The Gospel of the divine sacrifice; a study in Evangelical belief, with some conclusions touching life

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Atonement not the Cause of God's Love, but Love the Cause

of the Atonement 3

Chapter I

The Atonement not the Cause of God's Love, but Love the Cause of the Atonement

Christianity is the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice. Christianity derives its name from Christ, its meaning from the Cross. Reduced to its simplest terms Christianity gives Jesus Christ and Him crucified. This, the essence of Christianity, forms the subject of the following pages. The conditions of our time invite the study of this subject. Our time is a crowded, pushing, keenwitted time; there are many gospels, — gospels of ambition, gospels of selfishness, gospels of progress, gospels of worldly and churchly pride. It is a time of all times to consider the

Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice. The conditions of our lives invite the study of this subject. Those who are trained to think for themselves, not to do their thinking by proxy, are also tempted to think too little about Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It becomes easier to accept the forms of Christianity than to realize its essence ; that which is spiritual tends to sink into that which is habitual ; the vision of God to fade into the light of common day. The glory of God calls for the study of this subject. u God, Who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son." The Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice is God's message by His Son. Christ is the Word, — the Message Incarnate, — Him we must hear. " See," said one of old, " that ye refuse not Him That speaketh.

For if they escaped not, when they refused Him That warned them on earth, much more shall not we escape who turn away from Him Thatwarneth from heaven : Whose voice then shook the earth : but now hath He promised, saying : Yet once more will I make to tremble, not the earth only, but also the heaven."

The present observations on this subject proceed from an attempt (begun long since in the writer's own private studies of the Word, and for the sake of satisfying the hunger of his own heart, and continued in the larger hope of helping others), to find a starting-point from which to think one's way into the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice ; into the truth " Jesus Christ and Him crucified;" into the essence of Christianity. The result of this attempt has been the evolution of a formula : The Atonement not the cause of God's Love, but Love the cause of the Atonement. This formula furnishes a convenient starting-point from which to begin to think one's way into the problem of "Jesus Christ and Him crucified." There must be a starting-point from which the human mind shall begin its study of the Divine Sacrifice. Intellectually, a starting-point is a necessity. The proposition, " Jesus Christ and Him crucified " is too great to be taken up as an incident, a detached event, to be considered by itself. There must be something back of it, something prior to it, some antecedent fact of some kind, of which fact " Jesus Christ and Him crucified " is the result. The question then is : What is that antecedent fact upon which the mind may rest, and from which the mind may begin, as from a starting-point, to work its way up to the supreme consummation, which is the Divine Sacrifice ? Spiritually, a starting-point is a necessity. If the Holy

Spirit reveals to us a Saviour Whom we are to worship, He must, in order that we may worship Him intelligently, also reveal the cause of which the Saviours work is the result. Faith requires a starting-point from which to pursue its course, a fundamental idea on which to build, an underlying ultimate cause, in which, as in the socket of Calvary's rock, to plant the Cross. Deny this to faith, and faith in Jesus Christ and Him crucified becomes a vag;ue and fitful conception, floating about a cross which is rather a figure of speech than a fixed and unalterable reality. The soul hungers to find that starting-point. It cannot take Jesus Christ and Him crucified as an incident, an after-thought, an heroic rescue devised in an emergency. It feels instinctively that the Cross must be the result of some deeper cause. It demands to be led to that deeper cause, that it may make it the starting-point of thought. Such a starting-point is provided in the formula : The Atonement not the cause of God's Love, but Love the cause of the Atonement. In defining this formula it becomes necessary to state the assumptions on which it rests. They are three in number : the authenticity of the Scriptures, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the Godhead of Christ. It is not essential, for our present purpose, to sketch even in outline the process of thought by which an unprejudiced mind may be satisfied of the authenticity of the Scriptures, of the inspiration of the Scriptures, and of the Godhead of Jesus Christ; it is sufficient to announce that these three propositions are assumed as the basis of all that may hereafter be said.

It will be observed that the formula contains two declarations, — one negative, one positive.

I. The negative declaration: The 8

Atonement is not the cause of God's Love. When one who desires a settled faith in the Atonement, and who feels that the Death of Christ must be more than a mere tragic incident in history, begins to search for that ultimate idea which lies beneath the Atonement, and which explain^ it, he may think he has found it in the idea of a loving Saviour interposing to shield guilty sinners from an angry God. As he turns the pages of his Bible, his eyes fall on many passages which speak of the wrath of God, and of the punishment of sin ; and then in melting contrast to those fearful passages breathing of judgment, the face of Christ shines upon him from the same Bible, — the face of the Man of Sorrows, pale with fatigue, seamed with grief, scarred with the wounds from a thorny crown, marvellous in pity, compassion, willingness to suffer. As these two opposite ideas meet him again and again in his study of the Bible, — the wrath of God, the tenderness and self-sacrifice of Jesus, • — he feels the force of the contrast between them working out a practical result in his own thought. God is contrasted with Christ. God the stern and terrible punisher of sin ; Christ the meek and gentle lamb ; Christ the voluntary offering, placing himself between the terrible wrath of God and the defenceless head of man, and receiving upon Himself the storm of wrath. And as his thought crystallizes around these two contrasted ideas, he conceives of God as a Being Whose wrath has been appeased by the Atonement, Who loves us because Christ has died for us ; and thus the ultimate idea lying back of the Atonement appears to be that the Atonement is the cause of God's love. Christ is thus represented to the mind as having in His love and compassion stepped between man and

IO

God to make God feel differently toward man, to make Him love man, Who but far Christ would not have loved man. It is easy for any one familiar with the New Testament to see how this contrast between the wrath of God and the love of Christ, or, to speak more exactly, this contrast between God and Christ can be supported by texts of Scripture, and nothing could be farther from the writers purpose than to criticise or to condemn the opinions of those who are persuaded that this is the deepest idea beneath the Atonement : that the Atonement is the cause of God's love, that God loves man because of the Atonement, because Christ died. But as one studies the effects of this view in the spiritual life of people, one sees certain things which suggest the thought that this may not be the ultimate idea which underlies the great truth of Jesus Christ and Him

crucified. For the effect of this view

ii seems to be the introduction of discord into the Holy Trinity, setting the Father against the Son, and the Son against the Father in Their respective attitudes toward man. The Father is stern and wrathful ; the Son is tender and pitiful ; the Father has lifted His hand to strike and destroy ; the Son, moved by a holy passion to save, has flung Himself into the very path of descending judgment, to receive its shock upon His own Person. Can this be our deepest and best thought of God ? Can this thought lead us as far as we may be led into the conception of the perfect unity of life and purpose which exists in the Triune Godhead ? Moreover, as one traces the results of this proposition, that the love of God is caused by Christ's Atonement, as these results work themselves out in many of the lives brought in contact with the idea, one feels that in reaching this idea we have not gone so far as we may go to find a starting-point for our thought of the Atonement For one encounters two opposite results which apparently develop from the proposition that the Atonement is the cause of love. One result is a form of clinging to Christ which practically separates Him from God. We find one trusting, loving, clinging to, confiding in Jesus as a shelter from God ; much as a child runs to its mother and buries its face in her arms to shut out from view some gloomy figure that has terrified it. The other result is substantially the rejection of the Atonement as something unworthy of God ; the setting aside of Jesus as Mediator, from the feeling that God is too great, too noble, too good to demand the blood of an innocent victim such as Christ was, before He will be induced to love man. There are those who deny the Atonement out of respect for God ; they feel unwilling to attribute to God a nature

J 3 so revengeful that He will not love man until He has seen His own Son stretched in deadly anguish and ignominy on the Cross.

II. Observing for years these results working themselves out respectively in various classes of minds (while, one is also bound to say, many others seem to experience no difficulty in holding that the Atonement is the cause of God's love), it has appeared to the writer possible to reach some still deeper basis of thought where one might establish a starting-point whence to think one's w r ay on to Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And in this formula, the positive proposition of which is now presented, that deeper basis of thought is humbly suggested. It is this : The Atonement not the cause of God's Love, but Love the cause of the Atonement. Not this : God loves us because Christ died for us ; but this : Because God loves us

Christ died for us. Love the cause of the Atonement. " We have seen and do testify, that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world." " God commendeth His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

As one takes the Bible into ones hand, and with an open mind and a prayerful spirit brings together all the material in it bearing upon the formula now before us ; doing this in absolute honesty, neither suppressing any fact in the interest of a theory, nor buttressing any preconceived opinion by . an artful use of Scripture, — four thoughts present themselves, and form in their relation to one another a starting-point from which to think our way up to Jesus Christ and Him crucified: The Unity of God. What Man is to God. What Sin is to God. What Atonement is to God.

i. The Unity of God. Not alone r 5 on the quotation of simple and separate texts rests this most fundamental conception of our religion. It is involved philosophically and ethically in the Christian concept of God. There is One God, and if in His mysterious love He reveals Himself to us as Three in One, the very terms of that revelation preclude the thought of conflicting purpose or contrasted feelings in the life of the Godhead. The thought of the Father hating while the Son is loving; of the Father destroying while the Son is saving, becomes unthinkable when we stand within the precinct of the Word. Explicitly have we been told of that eternal Unity. Christ declared it : " The Comforter will not speak from Himself, but what He shall hear, that shall He speak." " The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do." " The Father is glorified in the

Son." If we behold in the Father holy wrath against sin, we may know that the Son, gentle and gracious though He be, shares in all its fulness that passion of holy wrath. If we behold in the Son tenderness and grace, the spirit of self-giving for the sake of man, we may know, whatever else we seem to see in God, that that marvellous, sacrificial love for humanity is also in the heart of the Father. " He that hath seen me," said Christ, " hath seen the Father."

2. What Man is to God. Because we have in the Bible declarations of the wrath of God, and demonstrations of the judgment of God, some have concluded that the attitude of Gods heart toward man is that of revengeful passion, which has simply been appeased by the shedding of Christ's blood ; and that the love which is now predicated of God is not a love for us, so to speak, in our own right, but a love for

2 jj

Christ the Son, the benefit of which only indirectly comes to us. But not to this conclusion is one necessarily led in ones study of God as related to man. If any one would know what man is to God, let him study that relationship as it appeared before sin entered the world to darken the scene ; let him look upon man as he stood before God in the simplicity of an unfallen state, beautiful, stainless, glorious, a child worthy of his Father. And what then was man to God in the unfallen state ? He was God's child, and God was his Father, and God's delight was in him, and God's hopes were centered upon him, and God's world was given him for a home, and God's banner over him was love. What man was to God then, when he had not sinned, but when God knew that man's personal freedom made it possible for him to sin, that man is to God to-day, when he has sinned, and come short of the glory of God, and has brought down on him the wrath of God, and done things worthy of death Man was dear to God then in the sinless state. He is dear to God now in that sinful state which inevitably exposes him to the wrath of holiness. Man has changed ; God has not changed. God loved him then, God loves him now. God was his Father then, God is his Father now. The calm study of the Scriptures appears to justify not only, but to require, a belief in the Fatherhood of God toward all men, — the saintliest and the most devil-possessed. This is the thought from which some shrink because of the rash conclusion which has been drawn from it. The Fatherhood of God is sometimes represented as in itself an all-sufficient relationship, which renders the Atonement unnecessary, and which sinks the penal consequences of sin in an unfathomable ocean of Divine benevolence. Men rashly talk of the Fatherhood of God as if it were a universal indulgence, a license to sin. And for this reason some with much cause shrink from using the term lest it be made a snare. But it is not necessary, it is not practicable, to surrender a term which, however it may have been perverted, contains the essential thought of Christianity,

— that man is dear to God, that God loves man as the offspring of His own life ; and that all that has been done for man's redemption springs from the eternal love in the heart of God which would not let man go into self-destruction without placing an Atonement within his reach.

3. What Sin is to God. It is in realizing this that we have most signally failed, and in failing here we have failed to realize the true intensity of those blended passions

— the passion of wrath and the passion of love — that meet in the

Atonement. Who can realize what sin is to God : how horrible an offence to His nature ; how gross an intrusion upon the order of His universe; how intolerable a condition which must be beaten down and stamped out with the vengeance of righteousness ? They who suppose that wrath against sin is incompatible with Gods Fatherhood show by that supposition that they have failed to grasp the essential conditions of life as they exist in a holy Being. We have not understood what God is until we are able to speak of the wrath of holy love against sin. If God is love, and God is holy, the wrath of holy love, august, terrible, pure, is the necessary condition of such a Being in the presence of sin. There is a wrath known on earth which is born of sinfulness, and is filled with hatred. Such wrath is of the devil, a hellish passion. But the wrath of God is the wrath of holy love, the protest of God's truth and beauty and purity and love against that which, by disorganizing the universe, obstructs His purpose of eternal affection toward a race made in His own Image, born out of His own life. Ah, what is sin to God ! If we in moments of pure and noble thought have suddenly been stricken by it, and have felt the just wrath of righteousness rising up within us, what must be the wrath of God against the sin cherished in human lives ; pursued and followed after by human passions; wrought out to the foul and bitter end in human histories!

4. What, then, is the Atonement to God? Ask that question in the light of these preceding thoughts, — what man is to God, and what sin is to God. Man is the dear object of God's love ; sin is the intolerable outrage against God's nature, filling God's universe with lawlessness and misery. Atonement is the supreme effort of God's love, by His own suffering to save man from that sin which makes him an object of Gods wrath. Put side by side these two Scriptures : " The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men," — that is the essential attitude of God's holiness towards sin ; — " But God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us ; much more then, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him."

We return, then, to the formula, believing it to express the spirit of the Scriptures : The Atonement not the cause of God's Love, but Love the cause of the Atonement. The Atonement is the expression on earth of a love that filled God's heart from the beginning. The Atonement is God s self-giving to save us from the holy wrath under which our sins have brought us. The love of the holy God is the starting-point from which to think one's way up to Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Begin there, with the knowledge that God is love. Be sure that a holy God loves you. Be sure that because He is holy, His wrath, the indignant, sorrowful wrath of holy love, is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Be sure that that tremendous love has expressed itself in sacrificial suffering to save you from that tremendous wrath. Take these thoughts, put them together, and realize two facts : the nature of sin, the Person of Christ. Realize the nature of sin ; it is a scorn of the Atonement, a contempt of Gods supreme declaration of love, a delivering over of one's self to wrath, the wrath which is, because God is holy. Realize the

Person of Christ. Behold in Him the holy God Whose wrath is revealed against sin, suffering in the flesh for love 9 to save from that wrath. Realize the Godhead of Christ. Grasp the sense in which Christ declares the Unity of Godhead when He says : " I and my Father are One ; " and realizing the Unity of the Godhead, bow before the Cross as before a throne.

II The Extent Of The Atonement; Or, For Whom Did Christ Die?

Jesus Christ the righteous is the propitiation for our sins ; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.

First Epistle of St. John.

We behold Him Who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God He should taste death for every man.

Epistle to the Hebrews.

Chapter II The Extent of the Atonement ; or, For whom did Christ die?

The subject now brought to our attention is the Extent of the Atonement. This is the next step, logically speaking, following the position defined in the preceding chapter. We sought a basis on which to rest the idea of an Atonement; a starting-point from which to think our way up to Jesus Christ and Him crucified. That basis we found in the proposition : The Atonement not the cause of God's Love, but Love the cause of the Atonement. Examining the former and negative member of the proposition in the light of Scripture,

we concluded that the Atonement is not the cause of God's love, inasmuch as there could not be division and conflict of motives in the Godhead ; the Father hating man and wishing to destroy him ; the Son loving man and interposing to save him from the Father, and to turn the disposition of the Father from wrath to love. Examining the latter and positive member of the proposition, we concluded that " Jesus Christ and Him crucified " is the supreme expression of the love of the Father; that, in the words of St. John, " the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world," and that in the words of St. Paul, " God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." And our starting-point was, accordingly, thus defined ; not in the pride of reason, nor with the confidence of dogmatic assertion, but in the humility and reverence befitting those who are founding all their thought upon the authenticity of Scripture, the inspiration of Scripture, and the Godhead of Christ : Not God loves us because Christ died for us, but Christ died for us because God loves us.

With this starting-point ascertained and defined, the next step is to inquire into the extent of the Atonement; that is to say, the wideness of its application. Assuming the Atonement to be the supreme expression of God s love, the question follows : To whom is this expression of love addressed ? On whose behalf did the Atonement take place ? For whom did Christ die ? For one ? for some ? or for all ?

It is quite evident that both the degree of interest and the kind of interest excited in our minds by the Atonement are affected by our opinion of its extent. An event which concerns one, or some, cannot rank in interest with an event which equally concerns all. All men of intelligence may take a certain kind of interest in an occurrence affecting one individual, or one class of individuals ; but the interest so awakened is different in kind as well as in degree from that which every man takes in an event immediately affecting himself.

In the foregoing observations on the subject of the Atonement, and in all that may follow, the writer desires only that he may be regarded as a seeker after truth in the Word of God. He has no discoveries to announce, no original conclusions to propound, no claim to make upon public attention which rests in intellectual certitude ; above all, no assault to bring against those whose thought has worked out on other lines. He is but a seeker after truth in the place where alone the truth he seeks may be found, — that is, in the inspired Scriptures. Other truths may be sought and found in other places. Astronomy has its own gospel of the glory of God to proclaim from the star spaces of the ecliptic and the orbits of the planets; Archaeology has its own gospel of the antiquity of man to proclaim from the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the shell-mounds of Denmark, the caves of Belgium and Sicily and Gibraltar; but the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice is proclaimed only from the Scriptures, and apart from them we have no means of comprehending the work of Christ. It is, however, impossible to give any answer whatsoever to the question " For whom did Christ die ? " without referring to the great historical divide which distinguishes those who interpret the Scripture teaching on the death of Christ as declaring a limited Atonement from those who interpret that teaching as the declaration of a universal Atonement. There are four ways of answering the question, " For 3 33 whom did Christ die ? " He died for none ; or He died for some one favored individual ; or He died for a portion of the human race ; or He died for all. With the first and the second of these answers we have no concern, as the facts of Scripture sweep them aside. It cannot be that Christ died for no one, that His death was a mere catastrophe resulting from His own determination to oppose and rebuke the Jews ; for the Word of God represents His death as containing a purpose and a result intended to affect life other than His own. It cannot be that Christ died in the heroism of personal self-devotion for some one favored individual between whom and death he thrust Himself, as the victim of an intrepid friendship ; for all the facts of the case are known to us without the suggestion of any person on whose individual behalf He laid down His life. There remain open, therefore, only these alternatives, — he died for some, or he died for all : a limited Atonement or a universal Atonement.

The distinction between these two modes of interpreting the Scriptures we may describe as the great divide in distinctively Christian thought. It would take a volume to give merely the literary and ecclesiastical history of the great divide, and to follow through their infinitely interesting modifications and progressions the movements of thought on either side of this vast question : " For whom did Jesus Christ lay down His life ? " To a thoughtful and clear-visioned mind these movements are infinitely interesting. Such minds will not turn impatiently from the intense and anxious reasonings with which those who lived before us pondered the Cross and sought to read aright its message to mankind. Nor will such minds disparage the controversial literature on the Atonement as but the cobweb-weaving and the hairsplitting of men who had become the devotees of speculative theology. For one finds in the times in which we live, and among the men and women whom we touch, the same anxious reasonings around the Cross ; the same longing: to obtain in the Word of God some answer to the question " For whom did Christ die ? " which will meet and satisfy all other scriptural statements bearing on the destiny of man under the government of God. The great divide exists to-day, and on the one side or on the other side each individual mind tends to find an answer which may for itself best satisfy the conditions of the case. Is it a limited Atonement ? or is it a universal Atonement ? Did He die for some ? or did He die for all ?

To those who have not thought their way down into the depths of this subject, and who have not carefully searched their Bibles and brought together all that they contain, not only respecting the Death of Christ, but also respecting the destiny of man ; to those who have lived merely upon the broad surface of the general idea that Christ died for mankind, — it may appear a most unaccountable and uncalled for circumstance that any question should ever have arisen on the extent of the Atonement ; that any one ever supposed the Atonement to be limited in its extent; that all persons have not agreed and taken for granted that the Atonement is universal, and that Christ died for all. And this surprise that any have hesitated to affirm a universal Atonement deepens into curiosity under the statement that from a very early period in the history of Christian thought it has seemed impossible and unscriptural to multitudes of intelligent and devout persons to affirm, in plain, unguarded words, that Christ died for the whole world. Curiosity concentrates itself upon the reason why this is so, — why any one should raise the question of extent, or conceive the idea of a limited Atonement What suggests the thought that the Atonement is not for all? An answer should be given to satisfy this entirely proper curiosity. It may be given in one sentence : The conception of a limited Atonement arises from a certain mode of stating the doctrine of Election. It may be said with some degree of probability that no believer in the New Testament might ever have thought of saying that Christ did not die for all, except for a certain interpretation which was placed, very early in the history of Christian thought, upon those scriptures of the New Testament which speak of God s election and predestination of men.