The problem of atonement

Front matter

HE PROBLEM OF ATONEMENT

Class

Book _._.

Introduction

The work of Christ, commonly called the Atonement, is the work which lies at the center of human history. It illustrates what is ever going on at the heart of the world. No life in a world like ours is ever possible that does not manifest the vicarious principle. Hence we are to study the act of Christ under the term the " Cross" as not only an act of historic importance, by which man and God were once provided with a basis of reconciliation, but also as an act illustrative of the living relations between his Church and the world. "As was he, so are we in this world."

Two attitudes of mind concerning the work of Jesus may be assumed. The first is that taken under the spontaneous impulse of worship, or a reverential feeling — that his work was altogether unique, unshared by any of his followers. It has been thought lacking in reverence to suppose that any other person could do a work having the same relations to salvation as his. Being the only Begotten Son of God, his work must be distinguished from that of all creatures. Hence none but those who viewed him from the Unitarian standpoint, it was thought, would ever represent another's 7

INTRODUCTION.

work as the same in kind as his, even while conceding that his in its degree may be far removed from that of any one else. This, probably, has been the attitude of mind of a vast majority of his followers.

The other attitude is the outcome of a second thought. It is that Jesus is most exalted in having attributed to him the exemplification of some of the great principles that may be universal in the world ; that others may follow him in the pathway of his influence, and take up his work where he laid it down, and carry it on in its universal sweep in the world; that he may have not only disciples, but followers. Specifically the atoning principle which he came into the world to exemplify may be manifested by all who share his love for men, by all who will respond to the call of the All-Father to seek the lost and lift the fallen. Others may bring about the righteousness in men, which in the last analysis is that which propitiates the Father and his children.

It must be admitted that the words of Jesus favor this latter attitude of mind. He called his disciples to follow him; to love one another as he loved them ; that they should do greater works than he had done; and that in many ways they should reproduce his work in the world. His power to reproduce workers on this high plane shows him greater than to imagine that he alone could do such work. His greatest work in the world is the reproduction of Christ-ones (Christians).

INTRODUCTION.

It would be difficult to discover another element that has not been mentioned in the discussions concerning the atonement in the long centuries. This general theme has been the great subject for men's study and thought during all the ages, not only Christian ages, but all world ages. It is probable that it will be the theme for all ages to come. Any age that does not take up this theme and think it through again will have dropped into the period of moral and mental decline.

While no new elements may be discovered, yet conviction on the subject is constantly to be produced. So much has been said, so many sources have been exploited, secondary as well as fundamental elements have been discussed, that a new evaluation must ever be made, while the subject tends to become more and more complicated by the numberless disputants. It will ever be incumbent upon us to study the subject again, for the purpose of eliminating the irrelevant as well as with the object of elaboration.

One can not but feel that the subject has been complicated as well as enlightened by the work of theologians. They have often built their system from a false point of view, the view that represents God as a Judge or a Ruler simply. The implications of law courts have been wrought into this doctrine until it is much more complicated in theological treatises that seek to explain it than it is in the Bible or life itself. Much of this material must be renounced or left to one side by 9

INTEODUCTION.

estimating the problem from the viewpoint of the Fatherhood of God, which is inclusive of all that is true in that which views God as Judge or Sector. It is our belief that the subject admits of much more simple statement, even though the implications are multitudinous: for sin, atonement, reconciliation are fully illustrated by the life we all live.

One can not read very far in the literature of the atonement before he comes to the impression of a sort of frame-up, such as has been connected with the ideas of imputation of guilt or of righteousness, substitution of Christ, whether for purposes of suffering or award. The impression on the mind that is bold enough to acknowledge its own impression to itself, is that of unreality. Nothing like it is noted in life, except in certain rare cases, and all literature has been ransacked to find these unnatural cases. The final effect is that the popular mind pushes atonement to one side as not very important in the world in which we live, so different from the world in which these writers exercise their ingenuity. Atonement, a world-wide principle, permeating all the life we live, should be emancipated from this fictional air of unreality.

Moreover, there is a work of disseminating and popularizing the teachings of choice scholars that remains to be done. Judged by numbers, the popular conceptions of the atonement are medieval; the finding of late studies are almost un- 10

INTRODUCTION.

known except in certain rather limited circles. Certainly this is a subject of such central importance in the religious life of the people that any increment of truth which may come to it by diligent research ought to be given to all the people as soon as it has been made fairly credible.

The accretions that grow up around current doctrine and teaching of the atonement often control in the thought of Christians rather than those statements which are the well-reasoned and accepted teachings of religious scholars. The phrases that have been developed in evangelistic and devotional meetings have a very uncertain meaning often. If an attempt were made to reduce them to some logical statement, they would probably be found quite outside the sphere of revelation. The phrase, "the blood of Jesus," is much abused in the cheaper songs of religious gatherings as well as in the speech of the people. These aberrations will need continual checking and correcting by ever-renewed study and statement of the doctrine of atonement.

It would be almost a calamity for us to have some treatment on the atonement that should, from a doctrinal point of view, be regarded as the last word that need be or could be said on that subject. As a body of truth it would soon become traditional, indisputable, and negligible. Because we could not in any way improve it, we would neglect to think the subject through again from bottom to top and from side to side. The 11

INTRODUCTION.

subject would become a dead, inert core of truth, and around it would grow the accretions of current phrase and popular interpretation, and in a few decades we would wake up to the fact that the truth concerning atonement had become lost in tradition and ignorant, unthinking apprehension. "A cohesive Church must have a coherent creed. But it must be a dogma the Church holds, not one that holds the Church. The life is in the body, not in the system. It must be a dogma revisable from time to time to keep pace with the Church's growth as a living body in a living world. The study of theology must go and go forward. Solution of the great problems must be both attempted and encouraged by vital faith." (Forsyth: "Person and Place of Jesus Christ," 213.)

The Problem of Atonement.

Chapter I. WHAT IS REQUIRED— THE PEOBLEM STATED

The problem of the Atonement is the re-establishment of fellowship between God and man; this, and nothing more. Accidentally, not etymologically, the word itself may present the problem: at-one-ment. Whatever other problems there are in salvation — and there are many — they belong to other phases of the co-operation of God and men. If Fellowship and Communion can be established, all other desired results may come in their order.

Creation's problem was the establishment of fellowship through the development of a nature that could harmoniously live its life with God. But now we have a problem of a very different and more difficult kind — a difficulty not of nature, but of moral disposition, a difficulty established through a misuse of volition or freedom. Sin is moral alienation, not merely because it meets the disapproval of God, but because it begets a centrifugal disposition in man, causing him to flee from God. His confidence in the mutual re- 13

THE PROBLEM OP ATONEMENT.

lationship is destroyed, and his self-assertive attitude relative to God is established.

Sin and its action are in the way of fellowship: how can they be overcome and removed from the way?

I. What does God require?

II. What does man's nature and condition require!

Our answer to these questions must constitute our problem. Has God's alienation from man resulted in a settled attitude of opposition and vengeance, so that he would not welcome a re-established fellowship? If this were the situation, there would be no atonement-problem; for one of the parties would be implacable, and nothing could result from any effort.

We are assured by revelation, and the assurance is the working basis of all teaching and effort looking toward salvation, that sin does not alienate God from man. He is grieved ; he is thwarted in his plans, but he still continues to love men. (John 3:16.) What demand, then, does God make upon man? Does he demand that man shall make complete restitution before he can be in fellowship with him? Shall man have to repair the damage that has been done? If he did, the problem would again be insoluble: for neither man nor God can do that. The damage is an eternal fact, inerasable; it will have to stand, so far as the past is concerned.

What, then, is God's demand? Upon the an- 14

WHAT IS REQUIRED.

swer to the question is the parting of the ways among theologians. Our way is the one that we can see ; he that has better vision may take some other path.*

God's demands cover the future, and not the past; they cover the mutual relations of himself and his children, and are not a demand for the satisfaction of his own nature, when viewed alone out of relation to his children. His heart bleeds with the outrages of an irrecoverable past, but nevertheless, he turns in magnanimity and love and offers to forget it all (in a moral sense) if man will but turn and live righteously. Analyzed, the demand seems to be: 1) a turning from sin,

*Shedd, in hia "History of Doctrine" (TT, 204"), decides the whole question of theory of the atonement by his definition. He says it "denotes the satisfaction of Divine ."justice for the sin of man, by the substituted penal sufferings of the Son of God." This narrows the atonement down to a very close line; but it is a preparation for the rejection of any atonement save the fact or the necessity of such an atonement as is acceptable to the author. To so narrowly define a subject that all conclusions save the author's are rejected in advance by definition we hold to be but a "begging of the question." It leaves no room even for the consideration of other views or other sides of the question.

A more modern view is presented by Dr. Burton. "Atonement," he says, "is accomplished when men, abandoning their unloving way of life, turn with repentance to Jesus' way of life; forgiving as he forgave, loving as he loved. Apart from such repentance there is no forgiveness. The supreme significance of the death of Jesus as of his life is in its revelation of the will of God, and consequently of the ideal of life. It is redemptive for those who accept the truth thus revealed. Men are reconciled to God when, accepting the revelation made in the life and death of Jesus, they enter into the fellowship of his death and become partakers of his life. This is to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Thus he ransoms them from sin. Thus he brings them into covenant relation with God." ("Biblical Ideas of Atonement," 144.)

THE PROBLEM OF ATONEMENT.

a change of mind, of attitude, of purpose; a repentance; a conversion; 2) the acceptance of a righteous or new nature as a guarantee of righteousness for the future. This second demand, so often overlooked as a necessity of the atonement, is quite as essential as the first. The problem in the concrete is to beget in man that life which John's Gospel defines as knowing God.

There have been various elements brought into the atonement theory, such as the satisfaction of the Divine Nature concerning sins already committed, a meeting of the needs of moral government, which, it is claimed, forbids forgiveness without the infliction of penalty as the price of forgiveness. But we believe that these demands are unfounded, that they grow up from legalistic considerations, borrowed from the forum, and not from the family, which make the atonement problem, if allowed, insoluble. They have been raised up as legal barriers to forgiveness, and have in turn been removed by legal fictions, which is the only possible method by which they could be removed. For if God is actually alienated in feeling from man, then Christ can not remove that barrier; for Christ is in perfect harmony in feeling and attitude with the Father. What the Father would not do, the Son can not do. To attribute two wills on this subject to the Deity is anarchy in the Godhead. It creates difficulties a thousand-fold greater than it removes.

We shall take up these subjects one by one 16

WHAT IS REQUIRED.

later, but just now we inquire, What is the demand in the nature of man which the atonement must meet?

Unquestionably the barriers in man are the greater. Man's consciousness of sin and its ill-deserts has broken down his confidence in the relationship with the Divine. He knows that he deserves ill; he expects that God will visit it upon him. Further, the nature of sin itself is selfassertion relative to God, and this principle man has taken into his being. The problem of the atonement, then, relative to man is twofold: 1) Such an exhibition of Divine love as will take away his fear of God and establish the confidence which his own action has destroyed. 2) That God shall grant him a new nature that can keep the new law of love. If these conditions can be met, it seems possible for the Divine family again to be re-established. Phillips Brooks holds that "there is no principle involved in the atonement that is not included in its essence in the most sacred relations between man and man."

Dinsmore says concerning a "sure instinct of our nature :" " There can be no forgiveness where love does not work in such a way as to satisfy the strictest demands of conscience and meet every requirement of perfect repentance." ("Atonement in Literature and Life," 178.) What are these requirements? What does conscience demand of love? What are the requirements of repentance?

To answer the latter first, the first require- 17

THE PROBLEM OF ATONEMENT.

ment of repentance is restitution. No one can believe that repentance has done its perfect work while the sinner is enjoying the fruits of his iniquity and the wronged one is suffering the loss of it. Does repentance require restitution in the case of man's sin? As far as possible. But if there is no restitution possible, then what must be done? In case man is morally bankrupt, that fact must be acknowledged and declared. This is confession. The only farther requirement of repentance that is conceivable is such a turning away from sin that it will not be repeated. This repentance must mean, if it be adequate to meet the demands of conscience.

What does conscience demand of love? Does any conscience demand that before I accept forgiveness from my Father he must suffer the penalty that was due me from him? We think it does not. It only demands that there shall be an exhibition on his part of love so clear that I can trust it. My conscience would protest, as we believe, against my heavenly Father bearing the penalty that was due me from sin.

What does conscience demand of me before God can forgive ? Simply that my life should be yielded to God in obedience. It demands this utterly; but has nothing to say concerning a suffering that is in no sense a restitution. Confession of bankruptcy obliterates any ground of demand for suffering and pronounces its infliction a fruitless cruelty.

WHAT IS REQUIRED.

It may help our thought if we turn aside for a moment and see how our problem has been estimated by some of the most original and penetrating minds. The following quotations concerning the view of Dante are from Dinsmore, "Atonement in Literature and Life:" "He accepted the prevalent notion of his time that Christ's death on the cross was a price paid to divine justice, remitting the eternal penalties of sin to all who by baptism and repentance identified themselves with the Son of God." To complete his reconciliation with God man must pass the gate of justification, for which three steps are necessary: confession, contrition, satisfaction; the latter is the work of Christ supplemented by "the sinner's own expiatory deeds." Further, the sinner must practice virtue, "so as both to satisfy divine justice and heal the wounds sin has made in his soul. ' ' The picture of the atonement for memory, provided by drinking the waters of Lethe, is, of course, a personal picture, and not one that enters into the Christian conception.

Of man's condition demanding atonement, Dante says: "And here must I bear this load for it (sin) till God be satisfied." "Of such pride the fee is here paid. " " Such coin does every one pay in satisfaction." "And to his dignity man never returns, unless where sin makes void, he fill up for evil pleasures with just penalties ! Although the arms of divine mercy are so widely 19

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extended, still God can not receive the sinner to himself until the void has been filled. Christ, who is the representative of both parties, by his death offers a satisfaction. He might have paid all the debt, but he lets man have some part in the work by enjoining upon him the expiation of all the temporal penalties of sin." Thus we see that Dante shrinks from the statement of substitution as the solution of the problem. But while the pains of Christ are not sheerly substitutionary, only being a partial satisfaction, yet they fulfill the further office of establishing the repentant sinner in righteousness. "They (expiatory penalties) are both a satisfaction rendered to a violated moral order and are remedial to the penitent by confirming him in right habits of thought and action."

It can hardly be denied that this statement of the problem is far from any agreement either with Scripture or the extreme satisfaction views that tradition has brought down to us.

The problem of the atonement is often made absurd by the elimination of the moral element. Dr. Forsyth says: "We have to be saved into faith before we are saved by it. The power of sin is such that we can not believe to saving purpose except we are redeemed into that power. We can not believe even when we wish to." ("Positive Preaching," 344.)

"We are justified by faith," says Paul. But Dr. Forsyth would say that we can not have faith until we are justified. In other words, we can not 20

WHAT IS REQUIRED.

be saved until we believe, and we can not have faith until we are saved. Of course, the answer to this riddle is : God gives us faith because he is going to save us; and then saves us because we have the faith that he has given us. This theory of redemption is built on the sovereignty of God. Man's co-operation is not necessary to salvation at all — that is, his free and real co-operation is not necessary. It includes, of course, a sort of automatic co-operation which, not depending on his own choice or action, has no moral quality in it. He is reduced to an automaton, arranged and manipulated by God.

If this theory could be true, then there is no utility in our seeking the moral foundations of salvation. It is purely a question of Divine Sovereignty; God can do what he pleases, and will do it whenever and however it pleases him. For such a conclusion the whole plan of redemption seems but a stage play, no part of which grows out of moral necessity. God could have redeemed man some other way if he had cared to. All the reality and tragedy of the actual plan seem to be a mere gratuity. In that case it seems to us that God ought to have redeemed man in some way that was not so costly.

That is a strange, if not a useless, conception of faith as a moral factor of salvation which says, "We can not believe even when we wish to." If some other potency is given to a "wish" than that which we ordinarily express by choice, then we have suppressed part of the facts in the case. 21

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We may wish one thing, bnt wish something else more, and hence choose the something else. If this was what is meant, then the problem was not candidly stated. But unless something more is said, the "wish to" represents the soul's choice — in this case the moral choice. Now, if some intellectual feat is too difficult for the soul that has made the moral choice of it, that intellectual feat, however important from the standpoint of intellectual gifts, has no adverse value in the soul's redemption. If I choose the Lord Jesus in my heart, I am sure of him, whether some contortion of mere belief is possible to me or not. In other words, faith is pre-eminently a moral act, a moral choice. It is irrelevant in a doctrine of redemption to place some problem of belief in its way when the moral choice has been made.

Sinfulness and atonement are closely related. In a sense atonement is the cure for sin. What the cure is in its nature, then, ought to receive some light from a correct apprehension of what the disease is. It is said that our age has not a deep sense of sin. Can we discover the cause of this! Shall we conclude that it is merely because man has a dull religious consciousness? This would hardly agree with what the age is producing in many lines.

It may be that sin has been wrongly apprehended. The works of our older theologians show that sin has been regarded as largely a matter of the workings of the flesh. Fleshly lust of differ- 22

WHAT IS REQUIRED.

ent kinds has been spoken of as though it constituted the very being of sin. This is doubtless a mistake. Sin is not in the flesh at all. The conscience of this age, which has apprehended much more of the light of truth than other ages, fails to feel condemned for the " movements" of the flesh, when those " movements" are entirely in the line of the laws of na ture as revealed through scientific disclosure. Sin is something that pertains entirely to the spirit, the choice, the will. If this can be clearly apprehended we may hope that the conscience will again respond to the sense of sin. But the "movements of the flesh" we will regard as presenting temptations to the spirit, and many of them are open to physical rather than moral treatment. Acceptance of the atonement will not cure criminality in one in whom the basis of his evil doings is a pressure on the brain, a bad tooth, a growth in the nostril, etc., as is known to be often the case. It is only when the wicked choice is isolated and stands by itself that it may be a subject of moral remorse.

Man's laws are operative only externally and violently, as we may say; God's laws, on the other hand, are operative internally, inevitably, automatically, and ofttimes, in the beginning, imperceptibly. We have been used to viewing the operations of sin and its punishment under the forms of law of human sanction, by which we have seen only an external relation, a more or less capricious vindication, which by edict could be set aside. If we will undertake to see sin and the 23

THE PROBLEM OF ATONEMENT.

atonement under the methods in which God operates, we may come nearer the truth than we have through the analogy of human law.

Human sinfulness has come upon all men, not by an edict that God sent forth in which he cursed all mankind for the sin of one, but rather through the operation of the social law, which sees mankind as an organism, and sin as a virus introduced into it, finding its way from individual to individual by the law of social relation or personal contact. Under the former conception it could not be escaped by any moral attitude toward it, and hence lost its character as sin containing personal guilt. Under the latter conception it may be resisted by moral choice, and spreads by moral consent in so far as it is a moral contagion. Atonement seems to have the same nature. Christ did not atone for all men in the sense of a mere legal relation, whose benefits come to all without moral consent; but he did start a morally saving power which spreads under moral and social conditions and is available for all, if morally accepted.

By this view sin is no less dreadful, nor atonement less helpful, but the conditions of both become moral in their influence and operation.

Mankind has sinned. This is a fact so universal that it is not much modified if we think of it as a race act, as in the traditional doctrine of the Fall, or whether we think of it as the unexceptional experience of all members of the race. The former view does not, indeed, from the point 24

WHAT IS REQUIRED.

of view of humanity's origin through a process of evolution, seem to be an enlightening explanation. But the fact of sin is so general that the picture of the Jewish account of the Fall in the Garden of Eden is a fairly accurate representation.

Such a picture, it is true, implies that sin is a universal experience. This is going farther than we are justified in going from observation. Moreover, the problem of the atonement does not rest upon any a priori position that every man has sinned. We need not burden the discussion with a prophecy that there never will be a man who keeps God's moral law. The sinful condition of mankind is a situation requiring a helpful relief to every man, whether he personally has consciously disobeyed God or not. Every man needs assistance to come into the Divine fellowship and to grow into the Divine likeness, even though he may be groping after God the best that he can in such an environment as the present, and may be justified in his sight. In such social surroundings, influenced and retarded by those who are disobedient to God, and enveloped in the ignorance of his own unassisted powers, every man needs the God-man to enlighten him, as well as to cleanse him from the stain of sin.

So we do not need to commit ourselves to a Race Fall. There has been practically, we will not say necessarily, an individual fall in the history of all men. The problem of the atonement is to bring this sinner back to his Divine Father.

All men sin. This is a statement of fact, not 25

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a statement of necessity. That all men sin sometimes, is no more verifiable than that all men do right sometimes. That they sin is no greater proof of a sinful nature that necessitates them to sin than that they sometimes do right is a proof of a righteous nature that necessitates them to do right. Indeed, this idea of a constraining nature back of the deed takes away the moral quality of our deeds and does away both with sin and moral righteousness. The word ' ' necessity ' ' does not belong in a moral scheme, even though the observable facts might seem to yield to the explanation of a mechanical law. So we prefer to deal with sin as an empirical fact, not as a matter which outflows from a fallen nature. Man's moral conflict is such that he can not unaided live a Godlike life. On the other hand, no man lives a life thus isolated from Divine aid except as he chooses. So his sinfulness is rooted in his moral choices, and not in some nature supposed to be back of his volitions. There is a nature back of his volitions, presenting the elements of moral contest; but it is not therefore a fallen or sinful nature. It is simply a non-moral, animal nature needing guidance and control, and for this control his higher spiritual nature is fitted and may succeed when accepting the assistance of the Divine Spirit. Sin is seated always in this higher nature, and never in the lower.