to the
+Atonement--that His active obedience (to use the theological formula)
+as well as His passive obedience was essential to His propitiation--we
+should rather say that His life is part of His death: a deliberate and
+conscious descent, ever deeper and deeper, into the dark valley where
+at the last hour the last reality of sin was to be met and borne.  And
+if the objection is made that after all this only means that death is
+the most vital point of life, its intensest focus, I should not wish to
+make any reply.  Our Lord's Passion _is_ His sublimest action--an
+action so potent that all His other actions are sublated in it, and we
+know everything when we know that He _died_ for our sins.
+
+The desire to bring the life of Christ as well as His death into the
+Atonement has probably part of its motive in the feeling that when the
+death is separated from the life it loses moral character: it is
+reduced to a merely physical incident, which cannot carry such vast
+significance as the Atonement.  Such a feeling certainly exists, and
+finds expression in many forms.  How often, for example, we hear it
+said that it is not the death which atones, but the spirit in which the
+Saviour died--not His sufferings which expiate sin, but the innocence,
+the meekness, the love to man and obedience to God in which they were
+borne.  The Atonement, in short, was a moral achievement, to which
+physical suffering and death are essentially irrelevant.  This is our
+old enemy, the false abstraction, once more, and that in the most
+aggressive form.  The contrast of physical and moral is made absolute
+at the very point at which it ceases to exist.  As against such
+absolute distinctions we must hold that if Christ had not really died
+for us, there would have been no Atonement at all, and on the other
+hand that what are called His physical sufferings and death have no
+existence simply as physical: they are essential elements in the moral
+achievement of the passion.  It leads to no truth to say that it is not
+His death, but the spirit in which He died, that atones for sin: the
+spirit in which He died has its being in His death, and in nothing else
+in the world.
+
+It seems to me that what is really wanted here, both by those who seek
+to co-ordinate Christ's life with His death in the Atonement, and by
+those who distinguish between His death and the spirit in which He
+died, is some means of keeping hold of the Person of Christ in His
+work, and that this is not effectively done apart from the New
+Testament belief in the Resurrection.  There is no doubt that in
+speaking of the death of Christ as that through which the forgiveness
+of sins is mediated to us we are liable to think of it as if it were
+only an event in the past.  We take the representation of it in the
+Gospel and say, "Such and such is the impression which this event
+produces upon me; I feel in it how God is opposed to sin, and how I
+ought to be opposed to it; I feel in it how God's love appeals to me to
+share His mind about sin; and as I yield to this appeal I am at once
+set free from sin and assured of pardon; this is the only ethical
+forgiveness; to know this experimentally is to know the Gospel."  No
+one can have any interest in disputing another's obligation to Christ,
+but it may fairly be questioned whether this kind of obligation to
+Christ amounts to Christianity in the sense of the New Testament.
+There is no living Christ here, no coming of the living Christ to the
+soul, in the power of the Atonement, to bring it to God.  But this is
+what the New Testament shows us.  It is _He_ who is the propitiation
+for our sins--He who died for them and rose again.  The New Testament
+preaches a Christ who was dead and is alive, not a Christ who was alive
+and is dead.  It is a mistake to suppose that the New Testament
+conception of the Gospel, involving as it does the spiritual presence
+and action of Christ, in the power of the Atonement, is a matter of
+indifference to us, and that in all our thinking and preaching we must
+remain within purely historical limits, if by purely historical limits
+is meant that our creed must end with the words "crucified, dead, and
+buried."  To preach the Atonement means not only to preach One who bore
+our sins in death, but One who by rising again from the dead
+demonstrated the final defeat of sin, and One who comes in the power of
+His risen life--which means, in the power of the Atonement accepted by
+God--to make all who commit themselves to Him in faith partakers in His
+victory.  It is not His death, as an incident in the remote past,
+however significant it may be; it is the Lord Himself, appealing to us
+in the virtue of His death, who assures us of pardon and restores our
+souls.
+
+One of the most singular phenomena in the attitude of many modern minds
+to the Atonement is the disposition to plead against the Atonement what
+the New Testament represents as its fruits.  It is as though it had
+done its work so thoroughly that people could not believe that it ever
+needed to be done at all.  The idea of fellowship with Christ, for
+example, is constantly urged against the idea that Christ died for us,
+and by His death made all mankind His debtors in a way in which we
+cannot make debtors of each other.  The New Testament itself is pressed
+into the service.  It is pointed out that our Lord called His disciples
+to drink of His cup and to be baptized with His baptism, where the
+baptism and the cup are figures of His passion; and it is argued that
+there cannot be anything unique in His experience or service, anything
+which He does for men which it is beyond the power of His disciples to
+do also.  Or again, reference is made to St. Paul's words to the
+Colossians: 'Now I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf, and fill up
+on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my
+flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church'; and it is argued that
+St. Paul here represents himself as doing exactly what Christ did, or
+even as supplementing a work which Christ admittedly left imperfect.
+The same idea is traced where the Christian is represented as called
+into the fellowship of the Son of God, or more specifically as called
+to know the fellowship of His sufferings by becoming conformed to His
+death.  It is seen pervading the New Testament in the conception of the
+Christian as a man _in Christ_.  And to descend from the apostolic age
+to our own, it has been put by an American theologian into the
+epigrammatic form that Christ redeems us by making us redeemers.  What,
+it may be asked, is the truth in all this? and how is it related to
+what we have already seen cause to assert about the uniqueness of
+Christ's work in making atonement for sin, or mediating the divine
+forgiveness to man?
+
+I do not think it is impossible or even difficult to reconcile the two:
+it is done, indeed, whenever we see that the life to which we are
+summoned, in the fellowship of Christ, is a life which we owe
+altogether to Him, and which He does not in the least owe to us.  The
+question really raised is this: Has Jesus Christ a place of His own in
+the Christian religion?  Is it true that there is one Mediator between
+God and man, Himself man, this man, Christ Jesus?  In spite of the
+paradoxical assertion of Harnack to the contrary, it is not possible to
+deny, with any plausibility, that this was the mind of Christ Himself,
+and that it has been the mind of all who call Him Lord.  He knew and
+taught, what they have learned by experience as well as by His word,
+that all men must owe to Him their knowledge of the Father, their place
+in the Kingdom of God, and their part in all its blessings.  He could
+not have taught this of any but Himself, nor is it the experience of
+the Church that such blessings come through any other.  Accordingly,
+when Christ calls on men to drink His cup and to be baptized with His
+baptism, while He may quite well mean, and does mean, that His life and
+death are to be the inspiration of theirs, and while He may quite well
+encourage them to believe that sacrifice on their part, as on His, will
+contribute to bless the world, He need not mean, and we may be sure He
+does not mean, that their blood is, like His, the blood of the
+covenant, or that their sinful lives, even when purged and quickened by
+His Spirit, could be, like His sinless life, described as the world's
+ransom.  The same considerations apply to the passages quoted from St.
+Paul, and especially to the words in Colossians i. 24.  The very
+purpose of the Epistle to the Colossians is to assert the exclusive and
+perfect mediatorship of Christ, alike in creation and redemption; all
+that we call being, and all that we call reconciliation, has to be
+defined by relation to Him, and not by relation to any other persons or
+powers, visible or invisible; and however gladly Paul might reflect
+that in his enthusiasm for suffering he was continuing Christ's work,
+and exhausting some of the afflictions--they were Christ's own
+afflictions--which had yet to be endured ere the Church could be made
+perfect, it is nothing short of grotesque to suppose that in this
+connection he conceived of himself as doing what Christ did, atoning
+for sin, and reconciling the world to God.  All this was done already,
+perfectly done, done for the whole world; and it was on the basis of
+it, and under the inspiration of it, that the apostle sustained his
+enthusiasm for a life of toil and pain in the service of men.  Always,
+where we have Christian experience to deal with, it is the Christ
+through whom the divine forgiveness comes to us at the Cross--the
+Christ of the substitutionary Atonement, who bore all our burden alone,
+and did a work to which we can for ever recur, but to which we did not
+and do not and never can contribute at all--it is this Christ who
+constrains us to find our representative with God in Himself, and to
+become ourselves His representatives to men.  It is as we truly
+represent Him that we can expect our testimony to Him to find
+acceptance, but that testimony far transcends everything that our
+service enables men to measure.  What is anything that a sinful man,
+saved by grace, can do for his Lord or for his kind, compared with what
+the sinless Lord has done for the sinful race?  It is true that He
+calls us to drink of His cup, to learn the fellowship of His
+sufferings, even to be conformed to His death; but under all the
+intimate relationship the eternal difference remains which makes Him
+_Lord_--He knew no sin, and we could make no atonement.  It is the goal
+of our life to be found in Him; but I cannot understand the man who
+thinks it more profound to identify himself with Christ and share in
+the work of redeeming the world, than to abandon himself to Christ and
+share in the world's experience of being redeemed.  And I am very sure
+that in the New Testament the last is first and fundamental.
+
+
+
+
+THE EXPOSITOR'S GREEK TESTAMENT.
+
+
+Edited by the
+
+Rev. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
+
+
+ALREADY PUBLISHED.
+
+Volume I., 880 pages, containing--
+
+  St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke.
+    By the Rev. Prof. A. B. BRUCE, D.D.
+  St. John.
+    By the Rev. Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
+
+Volume II., 934 pages, containing--
+  The Acts of the Apostles.
+    By the Rev. R. J. KNOWLING, D.D.
+  The Epistle to the Romans.
+    By the Rev. Prof. JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
+  The First Epistle to the Corinthians.
+    By the Rev. Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, D.D.
+
+Volume III., _ready shortly_, containing--
+  The Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
+    By the Very Rev. Dean BERNARD, D.D.
+  The Epistle to the Galatians.
+    By the Rev. FREDERICK RENDALL, M.A.
+  The Epistle to the Ephesians.
+    By the Rev. Principal SALMOND, D.D.
+  The Epistle to the Philippians.
+    By the Rev. H. A. A. KENNEDY, D.Sc.
+  The Epistle to the Colossians.
+    By Professor A. S. PEAKE, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+
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