Untitled Sermon

There is always some kind of strain or tension between man and his environment, and man has always an interest in overcoming the strain, in resolving the discord in his situation into a harmony, in getting the environment to be his ally rather than his adversary. The process by which his end is attained may be described as one of reconciliation, but whether the reconciliation is adequate depends on whether his conception of the environment is equal to the truth.

Men may be very dimly and imperfectly conscious of the nature of the strain which disquiets their life, and may seek to overcome it in blind and insufficient ways. They may interpret it as physical in its origin when it is really ethical, or as the misapprehension of a moral order when it is really antagonism to a personal God, and in either case the reconciliation they seek will fail to give the peace of which they are in quest. Nevertheless, reconciliation and nothing else is what they want, and its place in religion is central and vital.

By emphasising these differences, and especially the ultimate difference between the physical and the ethical, and between right and wrong, with an implacable logical rigour, Kant gave the problem of reconciliation new aspects

But though the pantheistic reconciliation which merely assumes the unity of man and nature is less than Christian, it is not worthless or unreal. There are problems inevitable to the Christian which it has not raised, but on its own ground its value is not to be disputed.

Stoics and Epicureans were far nearer than is often admitted in their conception of the end to be attained. Both wished to be delivered from what they saw made life painful and futile; both wished what might in a large sense be called redemption from a ‘vain conversation,’ and the reconciliation and peace which came in its train

The assumption—which is also the experience—of the highest form of religion, as we have it represented in the Christian Scriptures, is the existence of a personal God and of personal relations between that God and man. When these relations are interrupted or deranged by man’s action, he finds himself alienated or estranged from God, and the need of reconciliation emerges

Still, the heart of the reconciliation lies in the readjustment or restoration of the true personal relation between God and the creature which has lapsed by its own act into alienation from Him; in other words, it consists in the forgiveness of sins.

Just because the experience of reconciliation is the central and fundamental experience of the Christian religion, the doctrine of reconciliation is not so much one doctrine as the inspiration and focus of all

importance of reconciliation both as an experience and a doctrine

But he would insist that in the experience of reconciliation to God through Christ is to be found the principle and the touchstone of all genuine Christian doctrine: whatever can be derived from this experience and is consistent with it is true and necessary; whatever is incompatible with it lacks the essential Christian character.

The main thing—in the sense of that through which the reconciling power of Christ mainly enters with effect into the lives of sinful men—is the New Testament witness to Jesus. It is admitted, as has just been said, that this reaches us indirectly in ways which can never be fully traced, but it is most powerful when the mediation is most direct. An evangelist who has himself been reconciled to God through Christ, and who can make the New Testament witness to the reconciling power of Jesus his own, is a far more powerful minister of reconciliation than any institution or atmosphere can be

A reconciled man, preaching Christ as the way of reconciliation, and preaching Him in the temper and spirit which the experience of reconciliation creates, is the most effective mediator of Christ’s reconciling power.

For when we read the New Testament with susceptible minds, we listen to the voice of those who were once themselves estranged from God, but have been reconciled to Him through Christ, and are letting us into the secret of their new life; it is the nearest approach we can make, and therefore the most vital, to the reconciling power which streamed from Christ Himself.

There is certainly no reconciliation but through the historical Christ: there is no other Christ of whom we know anything whatever. But the historical Christ does not belong to the past. The living Spirit of God makes Him present and eternal; and it is not from Palestine, or from the first century of the Christian era, but here and now that His reconciling power is felt.

When we see Jesus as He is presented to us in the gospels, we see a life which is at one with God. All the problems which distract and baffle us are solved here. There is no quarrel with the conditions of existence.

It is our life that we see in Jesus, but we see it in its truth and as it ought to be, a life in God, wholly at one with Him. This life is its own witness, and there is no human soul to which it does not appeal

We may have an unanalysed feeling that here ‘all’s love and all’s law,’ but through everything we are conscious that the very presence of such a Being in our world is a promise of reconciliation. He is not here for Himself, but for us. There is invitation in His presence as in His voice: it is as though He were saying all the time, ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’

But the whole experience of reconciliation may not be made at once

it gradually dawns upon them in the presence of Jesus that here is the perfect life, and that with all these things it has no concern whatever. It is absolutely independent of them.

Sometimes this aspect of reconciliation is not adequately recognised. The term is restricted too narrowly to a transaction in the sphere of conscience. But the end of reconciliation is to make saints, and no life impresses us as saintly unless it reflects, however obscurely, the glory of the beatitudes. We are not really reconciled to God through Jesus unless we are reconciled to this as the true life, and we are not reconciled to this as the true life unless we are reconciled to renouncing all the passion with which when we were ignorant of it we sought the chief ends of life elsewhere.

It is not by any doctrine that we are reconciled to God; the reconciling power for sinful men lies in the attitude of Jesus to the sinful. This is happily one of the points in the gospel story about which there can be no dispute. There might be a question as to whether Jesus spoke any given word assigned to Him, or as to the circumstances in which it was spoken, or as to its proper application; but it is quite inconceivable that the evangelists should misrepresent so new and wonderful a thing as the attitude of Jesus to the sinful, or the reconciling power which accompanied it.

He brought with Him the power which reconciled Zacchæus to God, and in the very same act or process delivered him from his old sin of covetousness and made him a new creature. This experience is not separable from the sinner’s reconciliation; it is part and parcel of it, and is the visible proof that it is real.

The simplest answer to this is to say that Jesus did not ‘find’ repentance at all. It was not there ready made, waiting for forgiveness. He had to create or evoke repentance, and there was something in His character and in His attitude to the sinful which worked powerfully to this end.

This, it may be said with confidence, is what is confirmed by experience still. We do not first repent of our sins and then come to Jesus; it is the visitation of our life by Jesus to which we owe first repentance and then all other spiritual blessings.

But while we must guard against unreal distinctions, and especially against turning the death of Christ into a thing which can be looked at materially rather than personally, we must not ignore the fact that of all things which go to make up the life of Jesus His death is the most wonderful in reconciling power. To avoid the mistake just referred to, we may speak rather of Jesus in His death than of the death of Jesus.

Nothing forbids us to acknowledge the subduing power of love everywhere—and to be subdued by love is to be reconciled

It is love which prevails against every form of evil in us—against pride, a hard heart, sensual passions, or whatever else; and the whole story is a demonstration of love.

These words and their accompaniments get behind all the sinner’s defences against God. We feel that in the very face of sin at its guiltiest a love revealed and maintained itself against which sin was powerless. In the dreadful conflict the victory remained with love. Love proved itself in the Passion of Jesus to be the final reality, and no truth which takes possession of the heart of man can ever have power to subdue and reconcile like this.

If we wish to experience or to preach reconciliation—which depends upon such love—we must not lose the revelation of it by reducing it to a symbol, like the cross, or a dogma, like that of satisfaction: we must keep before ourselves and others the concrete facts in which its reality first came home to men. Christ crucified must be ‘evidently set forth’—placarded (Gal. 3:1) before men’s eyes—that they may receive a due impression of all that there is in this wonderful sight.

The point is that as they looked at Jesus on His cross this actually was their experience: they became conscious through Him of a love which passes knowledge; it flashed out from His Passion and overcame them; they were suddenly aware of a goodness which outweighed all the sin of the world and made it impotent; and through that goodness, or rather through Him in whose Passion it was manifested to men, they were reconciled to God. Now, when we say that the story of the death of Christ never reaches us but through Christian tradition, we mean that it never reaches us but in the atmosphere of this interpretation. From the first, when we learn that Jesus died, we learn that He died for us

When the interpretation becomes formal, it may easily become inadequate, but what it rests on is the experience that in the death of Jesus the sinful soul has come face to face with a love which is stronger than sin. It is not sin which is the last reality in the world, nor any consequence of sin; it is not sin to which we have to reconcile ourselves, or sin’s punishments, temporal or eternal. The last reality is beyond sin. It is a love which submits to all that sin can do, yet does not deny itself, but loves the sinful through it all.

We do not preach that Jesus died, but that He died for us, and in particular that He died for our sins. The love revealed in His death is revealed signally in relation to them, and there is no simpler way of describing the effect of His death than to say that it dispels the despairing conviction that for us sin is the last of all things, in which we must hopelessly acquiesce, and evokes the inspiring conviction that the last of all things is sin-bearing love through which the sinner may be reconciled to God.1

Reconciliation as experienced has its outlook on a new life, and no doctrine of it is adequate in which this is not explicitly recognised

There is not in Christian experience any antagonism between justice and mercy: they are in active and immutable harmony with each other, and God always—not merely in forgiving sins—acts in unison with both. Mercy and justice do not need to be reconciled, for they are never at war. The true opposite of justice is not mercy, but injustice, with which God can have nothing to do either in reconciliation or in any other of His works.

The power which Christ exercises in reconciling us to God is a moral power, not a physical or magical one, and in its operation it is subject to the laws of a moral order. This not only means that there is no physical coercion in it, no denial of man’s freedom, but that the power itself which reconciles is ethical in quality.

The moral personality in which it is lodged and out of which it proceeds, has been formed and developed, like other moral personalities, through the duties and trials of our common human life. It could not have been formed and developed in any other way. This is the truth underlying some rather equivocal expressions which have been used about the work of Christ in the reconciliation of man to God.

All he knows about these consequences to begin with is that, be they what they may, they cannot and do not negate the reconciliation. But he has to learn by further experience how the healing power of reconciliation works in a sin-stricken nature, and, though he can never be reconciled to sin, whether there are not by the will of God painful and disabling consequences of sin to which in the meantime he must resign himself as patiently and unmurmuringly as he can. He has to learn what the standing temper of the reconciled life will be in his own case. It may be determined in part by his natural temperament, in part by his past life, in part by the completeness with which he has received the reconciliation; it may be more triumphant or more subdued, more akin to joy in the Holy Spirit or to ‘getröstetes Sündenelend’; but it does not affect the reconciliation itself. Most men after they receive the gospel have much to learn of the scope of reconciliation. They do not realise how much God covers, and that reconciliation to Him has not had its perfect work until we are reconciled also to our fellows, to the order of providence, and to the inexorable laws of the spiritual world.

ALL sound and legitimate doctrinal construction must be based on experience, and it is to such experiences as have been described in the previous chapter that we must refer all attempts at dogmatic definition.

But apart from such radical and questionable ideas there are good grounds for looking at the course of Christian thought in general before specially investigating the thought of the New Testament. One is that Christians had begun to think and to express themselves on the subject before the New Testament as we know it had been canonised and established in its present authority in the Church.

It is beyond the scope of these lectures, however, to do this in minute detail. At a comparatively early date the Christian Church hammered out, for better or worse, dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the history of these dogmas has an almost official character and can with comparative ease be made plain. But the Church has never had in the same sense a dogma of reconciliation.

In primitive Christianity two ideas are universally connected with the death of Christ and employed in its interpretation. It is spoken of as a sacrifice and as a ransom. The first of these finds its application more readily if our main thought is that of man’s reconciliation to God through Christ and His Passion; the second, if our main thought is that man owes to Christ and His Passion emancipation from some evil or hostile power. But it is necessary to look at both more closely.

In all probability, by the first century of the Christian era, all sacrifices among the Jews had this character of being expiatory or propitiatory sacrifices; whatever the modus, the effect was that they purged or put away sin.1

In sacrifice, we are warned, it is not the mere thing which is looked at, but the mind of the offerer.

All sacrifice was sacrifice offered to God, and, whatever its value, it had that value for Him.

The death of Christ was an atoning sacrifice through which sin was annulled and God and man reconciled.

Whatever be the power which holds him, man is held in bondage somehow: it may be bondage to sin, or to death, or to demons, or to the devil, but he is indubitably a slave.

The mythological expansion of these ideas has often been exhibited and derided. When it was pointed out that Satan, after all, did not get keeping Christ, and that therefore the ransom was not really but only apparently paid, the theory was expanded so as to include a deception of Satan, and the justification of that deception.

The sense of this was universal in the Church, and though the mythological form in which it often found expression is grotesque and incredible—how could the demands of righteousness be satisfied by a fraud?—it is nevertheless a witness to an ineradicable Christian feeling which can never be ignored. We were not bought for nothing; we were bought with a price. Our redemption was conditioned by the recognition of moral necessities which had to be recognised, and the recognition of which involved the death of Jesus on the cross.

In the thought as in the life of the ancient Church it soon became possible to distinguish characteristic tendencies in the East and the West.

A recent historian of our subject, M. Rivière, distinguishes in the Greek fathers, besides the speculative strain criticised by Ritschl and his disciples, what he calls a realistic line of thought on the atonement. As typical of the speculative he takes Irenaeus, and of the realistic Origen. The choice is surprising, for if there is any father in whom the speculative genius of Greece is incarnate it is Origen; Irenaeus, in spite of his daring idea of a recapitulatio of all things in Christ, is by comparison a sober and pedestrian mind.

A man who wrote commentaries, like Origen, no matter how speculative his bent was, would inevitably use Scripture language and speech with Scripture ideas more than a mere writer of philosophical theology

the Greek fathers were as a whole under the ban of their Logos philosophy.

To illustrate this, it will be sufficient to give an account of one typical work, the well-known treatise of Athanasius on the Incarnation of the Word.

This is confirmed by the appeal which he makes at c. 41 to the Greek philosophers who laughed at the idea of incarnation. It is inconsistent, he argues, for men who admit that the Logos pervades the whole universe to question that it can unite itself to man. ‘The philosophers of the Greeks say that the universe is a great body; and rightly so. For we see it and its parts as objects of our senses. If, then, the Word of God is in the universe, which is a body, and has united Himself with the whole and with all its parts, what is there surprising or absurd if we say that He has united Himself with men also?’1

The incarnation means for him that the eternal Word assumed flesh in the womb of the Virgin; in doing so, He united the human nature to the divine; and in principle the atonement, or the reconciliation of humanity to God, was accomplished.

can only be called metaphysical rather than moral.

Dominated though he was by his speculative conception of the incarnation, Athanasius himself was conscious of this, and the great interest of his treatise to a modern reader is to see how much he has to make room for which has no essential relation to his principle.

At the very beginning he makes it plain that the incarnation of the Word has an ethical motive

The one thing which bulks in the mind of Athanasius from first to last is not the sin of man, nor the estrangement between man and God, nor the need of effecting a change in man’s relation to God in the sphere of conscience, but the fact that man’s sin made him liable to death, and that therefore to abolish death must be the supreme achievement of the Saviour.

Although the terms ‘offering and sacrifice’ naturally suggest to a New Testament reader some reference to sin, there is no express or interpreted reference of this kind in the treatise of Athanasius.

As far as his conception of the incarnation is concerned, there is no reason in the nature of the case why the incarnate Word should not have died the moment He came to be. Athanasius has actually to find a reason why He did not do so. ‘He did not immediately upon His coming accomplish His sacrifice on behalf of all, by offering His body to death and raising it again, for by this means He would have made Himself invisible’ (16. 4).

What has value to God and reconciling power with man is not the incarnation conceived as the taking up of human nature into union with the divine; it is the personality of Jesus, fashioned, as every personality is fashioned, through the temptations and conflicts, the fidelities and sacrifices of life and death; the self which is offered to God as a ransom is the self which has acquired in these human experiences its being, its value, and its power; apart from these experiences and what He earned and achieved in them Jesus is nothing to us and has nothing to offer to God. But the speculative conception of the incarnation had become so organic to Greek theology that Athanasius could not transcend it, and when he made room beside it for things which Christianity could not do without it was inevitably in a somewhat casual way.

But he never comes to deal expressly with the question how the character of death has been changed; or, in other words, how Christ has so dealt with sin—to which death owes its dreadful character—as that men may die reconciled to God, instead of dying under a curse. The formal references to the cross as curse in 25. 1, 2 do not supply the blank.

It is not too much to say that the metaphysical incarnation which was the vital centre of Athanasius’ thought—his sacramental union of the divine and the human in the incarnate Word—had dulled his sense of an ethical union and communion of man with God, and of the powers by which such a union and communion can be impaired and destroyed, or restored and perfected.1

it is at the same time the theology of men whose philosophy of the incarnation rendered them at times almost incredibly insensible to the facts of the life of Jesus, and to the way in which His death told on the sinful as a reconciling power.

Experience, in short, has contributed too little to the doctrine of Athanasius on what Christ does for men; it has not sufficiently either inspired or controlled his thoughts; and great as are the patristic names which represent the same type of teaching from Irenaeus and Origen, through Athanasius and the Gregories, to Cyril of Alexandria and John of Damascus, it is not here we can hope to find the true key to the doctrine of reconciliation.1

Western Christianity has been described as more realistic, more Biblical, more practical, more ecclesiastical, less speculative than Eastern. Its theology is less metaphysical and more psychological. In one word, it is more experimental.

is in the world of ethics, not of metaphysics, that the real problems are raised; and even if, for this very reason, there is a greater possibility of fatal errors emerging, there is a greater hope of fundamental truths being reached.

Augustine’s is undoubtedly the greatest name in the West, but it is impossible to ignore Tertullian, to whom Latin Christianity owes more, both of its ideas and its vocabulary, than to any other. Tertullian’s interests were intensely practical, and his writings give us a more vivid idea than any others which survive, of what Christianity meant in the everyday life of men in his time

He was a lawyer, and it was natural for him not only to make large use of the vocabulary of his profession—which he could do in the way of allusion or illustration—but to be largely influenced by its ruling categories

In spite of this, however, Tertullian has no full interpretation of the death of Christ

The grace of God comes to man in or through it, but he does not directly explain how

But it is in connection with what is known as the second repentance—which for Tertullian is the last—that is, in connection with the reconciliation to the Church of those who have fallen into certain kinds of sin after baptism, that Tertullian develops ideas which came to have great influence on the Western theology of reconciliation

All the elements in the later Roman Catholic sacrament of penance can clearly be distinguished in Tertullian; contrition, confession—it is of course public confession, and on this he lays immense stress2—and satisfaction. For the future, the last is the most significant.

Satisfaction, in the strictly legal sense of the term, is identical with punishment. The man who has broken a law makes satisfaction by enduring the penalty which is attached by the law to his offence.

This term is not applied in Tertullian to the work of Christ in relation to sin;2 He is not conceived as making satisfaction to God, in whatever sense; to make satisfaction is the work of the sinner himself

The formula was bound to come, and for better or worse it did come, that Christ by His death—in which is concentrated ‘the whole weight and fruit of the Christian name’—made satisfaction for sins.

Some rendered it rigorously in the legal sense, and then to make satisfaction was the same thing as to pay the penalty, which in this case was eternal death. Others, in accordance with the facts involved in the sinner’s satisfaction for his own sin, could only regard the satisfaction of Christ as improperly or quasi penal.

Few things in the history of Christian thinking are more extraordinary than the progeny of this ambiguous idea of satisfaction.

He made satisfaction for sin by enduring the penalty which was due for it to man. But this penalty was eternal death, or the pains of hell. Could any one say that Christ had endured this? Luther said so. ‘In His innocent, tender heart He was obliged to taste for us eternal death and damnation, and, in short, to suffer everything that a condemned sinner has merited and must suffer for ever.’

Calvin, with all his constitutional caution, is almost equally emphatic. He makes much of the Descensus ad inferos, ‘that invisible and incomprehensible judgment which He underwent at the bar of God; that we might know that not only was the body of Christ given up as the price of our redemption, but that there was another greater and more excellent price—namely, that He endured in His soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man.’2

M. Rivière3 thinks that this terrible idea of Christ’s satisfaction for sin originated in Protestantism, but, as we shall see later, he can illustrate it copiously from Catholic preachers, and it is really given in the very conception of satisfaction when the term is taken in the strictly legal sense.

It was quite possible in the mediæval Church for a rich man to hire a poor man to do for him the satisfaction which the penitential discipline of the Church imposed on him for his sins—say, to recite the Psalter a certain number of times, or to fast a certain number of days

The real interest is that the work of Christ is henceforth going to be interpreted on the analogy of human experiences in the moral world, experiences in which sin and satisfaction and reconciliation may be poignantly real. They may not enable us completely to interpret the cross, but, at all events, the light they throw on it will be the light by which men actually live.

Augustine was a great nature, and what Bagehot called an experiencing nature. All that befell him, and especially all that he had responsibility for, struck deep roots into deep soil

It is true that Augustine in his pre-Christian days had been not only a sinner but a philosopher, and that when he became a Christian he found it even harder to get rid of his philosophical bias than of his sensuality. The strain of Neoplatonism, not to speak of Manichaeism, came out in his mind to the very end, and, as an infra-Christian mode of thinking, it sometimes curiously flawed what was otherwise pure Christian truth.

Sin has admittedly the double character of involving responsibility and of bringing with it moral disablement. It is something we have to answer for, and it is also something which enslaves us and keeps us from doing what we would and what we ought to do.

No sinner can help being conscious of his sin in both modes, but in Augustine the latter immensely preponderated. It was not responsibility, or the bad conscience attending on sin, which mainly troubled him; it was the bondage of the will, intensified, as he came to believe, into a corruption of the whole nature.

Augustine was perfectly sure that he could not save himself from his sins; without divine help he was a lost man. But the point is that the divine help, if it was to bring salvation from sin, must come in the form of a power annulling his inability to good, renewing his corrupt nature, restoring energy and freedom for good to his will. Although it is fair to say that in the West as contrasted with the East, Christian thought deals with sin and forgiveness rather than with death and immortality, in Augustine it is not guilt and pardon that are in the foreground, but moral impotence and renewing grace.

And grace is not an attitude or a disposition on the part of God to the sinner; it is infused grace; it is a holy, divine power actually lodged in the heart of man and enabling him to overcome his old sins. This is the grace which justifies the sinful, and it justifies him progressively by making him more and more righteous. This is in keeping with the Neoplatonic philosophy, in which good is identical with being, and evil is conceived negatively as the mere defect or absence of good. Man’s moral inability can be regarded as just such a defect, which is made good by the coming to the sinner of the strong grace of God.

As we shall see, there are traces even in Augustine of this radically non-Christian mental attitude, but in the main he gives the only Christian answer to all questions about grace: ‘No man can be reconciled to God and come to God except through Christ.’

Though grace is the grace of God, and is ultimately indistinguishable from the presence of God in the heart—it is He who says to the soul, ‘I am thy salvation’—it is not for the Christian a thing of which he has either idea or experience apart from Christ.

His great word for the interpretation of Christ in His saving work is Mediator.

Augustine believed that Christ Jesus was both God and man, but it was as man He did His mediating and reconciling work.2

But it remains to be discovered how we are to attach any rational and ethical ideas to the designation of Christ as at the same time sacrifice and priest.

We are dealing with something which is transacted in the moral world and makes a moral appeal to us. The sacrifices which Augustine assumes to be required from the Christian when he seeks reconciliation after sin, furnish an analogy by which we can interpret the sacrifice of Christ. ‘You are a sinner,’ he says; ‘take vengeance on yourself, descend into your conscience, exact the penalty from yourself, torture yourself; for thus you offer sacrifice

The Word became flesh, he says, that He might become head of the Church.

He not only unites Himself to us, but He unites us to Himself, and it is as we are caught up into this union that all the experiences of reconciliation—its blessings and its cost—come home to us together

And a little further on, ‘We have been made not only Christians, but Christ.’1 Christ includes us in one body with Himself (concorporans nos sibi), making us His members, that in Him we also might be Christ. It is through this in the long run that we are reconciled and renewed.

Yet this purpose of redemption was the cause of the incarnation. Christ had no reason for coming into the world but to save sinners.3 This is the true experimental and Biblical ground on which to stand

It is the supreme distinction of Augustine among the representatives of the ancient Church that he conceived Christ fundamentally as the mediator of the love of God to sinful men, and that when he spoke of that love he charged it with all the meaning that can be drawn from the gospel story

None of the fathers is steeped as he was in the synoptic gospels; none had learned so profoundly as he, from the whole life and passion of Jesus, what the love of God to sinners means. In spite of the Neoplatonic taint in his conception of renewing grace, when he comes to the point it is the love of God as exhibited in the man Christ Jesus which is everything to him. This is what makes him the most living of all the fathers. For nothing but love wins and reconciles.1

Augustine says that in a wondrous and divine way even when God hated us He loved us.

It ought to be acknowledged, in spite of his profound sense of the corruption of human nature, that Augustine recognises in man the capacity for redemption. There is still in the sinner something which is of God and which is dear to God; he even uses the startling expression ‘Christ loved nothing in us but God’—or the divine.3 It recalls Ritschl’s definition of Christian love as the identification of oneself with God’s interest in others, or with that which is of God in them, and by bringing the love of Christ once more within the range of a human analogy, it helps us to understand it more fully.

His humility. This it was which exercised an overpowering influence upon Augustine himself.

The primal sin and the root of all sins is pride, the desire and determination to be independent of God; and we cannot be reconciled to God but in the humility which is willing to be absolutely dependent on Him, and which appeals to us irresistibly in the lowly life of Jesus. It is impossible to exaggerate the place of such thoughts in the mind and heart of Augustine, and they passed from the gospels through him into the life of the Western Church as the most vital and valuable element in its piety

Instead of being the mediator of grace, Christ stands as the supreme illustration or example of it.

The grace by which Christ is good from the beginning is the same by which others, His members, are changed from bad to good.1

Every man from the beginning of his faith is made a Christian by the same grace by which that man, the Son of Mary, is made the Christ. He is not only an exemplum vitae, that by imitating Him we may live righteously; He is also exemplum gratiae, that by believing on Him we may hope to owe righteousness of our own to the same source to which He owed His

The most striking form in which Augustine puts his view, is that which makes Christ the most illustrious example of predestination.

If this is offered as any suggestion of how men are saved by the grace of God—the reconciliation of sinners to God being brought into some kind of parallelism to the predestination of the Son of Mary to be the Christ—the true answer is that absolute predestination is not the explanation of anything in the moral world. The man who asserts predestination thus, without mitigation or remorse, has cancelled the world of history and experience, and cannot say anything to the purpose whether about the Saviour or the saved. It is a wonderful proof of the tenacity of what is bred in the bone, that a man who could say what Augustine has said of the reconciling power of God’s love as exhibited in the humility of Jesus should still be haunted by a conception of God and his salvation which really dates from his pre-Christian days and is completely irrelevant to the gospel.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Augustine may be found, latent or patent, all the ideas on which the Western Church lived for a thousand years.

Anselm, the first and perhaps the greatest of the scholastic theologians, made a truly heroic effort to present the truth of the Christian doctrine of reconciliation in a scientific and systematic form. For him, as for all Christians in his time, there was only one dogma, that of the incarnation of the God-man; this was the one truth on which the Church as a whole had declared its mind.

The title of his famous work, Cur Deus Homo?—Why did God become man?—intimates that what he is in quest of is the rationale of Christianity itself. If he can answer his question, he has rationalised the Christian religion and raised to the level of science the dogma which was accepted by faith on the authority of the Church. Anselm emphasises in his preface this character of his work.

The argument that he is going to conduct, though it is all about Christ, does not owe anything to Christ. It is to be as convincing to Jews and pagans as to Christians, to those who are stating objections to the truth as to those who acknowledge the truth, to those who are seeking reasons for faith as to those who are seeking the reasons of faith. This is not attractive or convincing to the modern reader. We are not interested in what can be said in defence of Christianity remoto Christo or quasi nihil sciatur de Christo; we do not believe that Christ and all that the Church believes about Him—including the contents of the gospels—can be deduced by a necessary process of reasoning from any premises whatsoever, just as we do not believe that history is a subject for deductive reasoning at all.

Nevertheless, Anselm was a great Christian, and in answering the question ‘Cur Deus Homo?’ he wrote a great book. Put briefly, the answer to the question is that God became man because only thus could sin be dealt with for man’s salvation, and God’s end in the creation of man secured. In other words, the rationale of the incarnation is in the atonement

Even in the eleventh century, Anselm met people who made the objections to the Christian faith which are current to-day. If God had to redeem men, why could He not redeem them sola voluntate, by the mere exercise of His will?

If God had to redeem men, why could He not redeem them sola voluntate, by the mere exercise of His will?

His fundamental assumption, which is often overlooked, ought to be put in the foreground. It is that God’s end in the creation of man must be attained

We might ask whether the natural and inevitable inference from this rational necessity, as Anselm calls it, is not universal salvation, but this is a question he does not raise. He proceeds to point out that all men by their sin have forfeited the blessedness of communion with God, and can therefore only attain to their chief end through the remission of sins (I. x.). Hence the question arises, What is sin?

Sin, according to Anselm, consists in the creature’s withholding from God the honour which is His due. ‘He who does not render to God the honour which is due to Him takes away from God what is His; he robs God of His honour (Deum exhonorat), and this is sin’ (I. xi.

When Anselm speaks of sin as robbing God of honour, it is his way of saying that when we sin we wrong a person, and an infinitely great person, not merely a law or a principle; and it is not very bold to say that no conception of sin which ignores this is adequate to the truth about sin as it is revealed in the Christian conscience.

It is the highest merit of Anselm that he sees it to be impossible for God to ignore sin, or to treat it as less real or less awful than it is. To forgive sins by a mere arbitrary exercise of will would be to treat sin as if it were not, and so to bring confusion into God’s kingdom. It would not be the annulling of sin, but the annulling of the moral order through which God expresses Himself in the world; go to the bottom, and it would mean not that sin had ceased to be sin, but that God had ceased to be God (I. xii.).

Now here there are only two possibilities, and Anselm simply announces them. God’s honour must be restored, and it can be restored—here he argues from human analogies—either by satisfaction being done for the offence, or by punishment for it being endured. In the case of satisfaction the offender makes good his offence, in the case of punishment it is made good upon him by the act of the offended.

Hence to make satisfaction for sin not even the world would be enough to offer to God; no, not whole series of worlds. Something must be offered greater than all worlds, greater than everything which is less than God Himself.

If, however, satisfaction is to be rendered at all, it must be by a human being, one of the same stock with the sinner. The emphasis laid by Anselm on this point is not to be ignored.

He must be man that He may be entitled to act for the sinful race, and He must be God that He may be able to offer to God the immeasurable satisfaction which shall be equal to the necessities of the case

He is right in saying that we ought not to commit the slightest sin for worlds, which is only another way of saying that even the slightest sin involves a responsibility for which there is no material measure. In his time men thought they could make satisfaction for it themselves, without too much trouble; they even thought that in some cases they could hire others to make satisfaction for them

A generation trained upon natural science is apt to extenuate sin, to ascribe it to heredity, to environment, to irresistible natural impulses which will be outgrown and had best be forgotten; it is not thought of in any serious way as creating a responsibility which must be faced as all it is before the weight of it can be lifted from the conscience.

Finally, it is a merit of Anselm that he treats the forgiveness of sins as the result of Christ’s redemptive work. Even in Augustine we found indications of a grace of God—a redeeming grace—of which Christ is rather the most illustrious example than the only source or channel.

Anselm gives no prominence to the love of God as the source of the satisfaction for sin, or to the appeal which that love makes to the heart of sinful men. Starting as he does with the abstract proposition that God’s end in creating man must be attained, he almost succeeds, no doubt involuntarily, in banishing from his dialectical deduction of the truth the motive of love either on one side or the other.

Anselm calls a rational necessity, and belongs to the world of metaphysics, not of spiritual experience

It is not interpreted in connection with His life; in fact the possibility of so interpreting it is almost explicitly denied.

freely offer it to God as a satisfaction for the sins of men; but it is not filled with the moral value of love to man or obedience to the Father’s will. Ex hypothesi it is outside of the world of moral obligation, and is therefore not susceptible of moral construction.

In law, satisfaction was penal; it was rendered to the law by paying its penalty. In the discipline of the Church it was not strictly speaking penal; it was a means of averting the penalty. But it was painful, it was due to sin, and in that sense it was quasi-penal

Anselm, by defining Christ’s death merely as an alternative to the punishment of sin (necesse est ut omne peccatum satisfaction AUT poena sequatur), and by refusing to define it in relation to His life, as something which He owed to God, and which therefore entered into His vocation and could be morally understood, has practically made it meaningless

To conclude the estimate of his demerits, Anselm gives no clear account of the way in which the work of Christ comes to benefit men

and as therefore possessed of moral value, and in not relating it vitally to the new redeemed life in man, Anselm left great blanks in his doctrine of reconciliation.

The most striking defect in Anselm’s doctrine—its failure to relate the work of Christ to its source in the love of God—was apparently made good by his younger contemporary Abälard.

Christ’s whole work is for him a manifestation of love, and love does not need any explanation

Christ’s death reconciles us to God, because it is a demonstration of love which awakes in us an answer of love, and exactly in proportion as it does so justifies the sinful and annuls the punishment of their sins.

The death of Christ can only be regarded as a demonstration of love to sinners, if it can be defined or interpreted as having some necessary relation to their sins.

But no stress is laid on this, and Abälard may be said to represent subjective doctrines of atonement as fairly as Anselm to represent objective ones

But Abälard can treat Christ not as the necessary mediator of God’s grace to the sinful, but—as Augustine sometimes did—as merely an example or illustration of that grace.

he had not comprehended, as Anselm had, how much sin meant to God, nor what a problem it created for the Creator

It is strange to find this notion of redemption from the devil, who is regarded as having rights against men which cannot be overriden—a notion so emphatically rejected both by Abälard and Anselm—reappearing in the Lombard. He even puts it in an offensively aggravated form. The cross is a mouse trap, and the blood of Christ is the bait with which it is set to tempt the devil.1

Here good and being are identical, and we are once more in a world in which moral experience loses its meaning and real moral questions cannot be asked.

Thomas Aquinas absorbed into himself more completely than any mediæval theologian all the thoughts of his predecessors, and he kept his independence in relation to them; but though he was extraordinarily powerful, it is difficult to think of him as an original mind

But omnipotence, which is (so to speak) a natural attribute of God, is not so clear a conception that we can make use of it to bar questions about what is necessary or not necessary for God in the moral world.

In Thomas meritum has a different and a far larger place. Christ, he says, from the beginning of His conception merited eternal salvation for us.1 The ‘merit’ in the Passion is due to its not being imposed from without, but voluntarily endured (secundum quod eam aliquis voluntarie sustinet): in other words, accepted in the way of obedience to the will of God.

For example, Thomas writes that any one makes satisfaction for an offence, in the strict sense of the term, who renders to the offended person something his love for which is equal to or greater than his hatred of the offence.2

Thus he says that in the giving up of Christ to die there is shown both the severity of God, who would not let sin go unpunished (sine poena), and the goodness of God, who when man could not make a sufficient satisfaction by any penalty he might suffer, gave him One to make satisfaction for him.1 Similarly in another passage he writes: ‘It is an appropriate mode of making satisfaction for another, when one subjects himself to the penalty which another has deserved.’2

Instead of being an alternative to punishment, satisfaction was regarded as the endurance by one of the punishment due to another.

When a sufficient satisfaction has been rendered,’ he says, ‘liability to punishment is removed; but the satisfaction of Christ takes effect in us only in so far as we become one body with Him as members with their head. And the members ought to be conformed to the head.’1 Strictly speaking, this should mean that there must be a community of experiences between Christ and those who are redeemed by Him. His life and death are a life and death fulfilling moral demands which are binding upon them, and the experiences of love, obedience, humility, suffering, through which He merits salvation for them as for Himself must become theirs, in union with Him, if they are to have the benefit of His satisfaction. But even where this union is insisted on, there is the consciousness of a limit of some kind on both sides. After all, it is Christ who makes the satisfaction of which we avail ourselves in this way—Christ, not we; and there is something which,

This sentence shows vividly both how consciously the penitential system of the Church was being used to interpret the work of Christ, and what difficulties the interpretation encountered. Penitence consisted of three parts, contrition, confession, and satisfaction. It is the last alone which Thomas uses to interpret the Passion

Yet in ordinary human penitence it is the contrition and confession which give the satisfaction its value, and the ‘outward act,’ in which Thomas says satisfaction consists, must surely have some moral soul to give it worth to God

And it must again be noticed that if the atoning work of Christ is to be understood through this category, it must be a work of objective atonement. The satisfaction is meant for God, not for the sinner

The Reformation undoubtedly marks the greatest crisis in the history of Christianity, but it is difficult to tell exactly the difference it made to the central doctrine of the gospel.

became the attitude of God to sinners as exhibited in Christ

To a large extent it put its new wine into old bottles, and it was haunted by the sense of a radical inconsistency which it knew not how to overcome

A singular illustration of this is given in the second part of the Augsburg Confession, in which the first Protestants presented their conception of Christianity to Charles v. It begins with the words: ‘Inasmuch as the Churches among us’—that is, those which had followed Luther—‘dissent in no article of faith from the Catholic Church, but only omit some few abuses,’ etc.1 In a sense this was true, too true; but it ignores the main point that, for the evangelical Christian, faith is no longer a maker of ‘articles’; it is one whole and indivisible thing, the attitude of his sinful soul to God in Christ, his new life as a Christian. For better or worse, however, Protestantism took over from the earlier and inferior type of Christianity, under the heading of ‘articles of faith,’ certain doctrines or explanations of the Christian life and its presuppositions, and among other things it took over the doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction for human sin

The idea of satisfaction, too, was bound up with the penitential system of the mediæval Church, which more than anything roused the indignation of Luther as concealing, disguising, and corrupting the gospel.

Thus the fourth article of the Augsburg Confession teaches that men cannot be justified—obtain forgiveness of sins and righteousness—before God by their own powers, merits, or works; but are justified freely for Christ’s sake (propter Christum) through faith, when they believe that they are received into favour (in gratiam) and their sins forgiven for Christ’s sake, who by His death satisfied for our sins (propter Christum qui sua morte pro nostris peccatis satisfecit).

In quite similar words, and with the same religious interest in view, the Council of Trent (sess. vi. c. 7) declares

The satisfaction of which the theologians think is not the Anselmic one, which has no relation to punishment, nor that of the penitential system, which is only quasi-penal, but that of Roman law, which is identical with punishment. What

at comes more and more steadily into view is the idea that Christ made satisfaction for our sins, by bearing the penalty of them in our stead.

But in proportion as men rose above the conception of sin and satisfaction, as mere things or abstract ideas, and had their faith and attention concentrated on the personal Saviour by whom they were reconciled to God, this position became intolerable.

The life was the active obedience and the death the passive obedience, and though they were alike in respect that both were obedience, each fulfilled its separate and independent function.

Thus the Westminster Confession, in c. xi., repeatedly distinguishes in this way the ‘obedience and satisfaction’ of Christ, or His ‘obedience and death,’ the satisfaction or death being the ground on which we are cleared from sin, while the obedience constitutes a righteousness of Christ which is imputed to believers

The utmost refinements or discriminations in this mode of thought were probably to be found in the Puritan theologians of America. ‘

is the same fundamental strain of thought which is represented when the Council of Trent says: ‘nobis justificationem meruit’—He earned grace for us.4

was early alleged that this doctrine of justification and reconciliation, in many essential points a doctrine common to the Roman and the Reformation Church, contained an insoluble contradiction. This contradiction can be put in various ways, but principally it was put in these three.

Calvin formally raises the question how it is consistent to say that God, who comes to meet us with His mercy, is our enemy until He is reconciled to us through Christ

It is a remarkable fact that in wrestling with this problem Calvin falls back on Augustine’s idea that Christ Himself is the most shining illustration of free grace. It

was not by merits either of faith or works that He attained the dignity of Saviour. On the contrary, the grace by which any man, from the beginning of his faith, is made a Christian is the very same grace by which this man, from His beginning, is made the Christ.1

It had its motive in the feeling that the doctrine of reconciliation had become, so to speak, too objective; it was being regarded too exclusively as the doctrine of a work of Christ which had value for God, but which had no security for taking effect in man.

It even became a point of orthodoxy to distinguish sharply between justification, or the righteousness of Christ imputed to faith, and sanctification, or the new character wrought in the justified by the Holy Spirit. It was in the former alone that the sinner had standing in the sight of God; the latter was rather the moral vindication of the gospel than an essential element in it. The former, justification, had the completeness of the work of Christ; the latter, sanctification, had the imperfection of everything in which man is participant. But though imperfect it was real, and a sound instinct taught men, in spite of orthodoxy, that it is much more important that justification and sanctification should be inseparable, than that they should be distinguished

The earliest protest in this sense was made by the Reformation theologian Osiander. He taught justification by faith, but interpreted it ‘mystically,’ not legally. It did not consist in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, but in the essential indwelling of God in the soul, mediated through faith. His favourite text was Jer. 23:6, ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’

There really must be … in every one who is justified, some such token or substance of his justification’;2 there must be something real and not merely imputed. So again, if we except the first clause, it is quite in the line of Osiander when Newman writes:3 ‘Justification comes through the sacraments; is received by faith; consists in God’s inward presence, and lives in obedience.’

A finished work of Christ, outside of us, and not directly related to a new life—a justification not organically related to sanctification—was undoubtedly a moral peril.

Romanists might pretend to guard against it by the doctrine that justification comes through the sacraments—initially through baptism, and afterwards through penance—conferring as they do grace ex opere operato; and predestinarians, Calvinist or other, might evade all such difficulties by teaching that the work of Christ avails for the elect alone, and takes effect in them as an irresistible grace, by which all God’s ends are infallibly secured; but those to whom sacramental grace and predestination are not solutions of any problem, but counsels of moral and intellectual despair, are undoubtedly in a difficulty. They must admit that a doctrine of Christ’s work is wanted in which the new life is not an addendum, or a casual consequence merely, but the end which that work has in view from the beginning, and which it is divinely adapted to secure.

To use words which are useful, though apt to be misunderstood: the work of reconciliation must have justice done to its subjective as well as its objective reference; the doctrine must recognise its ultimate effect in man as well as its value for God.

Somehow or other, it had lost contact with experience. Its purpose was to explain how men are reconciled to God, to give an intelligible rationale of the process; but reconciled men failed to find in it a convincing reflection of the manner in which the reconciling power of God in Christ had taken effect in their souls.

There was too much apparatus in it, and too little personality.

Unconsciously, faith in a person was being displaced in favour of faith in articles.

The gospel was intellectualised, not only in the good sense that saved men applied their minds to it, as they had proved it in experience, but in the bad sense that it was presented in a form which might or might not satisfy the wise and prudent, but was certainly of no use to babes. It is this criticism by life which really discredits imperfect doctrines, and it can hardly be questioned that under it the traditional doctrine of reconciliation suffered severely.

Grotius points out the inapplicability to God of the categories so frequent in Socinus—pars offensa, creditor, dominus, etc. Neither, however, as on the orthodox theory of penal satisfaction, is God a judge, formally administering criminal law. He is not Judex, but Rector or Ruler, and when we think of Him in this character our conception of what we call punishment changes.

What God does as ruler, in the case of Christ’s satisfaction, is to grant a dispensation from the penal law on a condition which secures that the common interest shall not be prejudiced.

Looked at strictly, we cannot say that Christ’s sufferings are determined by the actual sins of men; they have no proper relation to anything men have actually done; they have in view rather possible and prospective sins, and their purpose is by arresting these to give God’s love room to operate

But what it is Christ suffers, or what it is in His sufferings which gives Him this virtue, Grotius does not tell.

But what it is Christ suffers, or what it is in His sufferings which gives Him this virtue, Grotius does not tell.

Notwithstanding these inconsistencies and drawbacks, the short treatise of Grotius had enormous influence. It introduced a new conception of God, which, whether or not it was adequate to the Christian truth, acted as a powerful stimulus to thought

With the disintegration of the satisfaction theory, the natural tendency was to regard forgiveness as easy and cheap.

Kant, with his austere morality, taught the presence in man of a radical evil, an intimate and constitutional badness, which in itself presents us with an insoluble problem.1

He reduced the satisfaction of Christ to the idea that always the new man must bear the sins of the old; when the bad man becomes good, it is by accepting the punishment of his iniquities, and as a new creature expiating through sorrow and suffering the sins of his past.

Kant’s younger contemporary Goethe stood at the opposite pole

Just in proportion as men felt the enormous power of the evil which was in them to disable and defeat them morally, they were prepared to listen to a gospel which met this evil not with a mere proclamation of pardon, but with a demonstration of redeeming love definitely related to the evil itself. Granting that the doctrine of satisfaction did not do justice to what God had done in Christ to annul sin and reconcile men to Himself, it at least recognised that to do something was necessary; it busied itself with the real problem, and men always hovered round it anew.1

They are all conscious of Jesus as well as of the Christ, and conscious that, whatever the work of the Christ may be, it must arise naturally out of the life of Jesus

He is not conceived as here to carry out any plan of salvation, but He is the Saviour by being what He is, doing what He does, and suffering what He suffers, as the relations in which He finds Himself require. There is nothing artificial in the work of the Saviour; it is ethical in its inspiration and its achievement from beginning to end.

It is ethical also in the mode of its appropriation

We are conscious, he says, of all approximations to blessedness which occur in the Christian life, as being based on a new and divinely affected common life (Gesammtleben) which counteracts the common life of sin and the misery developed there.1 It is this continuity with a collective and therefore objective Christianity which secures its historical, ethical, non-fanatical, non-magical character in the individual

But by mystical he only means that the truth of Christianity cannot be realised except through Christian experience; it cannot be antecedently demonstrated, on purely rational grounds, with a view to experience. Sacramentalism is not mystical but magical.

The main thing here is that Christ enters sympathetically, as His relation to man required Him to do, into the whole state and responsibilities of His sinful brethren, making their burden His own, as far as it was possible for love to do so; and this is undoubtedly a great thing whatever we may think of the description of it as vicarious repentance or vicarious confession. Something akin to it had been expressed long before by Jonathan Edwards the elder, a writer to whom McLeod Campbell owes much, as indeed we often owe much to those to whom we are most opposed.

In earlier theologians the idea that Christ was man’s substitute or representative in the work of making atonement had too much lost its connection with love: it had become part of the plan of salvation, and its ethical character was impaired. But now, as Bushnell is fond of expressing it, vicariousness is seen to be only another name for love; under the influence of love men make the case of others their own; and even if we speak of Christ as our substitute, it is because love has impelled Him to make our situation His.

His identification of Himself with us must have as its aim and issue an identification on our part of ourselves with Him. The vocabulary of imputation, if not displaced by that of identification, is interpreted through it.

There may be a tendency to ignore limits and distinctions, but there is a genuine desire to secure a true and real union between Christ and those who are His

His work is to save men from their sins, not to save them from the experience of being saved, which only comes in proportion as they become one with Him. If He is not really changing us into His own likeness, and enabling us to enter into the experiences in which sin involved Him, He is not reconciling us to God, and our sins are not forgiven. This is maintained even while it is maintained at the same time that Christ does something for us which we could never have done for ourselves, and enables us to do in union with Himself what we could never do alone; and if our union with Him is His work, His position as Saviour is unimpaired.

But now the personality of Jesus—the personal, which is also the ethical, character of all He does or suffers in relation to sin—the personal quality of the response made to Him and His work, the response of an indivisible faith in which we identify ourselves with Him, as He has identified Himself with us—all come out in a new relief. One advantage of this is that categories of quantity, which have no meaning where personality is concerned, are quite inapplicable to the work of Christ

There is a reconciling power of Christ in it to which no tormented conscience can be insensible. The originality of it is spiritual as well as intellectual, and no one who has ever felt its power will cease to put it in a class by itself. In speculative power he cannot be compared to Schleiermacher, nor in historical learning to Ritschl, and sometimes he writes as badly as either; but he walks in the light all the time, and everything he touches lives.

one of ‘satisfaction’—come from elsewhere.

We cannot, of course, simply borrow it to save ourselves the trouble of thinking; it is inconsistent with the nature of intelligence simply to borrow anything. But we may admit that it is entitled to the most serious consideration; and if our own interpretation of what we call the experience of reconciliation is inconsistent with it, we must feel that the question then raised is whether our interpretation is entitled to be called, in any properly historical sense, Christian.

A natural question to many in this connection is, Why limit to the New Testament the reference to Scripture?

The apostles, it may be said, read the Old Testament as a Christian book, and we do not get into their minds till we can do the same

and though the apostles may use Old Testament ideas—sacrifice, redemption, propitiation, and such like—to interpret Christ to themselves, these ideas are all involuntarily modified by their application to Him

It is quite fair to say that we do not see Jesus truly unless we see Him in the perspective of the Old Testament, but it is quite fair also to say that we do not see the Old Testament truly unless we see it in the perspective of Jesus. To study reconciliation in the Old Testament, with our eyes closed to Him, would be to study it in vain.

The propriety of this course is more evident if we observe that the New Testament is intensely conscious not only of its continuity with the Old, but of the fact that it transcends the Old

the New Testament does what the Old failed to do; it brings us to victory where the Old only led us to defeat

The New Testament gospel is related to human nature as well as to Jewish history, and much of it can probably be understood without a special historical training. Where this latter is indispensable as the key to peculiarities in the original construction and presentation of the gospel, we can consider as occasion requires.

On general grounds we can only hold that when the key to New Testament doctrines is sought anywhere rather than in the Old Testament, the presumption is that the search is misdirected. The sounder view historically is that nothing has a right to a place in the New Testament which has not antecedents and affinities in the Old.

Is the New Testament itself a unity? Does it, to apply the question to our special subject, contain one doctrine of reconciliation, and no other? Does every part of it contain such a doctrine? There was a time, not so very remote, when these questions would not have been asked

In the one, Jesus is the ideal subject of religion, the pattern believer, who shows men through all the vicissitudes, temptations, wrongs, and agonies of life, and even in death itself, how to trust the Father and to love His children; in the other, Jesus is, in the first instance, not the pattern but the object of faith; we believe in Him as Lord and Saviour, as the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sin of the whole world. He does not merely announce, by His life and death He achieves, the reconciliation of men to God.

That there are relative contrasts within the New Testament is not denied, but there are no absolute ones—that is, there are none such as would justify us in speaking of two gospels. It is more natural, for example, that our Lord should magnify the freeness of God’s love to the sinful, and more natural that the sinners to whom it came should magnify its cost, as coming through Him and through His Passion; and this, in fact, is what we find. But though there is a contrast between freeness and cost, there is no antagonism, and neither is there any antagonism between the gospel of Jesus and that of Paul, or Peter, or John.

How can the historical and human be eternal and divine? The New Testament, curiously enough, is aware of the contrasts here stated, but does not seem perplexed by them.

That a judicial murder, attended by many circumstances of squalor and horror, should also be the final sacrifice for the sin of the world, was strange indeed; but it was the Lord’s doing, and wonderful in believers’ eyes. No doubt the apostles were aware that in all its inner reality, in everything in it in which Christ was revealed, the passion was divine

In the New Testament presentation of the gospel the final cause of Christ’s death—what God does in it—completely overshadows the antecedent or historical causes by which it was produced, and here it is the New Testament point of view which must determine our course.1

At the same time, while we recognise that the historical in the New Testament is eternal and divine, we must not allow ourselves to suppose that when we have apprehended the eternal and divine we can become indifferent to the historical and let it go. The whole power of Christianity is in its historical character, and to replace its sublime and tragic facts by a system of ideas, however true and imposing, is to destroy it altogether.

We may say that the reconciling virtue of His being was concentrated in His death, or that the reconciling virtue of His death pervaded His being; in any case, that the whole influence exerted upon sinners by Jesus is an influence by which, through penitence and faith, they are won from sin to God—in other words, is a reconciling influence—cannot be denied. How He exercised such an influence, and what it cost Him to do so, are ulterior questions.

But to emphasise the freeness of forgiveness is not to deny that it has other characteristics. It is not unconditional. God does not forgive the impenitent, who do not wish nor ask to be forgiven. He cannot do so, for forgiveness, like all spiritual things, cannot be given unless it is taken, and it can only be taken by a penitent and surrendered soul. Neither, as has been observed above, is the freeness of forgiveness inconsistent with its cost. Those to whom the assurance of forgiveness came through Jesus were not unconscious that it cost Him something

But to emphasise the freeness of forgiveness is not to deny that it has other characteristics. It is not unconditional. God does not forgive the impenitent, who do not wish nor ask to be forgiven. He cannot do so, for forgiveness, like all spiritual things, cannot be given unless it is taken, and it can only be taken by a penitent and surrendered soul. Neither, as has been observed above, is the freeness of forgiveness inconsistent with its cost. Those to whom the assurance of forgiveness came through Jesus were not unconscious that it cost Him something

Such a thing as forgiveness is actually known among men, and it throws real light upon the forgiveness of God

To do wrong is to do what cannot be made right; it is to impair relations of trust and love which can never be the same again; its only end is despair. This is what we are apt to think and to feel, but the fact that we forgive each other is a practical refutation of this desponding logic

all these show that there is something in the world higher than the formal obligations we owe to each other—higher, it may be said, than law or wrong—something which comes into the field to deal with emergencies to which law is unequal, and which deals with them effectively. And

When we see the children forgiving one another their trespasses, we can look up securely and say, ‘There is forgiveness with Thee.

It is the duty of the offended person, of him who is in the right, to pave the way for reconciliation. He is not, because he is in the right, to wait passively and nurse his grievance till the offender comes and confesses that he is in the wrong. ‘If thy brother trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault; if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother’ (Matt. 18:15 f.).

But He never requires anything that He does not exhibit, and that seeking love, which takes the initiative and is willing to spend and to be spent to the uttermost in the work of reconciliation, is the breath of His being. Of course it was not for Him to say this, but it was for sinners to see and to feel it.

It is the plain truth that every one who knows, even in human relations, what it is to forgive or to be forgiven, knows also that it is the most costly and tragic of all experiences. Hence

It became Him, who came to seek and to save that which was lost, and to take the initiative in the work of reconciliation, even at the cost of His own life, not indeed to parade His sacrifice, but in moving and mysterious words like these, on solemn occasions, to reveal or betray its presence in His soul. The fact and its repression and its manifestation are all in moral harmony with each other.

who forgives another, is or ought to be the most powerful of all motives in the life of the forgiven

There is no such thing known to human experience as a dead, inert, fruitless forgiveness

we who are evil forgive with a forgiveness which regenerates—if the reconciliation with which we reconcile our offending brother makes him a new creature, with a new sense of loyalty to the relations in which we stand to each other—much more will the forgiveness of God bring with it the promise and potency of a new life

True forgiveness regenerates. Justification is the power which sanctifies. This truth, which we can verify in our forgiveness of one another daily, is the ultimate and fundamental truth of the gospel.

The vocation of Jesus is represented in the gospels in two ways. On the one hand, He came to reveal the Father, and by doing so to enable men to become children of God. In this relation He is spoken of simpliciter as the Son, to whom alone all others must owe it that they have the knowledge of the Father and a place among the children (Matt. 11:27 ff.). On the other hand, He came to bring in the Kingdom of God and to secure for men their citizenship in this divine commonwealth. In this relation He is spoken of as the Son of Man

with the suffering servant of the Lord depicted in Isaiah 42, 49, 53.

The heavenly voice speaks to Him in the words not only of Ps. 2:7, but of Isaiah 42:1; showing that from the very hour when He entered on His work as Saviour He was identified in His own mind with the suffering servant, and realised that in His calling to bring in the Kingdom of God a career like that of the servant was inevitable

He should not have used the word new Himself. And if the word were used, or the idea of a new covenant suggested at all, it is inconceivable that any mind, nourished as was His on the Old Testament scriptures, should have failed to recall that sublimest of ancient prophecies in which Jeremiah describes the new covenant as it dawned on his horizon, with its primary and fundamental blessing of the forgiveness of sins (Jer. 31:31–34).

Certainly we have no formal theology here, nothing abstract or speculative; but we have the consciousness, on the part of Jesus—the recognition, it may be said, in His words—of all the realities which present evangelical theology with its task. The problem of a doctrine of reconciliation has been set.

When we pass beyond the words of Jesus, the great preacher of reconciliation is Paul. The term owes its currency in the Church to him. It is he who describes what it is to be a Christian in the words, ‘we have received the reconciliation’ (Rom. 5:11). It is he who says, ‘All things are of God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.’ The apostolic ministry is for him ‘the ministry of reconciliation’; the apostolic gospel is ‘the word of reconciliation’; its appeal is condensed in the cry, ‘Be reconciled to God’ (2 Cor. 5:18–20).

The revelation of God’s righteousness—which is the method of reconciliation—is necessitated by the revelation of His wrath; we require the gospel because apart from it this is what awaits us. It ought to be noticed that both the righteousness of God which constitutes the gospel, and the wrath of God to which men are exposed apart from the gospel, are spoken of as revelations. God is behind both and present in both. Both have a divine reality and objectivity. It is because the wrath of God is divinely real that those who are exposed to it need to have a real divine righteousness; while the divine righteousness must have such a character as to meet the situation created by the divine wrath. The bare statement of these facts at once raises the problem of Pauline and indeed of all New Testament theology.

When God for man’s salvation reveals a divine righteousness which somehow confronts and neutralises a divine wrath, we can only conceive it as God taking part with us against Himself.

It is tempting when we preach the gospel to try to classify and simplify it so that every appearance even of contradiction shall disappear. But there is a real danger that in doing so we lose contact with the facts from which Paul started, and which have at least the semblance of contradiction; and when we lose contact with the facts we lose the power to evangelise

Nothing is commoner than the denial that the revelation of divine wrath is real. The wrath of God, it is constantly asserted, is an idea which is ultimately inconsistent with the Christian conception of God as a loving father.

Sin, against which it is supposed to be the divine reaction, has no such reality for God as this terrible word implies. It does not create a problem for Him the solution of which is costly and awful. The wrath of God, in short, is not a revelation but a bugbear.

that is, it comes into human experience as a divine reality about which he, at least, has no uncertainty.

It is revealed, as he explains in the first chapter of Romans, in the appalling spectacles of moral degradation which the world presents, and in which we see human sin, under the retributive judgment of God, exerting the most tremendous sentences upon itself. Three times over, in vv. 24, 26, 28, he says παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ Θεός—God gave them up, judicially abandoned them. He gave them up to uncleanness, to shameful passions, to a reprobate mind, meaning by the last a state of intelligence and conscience in which man’s moral nature could only be rejected by Him because it no longer did the work it was meant for, but had been perverted against itself and its Author

We may take too easily to the conception of natural law in the spiritual world, or, in a case like this, to that of inevitable moral consequences. Sinful nature inclines unconsciously to everything which keeps God at arm’s length

There is nothing good in the world but a good will, and nothing bad but a bad will; there is nothing moral at all except by the exercise of will. Moral consequences are consequences determined by a moral will, whatever the means employed to work them out, and we cannot hide from the will of God behind the very means which He is employing to express His will

the moral world is the very sphere and scene of God’s working. The appalling fact with which we have to deal is that God has delivered men up to the awful degradation which we see, and in doing so has made a revelation of His wrath.

This is not mythology, nor pseudo-science; it is the testimony of conscience that all sin, and all who identify themselves with sin, must confront the annihilating judgment of God

It is mainly, if not always, in this eschatological sense that the wrath of God is spoken of in Paul.1 It is the wrath to come. Jesus is our deliverer from the coming wrath (1 Thess. 1:10). We shall be saved from the wrath through Him (Rom. 5:9). And we must not say that this eschatological wrath is unreal, a picture painted on the clouds by an overheated imagination

This, though he gives no formal definition of sin, is the premiss of Paul’s gospel of reconciliation.

But his notion of sin is far more deeply tinctured by experience than the bare idea of universality suggests. Its universality is not more present to him than its virulence. This last is what is specially conveyed by his peculiar use of the term ‘flesh.’ He speaks of the flesh as flesh of sin (Rom. 8:8): the two are or have become so related that the flesh is conceived as characterised by or belonging to sin.

What the flesh stands for with him is not in the first instance the universality of sin, though that is included; it is its virulence, its ingrained, deep-seated, constitutional character

it would be a deep-seated congenital malady, against which the constitution had no resources within itself, and which could only have a fatal end

All the passion of which his nature is capable comes out when he speaks of the flesh—a passionate loathing and repulsion, a passionate sense of bondage, a passion of ignominy and despair. He did not learn these things nor how to speak of them from any one, either in the Old Testament or in the philosophic world: he learned them within. ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?’ ‘I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.

All the passion of which his nature is capable comes out when he speaks of the flesh—a passionate loathing and repulsion, a passionate sense of bondage, a passion of ignominy and despair. He did not learn these things nor how to speak of them from any one, either in the Old Testament or in the philosophic world: he learned them within. ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?’ ‘I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.’

The flesh’ may have a physical basis or relation, but it exists for Paul only in his moral consciousness. It does not occur to him that when sin is thus closely connected with nature it loses the proper character of sinfulness; its sinfulness is assumed all along, and the sense of its close connection with nature does not make it less sinful but more dreadful and hopeless

We are all responsible for ourselves, and when Paul uses the word flesh in this connection, it is not to deny or to minimise our responsibility, but to make us feel how deep, all-pervading and desperate it is. The reality of sin and the reality of our responsibility for it, as that which evokes the condemnation and wrath of God and leaves us exposed to them, ‘condemned and unsheltered men,’ is the presupposition of Paul’s gospel of reconciliation. The gospel does not deny these terrible realities; it confronts them and deals with them as what they are

At the present moment, the most current way of interpreting the divine righteousness is that which regards it as the righteousness of God Himself, His essential nature or character. Men are bankrupt of righteousness, they have none of their own, but the universe is not bankrupt. There is righteousness with God, inexhaustible and overflowing, and this is the sinner’s hope

There is none good but one, that is, God, and for all goodness all men are always indebted to Him.

Paul was dealing with a moral problem, with the position of sinners against whom there had been and was a revelation of wrath, and the problem cannot be stated, to say nothing of being solved, as long as we confine ourselves to the use of physical categories such as those implied in the illustrations of the sun and the spring. Neither do we come closer to his thought when we speak of the δικαιοσύνη Θεῖν as the righteousness of God, ‘not as inherent in the Divine Essence, but as going forth and embracing the personalities of men. It is righteousness active and energising; the righteousness of the Divine Will as it were projected and enclosing and gathering into itself human wills.

It is remarkable that such explanations of the righteousness of God can be given quite fully without introducing the name of Jesus. Room may be made for Him, no doubt, in the system of ideas which they exhibit; but at the utmost He is a shining illustration of the nature of the divine righteousness—it is in no way dependent on Him. But this is not the point of view of Paul. In Paul the divine righteousness which constitutes gospel for sinners exposed to the divine wrath is revealed in Christ, and nowhere else.

And Christ Jesus in this particular connection is the Son of God whom God has set forth as a propitiation, through faith, in His blood. The decisive word in this passage is propitiation—ἱλαστήριον—and without entering at this point further into the detail of interpretation, it will be admitted that it is only because Jesus Christ has the character or power of being a propitiation that there is revealed in Him a divine righteousness the revelation of which is gospel for sinners. Hence to comprehend ἱλαστήριον or propitiation as he comprehended it, is to have the only key to his gospel.

Following the example of St. Paul and St. John and the Epistle to the Hebrews, we speak of something in this great sacrifice, which we call “Propitiation.” We believe that the Holy Spirit spoke through these writers, and that it was His will that we should use this word. But it is a word which we must leave it to Him to interpret

Sufficient for us to know that through the virtue of the One Sacrifice our sacrifices are accepted, that the barrier which sin places between God and us is removed, and that there is a “sprinkling” which makes us free to approach the throne of grace.’1

It seems a fair inference from this that the conditions for understanding the vital idea of propitiation are to be sought, not in any peculiarities of Jewish or of pagan history, but in the human conscience which is common to both. If we have not the key to it in ourselves, no learning will put it into our hearts.

It seems

According to Paul, it is God who sets forth Christ as a propitiation, and as the propitiation in any case deals with sin for its removal, the setting forth of it is on God’s part an act of grace. It is a manifestation of God in the character of a sin-forgiving God.

Salvation meant Christ; it meant Christ crucified, Christ the propitiation; and though they knew and declared that this Christ was the gift of God’s love, it would never have occurred to them that God would have done Himself injustice—still less, that He would have done them injustice—unless He had so sent Christ. This is a theorem which they nowhere state, which they do not argue, and which it is permissible to think would have repelled rather than attracted them

To put it in a word, it is that in Christ as ἱλαστήριον justice is done not only to the grace of God but to His wrath—to that solemn reaction of God against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men from which the apostle sets out in the exposition of his gospel (Rom. 1:18).

Paul is not preaching to men, but to sinners, to men who know what a bad conscience is, and who have a witness within them from which there is no appeal that the wages of sin is death. They have never analysed death, and have no interest in the ingenious distinctions which present it as temporal, spiritual, or eternal; to conscience it is one and indivisible, and whatever else it may be, it is God’s annihilating sentence on sin

There is a tragic reality in redemption, not inferior to, but rather identical with, the tragic reality of sin; and apart from this Christ would not have the character of a ἱλαστήριον.

it has come in One who has realised to the uttermost in His own person all that sin meant, One who has drunk the cup our sins had mingled, One who has felt all the waves and billows break over Him in which God’s reaction against sin comes home to us sinners. This is of the very essence of the ἱλαστήριον as Paul understands it. It bears witness, of course, to the goodness of God, for it is God who provides it, out of pure love, and it is the way of salvation; but it bears witness also to His severity, to His inexorable repulsion of evil, to a righteousness on which no shadow of moral unreality must ever fall

Thus it has sometimes seemed necessary to define righteousness—in the sense in which it is ascribed to God, when He is said to be ‘righteous Himself’ (Rom. 3:26)—as retributive or distributive; and it has been argued that in virtue of it every sin must be punished, and that in the atonement the sum of all these punishments is laid on Christ, so that sinners may escape them. But all this is unreal. Quantitative categories are meaningless in the moral world. To say that the sin of the world in all its tragic reality was borne by Christ on His cross, so that He is a propitiation for that sin, is one thing; to say that the penalties due to all men’s offences were summed up and inflicted on Him, is another and an entirely different thing. He

No doubt for him the propitiation was sacrificial; when he thought of Christ as set forth by God in His blood, he thought of Him as a sacrifice in which atonement was made for sins. But this is precisely one of the points at which it is easy to go astray

It was prescribed in the law, and obedience to the law was a matter of conscience; but while in some vague sense all sacrifices, and not merely the sin or trespass offerings of the Old Testament, were probably regarded as having propitiatory power, there was no doctrine of the nature of sacrifice, or of the way in which it took effect.1

No doubt this propitiation has value also for men, and is intended to appeal to them, but what it does in the first instance is to meet divine necessities, the realities of the moral world as they exist in the order of God. If it did not meet these necessities, then forgiveness as the gospel knows and proclaims it could never come to men. God forgives our sins through Him who died for them.

This is the real basis in the New Testament for such a formula as that Christ by the sacrifice of Himself for sin satisfied divine justice

This is the real basis in the New Testament for such a formula as that Christ by the sacrifice of Himself for sin satisfied divine justice

In other words, it is divinely necessary—necessary not only with a view to impressing men, but necessary in order that God may be true to Himself and to the moral order He has established in the world—that sin, in the very process in which it is forgiven, should also, in all its reality, be borne. This is what is done by Christ in His blood. He enters into our lot as sinful men. In the unfathomable words of the apostle elsewhere, He is made sin for us. No element of the tremendous reality of sin, as that reality is determined in the divine order, is ignored or evaded by Him. On the contrary, sin is exhausted in His experience on the cross; the cup is not tasted but drained

But in itself, the propitiation is the recognition of what sin is to God, in all its solemn reality; it is the acceptance of the facts of the case, as they are in the truth of God. It is the manifestation of the ultimate truth about forgiveness: namely, that sin is only forgiven as it is borne

But in itself, the propitiation is the recognition of what sin is to God, in all its solemn reality; it is the acceptance of the facts of the case, as they are in the truth of God. It is the manifestation of the ultimate truth about forgiveness: namely, that sin is only forgiven as it is borne.

it is the voice of God, no less than that of the sinner, which says, ‘Thou, O Christ, art all I want; more than all in Thee I find.’ And this is our hope towards God. It is not that the love of God has inspired us to repent, but that Christ in the love of God has borne our sins.

But what is faith? There is nowhere any definition of it in Paul, and it is idle to look for its meaning in the lexicon

What he sees there is the astounding truth that the last reality in the world is not, as he might have feared, sin, condemnation, estrangement, death, but a love which bears sin, taking it in all its dreadful reality upon itself, and, out of the very passion in which it does so, appealing to him. How is he to respond to this appeal? Paul has no difficulty in answering: he must respond by faith. He must trust himself to such love instantly, unreservedly, for ever. He cannot negotiate with God about it. He cannot suggest that perhaps upon reconsideration something else might be found which would suit all parties better than sin-bearing love on the one side and the unconditional acceptance of it and surrender to it on the other.

The only right thing to do is to trust it, to let go, to abandon ourselves to it, keeping nothing back. This is what Paul means by faith. And it is the whole of religion on the inner side, just as Christ the propitiation, or the sin-bearing love of God, is the whole of religion on the outer side—the whole, at all events, of the gospel, that is, of Christianity as the religion of redemption from sin. When a man believes in this sense, he does the only thing which it is right to do in the presence of Christ, and it puts him right with God. It really puts him right. There is nothing imaginary or fictitious about it

Similarly the distinction of imputed and infused righteousness is unreal. The man who believes in Christ the propitiation—who stakes his whole being on sin-bearing love as the last reality in the universe—is not fictitiously regarded as right with God; he actually is right with God, and God treats him as such. He is in the right attitude to God the Redeemer, the attitude which has the promise and potency of all rightness or righteousness in it, and it only introduces intellectual and moral confusion to make artificial distinctions at this point

It was in His character of propitiation, the embodiment of sin-bearing love, that Christ appealed to Paul; and it was in that character, and no other, that His attraction was so irresistible, that Paul in the response of faith lost himself in His Lord

We must not eke out faith by works or love, any more than we must make good the deficiencies of the objective Christ by stray thoughts on the Spirit or the sacraments. Faith is the appropriation of Christ, and apart from Christ and faith, not only works and love, but sacraments and Spirit, are words without meaning

In experience, the Spirit is indistinguishable from the assurance that God is sin-bearing love; and to have that assurance in overpowering strength—as the apostle had it through faith in Christ—is to be full of the Holy Spirit. This again, it may be said, is everything in Christianity.

It is not Jewish law, in the legal or statutory sense, to which justice is done in the propitiation, though Paul would no doubt have admitted that the propitiation had its due application there; it is law in the large sense of the ethical necessities which determine all the relations of God and man.

It would be an imperfect view of the Pauline doctrine of reconciliation which did not emphasise its absoluteness or finality

Faith and the Spirit are correlative terms. The Spirit describes the Christian life as divinely determined, or as the gift of God; faith describes the very same life as humanly conditioned, a life which from first to last is one of trust in Christ. It is idle to try to separate these two from each other. There is no Christian experience whatever of which it cannot be said in the same instant that it is the Spirit of God and the faith of man. But this life at once divine and human is not yet consummated, nay, it is not lifted above all risks and uncertainties. We are saved in hope.

But Peter emphasises, as Paul does not, the example of Christ in His sufferings, and especially the power with which the innocence and meekness of the great Sufferer ought to appeal to wronged and suffering men. ‘He did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth. When He was reviled He reviled not again; when He suffered He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously’ (2:22 f.). ‘It is better if the will of God so will, that you should suffer in well-doing than in evil-doing’: it was so Christ suffered (3:17 f.). The idea here is that in the sufferings of the innocent Saviour there is something which has power to reconcile believers to the hardships and injustices of their lot

The gospel is the final form of religion, for the God who is worshipped in it is the God of peace, who brought again from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep, in the blood of an eternal covenant (13:20). This is the heart of the epistle, and in all this the author and Paul are thoroughly at one

He comes as close to us as He can possibly come. He becomes a partaker of flesh and blood, because flesh and blood mean so much to us (2:14). He not only enters into our nature, He enters into our experience. He suffers what we suffer, and because we suffer. He is tempted in all things like as we are, yet without sin. His suffering is a discipline by which He is perfectly fitted for His calling to be a merciful and faithful high priest, a true captain of salvation. Even His death is presented in this sequence of thought

He learned obedience—that is, He learned what obedience is, and what the life is which the children of God have to live—through the things which He suffered. And all these things which add to His experience, and bring Him nearer to us, and perfect him in sympathy whether to deal for us with God or for God with us, add to His attractiveness and charm. The more we realise how He has identified Himself with us, the more we feel drawn to identify ourselves with Him

The sympathy of Jesus is not something which displaces His death as a propitiation for sin; it is something which qualifies Him to bear sin in a way which is well pleasing to God and appeals with peculiar power to man. Christ does not cease to be a sacrifice for sin, because He is a perfectly sympathetic high priest. He offers Himself without spot to God. The way He opens for us into the holiest of all is through His flesh. The new and final covenant, with its fundamental blessing of forgiveness, is a covenant in His blood.

There is not, apart from this, a revelation of what God is which carries with it redeeming power; on the contrary, it is in the propitiation, and there only, that we have the revelation of redeeming love. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son a propitiation for our sins (4:10).

Both see in Christ the propitiation—and nowhere else—the truth that God is love. The meaning of that truth is discovered in the propitiation—and nowhere else. Alike to Paul and to John it signified the conviction that the ultimate reality in this world of sinful men was not after all sin, law, judgment, death, or hell, but a goodness in God which bears sin in all the dreadful reality it has for men, and in so doing wins them to trust it, delivers them from sin, reconciles them to itself, and makes them partakers in a divine and eternal life.

It is when men are not right with God that they are most apt to fall out with each other, and in coming into right relations to God they discover that they are at one, in all that is deepest in their nature and their interests, with multitudes of whom they had been ignorant or from whom they had been estranged by prejudice and suspicion. The apostle regards this as an important truth.

Reconciliation to God is not realised unless it includes reconciliation to the order of God’s providence, and to the circumstances of our life as fixed for us by Him. We are not really reconciled to Him if we are at war with the conditions of human existence, and lead a resentful, querulous, or despondent life. True reconciliation confronts the world in another mood. It can say, ‘I have learned in whatever state I am therein to be content.’ It can say, ‘We glory in tribulations also.’ It can look the most painful things in the face—tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword—and cry, ‘In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.’ It is of the utmost importance to keep this in mind when we think of the life of the justified or reconciled.

Not only is God a new God, the world is a new world to the reconciled sinner; he is not at war with the conditions of life—at least he is not at a spiritless, angry, discontented war with them. He knows that if God is for him, no one can be against him, and that his very badge as a Christian is that he can overcome the world, combining, as Paul so characteristically combined, much affliction with joy in the Holy Ghost. His faith in providence is an inference from his experience of reconciliation. ‘He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?’

But looking at the actual life and death of Jesus as the proper definition of the term incarnation—the sum of reality apart from which incarnation is an empty sound—he would have no difficulty in saying that the incarnation and the atonement, or the incarnation and the work of reconciling man to God, were all one.

The traditional dogmatic conception of the incarnation, with which the idea of an incarnation independent of sin, and designed to consummate creation, is usually connected, does not lift us into a region of eternal or ideal truth; it does not enlighten our minds in the knowledge of Christ; it only lifts us out of the region of historical and moral reality. We have the practical interest of Christianity as well as the broad sense of the New Testament with us when we stand by the view that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

Every one who is familiar with systems of philosophy or theology must have been struck with the fact that there is no such thing in them as in other departments of thought would be called proof

The system as a whole is taken for granted, and the only proof offered for any part is that it is consistent with the whole, and becomes intelligible in the light of it.

It is unreal to say, ‘God is love, and from the conception of love as such we shall deduce the idea and the necessity of reconciliation,’ when it is to the fact and experience of reconciliation, not deductions but data, that we owe the very idea that God is love.

It is not arbitrary if we say that the essential questions connected with the doctrine of reconciliation will come before us if we consider in succession the need and the possibility of reconciliation; the work of reconciliation as achieved by Christ; and the purpose and fruits of reconciliation as exhibited in the life of the reconciled. The subject of this chapter is the first of these—the need and the possibility of reconciliation.

It implies also that God is man’s chief good, so that when we are in the right relation to Him we enjoy the life which is life indeed (ἡ ὄντως ζωή: 1 Tim. 6:19), whereas if we are estranged from Him we have only an unhappy death in life.

This is not the nature of the family of God, in which law pervades all the relations of the Father and the children, though not in statutory or legal forms. The family exists in a world of universal moral necessities, and by these all the relations of its members are determined throughout. The

This is the point from which we must start in defining the need of reconciliation. There is a relation between God and His human creatures, a relation of universal moral significance, on which the blessedness of man, and his attainment of his chief good, are dependent, and this relation is in point of fact impaired. Man is somehow wrong with God, and the task of reconciliation is to put him right again.

but its character as sin comes into view only when we regard it as affecting his relation to God

Things are what they are, and we must take man as we find him, building on our present experience of sin as the one reality unquestionably within our reach.

But his whole moral health, strength, and happiness depend upon his having no secrets from his father; they depend, in fact, on his sharing with his father the common life of the family, without impediment or restraint

By his wrong act he has cut himself off from this, and till he overcomes it somehow he is morally crippled. He fears his father, for he knows he must disapprove of what he has done; he distrusts him, for he very possibly does not know that though his father’s love has been wounded by the wrong he has done, it is great enough to bear his offence and to love him through it; and if he fears and distrusts and hides long enough, he is quite likely at last to hate—on the principle odisse quem laeseris.

It is the fundamental truth with which we have to deal, that a bad conscience, or the sense of sin, induces moral paralysis.

One is good, that is God, and there is no such thing as doing good or being good, except in harmony with Him and in dependence on Him. How can any one be good who distrusts God the one spring of goodness, who is afraid of God, who is hiding from God, who hates God? It is like asking, How can any one be good in spite of God the only source of goodness? It is this impossibility which makes reconciliation necessary if sinners are ever to achieve their chief end. A famous hymn cries,

‘Be of sin the double cure:

Cleanse me from its guilt and power.’

But its guilt and power are not co-ordinate. It is its guilt which gives it power. Its guilt alienates us from God, and it is in virtue of this alienation that sin reigns in us. Hence to be reconciled to God is the sinner’s primary need. He overcomes the power of sin through having its guilt annulled, and his bad conscience stilled.

All men are members of a society in which they live and move and have their being morally, and in all they do, of right or wrong, they both affect and are affected by the body to which they belong. This has to be kept in mind, and it leads to two apparently contrary inferences.

must embrace in its scope not only the individual sinner whose original bad action has estranged him from God, but the society to which he belongs, and in which that bad action has originated unmeasured evils which he never contemplated. It must deal somehow with the sin of his world, and trammel up the consequences which drive him to despair. We become conscious that the individual cannot be reconciled to God except by a reconciliation in which the interest of all his fellows is identical with his own.

The distinction of an individual and of a corporate conscience, or of sin for which he who commits it must take the responsibility, and sin for which the responsibility falls on a society, does not exhaust the truth regarding sin, or show all that is meant by the need of reconciliation.

Taking things as we find them, the simple fact is that we are born into the world, and into the constitution and course of nature, and have to live out our life under its conditions. The saintliest man has the sap of nature in his veins. His roots strike down into its deepest and what will sometimes seem its darkest places, and he has in his own bosom the key to all that can ever appal him in the world. Human nature develops on the basis of nature in general, and our moral nature develops on the broad basis of human nature as it exists in human society; with

it is a consciousness that what I call my nature is in some kind of antagonism to the laws of the moral world, and that sin in me is as deep as being

We must either say that man is born damned, or that he has no responsibility for being what he is.

Augustine and his followers in the fifth century emphasised the sinfulness of human nature as contrasted with isolated sinful actions, and they were right in emphasising it. Every

is more than isolated acts, it is deeper than the deliberate volition of this or that moment, it is as deep as our very being

On the other hand, the Pelagian opponents of Augustine were justified in maintaining that no doctrine of sin could be upheld which in the long run made God the author of it, or which involved the conclusion that redemption was impossible, or guilt unreal.

The obvious fact that the moral world has risen on the basis of nature has been set in the perspective of a general doctrine of evolution. The tendency then is to regard sin as inevitable; but when evolution, as is usually the case, is identified with ‘progress,’ or an optimistic view is taken of its general ‘upward’ tendency—an ‘upward’ tendency being a tendency to progressive moralisation—then, though inevitable, sin is not regarded as fatal. It emerges only that it may be transcended. A bad conscience is not an impracticable liability, a responsibility which we can neither meet nor evade; it is a kind of moral ‘growing pains’ which in the course of nature will be outgrown.

It is attractive enough to any one who is not vexed with a bad conscience, or who is not so vexed by it as to be driven to despair. But, as we have already seen, conscience not only brings a man face to face with himself, as a being whose very nature, rooted in the universal nature of things, is at variance with the moral law; it brings him face to face with the living God. Nothing is more real to conscience than its responsibility to God, and while the relation to nature may determine the particular cast or range of this responsibility, it cannot conjure away the thing itself. This

even when it is seen in the perspective of a natural evolution, is something which to conscience—and conscience is the only judge—is incommensurable with anything in nature

Every one who knows anything about sin will admit that we should die rather than do wrong, and this is a conclusive proof that, however deeply our nature may be identified with sin, it is not finally one with it. We must be Augustinians without being Manichæans

Our whole nature is involved in sin, but not indistinguishably and irretrievably involved, and we disown the sin and protest against it even when we feel ourselves most hopelessly its slaves. On this the need and the possibility of redemption depend.

Our whole nature is involved in sin, but not indistinguishably and irretrievably involved, and we disown the sin and protest against it even when we feel ourselves most hopelessly its slaves. On this the need and the possibility of redemption depend.

This may be done in two opposite ways. On the one hand, for example, there is a widespread feeling that sin is natural and inevitable. But if it has a natural birth, so to speak, then in the course of nature it will, we may assume, die a natural death, and therefore there is no necessity for thinking about redemption or reconciliation as a way of getting rid of it. But experience disproves the assumption here made. Though sin may have a natural birth it does not die a natural death; in every case it has to be morally sentenced and put to death.

On the other hand, there may be a doctrine of human depravity, not only seriously expressing serious facts, but so exaggerated and uncompromising as to exclude the very possibility of redemption. The Westminster Divines came at least perilously near to this when they spoke of Adam’s posterity as ‘utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.’ The need of redemption is only too powerfully expressed here, but what becomes of its possibility? What is left in man for even redeeming love to appeal to? We must hold such a doctrine of sin as makes it evident that we cannot save ourselves, but not such a doctrine as implies that not even God can save us.1

We may have all the experience that is necessary to convince us of the need of reconciliation, without having any opinions about the first man, or the state in which he was created, or the connection between his primitive and our present condition. Our life has its roots in nature, and we can form no conception of a being who originated in any other way; we cannot imagine what it would be to be created in some sense mature, instead of being born and growing into maturity, with all the possible and inevitable mischances of this experience.

The disharmony between our nature and our vocation—between our nature as we know it in our moral consciousness and our calling to live in union and communion with God—is the primary fact from which we have to start; and it is not made more real, more certain, or more intelligible by any speculation about its origin. It does not take us an inch further on to say that our present condition is due to the disobedience of our first parents, to the corruption of their nature by the fall, and the transmission of that corrupted nature to their posterity

Probably the most widespread idea about the relation of the natural to the spiritual world is that which simply contrasts them

The laws of nature are the same for the good man as for the bad; the flood drowns them both, and the lightning does not go out of the way of either. It is even argued that this moral neutrality of nature is necessary to protect the integrity of the moral life. If nature immediately sided with virtue and opposed vice, if she did poetic justice on her stage at every turn, disinterested goodness would be impossible; man would never be able to prove that they loved righteousness for its own sake.

Nature is not merely the stage of the moral life, but in some sense its soil.

The universe is a system of things in which good can be planted and in which it will bear fruit; it is also a system of things in which there is a ceaseless and unrelenting reaction against evil. This view of nature is vital both to the doctrine of sin and to that of reconciliation. The natural and the spiritual worlds interpenetrate.

The divine punishment is the divine reaction against sin expressing itself through the whole constitution or system of things under which the sinner lives

There is a sin of the world in which all individuals are involved; and the divine reaction against sin—or, if we speak of it in such language, the divine punishment of sin—extends to every individual man, and to the race as a whole.

That there is such a reaction is hardly questioned, but there has been much disagreement as to its nature and extent

There are those who think that it is not only sensible in conscience, but that it begins and ends there. When a man does wrong, the bad conscience which attends upon his act is the divine reaction against it. It is his punishment, and all his punishment, and such an extension of this thought as would regard any reaction in the physical world as also penal, or as revealing or constituting part of the reality of sin for God, is a mistake

dulls the moral intelligence, it paralyses the moral energies. These consequences of sin, which are involved in the divine reaction against it, are no doubt realised through conscience, but they are not identical with it.

On the contrary, the inmost conviction of conscience itself is the conviction that the natural and the moral world are one, and that the universe is in arms against the sinner. The fact that the bad conscience in its panic gives expression to this conviction in arbitrary and capricious forms is no argument against its truth.

‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind;

The thief doth fear each bush an officer.’

The thief is mistaken, of course, when he takes the bush for a policeman; but he is not mistaken in his feeling that the world is no longer with him but against him. Conscience, if we will, is the weakest of all restraints, but it can summon to its reinforcement all the powers and terrors of nature.

‘Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;

The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,

That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced

The name of Prosper.’

Indeed it is not too much to say that it was not merely a truth to Wordsworth, but the truth which made him the poet and philosopher he was. And it is not against its truth that it can only be illustrated by reference to poetry. ‘I myself,’ says Höffding, ‘occupy a standpoint from which the fact that the poetic form is the only possible one is a sign that we are in the presence of the highest.’1

They are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner. They are nothing if not retributive. That does not prevent them from being disciplinary or reformatory; on the contrary, their whole power to correct or to educate depends on the fact that they are retributive. A penalty which is only connected with sin through a good intention of the legislator to benefit the criminal is connected with it in a way of which the criminal may never become conscious, and which might do him no good if he did; the only punishment which has the promise of beneficial results in it—the only one which in the nature of things can have a remedial virtue—is that which is the natural, inevitable, divine reaction of the sin itself. In other words, the only hopeful penalty is that in which the sin finds out the sinner and makes him see all that it means; the only way of salvation here, as always, is through the truth.

It is apparently accepted among them that what really prevents crime is not the severity of punishment, but the certainty of detection

Ordinary legal punishments—the sentences of the criminal courts—do little good to the criminals, not because they are purely retributive, but because they are hardly retributive at all. The conscience of the offender is not on their side; he does not feel instinctively, ‘This is what I was doing,’ and consequently he has no motive for doing otherwise. In his sentence, it is not his sin which has come back to him to show him all it is; it is just a cursed spite which has befallen him, from which others, worse than he, have had the luck to escape.

But benevolence which seeks to secure its ends by evading the idea of retribution seeks to attain apart from conscience that which cannot even be conceived except through conscience.

It is one our assurance of which is identical with our faith in God, or our possessing or being possessed by a conscience; apart from it, the very conception of the world as the scene of moral government or moral education would be impossible

Sin is something which is finally repelled by God. Part of its reality, of what it essentially is, remains unknown till this is recognised. Sin is essentially a thing against which an annihilating sentence of God lies. Those who identify themselves with it come under the sentence. The end of such things—of the doings of the sinful life—is death.

It was not sin that introduced death, in the sense of biology, into the world—though it is plausible to say that this was in Paul’s mind when he wrote Romans 5:12 ff.; nevertheless, sin is fatal to man, and that is what is meant by saying that the wages of it is death.

The moral significance of the story is far too wonderful and profound. There is too great a sum of tragic moral experiences beneath it to comfort with such a comparatively childish rendering. It is not the origin of death the author is interested in, but the origin of evil; this involves death, indeed, but only because evil cannot dwell with God. It is repelled and inexorably repelled from Him with whom alone is the fountain of life.

This has just been admitted, but it must be pointed out that when we come to speak of man, who is a spiritual being, there is no such thing as merely physical death.

It knows that for man death is not an event only, but an experience, and that it depends on the man who dies what kind of experience it shall be. It is one of the signal mercies of God to sinful men that, though sin is fatal, He enables men to win victory over death even in dying. They can die as heroes, as saints, as martyrs. But there is no such victory over death which is not at the same time a victory over sin, and that is part of the proof of an intimate connection between the two.

This does not refute but confirm the truth that death is the only expression we have for the culmination of the divine reaction against sin. All that is works ceaselessly for its destruction and for the destruction of all who are identified with it. This is part of what sin is in the mind and world of God.

Many of the difficulties connected with the ideas of sin and punishment in the divine order are due to the fact that men have essayed to interpret God’s providential government, and to read character through circumstances, with a precision which no calculus at our command enables us to attain. To say that there is a divine reaction against evil tempts the naïve and inexperienced mind to say that wherever there is suffering there is sin.

the truth was applied as if it meant that all the pain, disease, or disaster by which the life of this or that individual was attended were the immediate reflex or counterpart of his individual guilt. The depth to which this mode of thought had penetrated is shown by the fact that the necessary protest against it evoked the sublimest work in all literature, the Book of Job.

Job cannot find the moral interpretation of his own sufferings and sorrows, and he will not allow his friends to put an interpretation on them at which his integrity revolts: that is all. When

The moral problems raised by the state of an individual cannot be answered if our vision is limited to him and to his parents. The human race is one, and there is no answer—no complete answer—to problems arising out of the individual life until we take into account the common sin of the race, the universal divine reaction against it, and also the redemptive will of God as illustrated here by Jesus when He restored the man’s sight

What human suffering ought always to prompt in the first instance is help, not the investigation of character or a verdict upon it, and just as little general speculations on the relation of physical to moral evil. But we may recognise all this without modifying our conviction that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal, that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin, and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death.