VI. The Precise Problem Today *
There is a popular impression about both
philosophy and theology that the history of their problems is very sterile;
that it is not a long development, carrying the discussion on with growing
insight from age to age, and passing from thinker to thinker with growing
depth, but rather a scene in which each newcomer demolishes the work of his
predecessor in order to put in its place some theory doomed in turn to the same
fruitless fate. Truly, as Hegel says, if that were so with philosophy, its
history would become one of the saddest and sorriest things, and it would have
no right to go on. And if it were so with theology, we should not only be
distressed for Humanity, but we should be skeptical about the Holy Spirit in
the Church. It could be the Church of no Holy Spirit if those who translated
its life into thought did not offer to posterity a spectacle higher than
dragons that tare each other in the slime, or lions that bit and devoured one
another.
As a matter of truth and fact, both philosophy
and theology have not only a chronicle but a history. They register the
highest spiritual evolution of the race. The wave behind rolls on the wave
before. The past is not devoured but lives on, and comes to itself in the
future. The new arrivals do not consume their predecessors, and do not ignore
them; they interpret them and carry them forwards. They take their fertile
place in the great organic movement. They modulate what is behind upwards into
what is to come. They correct the past and enrich it; and they hand on their
corrected past to be a foundation for the workers yet to be.
The amateur, or the self-taught, therefore is at
a great disadvantage. He does not take up the problem where the scientific
succession laid it down. He does not come in where his great co-workers left
off. He must start ab ovo. He must do over again for himself what they
have conspired to do better. He risks "being a fool at first hand." He wants
himself criticizing what has long been dropped, and slaying the long-time
slain. He throws away effort in establishing what the competent have agreed to
accept. And he misses the right points to attack or to strengthen, because he
has not surveyed the ground. Every now and then one meets the capable amateur,
whose misfortune it has been to have no schooling in the scientific history or
method of the subject, who applied to it a shrewd mother-wit or an earnest but
uninstructed conscience, and who perhaps publishes a theory of Incarnation or
Atonement which, for all its hints and glimpses of truth, makes no real
contribution either to the history or the merits of the case. This is the
misfortune of the self-taught who goes straight to his Bible for the materials
of his theology, and ignores most of the treatment the problem has received
from the greatest minds in the history of the Church or the soul. The Bible is
enough for our saving faith, but it is not enough for our scientific
theology.
To make the most therefore of godly and able
men, who would else be wasted more or less, it is well that we should teach
them at the outset to take up the question where they find it, to begin where
their best predecessors left off, to work upon results, and to carry forward
the subject in the train of its evolution from the great and growing past. Let
us couple up with the past, and repay its gifts by fructifying them for the
future. Let us call in our thought, and concentrate it upon the precise
question which previous thinkers have left us to solve.
There is, thus, another thing we have to do. We
have to try to find a due place for those views which, however one-sided, yet
do compel attention to aspects that the Church from time to time ignores. We
have to meet, satisfy, and exceed such views. Much, for instance, has been
done in the lifetime of most of us to correct and extend those views of
Christ's work which were so rigidly objective that they became external. It
has been urged that the Church long thought too much of Christ's action on God
and not enough of His action on man. And what is called the moral theory of
the Atonement has therefore been pressed upon us, to replace the
ultra-objective and satisfactionary view. And the pressure has often been so
hard that an objective theory has been entirely denied as immoral, and denied
sometimes with a scorn unjustified by either the mental acumen or moral dignity
of the critic.
But in spite of this over-pressure, and the
occasional insolence that goes with ignorance, it remains our duty to find a
proper place in our view of the whole great subject for that effect of Christ
upon men which has meant so much of the sanctity of the Church. We have to
meet, satisfy, and transcend those pleas which have been called into existence
to redress the balance of theological neglect, and to fill out that which was
behind in our grasp of the manifold work. Especially we have to adjust our
theology of Christ's work to those who observe that the repentance of the
guilty is an essential condition of forgiveness, and who go on to ask how we
can speak of a finished reconciliation or atonement by a sinless Christ, who
could not possibly present before God a repentance of that kind.
There are certain results which, it may be said,
we have definitely reached in correction of what has long been known as the
popular view of Christ's death and work. They are modern, and they owe much to
Schleiermacher, Ritschl, McLeod Campbell, Maurice and others; but they have
also been shown to be scriptural, by a new, objective and scientific
investigation of what the Bible has to say on the subject. When we have
brought the long history of the question up to date, balanced the books, and
taken account of the general agreement on the modern side, we can then go on to
ask where exactly the question now stands.
The modifications on which the best authorities
are substantially at one we have seen to be such as these: -
1. Reconciliation is not the result of a change
in God from wrath to love. It flows from the changeless will of a loving God.
No other view could make the reconciliation sure. If God changed to it,
He might change from it. And the sheet-anchor of the soul for Eternity
would then have gone by the board. Forgiveness arose at no point in time.
Grace was there before even creation. It abounded before sin did. The
holiness which makes sin sin, is one with the necessity to destroy sin in
gracious love.
2. Reconciliation rests on Christ's person, and
it is effected by His entire work, doing, and suffering. This work does three
things. (1) It reveals and puts into historic action the changeless grace of
God. (2) It reveals and establishes His holiness, and therein also the
sinfulness of sin. And (3) it exhibits a Humanity in perfect tune with that
will of God. And it does more than exhibit these things - it sets them up,
grace, holiness, and the new Humanity in its Head.
3. This reconciling and redeeming work of
Christ culminates in His suffering unto death, which is indeed more of an act
than an experience. Here, in the Cross, is the summit of His revelation of
grace, of sin, and of Humanity. And the central feature of this threefold
revelation in the Cross is the holiness of God's love. It is this holiness
that deepens error into sin, sin into guilt, and guilt into repentance; without
which any sense of forgiveness would be but an anodyne and not a grace, a
self-flattering unction to the soul and not the peace of God.
4. In this relation to God's holiness and its
satisfaction, nobody now thinks of the transfer of our punishment to Christ in
its entirety - including the worst pains of hell in a sense of guilt. Christ
experienced the world's hate, and the curse of the Law in the sense of the
suffering entailed on man by sin; but a direct infliction of men's total
deserts upon Him by God is unthinkable. His penalty was not punishment,
because it was dissociated from the sense of desert. Whatever we mean by
atonement must be interpreted in that sense. And judgment is a much better
word than either penalty or punishment.
5. What we have in Christ's work is not the
mere pre-requisite or condition of reconciliation, but the actual and final
effecting of it in principle. He was not making it possible, He was doing it.
We are spiritually in a reconciled world, we are not merely in a world in
process of empirical reconciliation. Our experience of religion is experience
of a thing done once for all, for ever, and for the world. That is, it is more
than even experience, it is a faith. The same act as put God's forgiveness on
a moral foundation also revolutionized Humanity. Hence we are not disposed to
speak of substitution ** so much as of representation. But it is
representation by One who creates by His act the Humanity He represents, and
does not merely sponsor it. The same act as disburdens us of guilt
commits us to a new life. Our Savior in His salvation is not only our comfort
but our power; not merely our rescuer but our new life. His work is in the
same act reclamation as well as rescue.
6. Another thing may perhaps be taken as
recognized in some form by the main line of judicious advance in our subject.
The work of Christ was moral and not official. It was the energy and victory
of His own moral personality, and not simply the filling of a position, the
discharge of an office He held. His victory was not due to His rank, but to
His will and conscience. It lay in His faithfulness to the uttermost amid
temptations morally real and psychologically relevant to what He was. It was a
work that drew on His whole personality, and was built into the nature of that
personality as a moral necessity of it. What He did He did not do simply in
the room and stead of others, He did it as a necessity of His own person also -
though its effect for them was not what it was for Him. He fulfilled an
obligation under which His own personality lay; He did not simply pay the debts
of other people. He fulfilled a personal vocation.
And His faithfulness was not only to a vocation.
It was to a special vocation, that of a Redeemer, not merely a saint. The
immediate source of His suffering was not the sight of human sin, and it was
not a general holiness in Him. It was not the quivering of the saint's purity
at the touch of evil. But it was the suffering of One who touched sin as
the Redeemer. He would not have suffered for sin as He did, had He not
faced it as its destroyer. Not only was this His vocation as a moral hero, but
His special vocation as Savior. It was the work of a moral personality at the
heart of the race, of One who concentrated on a special yet universal task -
that of Redemption.
His perfection was not that of a paragon, one
who could do better what every soul and genius of the race could do well. He
was not all the powers and excellencies of mankind rolled into one superman.
But His perfection was that of the race's Redeemer. It was interior to all
other powers and achievements. It was central both for God and man. He made
man's center and God's coincide. He took mankind at its enter and laid it on
the center of God. His identification with man was not extensive but
intensive, it was not discursive and parallel, so to say. It was morally
central and creative. He was not Humanity on its divine side; He was its new
life from the inside. The problem He had to solve was the supreme and central
moral problem of guilt; and the work could only be done by the native action of
a personality moral in its nature and methods, moral to the pitch of the
Holy.
It is an immense gain thus to construe Christ's
work as that of a moral personality instead of a heavenly functionary. It
brings it into line with the modern mind and into organic union with the moral
problem of the race. It enables us to realize that every step of the moral
victory in His life was a step also in the Redemption of the whole human
conscience. And we grasp with new power the idea that His crowning victory of
the Cross was the victory in principle of the whole race in Him - that
Justification is really one with Reconciliation, and what He did before God
contained all He was to do on man. It makes possible for us what my last
lecture will attempt to indicate - a unitary view of His whole work and
person.
7. After these great modifications and gains,
we have cleared the ground to ask with some exactness just where the question
at the moment stands. What was the divinest thing, the atoning, satisfying
thing, the thing offered to God, in Christ; the thing, therefore, final and
precious in what He did? The permanent thing in Christianity must be that
which gives it its chief value to God. We are now beyond the crude alternative
that so easily besets us, "Did Christ's work bear upon God or on man?" Neither
alone would be true Reconciliation. Neither Orthodoxy nor Socinianism has it.
But we have to ask this: "Can we combine the truth in each alternative? Can we
reach the value of Christ's saving work to God (i.e. its true and final
value) if we exclude its effect within man? Must we not take that in?
Nihil in effectu quod non prius in causa. Must we not include the
effect to get the full value of the cause, and give a full account of it?"
Now, let us own at the outset that the first
things we must be sure about are the objective reality of our religion, its
finality, and its initiative in God's free grace independent of act or desert
of ours. But if we start there, it looks as if we were shut up to the first of
the crude alternatives, as if the idea of Christ's work as acting on God only
gave the best effect to these conditions. It looks as if the old theory alone
guaranteed a salvation finished on the Cross, one wholly God's in His grace,
one that ensures a full and objective release of the conscience. These things
are not secured by what we do, but by Christ's work on the Cross. Moreover,
that work was done for the whole of mankind, and was complete even for those
who as yet make no response. And, besides, that first alternative is a view
that seems to have the letter of Scripture with it. It does look as if we
could not have full security except by trust of an objective something, done
over our heads, and complete without any reference to our response or our
despite.
But the difficulties begin when we ask what the
objective something was. How describe it? For that purpose the old doctrine
used juridical forms. But these are not large enough for the dimensions of a
modern world, or for its deepened ethical insight. How exactly could the
obedience of Christ stand for the obedience of all? It was the fulfilment of
His own personal vocation; how does it stand for the obedience of every other
person? Or how does the suffering of Christ restore the moral order,
especially one He never broke? If you treat it as punishment, that punishment
alone does not restore the moral order. And, if we say He did not do that, He
did not restore a moral order, so much as acknowledge and confess the holiness
of God in His judgment, is not the value of that recognition still greatly
impaired by the fact that it is not made by the guilty but the Guiltless, who
is not directly affected by the connection between sin and suffering. A
finished religion would then be set up without the main thing - the
acknowledgment by the guilty. That acknowledgment, that repentance, would then
be outside the complete act, and would be at best but a sequel of it; whereas
we ought to give a real place in a complete work of Reconciliation to our
repentance (which some extremists say is all that is required), or to Christ's
moral action on us. Do we not need to include in some way the effect in the
cause, in order to give the cause its full and final value, i.e., its
value to God. The thing of price done by Christ for God, must it not already
include the thing done upon men? Does not Christ's confession of God's
holiness include man's confession of his sin?
Let us return to that idea of the moral order
which is at the bottom of this objective theory. We ask whether the moral
order is what the Bible means by the idea of the righteousness of God. The
righteousness of God is not only holy but gracious, not only regulative and
retributory, but also forgiving and restoring. It seems, indeed, in the
Gospels to need no other condition of forgiveness than repentance. This is so;
and it is all very well, we have seen, for individual cases. But we have to
deal, as Christ at last had to deal, with the forgiveness of a world, the
pardon of solidary sin. And we need to be sure, as Christ alone with His
insight could be sure, that the repentance is true and deep. There it is that
we are carried into questions which the Cross alone can answer. How shall I
know how much repentance is deep enough? Where find a repentance wide enough
to cover the sin of a guilty world? Could Christ offer that? No; directly, He
could not. He could not offer it as a pathos, a personal experience, for He
had no guilt. But, then, guilt is much more than a sense of guilt. And the
essence of repentance is not its intensity or passion but the thing confessed.
It is therefore the holiness more even than the sin that holiness makes so
sinful. It is the due and understanding acknowledgment of the holiness
offended. And this only a sinless Christ could really do, who was also
sympathetic enough with men to do it from their side. And only the sinless
could realize what sin meant for God.
Farther, this acknowledgment is not simply
verbal, nor simply a matter of profound moral conviction and admission, but it
must be a practical confession, as practical as the sin. It must place itself
as if it were active sin under the reaction of the Divine holiness; it must be
made sin. That is, it must accept judgment as the only adequate acknowledgment
of the holy God in a sinful world; it must allow His holy law to assert itself
in the Savior's person in the form forced on the sinner's Friend. He bore this
curse as God's judgment, praised it, hallowed it, absorbed it; and His
resurrection showed that He exhausted it.
But would His acceptance of judgment for us be
possible, would it stand to our good, would it be of value in God's sight for
us, if He were not in moral solidarity with us? How could it? What God sought
was nothing so pagan as a mere victim outside our conscience and over our
heads. It was a Confessor, a Priest, one taken from among men. But then this
moral solidarity is the very thing that also gives, and must give, Him His
mighty and revolutionary power on us. What makes it possible for Him to be a
Divine victim or a Divine priest for us also makes Him a new Creator in us His
offering of a holy obedience to God's judgment is therefore valuable to God for
us which also makes Him such a moral power upon us and in us. His creative
regenerative action on us is a part of that same moral solidarity which also
makes His acceptance of judgment stand to our good, and His confession of God's
holiness to be the ground of ours. The same stroke on the one Christ went
upward to God's heart and downward to ours.
Is this not clear? Christ could make no due
confession of holiness for us in judgment if He were outside Humanity, if He
were a third party satisfying God over our head. The acknowledgment would not
be really from the side of the culprit, certainly not from his interior, his
conscience. The judgment would not really be the judgment of our sin,
which would therefore be still due. To be of final value the atoning judgment
must be also within the conscience of the guilty. But how is the judgment, the
self-condemnation, the confession within our guilty conscience to be offered to
God as an ingredient of Christ's reconciling work and not its mere sequel? It
is not yet there. Or else it is nothing worth offering by way of atonement
when it is there. Is there any way of offering our self-condemnation as a
meritorious contribution to forgiveness? Can it be included in the Divine
ground of forgiveness in a guiltless Christ? Repentance is certainly a
condition of forgiveness. But Christ could not repent. How then could He
perfectly meet the conditions of salvation? The answer is that our repentance
was latent in that holiness of His which alone could and must create it, as the
effect is really part of the cause - that part of the cause which is prolonged
in a polar unity into the sequential conditions of time.
Not only, generally, is there an organic moral
connection and a spiritual solidarity between Christ and us, but also more
particularly, there is such a moral effect on Humanity included in the work of
Christ, who causes it, that that antedated action on us, judging, melting,
changing us, is also part of His offering to God. He comes bringing His
sheaves with Him. In presenting Himself He offers implicitly and proleptically
the new Humanity His holy work creates. The judgment we brought on Him becomes
our worst judgment when we arraign ourselves; and it makes it so impossible for
us to forgive ourselves that we are driven to accept forgiveness from the hands
of the very love which our sins doomed to a curse.
What Christ offers to God is, therefore, not
simply an objective satisfaction outside His revolutionary effect on the soul
of man in the way of faith, repentance, and our whole sanctification. As the
very judgment He bore for us is relevant to our sin by His moral solidarity
with us, so the value of His work to God includes also that value which it has
in acting on us through that same solidarity, and in presenting us to God as
the men it makes us to be. He represents before God not a natural Humanity
that produces Him as its spiritual classic, but the new penitent Humanity that
His influence creates. He calls things that are not yet as though they were.
In Him a goodness of ours that is not yet rising from its antenatal spring,
brings to naught the sin that is. There was presented to God, in Christ's
holiness, also that repentance in us which it alone has power to create. He
stretches a hand through time and seizes the far-off interest of our tears.
The faith which He alone has power to wake is already offered to God in the
offering of all His powers and of His finished work. That obedience of ours
which Christ alone is able to create, is already set out in Him before God,
implicit in that mighty and subduing holiness of His in which God is always
well-pleased. All His obedience and holiness is not only fair and beloved of
God, but it is also great with the penitent holiness of the race He sanctifies.
Our faith is already present in His oblation. Our sanctification is already
presented in our justification. Our repentance is already acting in His
confession. The effect of His Cross is to draw us into a repentance which is a
dying with Him, and therefore a part of the offering in His death; and then it
raises us in newness of life to a fellowship of His resurrection.
He is thus not only the pledge to us of God's
love but the pledge to God of our sure response to it in a total change of will
and life. We see now how organic, how central to Christ's gospel of Atonement
is Paul's idea of dying and rising with Him, how vital to His work is this
effect of it, this function of it. For such a process, such an experience, is
not a mere moral sequel or echo of ours to the story of the Cross, it is no
mere imitation or repetition of its moral greatness; nor is it a sensitive
impression of its touching splendor. To die and rise with Christ does not
belong to Christian ethic, to the method of Jesus, but it has a far deeper and
more religious meaning. It is to be taken into His secret life. It is a
mystic incorporation into Christ's death and resurrection as the standing act
of spiritual existence. We are baptized into His death, and not merely into
dying like Him. We do not echo His resurrection, we share it. As His trophies
we become part of Christ's offering to God; just as the captives in his
procession were part of the victor's self-presentation to the divinity of Rome.
God leadeth us in triumph in Christ (2 Cor. 2:14). It is, indeed, for Christ's
sake we are forgiven, but for the sake of a Christ who is the Creator of our
repentance and not only the Proxy of our curse. And it is to our faith,
which is no more perfect than our repentance. It is to nothing so poor as our
faith or our repentance that new life is given, but only to Christ on His
Cross, and to us for His sake who is the Creator and Fashioner of both. Our
justification rests on this atoning creative Christ alone. And when the matter
is so viewed, the objection some have to the phrase "for Christ's sake" should
disappear.
No martyrdom could do what the death of Christ
does for faith. No martyrdom could offer God in advance the souls of a changed
race. For no martyr as such is sure of the future. It is easier to forget all
the martyrs that the Savior; and their power fades with time, while His grows
with the ages. With the martyr's death we can link many admirable reflections,
exhortations, and even inspirations. What it does not give us is the new and
Eternal Life. It is not the consummation of God's saving purpose for the
world.
* This chapter owes much to Kirn, Herzog,
xx., Art. "Versohnung."
** Because substitution does not take account of
the moral results on the soul, and for a full account of the cause we must
include all the effects. To do justice to the whole of Christ's work we must
include the Church, and in justification include sanctification.
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