CHAPTER 1. CHRISTOLOGY, OR THE REDEMPTION WROUGHT BY CHRIST.

SECTION 1. — HISTORICAL PREPARATION FOR REDEMPTION.

Since God had from eternity determined to redeem mankind, the history of the race, from the time of the fall to the coming of Christ, was providentially arranged to prepare the way for this redemption. The preparation was twofold:

I. NEGATIVE PREPARATION, IN THE HISTORY OF THE HEATHEN WORLD.

This showed that the trite nature of sin and the depth of spiritual ignorance and of moral depravity to which the race, left to itself, must fall. It also showed the powerlessness of human nature to preserve or regain an adequate knowledge of God, or to deliver itself from sin by philosophy or art.

Why could not Eve have been the mother of the chosen seed, as she doubtless at the first supposed that she was? (Gen. 4:1 — “and she conceived and bare Cain [i. e, ‘gotten’, or acquired’], and said I have gotten a man even Jehovah”). Why was not the cross set up at the gates of Eden? Scripture intimates that a preparation was needful ( Galatians 4:4 — “but when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth his Son”).

Of the two agencies made use of, we leave called heathenism the negative preparation. But it was not wholly negative, it was partly positive also.

Justin Martyr spoke of a Lo>gov spermatiko>v among the heathen.

Clement of Alexandria called Plato a Mwsh~v ajttiki>zwn — a Greekspeaking Moses. Notice the priestly attitude of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Pindar and Sophocles. The Bible recognizes Job, Balaam, Melchizedek, as instances of priesthood, or divine communication, outside the bounds of the chosen people. Heathen religions either were not religions or God had a part in them. Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster were at least reformers raised up in God’s providence. Galatians 4:3 classes Judaism with the ‘rudiments of the world,’ and Romans 5:20 tells us that ‘the law came in beside,’ as a force cooperating with other human factors, primitive revelation, sin, etc.” The positive preparation in heathenism receives greater attention when we conceive of Christ as the immanent God, revealing himself in conscience and in history. This was the real meaning of Justin Martyr, Apol. 1:46; 2:10, 13 — “The whole race of men partook of the Logos and those who lived according to reason lo>gou , were Christians even though they were accounted atheists. Such among the Greeks were Socrates and Heracleitus and those who resembled them. Even to Socrates Christ was known in part and the teachings of Plato are not alien to those of Christ, though not in all respects similar. For all the writers of antiquity were able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the implanted Word lo>gou .” Justin Martyr claimed inspiration for Socrates. Tertullian spoke of Socrates as “pæne noster” — “almost one of us.”

Paul speaks of the Cretans as having “a prophet of their own” ( Titus 1:12) — probably Epimenides (596 B. C.) whom Plato calls a qwi~ov ajnh>r — “a man of God,” and whom Cicero couples with Bacis and the Erythræan Sibyl. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1:19; 6:5 — “The same God who furnished both the covenants was the giver of the Greek philosophy to the Greeks, by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks”; Augustine: “Plato made me know the true God; Jesus Christ showed me the way to him.”

Bruce, Apologetics, 207 — “God gave to the Gentiles at least the starlight of religious knowledge. The Jews were elected for the sake of the Gentiles.

There was some light even for pagans, though heathenism on the whole was a failure. But its very failure was a preparation for receiving the true religion.” Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 133, 238 — “Neo-Platonism, that splendid vision of incomparable and irrecoverable cloud-land in which the sun of Greek philosophy set...On its ethical side Christianity had large elements in common with reformed Stoicism; on its theological side it moved in harmony with the new movements of Platonism.” E. G.

Robinson: “The idea that all religions but the Christian are the direct work of the devil is a Jewish idea, and is now abandoned. On the contrary, God has revealed himself to the race just so far as they have been capable of knowing him. Any religion is better than none, for all religion implies restraint.” John 1:9 — “There was the fine light even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world” — has its Old Testament equivalent in Psalm 94:10 — “He that chastiseth the nations, shall not he correct, Even he that teacheth man knowledge.” Christ is the great educator of the race. The pre-incarnate Word exerted an influence upon the consciences of the heathen, He alone makes it true that “anima naturaliter Christiana est.” Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 138-140 — “Religion is union between God and the soul. That experience was first perfectly realized in Christ.

Here the ideal fact and the historical fact are united and blended. Origen’s and Tertullian’s rationalism and orthodoxy each has its truth. The religious consciousness of Christ is the fountainhead, from which Christianity has flowed. He was a beginning of life to men. He had the spirit of son-ship — God in man and man in God. ‘Quid interius Deo?’

He showed us insistence on the moral ideal while yet preaching of mercy to the sinner. The gospel was the acorn and Christianity is the oak that has sprung from it. In the acorn, as in the tree, are some Hebraic elements that are temporary. Paganism is the materializing of religion; Judaism is the legalizing of religion. ‘In me,’ says Charles Secretan, ‘lives someone greater than I.’” But the positive element in heathenism was slight. Her altars and sacrifices as well as her philosophy and art, roused cravings, which she was powerless to satisfy. Her religious systems became sources of deeper corruption. There was no hope and no progress. “The Sphynx’ motionless calm symbolizes the monotony of Egyptian civilization.” Classical nations became more despaired as they became more cultivated. To the best minds, truth seemed impossible of attainment and all hope of general wellbeing scorned a dream. The Jews were the only forward-looking people and all our modern confidence in destiny and development comes from them. They, in their turn, drew their hopefulness solely from prophecy. Not their “genius for religion,” but special revelation from God, made them what they were.

Although God was in heathen history, yet so exceptional were the advantages of the Jews that we can almost assent to the doctrine of the New Englander Sept. 1883:576 — “The Bible does not recognize other revelations. It speaks of the ‘face of the covering that covereth all peoples, e. i. the veil that is spread over all nations’ ( Isaiah 25:7); Acts 14:16,17 — ‘who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways. And yet he left not himself without witness’ = not an internal revelation in the hearts of sages, but an external revelation in nature, ‘in that he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.’ The convictions of heathen reformers with regard to divine inspiration were dim and intangible, compared with the consciousness of prophets and apostles that God was speaking through them to his people.”

On heathenism as a preparation for Christ, see Tholuck, Nature and Moral Influence of Heathenism, in Bib. Repos., 1832:80, 246, 441; Dollinger, Gentile and Jew; Pressense, Religions before Christ; Max Muller, Science of Religion, 1-128; Cocker, Christianity and Greek Philosophy; Ackerman, Christian Element in Plato; Farrar, Seekers after God; Renan, on Rome and Christianity, in Hibbert Lectures for 1880.

II. POSITIVE PREPARATION, IN THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL.

A single people was separated from all others, from the time of Abraham and was educated in three great truths: (1) the majesty of God, in his unity, omnipotence, and holiness, (2) the sinfulness of man, and his moral helplessness and (3) the certainty of a coming salvation. This education from the time of Moses was conducted by the use of three principal agencies:

A. Law. The Mosaic legislation, (a) by its theophanies and miracles, cultivated faith in a personal and almighty God and Judge, (b) by its commands and threatening, wakened the sense of sin and (c) by its priestly and sacrificial system, inspired hope of some way of pardon and access to God.

The education of the Jews was first of all an education by Law. In the history of the world, as in the history of the individual, law must precede gospel, John the Baptist must go before Christ, knowledge of sin must prepare a welcome entrance for knowledge of a Savior. While the heathen were studying God’s works, the chosen people were studying God. Men teach by words as well as by works and so does God. And words reveal heart to heart, as works never can. “The Jews were made to know, on behalf of all mankind, the guilt and shame of sin. Yet just when the disease was at its height, the physicians were beneath contempt.”

Wrightnour: “As if to teach all subsequent ages that no outward cleansing would tarnish a remedy, the great deluge, which washed away the whole sinful antediluvian world with the exception of one comparatively pure family, had not cleansed the world from sin.”

With this gradual growth in the sense of sin there was also a widening and deepening faith. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit,67 — “Abel, Abraham, Moses = the individual, the family, the nation. By faith Abel obtained witness, by faith Abraham received the son of the promise and by faith Moses led Israel through the Red Sea.” Kurtz, Religionslehre, speaks of the relation between law and gospel as “Ein fliessender Gegensatz” — “a flowing antithesis” — like that between flower and fruit. A. B. Davidson, Expositor, 6:163 — “The course of revelation is like a river, which cannot be cut up into sections.” E. G. Robinson: “The two fundamental ideas of Judaism were theological (the unity of God) and philosophical (the distinctness of God from the material world). Judaism went to seed.

Jesus, with the sledge-hammer of truth, broke up the dead forms, and the Jews thought he was destroying the Law.” On methods pursued with humanity by God, see Simon, Reconciliation, 232-251.

B. Prophecy. There was verbal prophecy beginning with the protevangelium in the garden and extending to within four hundred years of the coming of Christ. There also was typical prophecy in persons, such as Adam, Melchizedek, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Jonah, and in acts, such as Isaac’s sacrifice and Moses’ lifting up the serpent in the wilderness.

The relation of law to gospel was like that of a sketch to the finished picture, or of David’s plan for the temple to Solomon’s execution of it.

When all other nations were sunk in pessimism and despair, the light of hope burned brightly among the Hebrews. The nation was forward-bound.

Faith was its very life. The O. T. saints saw all the troubles of the present “sub specie eternitatis,” and believed that “Light is sown for the righteous, And gladness for the upright in heart” ( Psalm 97:11). The hope of Job was the hope of the chosen people: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth” ( Job 19:25).

Hutton, Essays, 2:237 — “Hebrew supernaturalism has transmuted forever the pure naturalism of Greek poetry. And now no modern poet, who does feel and reproduce in his writings the difference between the natural and the supernatural, can ever become really great.

Christ was the reality to which the types and ceremonies of Judaism pointed; and these latter disappeared when Christ had come. Just as the petals of the blossom drop away when the fruit appears, many promises to the O. T. saints, which seemed to them promises of temporal blessing, were fulfilled in a better and a more spiritual way than they expected.

Thus God cultivated in them a boundless trust — a trust which was essentially the same thing with the faith of the new dispensation, because it was the absolute reliance of a consciously helpless sinner upon God’s method of salvation and so was implicitly, though not explicitly, a faith in Christ.

The protevangelium ( Gen. 3:15) said “it [this promised seed] shall bruise thy head” The “it” was rendered in some Latin manuscripts “ipsa.”

Hence Roman Catholic divines attributed the victory to the Virgin. Notice that Satan was cursed but not Adam and Eve for they were candidates for restoration. The promise of the Messiah narrowed itself downward from Abraham Judah, David, Bethlehem, and to the Virgin, as the race grew older. Prophecy spoke of “the Scepter” and of “the seventy weeks.”

Haggai and Malachi foretold that the Lord should suddenly come to the second temple. Christ was to be true man and true God, the prophet, priest and king, humbled and exalted. When prophecy had become complete, a brief interval elapsed, and then he, of whom Moses in the law and the prophets, did write, actually came.

All these preparations for Christ’s coming, however, through the perversity of man became most formidable obstacles to the progress of the gospel. The Roman Empire put Christ to death. Philosophy rejected Christ as foolishness. Jewish rituals, the mere shadow, usurped the place of worship and faith, the substance of religion. God’s last method of preparation in the case of Israel was that of C. Judgment. Repeated divine chastisements for idolatry culminated in the overthrow of the kingdom and the captivity of the Jews. The exile had two principal effects. It had a religious effect (in giving monotheism firm root in the heart of the people, and in leading to the establishment of the synagogue-system, by which monotheism was thereafter preserved and propagated). It also had a civil effect (converting the Jews from an agricultural to a trading people, scattering them among all nations and finally imbuing them with the spirit of Roman law and organization).

Thus a people was made ready to receive the gospel and to propagate it throughout the world, at the very time when the world had become conscious of its needs and, through its greatest philosophers and poets, was expressing its longings for deliverance.

At the junction of Europe, Asia, and Africa, there lay a little land through which passed all the caravan routes from the East to the West. Palestine was “the eye of the world.” The Hebrews throughout the Roman world were “the greater Palestine of the Dispersion.” The scattering of the Jews through all lands had prepared a monotheistic starting point for the gospel in every heathen city. Jewish synagogues had prepared places of assembly for the hearing of the gospel. The Greek language — the universal literary language of the world — had prepared a medium in which that gospel could be spoken. “Cæsar had unified the Latin West, as Alexander the Greek East” and universal peace, together with Roman roads and Roman law, made it possible for that gospel, when once it had got a foothold, to spread itself to the ends of the earth. The first dawn of missionary enterprise appears among the proselytizing Jews before Christ’s time.

Christianity laid hold of this proselytizing spirit, and sanctified it to conquer the world to the faith of Christ.

Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 2:9, 10 — “In his great expedition across the Hellespont, Paul reversed the course which Alexander took and carried the gospel into Europe to the centers of the old Greek culture.” In all of these preparations we see many lines converging to one result, in a manner inexplicable, unless we take them as proof of the wisdom and power of God preparing the way for the kingdom of his Son. All of took place this in spite of the fact that “a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in” ( Romans 11:25). James Robertson, Early Religion of Israel,15 — “Israel now instructs the world in the worship of Mammon, after having once taught it the knowledge of God.”

On Judaism, as a preparation for Christ, see Dollinger, Gentile and Jew, 2:291-419; Martensen, Dogmatics, 224-236; Hengstenberg, Christology of the O. T.; Smith, Prophecy a Preparation for Christ; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 458-485; Fairbairn, Typology; MacWhorter, Jahveh Christ; Kurtz, Christliche Religionslehre, 114; Edwards’ History of Redemption, in Works, 1:297-395; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation; Conybeare and Howson, Life and Epistles of St. Paul, 1:1-37; Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 257-281; Schaff, Hist. Christian Ch., 1:32-49; Butler’s Analogy, Bohn’s ed., 228-238; Bushnell, Vicarious Sac., 63-66; Max Muller, Science of Language, 2:443; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:463-485; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 47-73

SECTION 2. — THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

The redemption of mankind from sin was to be effected through a Mediator who should unite in himself both the human nature and the divine order that he might reconcile God to man and man to God. To facilitate an understanding of the Scriptural doctrine under consideration, it will be desirable at the outset to present a brief historical survey of views respecting the Person of Christ.

In the history of doctrine, as we have seen, beliefs held in solution at the beginning are only gradually precipitated and crystallized into definite formulas. The first question which Christians naturally asked themselves was “What think ye of the Christ” ( Matthew 22:42). The second question Christians asked was of Christ’s relation to the Father and then, in due succession, the nature of sin, of atonement, of justification and of regeneration. Connecting these questions with the names of the great leaders who sought respectively to answer them, we have The Person of Christ, treated by Gregory Nazianzen (328), The Trinity, by Athanasius (325-373), Sin, by Augustine (353-430), Atonement, by Anselm (1033- 1109), Justification By Faith, by Luther (1485-1560) and Regeneration, by John Wesley (1703-1791) — six weekdays of theology, leaving only a seventh, for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which may be the work of our age. John 10:36 — “him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world” — hints at some mysterious process by which the Son was prepared for his mission. Athanasius — “If the Word of Cod is in the world, as in a body, what is there strange in affirming that he has also entered into humanity?” This is the natural end of evolution from lower to higher. See Medd, Bampton Lectures for 1882, on The One Mediator:

The Operation of the Son of God in Nature and in Grace; Orr, God’s Image in Man.

I. HISTORICAL SURVEY OF VIEWS RESPECTING THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

1. The Ebionites ( ˆwyb]a, = ‘poor’; A. D. 107?) denied the reality of Christ’s divine nature and held him to be merely man, whether naturally or supernaturally conceived. This man however, held a peculiar relation to God, in that from the time of his baptism, an unmeasured fullness of the divine Spirit rested upon him. Ebionism was simply Judaism within the pale of the Christian church, and its denial of Christ’s god-hood was occasioned by the apparent incompatibility of this doctrine with monotheism.

First (Hebrews Lexicon) derives the name ‘Ebionite’ from the word signifying ‘poor’; see Isaiah 25:4 — thou hast been a stronghold to the poor” Matthew 5:3 — “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It means “oppressed, pious souls.” Epiphanius traces them back to the Christians who took refuge, A. D. 66, at Pella, just before the destruction of Jerusalem. They lasted down to the fourth century. Dorner can assign no age for the formation of the sect nor can he historically ascertain a person as its head. It was not Judaic Christianity but only a fraction of this.

There were two divisions of the Ebionites: (a) The Nazarenes, who held to the supernatural birth of Christ while they would not go to the length of admitting the preexisting hypostasis of the Son. They are said to have had the gospel of Matthew, in Hebrew. (b) The Cerinthian Ebionites, who put the baptism of Christ in place of his supernatural birth and made the ethical son-ship the cause of the physical. It seemed to them a heathenish fable that the Son of God should be born of the Virgin. There was no personal union between the divine and human in Christ. Christ, as distinct from Jesus, was not a merely impersonal power descending upon Jesus, but was a preexisting hypostasis above the world creating powers. The Cerinthian Ebionites, who on the whole best represent the spirit of Ebionism, approximated to Pharisaic Judaism and were hostile to the writings of Paul. The Epistle to the Hebrews, in fact, is intended to counteract an Ebionitic tendency to overstrain law and to underrate Christ. In a complete view, however, it should also be mentioned: (c) The Gnostic Ebionism of the pseudo-Clementines, which in order to destroy the deity of Christ and save the pure monotheism, so called, of primitive religion, gave up even the best part of the Old Testament. In all its forms, Ebionism conceives of God and man as external to each other.

God could not become man. Christ was no more than a prophet or teacher who, as the reward of his virtue, was from the time of his baptism specially endowed with the Spirit After his death he was exalted to kingship but that would not justify the worship which the church paid him. A mere creature for a mediator would separate us from God instead of uniting us to him. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:305-307 (Syst. Doct., 3:201-204) and Hist. Doct. Person Christ, A. 1:187-217; Reuss, Hist.

Christ. Theol., 1:100-107; Schaff, Ch. Hist., 1:212-215. 2. The Docetú (doke>w — ‘to seem,’ ‘to appear’; A. D. 70-170), like most of the Gnostics in the second century and the Manichees in the third, denied the reality of Christ’s human body. This view was the logical sequence of their assumption of the inherent evil of matter. If matter is evil and Christ was pure, then Christ’s human body must have been merely phantasmal. Docetism was simply pagan philosophy introduced into the church.

The Gnostic Basilides held to a real human Christ, with whom the divine nou~v became united at the baptism but the followers of Basilides became Docetæ. To them, the body of Christ was merely a seeming one. There was no real life or death. Valentinus made the Æon Christ, with a body purely pneumatic and worthy of himself pass through the body of the Virgin as water through a reed, taking up into himself nothing of the human nature through which he passed or, as a ray of light through colored glass, which only imparts to the light a portion of its own darkness. Christ’s life was simply a theophany. The Patripassians and Sabellians, who are only sects of the Docetæ, denied all real humanity to Christ. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 141 — “He treads the thorns of death and shame ‘like a triumphal path,’ of which he never felt the sharpness.

There was development only externally and in appearance. No ignorance can be ascribed to him amidst the omniscience of the Godhead.” Shelley: “A mortal shape to him Was as the vapor dim Which the orient planet animates with light.” The strong argument against Docetism was found in Hebrews 2:14 — “Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same.”

That Docetism appeared so early, shows that the impression Christ made was that of a superhuman being. Among many of the Gnostics, the philosophy, which lay at the basis of their Docetism, was a pantheistic apotheosis of the world. God did not need to become man for man was essentially divine. This view, and the opposite error of Judaism, already mentioned, both showed their insufficiency by attempts to combine with each other, as in the Alexandrian philosophy. See Dorner, Hist. Doct.

Person Christ, A. 1:2l8-252, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307-310 (Syst. Doct., 3:204-206); Neander Ch. Hist., 1:387. 3. The Arians (Arms, condemned at Nice, 325) denied the integrity of the divine nature in Christ. They regarded the Logos who united himself to humanity in Jesus Christ, not as possessed of absolute god-hood but as the first and highest of created beings. This view originated in a misinterpretation of the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s state of humiliation, and in mistaking temporary subordination for original and permanent inequality.

Dorner, a reaction from Sabellianism, calls Arianism. Sabellius had reduced the incarnation of Christ to a temporary phenomenon. Arius thought to lay stress on the hypostasis of the Son, and to give it fixity and substance. But, to his mind, the reality of Son-ship seemed to require subordination to the Father. Origen had taught the subordination of the Son to the Father, in connection with his doctrine of eternal generation.

Arius held to the subordination and also to the generation but this last, he declared, could not be eternal, but must be in time. See Dorner, Person Christ A. 2:227-244, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307, 312, 313 (Syst. Doct., 3:203, 207-210); Herzog, Encyclopadie, art.: Arianismus. See also this Compendium, Vol. I:328-330. 4. The Apollinarians (Apollinaris, condemned at Constantinople, 381) denied the integrity of Christ’s human nature. According to this view, Christ had no human nou~v or pneu~ma, other than that which was furnished by the divine nature. Christ had only the human sw~ma and yuch> ; the place of the human nou~v or pneu~ma was filled by the divine Logos. Apollinarism is an attempt to construe the doctrine of Christ’s person m the forms of the Platonic trichotomy.

Lest divinity should seem a foreign element, when added to this curtailed manhood, Apollinaris said that there was an eternal tendency to the human in the Logos himself; that in God was the true manhood and that the Logos is the eternal, archetypal man. But here is no becoming man — only a manifestation in flesh of what the Logos already was. So we have a Christ of great head and dwarfed body. Justin Martyr preceded Apollinaris in this view. In opposing it, the church Fathers said that “what the Son of God has not taken to himself, he has not sanctified” — to< ajpro>slhpon kai< ajqera>peuton. See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408 — “The impossibility, on the Arian theory, of making two finite souls into one, finally led to the [Apollinarian] denial of any human soul in Christ”; see also, Dorner, Person Christ, A. 2:352-399, and Glaubenslehre, 2:310 (Syst. Doct., 3:206, 207); Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:394.

Apollinaris taught that the eternal Word took into union with himself, not a complete human nature, but an irrational human animal. Simon, Reconciliation, 329, comes near to being an Apollinarian, when he maintains that the incarnate Logos was human, but was not a man. He is the “constituter” of man, self-limited, in order that he may save that to which he has given life. Gore, Incarnation, 93 — “Apollinaris suggested that the archetype of manhood exists in God, who made man in his own image so that man’s nature in some sense preexisted in God. The Son of God was eternally human and he could fill the place of the human mind in Christ without his ceasing to be in some sense divine. The church denied this, man is not God nor is God man. The first principle of theism is that manhood at the bottom is not the same thing as Godhead. This is a principle intimately bound up with man’s responsibility and the reality of sin. The interests of theism were at stake.” 5. The Nestorians (Nestorius, removed from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, 431) denied the real union between the divine and the human natures in Christ, making it rather a moral than an organic one.

They refused therefore to attribute to the resultant unity the attributes of each nature and regarded Christ as a man in very near relation to God.

Thus they virtually held to two natures and two persons, instead of two natures n one person.

Nestorius disliked the phrase: “Mary, mother of God.” The Chalcedon statement asserted its truth, with the significant addition: “as to his humanity.” Nestorius made Christ a peculiar temple of God. He believed in suna>feia, not e]nwsiv — junction and indwelling, but not absolute union. He made too much of the analogy of the union of the believer with Christ and separated as much as possible the divine and the human. The two natures were, in his view, a]llov kai< a]llov , instead of being a]llo kai< a]llo , which together constitute ei=v — one personality. The union which he accepted was a moral union, which makes Christ simply God and man, instead of the God-man. John of Damascus compared the passion of Christ to the felling of a tree on which the sun shines. The axe fells the tree but does no harm to the sunbeams. So the blows, which struck Christ’s humanity, caused no harm to his deity; while the flesh suffered, the deity remained impassible. This leaves, however, no divine efficacy of the human sufferings and no personal union of the human with the divine. The error of Nestorius arose from a philosophic nominalism, which refused to conceive of nature without personality. He believed in nothing more than a local or moral union, like the marriage union, in which two become one or like the state, which is sometimes called a moral person, because having a unity composed of many persons. See Dorner, Person Christ, B. 1:53-79, and Glaubenslehre, 2:315, 316 (Syst. Doct., 3:211-213); Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:210; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 152-154. “There was no need here of the virgin-birth for to secure a sinless father as well as mother would have been enough. Nestorianism holds to no real incarnation, only to an alliance between God and man. After the fashion of the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, man and God are joined together.

But the incarnation is not merely a higher degree of the mystical union.”

Gore, Incarnation, 94 — “Nestorius adopted and popularized the doctrine of the famous commentator, Theodore of Mopsuestia. But the Christ of Nestorius was simply a deified man, not God incarnate. He was from below, not from above. If he was exalted to union with the divine essence, his exaltation was only that of one individual man.” 6. The Eutychians (condemned at Chalcedon, 451) denied the distinction and coexistence of the two natures, and held to a mingling of both into one, which constituted a tertium quid, or third nature. Since in this case the divine must overpower the human, it follows that the human was really absorbed into or transmuted into the divine, although the divine was not in all respects the same, after the union, that it was before. Hence the Eutychians were often called Monophysites, because they virtually reduced the two natures to one.

They were an Alexandrian school, which included monks of Constantinople and Egypt. They used the words su>gcusiv, metabolh> — confounding, transformation to describe the union of the two natures in Christ. Humanity joined to deity was as a drop of honey mingled with the ocean. There was a change in either element, but as when a stone attracts the earth, or a meteorite the sun, or when a small boat pulls a ship, all the movement was virtually on the part of the smaller object. Humanity was so absorbed in deity, as to be altogether lost. The union was illustrated by electron, a metal compounded of silver and gold. A more modern illustration would be that of the chemical union of an acid and an alkali, to form a salt unlike either of the constituents.

In effect, this theory denied the human element and, with this, the possibility of atonement, on the part of human nature, as well as of real union of man with God. Such a magical union of the two natures as Eutyches described is inconsistent with any real becoming man on the part of the Logos. The manhood is well nigh as illusory as upon the theory of the Docetæ. Mason, Faith of the Gospel. 140 — “This turns not the Godhead only but the manhood also into something foreign — into some nameless nature, betwixt and between — the fabulous nature of a semihuman demigod,” like the Centaur.

The author of “The German Theology” says that “Christ’s human nature was utterly bereft of self, and was nothing else but a house and habitation of God.” The Mystics would have human personality so completely the organ of the divine that “we may be to God what man’s hand is to a man,” and that “I” and “mine” may cease to have any meaning. Both these views savor of Eutychianism. On the other hand, the Unitarian says that Christ was “a mere man.” But there cannot be such a thing as a mere man, exclusive of aught above and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved.

The Trinitarian sometimes declares himself as believing that Christ is God and man, thus implying the existence of two substances. Better say that Christ is the God-man, who manifests all the divine powers and qualities of which all men and all nature are partial embodiments. See Dorner, Person of Christ, B. 1:83-93, and Glaubenslehre, 2:318, 319 (Syst Doct., 3:214-216); Guericke, Ch. History, 1:356-360.

The foregoing survey would seem to show that history had exhausted the possibilities of heresy, and that the future denials of the doctrine of Christ’s person must be, in essence, forms of the views already mentioned. All controversies with regard to the person of Christ must, of necessity, hinge upon one of three points: first, the reality of the two natures, secondly, the integrity of the two natures and thirdly, the union of the two natures in one person. Of these points, Ebionism and Docetism deny the reality of the natures, Arianism and Apollinarianism deny their integrity while Nestorianism and Eutychianism deny their proper union. In opposition to all these errors, the orthodox doctrine held its ground and maintains it to this day.

We may apply to this subject what Dr. A. P. Peabody said in a different connection: “The canon of infidelity was closed almost as soon as that of the Scriptures” — modern unbelievers having, for the most part, repeated the objections of their ancient predecessors. Brooks, Foundations of Zoology, 126 — “As a shell which has failed to burst is picked up on some old battlefield by someone on whom experience is thrown away and is exploded by him in the bosom of his approving family with disastrous results so one of these abandoned beliefs may be dug up by the head of some intellectual family to the confusion of those who follow him as their leader.” 7. The Orthodox doctrine (promulgated at Chalcedon, 451) holds that in the one person Jesus Christ there are two natures. There is a human nature and a divine nature, each in its completeness and integrity, and that these two natures are organically and indestructibly united, yet so that no third nature is formed thereby. In brief, to use the antiquated dictum, orthodox doctrine forbids us either to divide the person or to confound the natures.

That this doctrine is Scriptural and rational, we have yet to show. We may most easily arrange our proofs by reducing the three points mentioned to two, namely: first, the reality and integrity of the two natures and secondly, the union of the two natures in one person.

The formula of Chalcedon is negative, with the exception of its assertion of a e[nwsiv uJpostatikh> . It proceeds from the natures and regards the result of the union to be the person. Each of the two natures is regarded as in movement toward the other. The symbol says nothing of an ajnupostasi>a of the human nature nor does it say that the Logos furnishes the ego in the personality. John of Damascus, however, pushed forward to these conclusions and his work translated into Latin was used by Peter Lombard and determined the views of the Western church of the Middle Ages. Dorner regards this as having given rise to the Mariolatry, saint-invocation and transubstantiation of the Roman Catholic Church.

See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:189 sq.; Dorner, Person Christ, B. 1:9:1- 119, and Glaubenslehre, 2:320-328 (Syst. Doct., 3:216-223), in which last passage may be found valuable matter with regard to the changing uses of the words pro>swpon, uJpo>stasiv, oujsi>a, etc.

Gore, Incarnation, 96, 101 — “These decisions simply express in a new form, without substantial addition, the apostolic teaching as it is represented in the New Testament. They express it in a new form for protective purposes, as a legal enactment protects a moral principle. They are developments only in the sense that they represent the apostolic teaching worked out into formulas by the aid of a terminology, which was supplied by Greek dialectics. What the church borrowed from Greek thought was her terminology, not the substance of her creed. Even in regard to her terminology we must make one important reservation.

Christianity laid all stress on the personality of God and man, of which Hellenism had thought but little.”

II. THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST — THEIR REALITY AND INTEGRITY

1. The Humanity of Christ.

A. Its Reality. — This may be shown as follows: (a) He expressly called himself and was called “man.” John 8:40 — “ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth”; Acts 2:22 — “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you”; Romans 5:15 — “the one man, Jesus Christ”; 1 Corinthians 15:21 — “by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead”; 1 Timothy 2:5 — “one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus.” Compare the genealogies in Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38, the former of which proves Jesus to be in the royal line and the latter of which proves him to be in the natural line of succession from David and the former tracing back his lineage to Abraham and the latter to Adam. Christ is therefore the son of David and of the stock of Israel. Compare also the phrase “Sea of man,” e. g ., in Matthew 20:28, which, however much it may mean in addition, certainly indicates the veritable humanity of Jesus. Compare, finally, the term “flesh” = human nature applied to him in John 1:14 — “And the Word became flesh,” and in 1 John 4:2 — “every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.” “Jesus is the true Son of man whom he proclaimed himself to be. This implies that he is the representative of all humanity. Consider for a moment what is implied in your being a man. How many parents had you?

You answer, two. How many grandparents? You answer, four. How many great-grandparents? Eight. How many great great grandparents?

Sixteen, So the number of your ancestors increases as you go further back, and if you take in only twenty generations, you will have to reckon yourself as the outcome of more than a million progenitors. The name Smith or Jones, which you bear, represents only one strain of all those million; you might almost as well bear any other name because your existence is more an expression of the race at large than of any particular family or line. What is true of you was true on the human side of the Lord Jesus. In him all the lines of our common humanity converged. He was the Son of man, far more than he was Son of Mary”; see A. H. Strong, Sermon before the London Baptist Congress. (b) He possessed the essential elements of human nature as at present constituted — a material body and a rational soul. Matthew 26:38 — “My soul is exceeding sorrowful”; John 11:33 — “he groaned in the spirit”; Matthew 26:26 — “This is my body”; 28 — “this is my blood”; Luke 24:39 — “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; Hebrews 2:14 — “Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same”; 1 John 1:1 — “that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life”; 4:2 — “every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.”

Yet, Christ was not all men in one and he did not illustrate the development of all human powers. Laughter, painting, literature, marriage — these provinces he did not invade. Yet we do not regard these as absent from the ideal man. The perfection of Jesus was the perfection of selflimiting love. For our sakes he sanctified himself ( John 17:19), or separated himself from much that in an ordinary man would have been excellence and delight. He became an example to us, by doing God’s will and reflecting God’s character in his particular environment and in his particular mission — that of the world’s Redeemer; see H. E. Robins, Ethics of the Christian Life, 259-303.

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 86 — l05 — “Christ was not a man only amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that he was another specimen, differing, by being another, from every one but himself.

His relation to the race was not a differentiating but a consummating relation. He was not generically but inclusively man. The only relation that can at all directly compare with it is that of Adam, who in a real sense was humanity. That complete indwelling and possessing of even one other, which the yearnings of man toward man imperfectly approach, is only possible, in any fullness of the words, to that spirit of man which is the Spirit of God: to the Spirit of God become, through incarnation, the spirit of man. If Christ’s humanity were not the humanity of Deity, it could not stand in the wide, inclusive, consummating relation, in which it stands, in fact, to the humanity of all other men. Yet the center of Christ’s being as man was not in himself but in God. He was the expression, by willing reflection, of Another.” (c) He was moved by the instinctive principles, and he exercised the active powers, which belong to a normal and developed humanity (hunger, thirst, weariness, sleep, love, compassion, anger, anxiety, fear, groaning, weeping, prayer). Matthew 4:2 — “he afterward hungered”; John 19:28 — “I thirst”; 4:6 — “Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus by the well”; Matthew 8:24 — “the boat was covered with the waves: but he was asleep”; Mark 10:21 — “Jesus looking upon him loved him”; Matthew 9:36 — “when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them”; Mark 3:5 — “looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart”; Hebrews 5:7 — “supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death”; John l2:27 — “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour”; 11:33 — “he groaned in the spirit”; 35 — “Jesus wept”; Matthew 14:23 — “he went up into the mountain apart to pray.” Hebrews 3:16 — “For it is not doubtless angels whom he rescueth, but he rescueth the seed of Abraham” (Kendrick).

Prof. J. P. Silvernail, on The Elocution of Jesus, finds the following intimations as to his delivery. It was characterized by naturalness (sitting, as at Capernaum), deliberation (cultivates responsiveness in his hearers), circumspection (he looked at Peter), dramatic action (woman taken in adultery), self-control (authority, poise, no vociferation, denunciation of Scribes and Pharisees). All these are manifestations of truly human qualities and virtues. The epistle of James, the brother of our Lord, with its exaltation of a meek, quiet and holy life, may be an unconscious reflection of the character of Jesus, as it had appeared to James during the early days at Nazareth. So John the Baptist’s exclamation, “I have need to be baptized of thee” ( Matthew 3:14), may be an inference from his intercourse with Jesus in childhood and youth. (d) He was subject to the ordinary laws of human development, both in body and soul (grew and waxed strong in spirit, asked questions, grew in wisdom and stature, learned obedience, suffered being tempted, was made perfect through sufferings). Luke 2:40 — “the child grew, and waxed strong, filled with wisdom “; 46 — “sitting in the midst of the teachers, both hearing them, and asking them questions” (here, at his twelfth year, he appears first to become fully conscious that he is the Sent of God, the Son of God; 49 — “knew ye not that I must be in my Father’s house?” lit. ‘in the things of my Father’); — “advanced in wisdom and stature”; Hebrews 5:8 — “learned obedience by the things which he suffered”; 2:18 — “in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”; 10 — “it became him...to make the author of their salvation perfect trough sufferings.”

Keble: “Was not our Lord a little child, Taught by degrees to pray; By father dear and mother mild Instructed day by day?” Adamson, The Mind in Christ: “To Henry Drummond Christianity was the crown of the evolution of the whole universe. Jesus growth in stature and in favor with God and men is a picture in miniature of the age-long evolutionary process.” Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, 185 — The incarnation of the Son was not his one revelation of God, but the interpretation to sinful humanity of all his other revelations of God in nature and history and moral experience, which had been darkened by sin.

The Logos, incarnate or not, is the te>lov as well as the ajrch> of creation.”

Andrew Murray, Spirit of Christ,26,27 — “Though now baptized himself, he cannot yet baptize others. He must first, in the power of his baptism, meet temptation and overcome it, learn obedience and suffer.

Yea, through the eternal Spirit, offer himself a sacrifice to God and his Will and then only could he afresh receive the Holy Spirit. This, as the reward of obedience, with the power to baptize all who belong to him” see Acts 2:33 — “Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise the Holy Spirit, he hath poured forth this, which ye see and hear.” (e) He suffered and died (bloody sweat, gave up his spirit, his side, pierced and straightway there came out blood and water). Luke 22:44 — “being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground”; John 19:30 — “he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit”; 34 — “one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and. straightway there came out blood and water” — held by Stroud, Physical Cause of our Lord’s Death, to be proof that Jesus died of a broken heart.

Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, 1:9-19 — “The Lord is said to have grown in wisdom and favor with God, not because it was so, but because he acted as if it were so. So he was exalted after death, as if this exaltation were on account of death.” We may reply that to resolve all signs of humanity into mere appearance and you lose the divine nature as well as the human for God is truth and cannot act a lie. The babe, the child, even the man, in certain respects, was ignorant. Jesus, the boy, was not making crosses, as in Overbeck’s picture, but rather yokes and plows, as Justin Martyr relates — serving a real apprenticeship in Joseph’s workshop. Mark 6:3 — :Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”

See Holman Hunt’s picture. “The Shadow of the Cross” — in which not Jesus, but only Mary, sees the shadow of the cross upon the wall. He lived a life of faith, as we as of prayer Hebrews 12:2 — “Jesus the author [captain, prince] and perfecter of our faith”), dependent upon Scripture, which was much of it, as Psalm 16 and 118, and Isaiah 49,50,61, written for him as well as about him. See Park, Discourses, 297-327; Deutsch, Remains, 131 — “The boldest transcendental flight of the Talmud is its saying: ‘God prays.’” In Christ’s humanity, united as it is to deity, we have the fact answering to this piece of Talmudic poetry.

B. Its Integrity. We here use the term ‘integrity’ to signify, not merely completeness, but perfection. That which is perfect is, a fortiori complete in all its parts. Christ’s human nature was: (a) Supernaturally conceived since the denial of his supernatural conception involves either a denial of the purity of Mary, his mother, or a denial of the truthfulness of Matthew’s and Luke’s narratives. Luke 1:34,35 — “And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her. The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.”

The seed of the woman” ( Gen. 3:15) was one who had no earthly father, Eve” = life, not only as being the source of physical life to the race, but also as bringing into the world him who was to be its spiritual life. Julius Muller, Proof-texts, 29 — Jesus Christ “had no earthly father; his birth was a creative act of God, breaking through the chain of human generation.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:447 (Syst. Doct., 3:345) — “The new science recognizes manifold methods of propagation and that too even in one and the same species.”

Professor Loeb has found that the unfertilized egg of the sea urchin may be made by chemical treatment to produce thrifty young and he thinks it probable that the same effect may be produced among the mammalian.

Thus parthenogenesis in the highest order of life is placed among the scientific possibilities. Romanes, even while he was an agnostic, affirmed that a virgin birth, even in the human race, would be by no means out of the range of possibility. See his Darwin and After Darwin, 119, footnote — “Even if a virgin has ever conceived and borne a son and even if such a fact in the human species has been unique, it would not betoken any breach of physiological continuity.” Only a new impulse from the Creator could save the Redeemer from the long accruing fatalities of human generation. But the new creation of humanity in Christ is scientifically quite as possible as its first creation in Adam and in both cases there may have been no violations of natural law but only a unique revelation of its possibilities. “Birth from a virgin made it clear that a new thing was taking place in the earth, and that One was coming into the world who was not simply man.” A. B. Bruce: “Thorough going naturalism excludes the virgin life as well as the virgin birth.” See Griffith-Jones. Ascent through Christ, 254-270; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 176. Paul Lobstein, Incarnation of our Lord, 217 — “That which is unknown to the teachings of St. Peter and St. Paul, St. John and St. James and our Lord himself and is absent from the earliest and the latest gospels cannot be so essential as many people have supposed.” This argument from silence is sufficiently met by the considerations that Mark passes over thirty years of our Lord’s life in silence, that John presupposes the narratives of Matthew and of Luke, that Paul does not deal with the story of Jesus’ life.

The facts were known at first only to Mary and to Joseph; their very nature involved reticence until Jesus was demonstrated to be “the Son of God with power...by the resurrection from the dead” ( Romans 1:4). In the meantime, the natural development of Jesus and his refusal to set up an earthly kingdom may have made the miraculous events of thirty years ago seem to Mary like a wonderful dream. Gradually the marvelous tale of the mother of the Lord found its way into the gospel tradition and creeds of the church, and into the inmost hearts of Christians of all countries. See F. L. Anderson, in Baptist Review and Expositor, 1904:25- 44, and Machen, on the N. T. Account of the Birth of Jesus, in Princeton Theol. Rev., Oct. 1905, and Jan. 1906.

Cooke, on The Virgin Birth of our Lord, in Methodist Rev., Nov. 1904:849-857 — “If there is a moral taint in the human race, if in the very blood and constitution of humanity there is an ineradicable tendency to sin, then it is utterly inconceivable that any one born by natural means in the race should escape the taint of that race. And, finally, if the virgin birth is not historical, then a difficulty greater than any that destructive criticism has yet evolved from documents, interpolations, psychological improbabilities and unconscious contradictions confronts the reason and upsets all the long results of scientific observation. That a sinful and deliberately sinning and unmarried pair should have given life to the purest human being that ever lived or whom the human race has ever dreamed and that he, knowing and forgiving the sins of others, never knew the shame of his own origin.” See also Gore, Dissertations, 1-68, on the Virgin Birth of our Lord, J. Armitage Robinson, Some Thoughts on the Incarnation,42, both of whom show that without assuming the reality of the virgin birth we cannot account for the origin of the narratives of Matthew and of Luke, nor for the acceptance of the virgin birth by the early Christians. Per contra, see Hoben, in Am. Jour. Theol., 1902:473- 506, 709-752. For both sides of the controversy, see Symposium by Bacon, Zenos, Rhees and Warfield, in Am. Jour. Theol., Jan. 1906:1-30; and especially Orr, Virgin Birth of Christ. (b) Free, both from hereditary depravity, and from actual sin as is shown by his never offering sacrifice, never praying for forgiveness, teaching that all but he needed the new birth, challenging all to convict him of a single sin.

Jesus frequently went up to the temple, but he never offered sacrifice. He prayed: “Father, forgive them” ( Luke 23:34); but he never prayed: “Father, forgive me.” He said “Ye must be born anew” ( John 3:7); but the words indicated that he had no such need. ‘ At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.” He not only yielded to God’s will when made known to him, but he sought it: “I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” ( John 5:30). The anger which he showed was no passionate or selfish or vindictive anger, but the indignation of righteousness against hypocrisy and cruelty — an indignation accompanied with grief: “looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart” ( Mark 3:5). F. W.

H. Myers, St. Paul,19,53 — “Thou with strong prayer and very much entreating Willest be asked, and thou wilt answer then, Show the hid heart beneath creation beating, Smile with kind eyes and be a man with men.

Yea, through life, death, through sorrow and through sinning, He shall suffice me, for he hath sufficed: Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.” Not personal experience of sin, but resistance to it, fitted him to deliver us from it. Luke 1:35 — “wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”; John 8:46 — “Which of you convicteth me of sin?” 14:30 — “the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in me” = not the slightest evil inclination upon which his temptations can lay hold; Romans 8:3 — “in the likeness of sinful flesh” in flesh, but without the sin which in other men clings to the flesh; 2 Corinthians 5:21 — “Him who knew no sin”; Hebrews 4:15 — in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin”; 7:26 “holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners” — by the fact of his immaculate conception; 9:14 — “through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; 1 Peter 1:19 — “precious blood, so of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ”; 2:22 — “who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth”; 1 John 3:5,7 — “in him is no sin...he is righteous.”

Julius Muller, Proof-texts, 29 — “Had Christ been only human nature, he could not have been without sin. But life can draw out of the putrescent clod materials for its own living. Divine life appropriates the human.”

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:448 (Syst. Doct., 3:344) — “What with us is regeneration, is with him the incarnation of God.” In this origin of Jesus’ spinelessness from his union with God, we see the absurdity, both doctrinally and practically, of speaking of an immaculate conception of the Virgin, and of making her sinless state precede that of her Son. On the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, see H. B. Smith, System, 389-392; Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 129-131 — “It makes the regeneration of humanity begin, not with Christ, but with the Virgin. It breaks his connection with the race. Instead of springing sinless from the sinful race, he derives his humanity from something not like the rest of us.” Thomas Aquinas and Liguori both call Mary the Queen of Mercy, as Jesus her Son is King of Justice; see Thomas, Præf. in Sept. Cath. Ep., Comment on Esther, 5: 3, and Liguori, Glories of Mary, 1:80 (Dublin version of 1866). Bradford, Heredity, 289 — “The Roman church has almost apotheosized Mary but it must not be forgotten that the process began with Jesus. From what he was, an inference was drawn concerning what his mother must have been.” “Christ took human nature in such a way that this nature, without sin, bore the consequences of sin.” That portion of human nature which the Logos took into union with himself was, in the very instant and by the fact of his taking it, purged from all its inherent depravity. But if in Christ there was no sin or tendency to sin, how could he be tempted? In the same way, we reply that Adam was tempted. Christ was not omniscient. Mark 13:32 — “of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” Only at the close of the first temptation does Jesus recognize Satan as the adversary of souls: Matthew 4:10 — “Get thee hence, Satan.” Jesus could be tempted, not only because he was not omniscient, but also because he had the keenest susceptibility to all the forms of innocent desire. To these desires temptation may appeal. Sin consists, not in these desires, but in the gratification of them out of God’s order, and contrary to God’s will.

Meyer: “Lust is appetite run wild. There is no harm in any natural appetite considered in it. But appetite has been spoiled by the fall.” So Satan appealed ( Matthew 4:1-11) to our Lord’s desire for food, for applause, for power, to “Ueberglaube, Aberglaude, Unglaube” (Kurtz); cf. Matthew 26:39; 27:42; 26:53. All temptation must be addressed either to desire or fear so Christ “was in all points tempted like as we are” ( Hebrews 4:15). The first temptation, in the wilderness, was addressed to desire, the second, in the garden, was addressed to fear. Satan, after the first, “departed from him for a season” ( Luke 4:13). He returned, in Gethsemane — “The prince of the world cometh and he hath nothing in me” ( John 14:30) — if possible, to deter Jesus from his work, by rousing within him vast and agonizing fears of the suffering and death that lay before him. Yet, in spite of both the desire and the fear with which his holy soul was moved, he was “without sin” ( Hebrews 4:15). The tree on the edge of the precipice is fiercely blown by the winds, the strain upon the roots is tremendous, but the roots hold. Even in Gethsemane and on Calvary, Christ never prays for forgiveness, he only imparts it to others.

See Ullman, Sinless state of Jesus; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,2:7-17, 126-136, esp. 135, 136; Schaff, Person of Christ, 51-72; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 3:330-349. (c) Ideal human nature. Furnishing the moral pattern which man is progressively to realize, although within limitations of knowledge and of activity required by his vocation as the world’s Redeemer. Psalm 8:4-8 — “thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet” — a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ. Hebrews 2:6-10 — “But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.” 1 Corinthians 15:45 — “The first...Adam...The last Adam — “implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; so verse 49 — “as we have borne the image of the earthly [man], we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” [man]. 2 Corinthians 3:18 — “the glory of the Lord” is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed. Philippians 3:21 — “who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that may be conformed to the body of his glory”; Colossians 1:18 — “that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”; 1 Peter 2:21 — “suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”; 1 John 3:3 — “everyone that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”

The phrase “Son of man” ( John 5:27; cf. Daniel 7:13, Com. of Pusey, in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity. At one time he appeared without form or comeliness ( Isaiah 52:2), and aged before his time ( John 8:57 — “Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed ( Psalm 45:2 — “Thou art fairer than the children of men”; Luke 4:22 — “the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”; Mark 10:32 — “Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”; Matthew 17:1-8 — the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters, the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical wellbeing. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar: “Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic.

You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.” So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.

But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellence of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship so that, in loving him, “love can never love too much.” Christ’s human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation, it was secured by Christ’s miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge: “Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”

Seth, Ethical Principles, 420 — “The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is no mere ideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364 — “The a priori only outlines a possible, and does not determine what shall be actual within the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.” No a priori truths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, a realization of the divine ideal. “Great men,” says Amiel, “are the true men.” Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.

Gore, Incarnation, 168 — “Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time. ‘The truly great Have all one age and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’ But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.” Dale, Ephesians, 42 — “Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, and a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son...here is nothing constrained...he was born to it. He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought...no irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father but also no truce of fear, or even of wonder. Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince but not a son.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148 — “What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had opinions, no conjectures nor we are never told that he forgot nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting. We are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans but he desired and he purposed and he did one thing with a view to another.” On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:exeursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 278-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bibliotheca Sacra, 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451 sq . (d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature. In other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature and prior to its union therewith.

By the impersonality of Christ’s human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ajnupostasi>a, and substituted the word ejnupostasi>a , they favored not “unpersonality” but “inpersonality”. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person such as James, Peter or John but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name.

It reached its personality only in union with his divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons (a human person and a divine person) but one person and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:289-308.

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136 — “We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.” In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus’ twofold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal — it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence; its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Goschel, quoted in Dorner’s Person of Christ, 5:170 — “Christ is humanity, we have it, he is it entirely, we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity, he lies at the basis of every human consciousness without however, attaining realization in an individual for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”

Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp.

Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881 — “Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him but he is also the vital principle, which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man’s evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.” Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159 — “Christ’s incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God’s witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.” The incarnation was no detached event, it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word “whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting” ( Micah 5:2). (e) A human nature germinal and capable of self-communication. so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.

In Isaiah 9:6, Christ is called “Everlasting Father.” In Isaiah 53:10, it is said that “he shall see his seed.” In Revelations 22:16, he calls himself “the root” as well as “the offspring of David.” See also John 5:21 — “the Son also giveth life to whom he will”; 15:1 — “I am the true vine” whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures. John 17:2 — “thou gavest him authority overall flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life’; Corinthians 15:45 — “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Here “spirit” = not the Holy Spirit nor Christ’s divine nature but “the ego of his total divine-human personality.” Ephesians 5:23 — “Christ also is the head of the church” the head to which all the members are united and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his “little children” ( John 13:33), when he leaves them they are “orphans” (14:18 margin). “He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother” (20:17 — “my brethren”; cf . Hebrews 2:11 — “brethren”, and 13 — “Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. on John 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old: the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. Hence John 12:24 — “if it die, it beareth much fruit”; Matthew 10:37 and Luke 14:26 — “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” = none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountainhead and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race. Cf . 1 Timothy 2:15 — “she shall be saved through the childbearing” — which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre. 2:451 sq . (Syst.. Doct., 3:349 sq .).

Lightfoot on Colossians 1:18 — “who is the beginning, the first fruits from the dead” — Here ajrch> = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead 1 Corinthians 15:20,23); 2. originating power. not only principium prencipiatum, but also principium principians. As he is first with respect to the universe so he becomes first with respect to the church; cf. Hebrews 7:15,16 — ‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life’.” Paul teaches that “the head of every man is Christ” ( 1 Corinthians 11:3), and that “in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” ( Colossians 2:9).

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks on Ephesians 1:10, that God’s purpose is “to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth” — to bring all things to a head ajnakefalaiw>sasqai . History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fullness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious son-ship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name of the Son of God, in a preeminent but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.

Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror, which reflects him to us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yet HE appears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object ( James 1:23-25; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 1 Corinthians 13:12). Over against mankind is Christ-kind and over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ’s indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ’s humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source. See George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.

Simon, Reconciliation, 308 — “Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature — even as Paul teaches, qei~on ge>nov ( Acts 17:29). At the center, as it were, swathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living, divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”

The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ, “the light that lighteth every man” ( John 1:9), is present and is working within us.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272 — “That the divine idea of man as ‘the son of his love’ ( Colossians 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature. This has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought, the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.” But Mead, Ritschl’s Place in the History of Doctrine,10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl: “Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity.

Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer.

Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently, Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”

The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ’s veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ’s veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ’s human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity. 2. The Deity of Christ.

The reality and integrity of Christ’s divine nature have been sufficiently proved in a former chapter (see pages 305-315). We need only refer to the evidence there given, that, during his earthly ministry, Christ: (a) Possessed a knowledge of his own deity. John 3:13 — “the Son of man, who is in heaven” This is a passage which clearly indicates Christ’s consciousness, at certain times in his earthly life at least, that he was not confined to earth but was also in heaven [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with a , and B omit oJ w\n ejn tw~| oujranw~|; for advocacy of the common reading, see Broadus, in Hovey’s Com, on John 3:13; 3:58 — “Before Abraham was born, I am.” Here Jesus declares that there is a respect in which the idea of birth and beginning does not apply to him but in which he can apply to himself the name “I am” of the eternal God. 14:9,10 — “Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?”

Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 24-49, gives the following instances of Jesus’ supernatural knowledge: 1. Jesus’ knowledge of Peter ( John 1:42); 2. his finding of Philip (1:43); 3. his recognition of Nathanael (1:47-50); 4. of the woman of Samaria (4:17-19, 39); 5. miraculous draughts of fishes ( Luke 5:6-9; John 21:6); 6. death of Lazarus ( John 11:14); 7. of the ass’s colt ( Matthew 21:2); 8. of the upper room ( Mark 14:15); 9. of Peter’s denial ( Matthew 26:34); 10. of the manner of his own death ( John 12:33; 18:32); 11. of the manner of Peter’s death ( John 21:19); 12. of the fall of Jerusalem ( Matthew 24:2).

Jesus does not say “our Father” but “my Father” ( John 20:17).

Rejection of him is a greater sin than rejection of the prophets, because he is the “beloved Son” of God ( Luke 20:13). He knows God’s purposes better than the angels do, because he is the Son of God ( Mark 13:32).

As Son of God, he alone knows and he alone can reveal the Father ( Matthew 11:27). There is clearly something more in his Son-ship than in that of his disciples ( John 1:14 — “only begotten”; Hebrews 1:6 — first begotten”). See Chapman. Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 37; Denney, Studies in Theology, 33. (b) Exercised divine powers and prerogatives. John 2:24,25 — “But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men and because he needed not that any one should hear witness concerning man for he himself knew what was in man”; 18:4 — “Jesus therefore, knowing all the things that were coming upon him, went forth”; Mark 4:39 — “he awoke and rebuked the wind and said unto the sea, Peace, be still And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm”; Mark9:6 — “But that ye may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy)” Arise, and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house”; Mark 2:7 — “Why doth this man thus speak? he blasphemeth: who can forgive sins but one, even God?”

It is not enough to keep, like Alexander Severus, a bust of Christ, in a private chapel along with Virgil, Orpheus, Abraham, Apollonius and other persons of the same kind; see Gibbon, Decline and fall, chap. xvi. “Christ is all in all. The prince in the Arabian story took from a walnut shell a miniature tent, but that tent expanded so as to cover first himself then his palace, then his army and at last his whole kingdom. So Christ’s being and authority expand, as we reflect upon them, until they take in not only ourselves, our homes and our country but the whole world of sinning and suffering men and the whole universe of God”. See A. H. Strong, Address at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference, April 23, 1900.

Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 39 — “What is that law which I call gravitation but the sign of the Son of man in heaven? It is the gospel of self-surrender in nature. It is the inability of any world to be its own center, the necessity of every world to center in something else. In the firmament as on the earth, the many are made one by giving the one for the many.” “Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter; Churches change, forms perish, systems go, but our human needs, they will not alter, Christ no after age will e’er outgrow. Yea, amen, O changeless One, thou only Art life’s guide and spiritual goal; Thou the light across the dark vale lonely, Thou the eternal haven of the soul.”

But this is to say, in other words, that there were, in Christ a knowledge and a power such as belong only to God. The passages cited furnish a refutation of both the Ebionite denial of the reality and the Arian denial of the integrity of the divine nature in Christ.

Napoleon to Count Montholon (Bertrand’s Memoirs): “I think I understand somewhat of human nature, and I tell you all these [heroes of antiquity] were men and I am a man but not one is like him; Jesus Christ was more than man.” See other testimonies in Schaff, Person of Christ.

Even Spinoza, Tract. Theol.-Pol., cap. 1 (vol. 1:383), says that “Christ communed with God, mind to mind, this spiritual closeness is unique” (Martineau, Types, 1:254). and Channing speaks of Christ as more than a human being, as having exhibited a spotless purity which is the highest distinction of heaven; F. W. Robertson has called attention to the fact that the phrase “Son of man “( John 5:27; cf. Dan. 7:13) in itself implies that Christ was more than man because it would have been an impertinence for him to have proclaimed himself Son of man, unless he had claimed to be something more. Could not every human being call himself the same? When one takes this for his characteristic designation, as Jesus did, he implies that there is something strange in his being Son of man, that this is not his original condition and dignity. In other words, that he is also Son of God.

It corroborates the argument from Scripture, to find that Christian experience instinctively recognizes Christ’s Godhead and that Christian history shows a new conception of the dignity of childhood and of womanhood, of the sacredness of human life and of the value of a human soul. All of this arises from the belief that, in Christ, the Godhead honored human nature by taking it into perpetual union with itself by bearing its guilt and punishment and by raising it up from the dishonors of the grave to the glory of heaven. We need both the humanity and the deity of Christ.

The humanity, for, as Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment witnesses, the ages that neglect Christ’s humanity must have some human advocate and Savior and find a poor substitute for the ever-present Christ in Mariolatry. The invocation of the saints and the ‘real presence’ of the wafer and the mass; the deity, for unless Christ is God, he cannot offer an infinite atonement for us nor bring about a real union between our souls and the Father. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:325-327 (Syst. Doct., 3:221- 223) — “Mary and the saints took Christ’s place as intercessors in heaven; transubstantiation furnished a present Christ on earth.” It might almost be said that Mary was made a fourth person in the Godhead.

Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums: “It is no paradox and neither is it rationalism, but the simple expression of the actual position as it lies before us in the gospels. It is not the Son, but the Father alone, who has a place in the gospel as Jesus proclaimed it”; i. e., Jesus has no place, authority, supremacy, in the gospel, the gospel is a Christianity without Christ. See Nicoll, The Church’s One Foundation,48. And this in the face of Jesus’ own words: “Come unto me” ( Matthew 11:28); “the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations” ( Matthew 25:31,32); “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” ( John 14:9); “he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him” ( John 3:36). Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, advocate the nut-theory in distinction from the onion- theory of doctrine. Does the fourth gospel appear a second century production? What of it? There is an evolution of doctrine as to Christ. “Harnack does not conceive of Christianity as a seed but it is at first a plant in potentiality, then a real plant, identical from the beginning of its evolution to the final limit, and from the root to the summit of the stem.

He conceives of it rather as a fruit ripe or over ripe that must be peeled to reach the incorruptible kernel and he peels his fruit so thoroughly that little remains at the end.” R. W. Gilder: “If Jesus is a man, And only a man, I say That of all mankind I will cleave to him, And will cleave alway. If Jesus Christ is a God, And the only God, I swear I will follow him through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air.”

On Christ manifested in Nature, see Jonathan Edwards, Observations on Trinity, ed. Start, 92-97 — “He who, by his immediate influence, gives being every moment and by his Spirit actuates the world because he inclines to communicate himself. His excellencies, doth doubtless communicate his excellency to bodies, as far as there is any consent or analogy. And the beauty of face and sweet airs in men are not always the effect of the corresponding excellencies of the mind yet the beauties of nature are really emanations or shadows of the excellencies of the Son of God. So that, when we are delighted with flowery meadows and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see his love and purity. So the green trees and fields and singing of birds are the emanations of his infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and vines are shadows of his beauty and loveliness. The crystal rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of his favor, grace and beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the manifestations of his glory and goodness, and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things wherein we may behold his awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, in the hovering thunder clouds, in ragged rocks and the brows of mountains. That beauteous light wherewith the world is filled in a clear day is a lively shadow of his spotless holiness and happiness and delight in communicating himself. And doubtless, this is a reason why Christ is compared so often to these things. Often Christ is called by such names as the Sun of Righteousness, the Morning Star, the Rose of Sharon, and Lily of the Valley, the apple tree among trees of the wood, a bundle of myrrh, a roe or a young hart. By this we may discover the beauty of many of those metaphors and similes which, to a non-philosophical person, do seem so uncouth. In like manner, when we behold the beauty of man’s body in its perfection, we still see like emanations of Christ’s divine perfections, although they do not always flow from the mental excellencies of the person that has them. But we see the most proper image of the beauty of Christ when we see beauty in the human soul.”

On the deity of Christ, see Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:262, 351; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 127, 207, 458; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:61-64; Hovey. God with Us, 17-23; Bengel on John 10:30. On the two natures of Christ, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 201-212.

III. THE UNION OF THE TWO NATURES IN ONE PERSON.

Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and not divested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united so that he is properly not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord but by a bond unique and inscrutable which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will. This consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of God and man for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of God in man. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was “a mere man.” As if there could be such a thing as mere man, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton’s objection to the phrase “God and man,” because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term “God-man” to the phrase “God in man,” for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is “the only begotten,” in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115 — “Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed that there only should be, one, viz., ‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’” 1. Proof of this Union. (a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself and is spoken of as a single person.

There is no interchange of ‘I’ and ‘thou’ between the human and the divine natures such as we find between the persons of the Trinity ( John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11 — “we speak that we do know,” and even here “we “is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2 — “is come in the flesh” is supplemented by John 1:14 — “became flesh” and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality. John 17:23 — “I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one: that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”; 3:11 — “We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness” 1 John 4:2 — “every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”; John 1:14 — “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” = he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed not two persons, but one person.

In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father and both to the Spirit. But Christ’s divinity is never objective to neither his humanity nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97 — “He is not so much God and man, as God in and through and as man. He is one indivisible personality throughout. We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.” We err when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end ( Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature. Certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth ( John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine or of the divine from the human.

All of Christ’s words were spoken, the God-man did all of Christ’s deeds.

See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100. (b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ. Conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indestructibly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Romans 1:3 and 1 Peter 3:18; of the latter, 1 Timothy 2:5 and Hebrews 1:2,3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, today, and forever and, on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world ( Ephesians 1:23; 4:10; Matthew 28:20). Romans 1:3 — “his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”; 1 Peter 3:13 — “Christ also suffered for sins once...being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”; Timothy 2:5 — “one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”; Hebrews 1:2,3 — “his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things...who being the effulgence of his glory when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”; Ephesians 1:22,23 — “put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head of all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all”; 4:10 — “He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”; Matthew 28:20 — “lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145 — “Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ’s God-hood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation. Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God.

The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.

Let us also avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ (modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper). Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as ‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.” Charles Spurgeon remarked that people who “dear” everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in “dear Hebrews.” (c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ’s atonement and of the union of the human race with God, which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man in whom the two natures are united. That what each does has the value of both. 1 John 2:2 — “he is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,” — as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man; Ephesians2:16-18 — “might reconcile them both [Jew and Gentile] in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”; 21, 22 — “in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord in whom ye also are budded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”; 2 Peter 1:4 — “that through these [promises] ye may become partakers of the divine nature.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107 — “We cannot separate Christ’s divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.” (d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.

The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however — forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed — need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308) — “Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos ( Hebrews 2:14 — partook of...flesh and blood’; 2 Corinthians 5:19 — “God was in Christ’; Colossians 2:9 — “in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”; (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest ( Romans 5:14 — “Adam’s transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come”; 1 Corinthians 15:22 — “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”; 15:45 — “The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’; Luke 1:35 — “the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’; Matthew 1:20 — “that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity ( 1 Timothy 3:16 — “who was manifested in the flesh”; 1 John 4:2 — “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh”; John 6:41,51 — “I am the bread which came down out of heaven...I am the living bread’; 2 John 7 — “Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’; John 1:14 — “the Word became flesh”. This last text cannot mean that the Logos ceased to be what he was and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”

The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties. Genus idiomaticum = impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person, genus apotelesmaticum (from ajpote>lesma, ‘that which is finished or completed,’ i. e., Jesus’ work) = attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures.

Hence Mary may be called “the mother of God,” as the Chalcedon symbol declares, “as to his humanity,” and what each nature did has the value of both. Genus majestaticum = attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in a genus tapeinoticon, i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this third genus majestaticum are found in John 3:13 — “no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man who is in heaven” [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with a , and B omit oJ w\n ejn tw~| oujranw~| ]; 5:27 — “he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.” Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called “allúsis,” Luther says: “Allúsis est larva qædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”

The genus majestaticum is denied by the Reformed Church on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between that and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man’s “ascending up where he was before,” says: “By the ‘Son of man’ must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.” For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:387-397, 407-418. 2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.

A. Theory of an incomplete humanity. Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ’s humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.

The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man’s nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ’s pneu~ma , this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being, his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held in slightly varying forms by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.

Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine selfconsciousness, to become man so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke or wrought as God but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bibliotheca Sacra 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144- 151, and in Herzog, Encyclopadie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3. emphasizes the word “flesh,” in John 1:14 and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a human body, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.

Against this theory we urge the following objections: (a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14 — o lo>gov saneto . The word sa>rx here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf. John 3:6 — to< gegennhme>non ejk th~v sarkorx ejstin; Romans 7:18 — oujk oijkei~ ejn ejmoi> tou~t ejstin ejn th~ sarki> mou ajgaqo>n). That ejge>neto does not imply a transmutation of the lo>gov into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ejskh>nwsen which follows — an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2 — ejn sarki< ejlhluqo>ta — where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ’s person but also the distinctness of the constituent natures. John 1:14 — “the Word became flesh, and dwelt [tabernacled] among us, and we beheld his glory”; 3:6 — “That which is born of the flesh is flesh”; Romans 7:18 — “in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing” 1 John 4:2 — “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” Since “flesh,” in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place. Psalm 85:9 — “Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land” — was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men “beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” ( John 1:14). And Paul can say in 2 Corinthians 12:9 — “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me,” (b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to. It asserts, on the one hand, the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father and, on the other hand, the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham ( Matthew 1:1-16; Hebrews 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity and the true deity of Christ.

See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown. “Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite divine pneu~ma . It maintained at least the divine side of Christ’s person. But the theory before us denies both sides.” While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the “half length” portrait, which depicted only the lower half of the man. Matthew 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, and Hebrews 2:16 — “taketh hold of the seed of Abraham” — intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature. (c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God’s immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.

See Dorner, Unveranderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch fur deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412 — “Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus’ earthly life, the Trinity was altered.

The Father no more poured his fullness into the Son, the Son no more with the Father sent forth the Holy Spirit, the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone without the mediation of the Son and the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone has aseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family whose head is the Father but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus’ life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son and the Spirit depends on the Son as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.” (d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine, for when God becomes man he ceases to be God, in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature. For mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value, in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ. For where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.

See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390 — “Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God’s Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate and Christ, respectively. But in that ease we lose the likeness between Christ’s nature and our own, Christ’s being preexistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ’s unlikeness to us is yet greater for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead and, in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all, only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”

Isaac Watts’s theory of a preexistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity, it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction, hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bibliotheca Sacra, 1875:421. A. A. Hodge. Pop. Lectures, 226 — “If Christ does not take a human pneu~ma , he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138 — “The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men — a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners but it would have effected no union of God and men.” On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre. 4:356- 408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.

B. Theory of a gradual incarnation. Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.

The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fullness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125) — “In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.” 2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328) — “In spite of this becoming, inside of the Unio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being and Jesus’ life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction. Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos as the plant turns toward the light.

The initial union makes Christ already the God-man but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequent becoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.” 2:464 sq. (Syst. Doct., 3:363 sq.) — “The actual life of God, as the Logos reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if the Unio is to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically and turn into action each new revelation or perception of God’s will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says: ‘I must be about my Father’s business.’ To Satan’s temptation: ‘Art thou God’s Son?’ he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.” Dorner’s view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248- 261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).

A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87 — Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit. So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present, knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincides. The assumption of unity was gradual in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.” Rothe’s statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bibliotheca Sacra, 27:386.

It is objectionable for the following reasons: (a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Man was as completely Son of God as Son of man was ( Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the Godman ( Philippians 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations. Relation, with regard to which, the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.

In Luke 1:35 — “the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God” — and Philippians 2:7 — “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men” — we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality Jesus Christ was not divinehuman. (b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious and voluntary appropriation of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.

Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner’s view, that it “leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God, a man of God but not a man who is God.” He maintains, against Dorner, that “the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.” 193-195 — Dorner’s view “makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Two willing personalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other, two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner: ‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the central ego of this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’ At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him. ‘The unio personalis grows and completes itself and becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’ Thus Dorner’s views are. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine to the human in Christ’s person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.” See also Thomasius, 2:80-92. (c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says: “I and the Logos are one”; “he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”; “the Logos is greater than I”; “I go to the Logos.” In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.

Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture, of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity.

Philippi also objects to Dorner’s view on the basis that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man, it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh and that it does not explain how two personalities can become one. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying: “The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.” But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115 — “Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine. To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside. And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity. Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be willfully throwing away the gains of centuries and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”

See also Dorner, System, 1:123 — “Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.” The unity is the foundation of religion; the difference is the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man’s moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.

Stalker, Imago Christi: “Christ was not half a God and half a man but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95 — “The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeed always God and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.” He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14 — “The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volition of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.” See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:428-430). 3. The real nature of this Union. (a) Its great importance. While the Scriptures represent the person of Christ as the crowning mystery of the Christian scheme ( Matthew 11:27; Colossians 1:27; 2:2; 1 Timothy 3:16), they also incite us to its study ( John 17:3; 20:27; Luke 24:39; Philippians 3:8,10).

This is the more needful, since Christ is not only the central point of Christianity, but is Christianity itself, the embodied reconciliation and union between man and God. The following remarks are offered, not as fully explaining, but only as in some respects relieving, the difficulties of the subject. Matthew 11:27 — “no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” Here it seems to be intimated that the mystery of the nature of the Son is even greater than that of the Father. Shedd, Hist.

Doct., 1:408 — The Person of Christ is in some respects more baffling to reason than the Trinity. Yet there is a profane neglect, as well as a profane curiosity: Colossians 1:27 — “the riches of the glory of this mystery...which is Christ in you, the hope of glory”; 2:2, 3 — “the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”; 1 Timothy 3:16 — “great is the mystery of godliness; He who was manifested in the flesh” — here the Vulgate, the Latin Fathers, and Buttmann make musth>rion the antecedent of o[v , the relative taking the natural gender of its antecedent, and kusth>rion referring to Christ; Hebrews 2:11 — “both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one [not father but race or substance]” (cf. Acts 17:26 — “he made of one every nation of men”) — an allusion to the solidarity of the race and Christ’s participation in all that belongs to us. John 17:3 — “this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him who thou didst send, even Jesus Christ”; 20:27 — “Reach hither thy finger, and see my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and put it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing”; Luke 24:39 — “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; Philippians 3:8,10 — “I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord...that I nay know him”; John 1:1 — “that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life.”

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 254, 255 — “Ranke said that Alexander was one of the few men in whom biography is identical with universal history. The words apply far better to Christ.” Crane, Religion of Tomorrow, 267 — “Religion being merely the personality of God, Christianity the personality of Christ.” Pascal: “Jesus Christ is the center of everything and the object of everything, and he who does not know him knows nothing of the order of nature and nothing of himself.” Goethe in his last years wrote: “Humanity cannot take a retrograde step and we may say that the Christian religion, now that it has once appeared, can never again disappear. Now that it has once found a divine embodiment, cannot again be dissolved.” H. B. Smith, that man of clear and devout thought, put his whole doctrine into one sentence: “Let us come to Jesus, the person of Christ is the center of theology.” Dean Stanley never tired of quoting as his own Confession of Faith the words of John Bunyan: “Blest Cross — blest Sepulchre — blest rather he — The man who there was put to shame for me!” And Charles Wesley wrote on Catholic Love: “Weary of all this wordy strife, These motions, forms, and modes and names, To thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life, Whose love my simple heart inflames — Divinely taught, at last I fly, With thee and thine to live and die.” “We have two great lakes named Erie and Ontario and these are connected by the Niagara River through which Erie pours its waters into Ontario. The whole Christian Church throughout the ages has been called the overflow of Jesus Christ, who is infinitely greater than it is. Let Lake Erie be the symbol of Christ, the pre-existent Logos, the Eternal Word, God revealed in the universe. Let Niagara River be a picture to us of this same Christ now confined to the narrow channel of His manifestation in the flesh but within those limits showing the same eastward current and downward gravitation which men perceived so imperfectly before. The tremendous cataract, with its waters plunging into the abyss and shaking the very earth, is the suffering and death of the Son of God which for the first time makes palpable to human hearts the forces of righteousness and love operative in the Divine nature from the beginning. The law of universal life has been made manifest. Now it is seen that justice and judgment are the foundations of God’s throne, that God’s righteousness everywhere and always makes penalty to follow sin and that the love which creates and upholds sinners must itself be numbered with the transgressors and must bear their iniquities. Niagara has demonstrated the gravitation of Lake Erie and not in vain. For from Niagara there widens out another peaceful lake. Ontario is the offspring and likeness of Erie. So redeemed humanity is the overflow of Jesus Christ but only of Jesus Christ after he has passed through the measureless self-abandonment of His earthly life and of His tragic death on Calvary. The Church draws its life from the cross just as the Niagara feeds the waters of Lake Ontario.

Christ’s purpose is not that we should repeat Calvary for that we can never do but that we should reflect in ourselves the same onward movement and gravitation towards self-sacrifice which He has revealed as characterizing the very life of God.” (A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress, London, July 12, 1905). (b) The chief problems. These problems are 1) one personality and two natures, 2) human nature without personality, 3) relation of the Logos to the humanity during the earthly life of Christ,4) relation of the humanity to the Logos during the heavenly life of Christ. We may throw light on 1) by the figure of two concentric circles, on 2) by remembering that two earthly parents unite in producing a single child, on 3) by the illustration of latent memory, which contains so much more than present recollection and on 4) by the thought that body is the manifestation of spirit. Christ in his heavenly state is not confined to place.

Luther said that we should need “new tongues” before we could properly set forth this doctrine, particularly a new language with regard to the nature of man. The further elucidation of the problems mentioned above will immediately occupy our attention. Our investigation should not be prejudiced by the fact that the divine element in Jesus Christ manifests itself within human limitations. This is the condition of all revelation. John 14:9 — “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; Colossians 2:9 — “in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” = up to the measure of human capacity to receive and to express the divine. Hebrews 2:11 and Acts 17:26 both attribute to man a consubstantiality with Christ and Christ is the manifested God. It is a law of hydrostatics that the smallest column of water will balance the largest.

Lake Erie will be no higher than the water in the tube connected therewith.

So the person of Christ reached the level of God though limited in extent and environment; he was God manifest in the flesh.

Robert Browning, Death in the Desert: “I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee to be wise”; Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ: “That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my Universe that feels and knows. “That face,” said Browning to Mrs. Orr, as he finished reading the poem, “is the face of Christ. That is how I feel him.” This is his answer to those victims of nineteenth century skepticism for whom incarnate Love has disappeared from the universe, carrying with it the belief in God. He thus attests the continued presence of God in Christ, both in nature and humanity. On Browning as a Christian Poet, see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 181-226. (c) Reason for mystery. The union of the two natures in Christ’s person is necessarily inscrutable, because there are no analogies to it in our experience. Attempts to illustrate it, on the one hand, from the union and yet the distinctness of soul and body (like iron and heat) and on the other hand from the union and yet the distinctness of Christ and the believer, of the divine Son and the Father. They are one-sided and become utterly misleading, if they are to be regarded as furnishing a rationale of the union and not simply a means of repelling objection. The first two illustrations mentioned above lack the essential element of two natures to make them complete. Soul and body are not two natures, but one, nor are iron and heat two substances. The last two illustrations mentioned above lack the element of single personality. Christ and the believer are two persons, not one, even as the Son and the Father are not one person but two.

The two illustrations most commonly employed are the union of soul and body and the union of the believer with Christ. Each of these illustrates one side of the great doctrine but each must be complemented by the other. The former, taken by it would be Eutychian, the latter, taken by it, would be Nestorian. Like the doctrine of the Trinity, the Person of Christ is an absolutely unique fact for which we can find no complete analogies.

But neither do we know how soul and body are united. See Blunt, Dict.

Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Hypostasis; Sartorius, Person and Work of Christ, 27-65; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 39-77; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 28l — 334.

A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 218, 230 — “Many people are Unitarians, not because of the difficulties of the Trinity, but because of the difficulties of the Person of Christ. The union of the two natures is not mechanical, as between oxygen and nitrogen in our air nor chemical, as between oxygen and hydrogen in water nor organic, as between our hearts and our brains but personal. The best illustration is the union of body and soul in our own persons — how perfectly joined they are in the great orator! Yet here are not two natures, but one human nature. We need therefore to add the illustration of the union between the believer and Christ.” And here too we must confess the imperfection of the analogy, for Christ and the believer are two persons and not one. The person of the God-man is unique and without adequate parallel. But this constitutes its dignity and glory. (d) Ground of possibility. The possibility of the union of deity and humanity in one person is grounded in the original creation of man in the divine image. Man’s kinship to God, in other words, his possession of a rational and spiritual nature is the condition of incarnation. Brute-life is incapable of union with God. But human nature is capable of the divine, in the sense not only that it lives, moves and has its being in God but that God may unite himself indestructibly to it and endue it with divine powers while yet it remains all the more truly human. Since the moral image of God in human nature has been lost by sin Christ, the perfect image of God after which man was originally made, restores that lost image by uniting himself to humanity and filling it with his divine life and love. 2 Peter 1:4 — “partakers of the divine nature.” Creation and providence do not furnish the last limit of God’s indwelling. Beyond these, there is the spiritual union between the believer and Christ and even beyond this, there is the unity of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:283 (Syst. Doct., 3:180) — “Humanity in Christ is related to divinity, as woman to man is marriage. It is receptive but it is exalted by receiving. Christ is the offspring of the [marriage] covenant between God and Israel.” Ib., 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:301-308) — “The question is: How can Christ be both Creator and creature? The Logos, as such, stands over against the creature as a distinct object. How can he become, and be, that which exists only as object of his activity and his in-working? Can the cause become its own effect? The problem is solved, only by remembering that the divine and human, though distinct from each other, are not to be thought of as foreign to each other and mutually exclusive. The very thing that distinguishes them binds them together. Their essential distinction is that God has aseity while man has simply dependence. ‘Deep calleth unto deep’ ( Psalm 42:7) — the deep of the divine riches and the deep of human poverty call to each other. ‘From me a cry, from him reply.’ God’s infinite resources and man’s infinite need, God’s measureless supply and man’s boundless receptivity attract each other, until they unite in him in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. The mutual attraction is of an ethical sort, but the divine love has ‘first loved’ ( 1 John 4:19). “The new second creation is therefore not merely, like the first creation, one that distinguishes from God, it is one that unites with God. Nature is distinct from God yet God moves and works in nature. Much more does human nature find its only true reality, or realization, in union with God.

God’s uniting act does not violate or unmake it but rather first causes it to be what, in God’s idea, it was meant to be.” Incarnation is therefore the very fulfillment of the idea of humanity. The supernatural assumption of humanity is the most natural of all things. Man is not a mere tangent to God but an empty vessel to be filled from the infinite fountain. Natura humana in Christo capax divinæ. See Talbot, in Bap. Quar., 1868:129; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 270.

God could not have become an angel or a tree or a stone. But he could become man because man was made in his image. God in man, as Phillips Brooks held, is the absolutely natural. Channing said that “all minds are of one family.” E. B. Andrews: “Divinity and humanity are not contradictory predicates. If this had been properly understood, there would have been no Unitarian movement. Man is in a true sense divine.

This is also true of Christ. But he is infinitely further along in the divine nature than we are. If we say his divinity is a new kind, then the new kind arises out of the degree.” “Were not the eye itself a sun, No light for it could ever shine: By nothing godlike could the soul be won, Were not the soul itself divine.”

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:165 — “A smaller circle may represent a larger in respect of its circularity but a circle, small or large, cannot be the image of a square.” 2:101 — “God would not be God without union with man and man would not be man without union with God. Immanent in the spirits he has made, he shares their pains and sorrows...Showing the infinite element in man, Christ attracts us toward his own moral excellence.” Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 190 — “Incarnation is the indwelling of God in his children, of which the type and pattern is seen in him who is at once the manifestation of God to man and the revelation to men of what humanity is to be when God’s work in the world is done, perfect God and perfect man, because of God perfectly dwelling in a perfect man.”

We have quoted these latter utterances, not because we regard them as admitting the full truth with regard to the union of the divine and human in Christ but because they recognize the essential likeness of the human to the divine. This helps our understanding of the union between the two. We go further than the writers quoted, in maintaining not merely an indwelling of God in Christ but an organic and essential union. Christ moreover is not the God-man by virtue of his possessing a larger measure of the divine than we possess but rather by being the original source of all life, both human and divine. We hold to his deity as well as to his divinity, as some of these authors apparently do not. See Hebrews 7:15,16 — “another priest, who hath been made...after the power of an endless life”; John 1:4 — “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (e) No double personality. This possession of two natures does not involve a double personality in the God-man for the reason that the Logos takes into union with himself, not an individual man with already developed personality but human nature which has had no separate existence before its union with the divine. Christ’s human nature is impersonal, in the sense that it attains self-consciousness and self-determination only in the personality of the God-man. Here it is important to mark the distinction between nature and person. Nature is substance possessed in common, the persons of the Trinity have one nature, there is a common nature of mankind. Person is nature separately subsisting, with powers of consciousness and will. Since the human nature of Christ has not and never had a separate subsistence, it is impersonal, and in the God-man the Logos furnishes the principle of personality. It is equally important to observe that self-consciousness and self-determination do not belong to nature as such but only to personality. For this reason, Christ has not two consciousness’ and two wills, but a single consciousness and a single will. This consciousness and will, moreover, is never simply human, but is always theanthropic — an activity of the one personality which unites in itself the human and the divine ( Mark 13:32; Luke 22:42).

The human father and the human mother are distinct persons, and they each give something of their own peculiar nature to their child yet the result is, not two persons in the child, but only one person, with one consciousness and one will. So the Fatherhood of God and the motherhood of Mary produced not a double personality in Christ, but a single personality. Dorner illustrates the union of human and divine in Jesus by the Holy Spirit in the Christian. Nothing foreign, nothing distinguishable from the human life into which it enters and by the moral sense, which is the very presence and power of God in the human soul, yet conscience does not break up the unity of the life. See C. C. Everett, Essays, 32. These illustrations help us to understand the inter-penetration of the human by the divine in Jesus but they are defective in suggesting that his relation to God was different from Ours not in kind but only in degree. Only Jesus could say: “Before Abraham was born, I am” ( John 8:58); “I and the Father are one” ( John 10:30).

The theory of two consciousness’ and two wills, first elaborated by John of Damascus, was an unwarranted addition to the orthodox doctrine propounded at Chalcedon. Although the view of John of Damascus was sanctioned by the Council of Constantinople (681), “this Council has never been regarded by the Greek Church as ecumenical. Its composition and spirit deprive its decisions of all value as indicating the true sense of Scripture”; see Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 90. Nature has consciousness and will, only as it is manifested in person. The one person has a single consciousness and will which embraces within its scope at all times a human nature, and sometimes a divine. Notice that we do not say Christ’s human nature had no will but only that it had none before its union with the divine nature and none separately from the one will which was made up of the human and the divine united versus Current Discussions in Theology, 5:283.

Sartorius uses the illustration of two concentric circles: the one ego of personality in Christ is at the same time the center of both the human nature and the divine circles. Or, still better, illustrate by a smaller vessel of air inverted and sunk, sometimes below its center, sometimes above, in a far larger vessel of water. See Mark 13:32 — “of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son “ ; Luke 22:42 — “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” To say that, although in his capacity as man he was ignorant yet at that same moment in his capacity as God he was omniscient is to accuse Christ of non-veracity. Whenever Christ spoke, it was not one of the natures that spoke, but the person in whom both natures were united.

We subjoin various definitions of personality: Bo”thius, quoted in Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:415 (Syst. Doct., 3:313) — “Persona est animæ rationalis individua substantia”; F. W. Robertson, Lect. on Gen., p. 3 — “Personality = self-consciousness, will, character”; Porter, human Intellect, 626 — “Personality = distinct subsistence, either actually or latently self-conscious and self-determining”; Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 408 — “Person = being, conscious of self, subsisting in individuality and identity, and endowed with intuitive reason, rational sensibility, and freewill.” Dr. E. G. Robinson defines “nature” as “that substratum or condition of being which determines the kind and attributes of the person but which is clearly distinguishable from the person itself.”

Lotze, Metaphysics, ß244 — “The identity of the subject of inward experience is all that we require. So far as, and so long as, the soul knows itself as this identical subject, It is and is named, simply for that reason, substance.” Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine,32 — “Our conception of substance is not derived from the physical, but from the mental, world. Substance is first of all that which underlies our mental affections and manifestations. Kant declared that the idea of freedom is the source of our idea of personality. Personality consists in the freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature.” On personality, see Windelband, Hist. Philos., 238. For the theory of two consciousness’ and two wills, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:129, 234; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:314; Ridgeley, Body of Divinity, 1:476; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:378-391; Shedd. Dogmatic Theology, 2:289-308, esp. 328. Per contra, see Hovey, God with Us, 66; Schaff, Church fist., 1:757 and 3:751; Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 12-14; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 148- 169; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 512-518. (f) Effect upon the human. The union of the divine and the human natures makes the latter possessed of the powers belonging to the former. In other words, the attributes of the divine nature are imparted to the human without passing over into its essence, so that the human Christ even on earth had power to be, to know, and to do, as God. That this power was latent, or was only rarely manifested, was the result of the self-chosen state of humiliation upon which the God-man had entered. The Holy Spirit mediated communication between his divine nature and his human nature in this state of humiliation. The God-man, in his servant-form, knew and taught and performed only what the Spirit permitted and directed ( Matthew 3:16; John 3:34; Acts 1:2; 10:38; Hebrews 9:14).

But when thus permitted, he knew, taught, and performed, not, like the prophets, by power communicated from without, but by virtue of his own inner divine energy ( Matthew 17:2; Mark 5:41; Luke 5:20,21; 6:19; John 2:11,24,25; 3:13; 20:19).

Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2d ed., 2:77 — “Human nature does not become divine, but (as Chemnitz has said) only the medium of the divine; as the moon has not a light of her own but only shines in the light of the sun. So human nature may derivatively exercise divine attributes, because it is united to the divine in one person.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 151 — “Our souls spiritualize our bodies and will one day give us the spiritual body while yet the body does not become spirit. So the Godhead gives divine powers to the humanity in Christ while yet the humanity does not cease to be humanity.”

Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:131 — “The union exalts the human. As light brightens the air, heat gives glow to the iron, spirit exalts the body, the Holy Spirit hallows the believer by union with his soul. Fire gives to iron its own properties of lighting and burning yet the iron does not become fire. Soul gives to body its life-energy yet the body does not become soul.

The Holy Spirit sanctifies the believer, but the believer does not become divine for the divine principle is the determining one. We do not speak of airy light, of iron heat or of a bodily soul. So human nature possesses the divine only derivatively. In this sense it is our destiny to become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ ( 2 Peter 1:4).” Even in his earthly life, when he wished to be, or more correctly, when the Spirit permitted, he was omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, could walk the sea or pass through closed doors. But, in his state of humiliation, he was subject to the Holy Spirit.

In Matthew 3:16, the anointing of the Spirit at his baptism was not the descent of a material dove (“as a dove”). The dove-like appearance was only the outward sign of the coming forth of the Holy Spirit from the depths of his being and pouring itself like a flood into his divine-human consciousness. John 3:34 — “for he giveth not the Spirit by measure”; Acts 1:2 — “after that he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles”; 10:33 — “Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him”; Hebrews 9:14 — “the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God.”

When permitted by the Holy Spirit, he knew, taught, and wrought as God: Matthew 17:2 — “he was transfigured before them”; Mark 5:41 — “Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise”; Luke 5:20,21 — “Man, thy sins are forgiven thee...Who can forgive sins, but God alone?”; Luke 6:19 — “power came forth from him, and healed them all’; John 2:11 — “This beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory”; 24, 25 — “he knew all men...he himself knew what was in a man”; 3:13 — “the Son of man, who is in heaven” [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with a and B, omit oJ w[n ejn tw~| sujranw~| for advocacy of the common reading, see Broadus, in Hovey’s Com., on John 3:13]; 20:19 — “when the doors were shut...Jesus came and stood in the midst.”

Christ is the ‘servant of Jehovah” ( Isaiah 42:1-7; 49:1-12; 52:13; 53:11) and the meaning of pai~v ( Acts 3:13,26; 4:2; 30) is not “child” or “Son”; it is “servant,” as in the Revised Version. But, in the state of exaltation, Christ is the “Lord of the Spirit” ( 2 Corinthians 3:18 — Meyer), giving the Spirit; John l6:7 — “I will send him unto you”, present in the Spirit; ( John 14:18 — “I come unto you”; Matthew 28:20 — “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”, and working through the Spirit; 1 Corinthians 15:45 — “The last Adam became a life-giving spirit”; 2 Corinthians 3:17 — “Now the Lord is the Spirit”.

On Christ’s relation to the Holy Spirit, see John Owen, Works, 282-297; Robins, in Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1874:615; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-241.

Delitzsch: “The conception of the servant of Jehovah is, as it were, a pyramid, of which the base is the people of Israel as a whole; the central part, Israel according to the Spirit and the summit, the Mediator of Salvation who rises out of Israel.” Cheyne, on Isaiah, 2:253, agrees with this view of Delitzsch, which is also the view of Oehler. The O. T. is the life of a nation; the N. T. is the life of a man. The chief end of the nation was to produce the man and the chief end of the man was to save the world. Sabatier, Philos. Religion,59 — “If humanity were not potentially and in some degree an Emmanuel, God with us, there would never have issued from its bosom he who bore and revealed this blessed name.” We would enlarge and amend this illustration of the pyramid, by making the base to be the Logos, as Creator and Upholder of all ( Ephesians 1:23; Colossians 1:16); the stratum which rests next upon the Logos is universal humanity ( Psalm 8:5,6); then comes Israel as a whole ( Matthew 2:15); spiritual Israel rests upon Israel after the flesh ( Isaiah 42:1-7); as the acme and cap stone of all, Christ appears, to crown the pyramid, the true servant of Jehovah and Son of man ( Isaiah 53:11; Matthew 20:28). We may go even further and represent Christ as forming the basis of another inverted pyramid of redeemed humanity ever growing and rising to heaven ( Isaiah 9:6 — “Everlasting Father”; Isaiah 53:10 — “he shall see his seed”; Revelations 22:16 — “root and offspring of David”; Hebrews 2:13 — “I and the children whom God hath given me.” (g) Effect upon the divine. This communion of the natures was such that, although the divine nature in itself is incapable of ignorance, weakness, temptation, suffering or death, the one person Jesus Christ was capable of these by virtue of the union of the divine nature with a human nature in him. As the human Savior can exercise divine attributes, not in virtue of his humanity alone, but derivatively, by virtue of his possession of a divine nature, so the divine Savior can suffer and be ignorant as man. He can do this not in his divine nature, but derivatively, by virtue of his possession of a human nature. We may illustrate this from the connection between body and soul. The soul suffers pain from its union with the body, of which apart from the body it would be incapable. So the God-man, although in his divine nature impassible, was capable, through his union with humanity, of absolutely infinite suffering.

Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity.

He never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass non-scorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300 sq.; Lawrence, in Bibliotheca Sacra, 24:41; Schoberlein, in Jahrbuch fur deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.

J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898 — “Jesus Christ is God in the form of man, as completely God as if he were not man, as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human. The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature. The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within It is the righteousness in him which makes his death necessary.” (h) Necessity of the union. The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His twofold nature gives him fellowship with both parties since it involves an equal dignity with God and, at the same time, a perfect sympathy with man ( Hebrews 2:17,18; 4:15, 16). This twofold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation. Being man, he can make atonement for man and being God, his atonement has infinite value. While both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love ( 1 Timothy 2:5; Hebrews 7:25). Hebrews 2:17,18 — “Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.” 4:15, 16 — “For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”; Timothy 2:5 — “one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”; Hebrews 7:25 — “Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”

Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value and the union, which he effects with God, is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine- human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208.

Just as the high priest of old bore on his miter the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God.

In Virgil’s Æneid, Dido says well: “Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco” — “Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.” And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote: “Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto” — “I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.” Christ’s experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being. (i) The union eternal. The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indestructible and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Corinthians 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father, since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf. Hebrews 1:8; 7:24, 25). 1 Corinthians 15:28 — “And when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”; John 17:5 — “Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”; Hebrews 1:8 — “of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”; 7:24 — “he because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son’s will, as Mediator, and that of the Father ( Matthew 26:39 — “not as I will, but as thou wilt”) — a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge ( John 16:26 — “In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that l will pray the Father for you.”) If Christ’s reign ceased, he would be inferior to the saints themselves who are to reign but, they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.

The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ’s giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it. In that, of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vice-regency, but not his mediator-ship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bibliotheca Sacra, Jan. 1890:68- 83. Wrightnour: “When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the office of mediator of the Son will cease.”

We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.

Melanchthon: “Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.” Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward and not a surrender of all power and authority but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4 — “It is not a giving up of his authority as mediator because that throne is to endure forever. But it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God’s medium of accomplishing all.” An. Par. Bible, on 1 Corinthians 15:28 — “Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.” See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85 sq. Expositor’s Greek Testament, on Corinthians 15:28, “affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.

This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power but the free submission of love...which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last. Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”

Dorner, Glaubenslehre,2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299) — “We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres.

This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany and Christ’s relation to humanity would be a merely external one.” Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord’s Knowledge as Man, XX — “Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord’s humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? That it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? See Colossians 1:24 — “fill up that which is lacking’; Hebrews 10:12,13 — “expecting till his enemies”; 1 Corinthians 15:28 — “when all things have been subjected unto him.” In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preexistent state ( John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him ( Ephesians 1:21,22) and that he is now omnipresent ( Matthew 28:20). (j) Infinite and finite in Christ. Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions.

The first is that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive. The second is that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind. The third is that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.

Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God’s Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fullness of the Godhead is in him alone but it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Systematic Theology, 176- 178, that Christ’s humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation but in the finite we see the Infinite; 2 Corinthians 5:19 — “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself”; John 14:9 — “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.

J. M. Whiton: “How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished, qua divine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead bodily. I emphasize fullness and say: The Godhead is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but the fullness is in the head alone, a fullness of course not absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fullness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one and all life is divine.” Gloria Patri, 88, 23 — “Every incarnation of life is pro tanto and in its measure an incarnation of God. God’s way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fullness of life in Christ. The Homoousios of the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth but the Nicene Fathers built better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long afterward; God and man are of one substance.” So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man’s nature to be the same in kind with God’s. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134. Homoiousios he regards as involving homoousios. This means that the divine nature is capable of fission or segmentation, to break off in portions and distribute among finite moral agents, the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment. Every man therefore, to some extent is inspired and evil, as truly an inspiration of God as, is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite and so not excluding it.

Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is, “not God and man, but God in man.” Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature, which is finite in man, is identical with the nature, which is infinite in God. Christ’s distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fullness of life — “anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power” ( Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks: “To this humanity of man as a part of God — to this I cling for I do love it, and I will know nothing else. Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word. Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.” Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:. “You are a part of God.”

While we shrink from the expressions, which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth, which these writers are laboring to express. The truth is namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it. “Jesus quotes approvingly the words of Psalm 82:6 — “I said, Ye are Gods.” Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we — sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause. “And we through him” ( 1 Corinthians 8:6) = we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.” Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of “the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.” The Son, or Word of God, “when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion. 1:196 — “The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love and it is an Emmanuel and Son of God. Its whole history is a continual incarnation of God. Indeed, it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.” Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal lo>gov and an impersonal u[lh , both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter, natura naturata: “Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris” (Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as the natura naturans and this became the governing conception. The products are all divine but not equally so. Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul; it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopadie, art.:

Christologie; Barrows, In Bibliotheca Sacra, 10:765; 26:83; also, Bibliotheca Sacra, 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works. 1:223; Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, book v, chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap.

Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61- 88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct 1889:509 625.

SECTION 3 — THE TWO STATES OF CHRIST.

I. THE STATE OF HUMILIATION.

1. The nature of this humiliation.

We may dismiss, as unworthy of serious notice, the views that it consisted essentially either in the union of the Logos with human nature, for this union with human nature continues in the state of exaltation, or in the outward trials and privations of Christ’s human life. This view casts reproach upon poverty and ignores the power of the soul to rise superior to its outward circumstances.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 224 — “The error of supposing it too humiliating to obey law was derived from the Roman treasury of merit and works of supererogation. Better was Frederick the Great’s sentiment when his sturdy subject and neighbor, the miller, whose windmill he had attempted to remove. Having beaten him in a lawsuit, the thwarted monarch exclaimed: ‘Thank God, there is law in Prussia!’” Palmer, Theological Definition, 79 — “God reveals himself in the rock, vegetable, animal, man. Must not the process go on? Must there not appear in the fullness of time a man who will reveal God as perfectly as is possible in human conditions, a man who is God under the limitations of humanity?

Such incarnation is humiliation only in the eyes of men. To Christ it is lifting up, exaltation, glory. John 12:32 — “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409 — “The divinity of Christ is not obscured but is more clearly seen shining through his humanity.”

We may devote more attention to the A. The theory of Thomasius, Delitzsch, and Crosby was that the humiliation consisted in the surrender of the relative divine attributes.

This theory holds that the Logos, although retaining his divine selfconsciousness and his immanent attributes of holiness, love and truth surrendered his relative attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, in order to take to him veritable human nature. According to this view, there are, indeed, two natures in Christ but neither of these natures is infinite. Thomasius and Delitzsch are the chief advocates of this theory in Germany. Dr. Howard Crosby has maintained a similar view in America.

The theory of Thomasius, Delitzsch and Crosby has been, though improperly, called the theory of the Kenosis (from ejke>nwsen — “emptied himself” — in Philippians 2:7) and its advocates are often called Kenotic theologians. There is a Kenosis of the Logos but it is of a different sort from that which this theory supposes. For statements of this theory, see Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:233-255, 542-550; Delitzsch, Biblische Psychologie, 323-333; Howard Crosby, in Bap.

Quar., 1870:350-363 — a discourse subsequently published in a separate volume, with the title: The True Humanity of Christ, and reviewed by Shedd, in Presb. Rev., April, 1881:429-431. Crosby emphasizes the word “became,” in John 1:14 — “and the Word became flesh” — and gives the word “flesh” the sense of “man,” or “human.” Crosby, then, should logically deny, though he does not deny, that Christ’s body was derived from the Virgin.

We object to this view that: (a) It contradicts the Scriptures already referred to, in which Christ asserts his divine knowledge and power. Divinity, it is said, can give up its worldfunctions, for it existed without these before creation. But to give up divine attributes is to give up the substance of the Godhead. Nor is it a sufficient reply to say that only the relative attributes are given up, while the immanent attributes, which chiefly characterize the Godhead, are retained for the immanent necessarily involve the relative, as the greater involve the less.

Liebner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:349-356 — “Is the Logos here? But wherein does he show his presence, that it may be known?” Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 217, note. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:125-146, criticizes the theory of the Kenosis but grants that, with all its self-contradictions as he regards them, it is an attempt to render conceivable the profound truth of a sympathizing, self-sacrificing God. (b) Since the Logos, in uniting himself to a human soul, reduces himself to the condition and limitations of a human soul, the theory is virtually a theory of the coexistence of two human souls in Christ. The union of two finite souls is more difficult to explain than the union of a finite and an infinite, since there can be in the former case no intelligent guidance and control of the human element by the divine.

Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408 — “The impossibility of making two finite souls into one finally drove Arianism to the denial of any human soul in Christ” (Apollinarianism). This statement of Dorner, which we have already quoted in our account of Apollinarianism, illustrates the similar impossibility, upon the theory of Thomasius, of constructing out of two finite souls the person of Christ. See also Hovey, God with Us, 68. (c) This theory fails to secure its end which is that of making comprehensible the human development of Jesus, for even though divested of the relative attributes of God-hood, the Logos still retains his divine selfconsciousness, together with his immanent attributes of holiness, love, and truth. This is as difficult to reconcile with a purely natural human development as the possession of the relative divine attributes would be.

The theory logically leads to a further denial of the possession of any divine attributes or of any divine consciousness at all on the part of Christ and merges itself in the view of Gess and Beecher that the Godhead of the Logos is actually transformed into a human soul.

Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:343 — “The old theology conceived of Christ as in full and unbroken use of the divine self-consciousness, the divine attributes and the divine world-functions from the conception until death.

Though Jesus, as fútus, child, boy was not almighty and omnipresent according to his human nature yet he was so, as to his divine nature, which constituted one ego with his human. Thomasius, however, declared that the Logos gave up his relative attributes, during his sojourn in flesh.

Dorner’s objection to this, on the ground of the divine unchangeableness, overshoots the mark, because it makes any becoming impossible. “But some things in Thomasius’ doctrine are still difficult. Divinity can certainly give up its world-functions for it has existed without these before the world was. In the nature of an absolute personality, however, lies an absolute knowing, willing and feeling which it cannot give up. Hence Philippians 2:6-11 speaks of a giving up of divine glory but not of a giving up of divine attributes or nature. Little is gained by such an assumption of the giving up of relative attributes, since the Logos, even while divested of a part of his attributes, still has full possession of his divine self-consciousness, which must make a purely human development no less difficult. The expressions of divine self-consciousness, the works of divine power and the words of divine wisdom prove that Jesus was in possession of his divine self-consciousness and attributes. “The essential thing which the Kenotics aim at, however, stands fast, namely, that the divine personality of the Logos divested itself of its glory ( John 17:5), riches ( 2 Corinthians 8:6), divine form ( Philippians 2:6). This divesting is the becoming man. The humiliation then, was a giving up of the use, not of the possession, but of the divine nature and attributes. That man can thus give up self-consciousness and powers we see every day but man does not thereby, cease to be man. So we maintain that the Logos, when he became man, did not divest himself of his divine person and nature, which was impossible but only divested himself of the use and exercise of these — these being latent to him — in order to unfold themselves to use in the measure to which his human nature developed itself, a use which found its completion in the condition of exaltation.” This statement of Kahnis although approaching correctness is still neither quite correct nor quite completes.

B. The theory is that the humiliation consisted in the surrender of the independent exercise of the divine attributes.

This theory, which we regard as the most satisfactory of all, may be more fully set forth as follows. The humiliation, as the Scriptures seem to show, consisted: (a) In that act of the preexistent Logos by which he gave up his divine glory with the Father, in order to take a servant form. In this act, he resigned not the possession nor yet entirely the use, but rather the independent exercise of the divine attributes. John 17:5 — “glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”; Philippians 2:6,7 — “who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men”; 2 Corinthians 8:9 — “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.” Pompilia, in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book: “Now I see how God is likest God in being born.”

Omniscience gives up all knowledge but that of the child, the infant or the embryo, the infinitesimal germ of humanity. Omnipotence gives up all power but that of the impregnated ovum in the womb of the Virgin. The Godhead narrows itself down to a point that is next to absolute extinction.

Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, in John 13:1-20, is the symbol of his coming down from his throne of glory and taking the form of a servant in order that be may purify us by regeneration and sanctification for the marriage supper of the Lamb. (b) In the submission of the Logos to the control of the Holy Spirit and the limitations of his Messianic mission, in his communication of the divine fullness of the human nature which he had taken into union with himself. Acts 1:2 — Jesus, “after that he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”; 10:38 — “Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power”; Hebrews 9:14 — “the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God.” A minor may have a great estate left to him yet may have only such use of it as his guardian permits.

In Homer’s Iliad, when Andromache brings her infant son to part with Hector, the boy is terrified by the warlike plumes of his father’s helmet, and Hector puts them off to embrace him. So God lays aside “That glorious form, that light unsufferable And that far beaming blaze of majesty.” Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his Friends, 282, 283 — “Revelation is the voluntary approximation of the infinite being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.” (c) In the continuous surrender, on the part of the God-man, so far as his human nature was concerned, of the exercise of those divine powers with which it was endowed by virtue of its union with the divine and in the voluntary acceptance, which followed upon this, of temptation, suffering and death. Matthew 26:53 — “thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legion of angels?” John 10:17,18 — “Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; Philippians 2:8 — “and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.” Cf . Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice: “Such music is there in immortal souls, That while this muddy vesture of decay Doth close it in, we cannot see it.”

Each of these elements of the doctrine has its own Scriptural support. We must therefore regard the humiliation of Christ, not as consisting in a single act, but as involving a continuous self-renunciation, which began with the Kenosis of the Logos in becoming man and which culminated in the selfsubjection of the God-man to the death of the cross.

Our doctrine of Christ’s humiliation will be better understood if we put it midway between two pairs of erroneous views, making it the third of five.

The list would be as follows: Gess (the Logos gave up all divine attributes), Thomasius (the Logos gave up relative attributes only), True View (the Logos gave up the independent exercise of divine attributes), Old Orthodoxy (Christ gave up the use of divine attribute and Anselm (Christ acted as if he did not possess divine attributes). The full exposition of the classical passage with reference to the humiliation, namely, Philippians 2:5-8, we give below, under the next paragraph, pages 705, 706. Brentius illustrated Christ’s humiliation by the king who travels incognito. But Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 158, says well that “to part in appearance with only the fruition of the divine attributes would be to impose upon us with a pretense of self-sacrifice but to part with it in reality was to manifest most perfectly the true nature of God.”

This same objection lies against the explanation given in the Church Quarterly Review, Oct. 1891:1-30, on Our Lord’s Knowledge as Man: “If divine knowledge exists in a different form from human and a translation into a different form is necessary before it can be available in the human sphere, our Lord might know the day of judgement as God and yet be ignorant of it as man. This must have been the case if he did not choose to translate it into the human form. But it might also have been incapable of translation. The processes of divine knowledge may be far above our finite comprehension.” This seems to us to be a virtual denial of the unity of Christ’s person, and to make our Lord play fast and loose with the truth. He either knew, or he did not know and his denial that he knew makes it impossible that he should have known in any sense. 2. The stages of Christ’s humiliation.

We may distinguish (a) that acts of the pre-incarnate Logos by which, in becoming man, he gave up the independent exercise of the divine attributes. (b) His submission to the common laws which regulate the origin of souls from a preexisting sinful stock, in taking his human nature from the Virgin, a human nature which only the miraculous conception rendered pure. (c) His subjection to the limitations involved in a human growth and development, reaching the consciousness of his son-ship at his twelfth year and working no miracles till after the baptism. (d) The subordination of himself as a servant, in state, knowledge, teaching and acts, to the control of the Holy Spirit so lives not independently. (e) His subjection, as connected with a sinful race, to temptation and suffering, and finally to the death which constituted the penalty of the law.

Peter Lombard asked whether God could know more than he was aware of? It is only another way of putting the question whether, during the earthly life of Christ, the Logos existed outside of the flesh of Jesus. We must answer in the affirmative. Otherwise the number of the persons in the Trinity would be variable and the universe could do without him who is ever “upholding all things by the word of his power” ( Hebrews 1:3), and in whom “all things consist” ( Colossians 1:17). Let us recall the nature of God’s omnipresence (see pages 279-282). Omnipresence is nothing less than the presence of the whole of God in every place. From this it follows, that the whole Christ can be present in every believer as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fullness. The whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the universe. By virtue of this omnipresence, therefore, the whole Logos can suffer on earth, while yet the whole Logos reigns in heaven. The Logos outside of Christ has the perpetual consciousness of his Godhead, while yet the Logos, as united to humanity in Christ, is subject to ignorance, weakness and death. Shedd, Dogma. Theol., 1:153 — “Jehovah, though present in the form of the burning bush was at the same time omnipresent also”; 2:265-284 esp. — “Because the sun shining in and through a cloud, it does not follow that it cannot at the same time be shining through the remainder of universal space, unobstructed by any vapor whatever.” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 21 — “Not with God, as with finite man, does arrival in one place necessitate withdrawal from another.” John Calvin: “The whole Christ was there but not all that was in Christ was there.” See Adamson, The Mind of Christ.

How the independent exercise of the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence can be surrendered, even for a time, would be inconceivable, if we were regarding the Logos as he is in himself, seated upon the throne of the universe. The matter is somewhat easier when we remember that it was not the Logos per se, but rather the God-man, Jesus Christ, in whom the Logos submitted to this humiliation.

South, Sermons, 2:9 — “Be the fountain never so full, yet if it communicate itself by a little pipe, the stream can be but small and inconsiderable, and equal to the measure of its conveyance.” Sartorius, Person and Work of Christ,39 — “The human eye when open, sees heaven and earth but when shut, it sees little or nothing. Yet in inherent capacity does not change. So divinity does not change its nature when it drops the curtain of humanity before the eyes of the God-man.”

The divine in Christ, during most of his earthly life, is latent, or only now and then present to his consciousness or manifested to others. Illustrate from second childhood, where the mind itself exists but is not capable of use or from first childhood, where even a Newton or a Humboldt, if brought back to earth and made to occupy an infant body and brain, would develop as an infant with infantile powers. There is more in memory than we can at this moment recall; memory is greater than recollection. There is more of us at all times than we know, only the sudden emergency reveals the largeness of our resources of mind and heart and will. The new nature, in the regenerate, is greater than it appears. “Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that if he shall be manifested. We shall be like him” ( 1 John 3:2). So in Christ there was an ocean like fullness of resource, of which only now and then the Spirit permitted the consciousness and the exercise.

Without denying (with Dorner) the completeness, even from the moment of the conception, of the union between the deity and the humanity, we may still say with Kahnis: “The human nature of Christ, according to the measure of its development, appropriates more and more to its conscious ease the latent fullness of the divine nature! So we take the middle ground between two opposite extremes. On the one hand, the Kenosis was not the extinction of the Logos nor, on the other hand, did Christ hunger and sleep by miracle. This is Docetism. We must not minimize Christ’s humiliation for this was his glory. There was no limit to his descent, except that arising from his sinless perfection. His humiliation was not merely the giving up of the appearance of Godhead. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 585 — “Should any one aim to celebrate the condescension of the emperor Charles the Fifth by dwelling on the fact that he laid aside the robes of royalty and assumed the style of a subject and altogether ignore the more important matter that he actually became a private person, it would be very weak and absurd.” Cf. 2 Corinthians 8:9 — “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor” = he beggared himself. Matthew 27:46 — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” = non-exercise of divine omniscience.

Inasmuch, however, as the passage Philippians 2:6-8 is the chief basis and support of the doctrine of Christ’s humiliation, we here subjoin a more detailed examination of it.

EXPOSITION OF PHILIPPIANS 2:6-8. The passage reads: ‘who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant being made in the likeness of men and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.”

The subject of the sentence is at first (verses 6, 7) Christ Jesus, regarded as the preexistent Logos. Subsequently (verse 3), this same Christ Jesus is regarded as incarnate. This change in the subject is indicated by the contrast between morfh~| qeou~ (verse6) and morfhlou (verse 7), as well as by the participles la>bw>n and geno>menov (verse 7) and eujreqei>v (verse 8) it is asserted, then, that the preexisting Logos, “although subsisting in the form of God, did not regard his equality with God as a thing to be forcibly retained but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, (that is) by being made in the likeness of men. And being found in outward condition as a man, he (the incarnate son of God, yet further) humbled himself by becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (verse 8).

Here notice that what the Logos divested himself of, in becoming man, is not the substance of his Godhead, but the “form of God” in which this substance was manifested. This “form of God” can be only that independent exercise of the powers and prerogatives of Deity, which constitutes his “equality with God.” This he surrenders, in the act of “taking the form of a servant” — or becoming subordinate, as man. (Here other Scriptures complete the view, by their representations of the controlling influence of the Holy Spirit in the earthly life of Christ.) The phrases “made in the likeness of men” and “found in fashion as a man” are used to intimate, not that Jesus Christ was not really man, but that he was God as well as man and therefore free from the sin which clings to man (cf. Romans 3:3 — ejn oJmoiw>mati sarkoav — Meyer). Finally, this one person, now God and man united, submits himself consciously and voluntarily to the humiliation of an ignominious death.

See Lightfoot, on Philippians 2:8 — “Christ divested himself, not of his divine nature, for that was impossible, but of the glories and prerogatives of Deity. This he did by taking the form of a servant.” Evans, in Presb. Rev., 1883:287 — “Two stages in Christ’s humiliation, each represented by a finite verb defining the central act of the particular stage, accompanied by two modal participles. 1st stage indicated in vs. 7. Its central act is: ‘he emptied himself.’ Its two modalities are: (1) ‘taking the form of servant’ and (2) ‘being made in the likeness of men.’ Here we have the humiliation of the Kenosis, that by which Christ became man. 2d stage indicated in vs. 8. Its central act is: ‘he humbled himself.’ Its two modalities are (1) ‘being found in fashion as a man’ and (2) ’ becoming obedient unto death yea, the death of the cross. Here we have the humiliation of his obedience and death, that by which, in humanity, he became a sacrifice for our sins.”

Meyer refers Ephesians 5:31 exclusively to Christ and the church, making the completed union future, however, i. e, at the time of the Parousia. “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother” = “in the incarnation, Christ leaves father and mother (his seat at the right hand of God), and cleaves to his wife (the church). The two (the descended Christ and the church) then become one flesh (one ethical person, as the married pair become one by physical union). The Fathers, however, (Jerome, Theodoret, Chrysostom), referred it to the incarnation.” On the interpretation of Philippians 2:6-11, see Comm. of Neander, Meyer, Lange, Ellicott.

On the question whether Christ would have become man had there been no sin, theologians are divided. Dorner, Martensen, and Westcott answer in the affirmative and Robinson, Watts and Denney in the negative. See Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 5:236; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 327-329; Westcott, Com. on Hebrews, page 8 — “The incarnation is in its essence independent of the Fall, though conditioned by it as to its circumstances.” Per contra, see Robinson, Christ. Theol., 219, note — “It would be difficult to show that a like method of argument from a priori premises will not equally avail to prove sin to have been a necessary part of the scheme of creation.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 101, objects to the doctrine of necessary incarnation irrespective of sin, that it tends to obliterate the distinction between nature and grace, to blur the definite outlines of the redemption wrought by Christ, as the supreme revelation of God and his love. See also Watts, New Apologetic, 198-202; Julius Muller, Dogmat. Ablhandlungen, 66-126; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 512-526, 543-548; Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 340-345.

On the general subject of the Kenosis of the Logos, see Bruce, Humiliation of Christ; Robins, in Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1874:615; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:138-150, 386-475; Pope, Person of Christ,23; Bodemeyer, Lehre von der Kenosis; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:610- 625.

II. THE STATE OF EXALTATION.

1. The nature of this exaltation.

It consisted essentially, in resumption on the part of the Logos, of his independent exercise of divine attributes, the withdrawal, on the part of the Logos, of all limitations in his communication of the divine fullness to the human nature of Christ. The corresponding exercise, on the part of the human nature, of those powers which belonged to it by virtue of its union with the divine.

The eighth Psalm, with its account of the glory of human nature, is at present fulfilled only in Christ (see Hebrews 2:9 — “but we behold...Jesus”). Hebrews 2:7 — hjllattwsav aujton qracu> ti par ajgge>louv — may be translated, as in the margin of the Revised Version: “Though madest him for a little while lower than the angels.”

Christ’s human body was not necessarily subject to death; only by outward compulsion or voluntary surrender could he die. Hence resurrection was a natural necessity ( Acts 2:24 — “whom God raised up having loosed the pangs of death because it was not possible that he should beholden of it”; 31 — “neither was he left unto Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption”). This exaltation, which then affected humanity only in its head, is to be the experience also of the members. Our bodies also are to be delivered from the bondage of corruption and we are to sit with Christ upon his throne. 2. The stages of Christ’s exaltation, (a) The quickening and resurrection.

Both Lutherans and Romanists distinguish between these two, making the former precede, and the latter follow, Christ’s “preaching to the spirits in prison.” These views rest upon a misinterpretation of 1 Peter 3:18-20.

Lutherans teach that Christ descended into hell to proclaim his triumph to evil spirits. But this is to give ejkhruxen the unusual sense of proclaiming his triumph instead of his gospel. Romanists teach that Christ entered the underworld to preach to Old Testament saints, that they might be saved.

But the passage speaks only of the disobedient; it can not be pressed into the support of a sacramental theory of the salvation of Old Testament believers. The passage does not assert the descent of Christ into the world of spirits, but only a work of the pre-incarnate Logos in offering salvation, through Noah, to the world then about to perish.

Augustine. Ad Euodiam, ep. 99 — “The spirits shut up in prison are the unbelievers who lived in the time of Noah, whose spirits or souls were shut up in the darkness of ignorance as in a prison. Christ preached to them, not in the flesh, for he was not yet incarnate, but in the spirit, that is, in his divine nature.” Calvin taught that Christ descended into the underworld and suffered the pains of the lost, but not all Calvinists hold with him here. See Princeton Essays, 1:153. Meyer, on Romans 10:7, regards the question — “Who shall descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead) — as an allusion to, and so indirectly a proof text for, Christ’s descent into the underworld. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 211, favors a preaching to the dead: “During that time [the three days] he did not return to heaven and his Father.” But though John 20:17 is referred to for proof, is not this statement true only of his body?

So far as the soul is concerned, Christ can say “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” and “Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise” ( Luke 23:43,46).

Zahn and Dorner best represent the Lutheran view. Zahn, in Expositor, March, 1898:216-233 — “If Jesus was truly man, then his soul, after it left the body, entered into the fellowship of departed spirits. If Jesus is he who lives forevermore and even his dying was his act, this tarrying in the realm of the dead cannot be thought of as a purely passive condition, but must have been known to those who dwelt there. If Jesus was the Redeemer of mankind, the generations of those who had passed away must have thus been brought into personal relation to him, his work and his kingdom, without waiting for the last day.”

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:662 (Syst. Doct., 4:127), thinks “Christ’s descent into Hades marks a new era of his pneumatic life, in which he shows himself free from the limitations of time and space.” He rejects “Luther’s notion of a merely triumphal progress and proclamation of Christ. Before Christ,” he says, “there was no abode peopled by the damned. The descent was an application of the benefit of the atonement (implied in kh>ru>ssein). The work was prophetic, neither high priestly nor kingly. Going to the spirits in prison is spoken of as a spontaneous act, not one of physical necessity. No power of Hades led him over into Hades. Deliverance from the limitations of a mortal body is already an indication of a higher stage of existence. Christ’s soul is bodiless for a time — pneu~ma only — as the departed was. “The ceasing of this preaching is neither recorded, nor reasonably to be supposed, indeed the ancient church supposed it carried on through the apostles. It expresses the universal significance of Christ for former generations and for the entire kingdom of the dead. No physical power is a limit to him. The gates of hell, or Hades, shall not prevail over or against him. The intermediate state is one of blessedness for him and he can admit the penitent thief into it. Even those who were not laid hold of by Christ’s historic manifestation in this earthly life still must and may, be brought into relation with him, in order to be able to acceptor to reject him. And thus the universal relation of Christ to humanity and the absoluteness of the Christian religion are confirmed.” This is the substance of Dorner’s views.

All this versus Strauss, who thought that the dying of vast masses of men, before and after Christ, who had not been brought into relation to Christ proves that the Christian religion is not necessary to salvation, because it is not universal. For advocacy of Christ’s preaching to the dead, see also Jahrbuch fur d. Theol., 23:177-228; W. W. Patton, in N. Eng., July, 1882:460-478; John Miller, Problems Suggested by the Bible, part 1:93- 98; part 2:38; Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison; Kendrick, in Bap. Rev., Apl. 1886; Clemen, Niedergefahren zu den Toten.

For the opposite view, see “No Preaching to the Dead,” in Princeton Rev., March 2 1875:197; 1878:451-491; Hovey, in Bap. Quar., 4:486 sq., and Bib. Eschatology, 97-107; Love, Christ’s Preaching to the Spirits in Prison; Cowles, in Bibliotheca Sacra, 1875:401; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:616-622; Salmond, in Popular Commentary; and Johesrone, Com., in loco . See also Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Pearson.

See also E. D. Morris, Is There Salvation after Death? and Wright, Relation of Death to Probation, 22:28 — “If Christ preached to spirits in Hades, it may have been to demonstrate the hopelessness of adding in the other world to the privileges enjoyed in this. We do not read that it had any favorable effect upon the hearers. If men will not hear Moses and the Prophets, then they will not hear one risen from the dead. ‘Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise’ ( Luke 23:43) was not comforting, if Christ was going that day to the realm of lost spirits. The antediluvians, however, were specially favored with Noah’s preaching, and were specially wicked.”

For a full statement of the view presented in the text, that the preaching referred to was the preaching of Christ as pre-existing Logos to the spirits, now in prison, when once they were disobedient in the days of Noah, see Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1872:601 sq., and in Bibliotheca Sacra, Apr. 1883:333-373. Before giving the substance of Bartlett’s exposition, we transcribe in full the passage in question, Peter 3:18-20 — “Because Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit in which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, that aforetime were disobedient when the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah.”

Bartlett expounds as follows: “‘in which’ [pneu>mati, divine nature] ‘he went and preached to the spirits in prison when once they disobeyed.’

Ajpeiqh>sasin is circumstantial aorist, indicating the time of the preaching as a definite past. It is an anarthrous dative, as in Luke 8:27; Matthew 8:23; Acts 15:25; 22:17. It is an appositive, or predicative, participle. [That the aorist participle does not necessarily describe an action preliminary to that of the principal verb appears from its use in verse 13 qanatwqei>v, in 1Thess. 1:6 (dexa>menoi , and in Colossians 2:11,13.) The connection of thought is: Peter exhorts his readers to endure suffering bravely, because Christ did so, in his lower nature being put to death, in his higher nature enduring the opposition of sinners before the flood. Sinners of that time only are mentioned because this permits an introduction of the subsequent reference to baptism. Cf .

Gen. 6:3; 1 Peter 1:10,11; 2 Peter 2:4,5.” (b) The ascension and sitting at the right hand of God.

As the resurrection proclaimed Christ to men as the perfected and glorified man, the conqueror of sin and lord of death, the ascension proclaimed him to the universe as the reinstated God, the possessor of universal dominion, and the omnipresent object of worship and hearer of prayer. Dextra Dei ubique est. Matthew 28:18,20 — “All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”; Mark 16:19 — “So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken unto them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God”; Acts 7:55 — “But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God”; 2 Corinthians 13:4 — “he was crucified through weakness, yet he liveth through the power of God”; Ephesians 1:22,23 — “he put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all”; 4:10 — “he that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.” Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:184-189 — “Before the resurrection, Christ was the God-man; since the resurrection, he is the God-man...he ate with his disciples, not to show the quality but the reality, of his human body.”

Nicoll, Life of Christ: “It was hard for Elijah to ascend” — it required chariot and horses of fire — “but it was easier for Christ to ascend than to descend,” there was a gravitation upwards. Maclaren: “He has not left the world, though he has ascended to the Father, any more than he left the Father when he came into the world”; John 1:18 — “the only begotten Son, who is the bosom of the Father”; 3:13 — “the Son of man, who is in heaven.”

We are compelled here to consider the problem of the relation of the humanity to the Logos in the state of exaltation. The Lutherans maintain the ubiquity of Christ’s human body and they make it the basis of their doctrine of the sacraments. Dornes Glaubenslehre, 2:674-676 (Syst.

Doct., 4:138-142), holds to “a presence, not simply o the Logos, but of the whole God-man, with all his people, but not necessarily likewise a similar presence in the world. In other words, his presence is morally conditioned by men’s receptivity.” The old theologians said that Christ is not in heaven, quasi carcere. Calvin, Institutes, 2:15 — he is “incarnate, but not incarcerated.” He has gone into heaven, the place of spirits, and he manifests himself there but he has also gone far above all heavens that he may fill all things. He is with his people always. All Power is given into his hand. The church is the fullness of him that filleth all in all. So the Acts of the Apostles speak constantly of the Son of man, of the man Jesus as God, ever present, the object of worship, seated at the right hand of God, having all the power and prerogatives of Deity. See Westcott, Bible Com., on John 20:22 — “he breathed on them and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit.” The characteristic effect of the Paschal gift was shown in the new faith by which the disciples were gathered into a living society; the characteristic effect of the Pentecostal gift was shown in the exercise of supremacy potentially universal.”

Who and what is this Christ who is present with his people when they pray? It is not enough to say, he is simply the Holy Spirit for the Holy Spirit is the “Spirit of Christ” ( Romans 8:9), and in having the Holy Spirit we have Christ himself ( John 16:7 — “I will send him [the Comforter] unto you”; 14:18 — “I come unto you”). The Christ, who is thus present with us when we pray, is not simply the Logos, or the divine nature of Christ, his humanity being separated from the divinity and being localized in heaven. This would be inconsistent with his promise, “Lo, I am with you” in which the “I” that spoke was not simply Deity, but Deity and humanity inseparably united and it would deny the real and indestructible union of the two natures. The elder brother and sympathizing Savior whom is with us when we pray are man, as well as God. This manhood is therefore ubiquitous by virtue of its union with the Godhead.

But this is not to say that Christ’s human body is everywhere present. It would seem that the body must exist in spatial relations and be confined to place. We do not know that this is so with regard to soul. Heaven would seem to be a place, because Christ’s body is there and a spiritual body is not a body but is spirit, but a body, which is suited to the uses of the spirit. But even though Christ may manifest himself, in a glorified human body, only in heaven, his human soul, by virtue of its union with the divine nature, can at the same moment be with all his scattered people over the whole earth. As, in the days of his flesh, his humanity was confined to place, while as to his Deity he could speak of the Son of man who is in heaven, so now, although his human body may be confined to place, his human soul is ubiquitous. Humanity can exist without body; for during the three days in the sepulchre. Christ’s body was on earth, but his soul was in the other world and in like manner there is, during the intermediate state, a separation of the soul and the body of believers. But humanity cannot exist without soul; and if the human Savior is with us, then his humanity, at least so far as respects its immaterial part, must be everywhere present. Per contra , see Shedd, Dogma. Theol., 2:326, 327.

Since Christ’s human nature has derivatively become possessed of divine attributes, there is no validity in the notion of a progressiveness in that nature, now that it has ascended to the right hand of God. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:131; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 558, 576.

Shedd, Dogma. Theol., 2:327 — “Suppose the presence of the divine nature of Christ in the soul of a believer in London. This divine nature is at the same moment conjoined with and present to and modified by, the human nature of Christ, which is in heaven and not in London.” So Hooker, Eccl. Pol., 54, 55, and E. G. Robinson: “Christ is in heaven at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us, while he is present in the church by his Spirit. We pray to the theanthropic Jesus. Possession of a human body does not now constitute a limitation. We know little of the nature of the present body.” We add to this last excellent remark the expression of our own conviction that the modern conception of the merely relative nature of space and the idealistic view of matter as only the expression of mind and will, have relieved this subject of many of its former difficulties. If Christ is omnipresent and if his body is simply the manifestation of his soul, then every soul may feel the presence of his humanity even now and every eye” may “see him” at his second coming, even though believers may be separated as far as is Boston from Peking.

The body from which his glory flashes forth may be visible in ten thousand places at the same time; ( Matthew 28:20; Revelations 1:7).

SECTION 4. THE OFFICES OF CHRIST.

The Scriptures represent Christ’s offices as three in number, prophetic, priestly, and kingly. Although these terms are derived from concrete human relations, they express perfectly distinct ideas. The prophet, the priest and the king of the Old Testament were detached but designed pre-figurations of him who should combine all these various activities in himself, and should furnish the ideal reality, of which they were the imperfect symbols. 1 Corinthians 1:30 — “of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.” Here “wisdom” seems to indicate the prophetic, “righteousness” (or “justification”) the priestly, and “sanctification and redemption” the kingly work of Christ. Denovan: “Three offices are necessary. Christ must be a prophet, to save us from the ignorance of sin; a priest, to save us from its guilt; a king, to save us from its dominion in our flesh. Our faith cannot have firm basis in any one of these alone any more than a stool can stand on less than three legs.” See Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 583-586; Archer Butler, Sermons, 1:314.

A. Hodge, Popular Lectures. 235 — “For ‘office,’ there are two words in Latin: munus = position (of Mediator) and officia = functions (of Prophet, Priest, and King). They are not separate offices, as are those of President, Chief Justice, and Senator. They are not separate functions, capable of successive and isolated performance. They are rather like the several functions of the one living human body — lungs, heart, brain — functionally distinct, yet interdependent and together constituting one life.

So the functions of Prophet, Priest and King mutually imply one another.

Christ is always a prophetical Priest and a priestly Prophet. He is always a royal Priest and a Priestly King and together they accomplish one redemption, to which all are equally essential. Christ is both mesi>thv and para>klhtov .”

I. THE PROPHETIC OFFICE OF CHRIST.

1. The nature of Christ’s prophetic work. (a) Here we must avoid the narrow interpretation, which would make the prophet a mere foreteller of future events. He was rather an inspired interpreter or revealer of the divine will, a medium of communication between God and men (profh>thv = not foreteller, but foreteller, or forthteller. Cf. Gen. 20:7 — of Abraham; <19A515> Psalm 105:15 — of the patriarchs; Matthew 11:9 — of John the Baptist; 1 Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians 2:20, and 3:5 — of N. T. expounders of Scripture). Gen. 20:7 — “restore the man’s wife; for he is a prophet” — spoken of Abraham; <19A515> Psalm 105:15 — “Touch not mine anointed ones, And do my people no harm” — spoken of the patriarchs; Matthew 11:9 — “But wherefore went ye out? to see a prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet” — spoken of John the Baptist, from whom we have no recorded predictions, and whose pointing to Jesus as the “Lamb of God” ( John 1:29) was apparently but an echo of Isaiah 53. Corinthians 12:28 — “first apostles; secondly prophets”; Ephesians 2:20 — “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets”; 3:5 — “revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit” — all these latter texts speaking of New Testament expounders of Scripture. Any organ of divine revelation, or medium of divine communication, is a prophet. “Hence,” says Philippi, “the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are called ‘prophetæ priores,’ or ‘the earlier prophets.’

Bernard’s Respice. Aspice, Prospice describes the work of the prophet for the prophet might see and might disclose things in the past, things in the present or things in the future. Daniel was a prophet, in telling Nebuchadnezzar what his dream had been as well as in telling its interpretation ( Daniel 2:28,36). The woman of Samaria rightly called Christ a prophet, when he took her all things that ever she did ( John 4:29).” On the work of the prophet, see Stanley Jewish Church, 1:491. (b) The prophet commonly united three methods of fulfilling his office, those of teaching, predicting and miracle working. In all these respects, Jesus Christ did the work of a prophet ( Deuteronomy 18:15; cf . Acts 3:22; Matthew 13:57; Luke 13:33; John 6:14). He taught (Matthew 5-7), he uttered predictions (Matthew 24 and 25), he wrought miracles (Matthew 8 and 9), while in his person, his life, his work and his death, and he revealed the Father ( John 8:26; 14:9; 17:8). Deuteronomy 18:15 — “Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet, from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him shall hearken” cf . Acts 3:22 — where this prophecy is said to be fulfilled in Christ. Jesus calls himself a prophet in Matthew 13:57 — “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house”; Luke 13:33 — “Nevertheless I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.” He was called a prophet; John 6:14 — “When therefore the people saw sign which he did, they said, This is of a truth the prophet that cometh into the world.” John 8:26 — “the things which I heard from him [the Father], these speak I unto the world”; 14:9 — “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; 17:8 — “the words which thou gavest me I have given unto them.”

Denovan: “Christ teaches us by his word, his Spirit, his example.”

Christ’s miracles were mainly miracles of healing. “Only sickness is contagious with us. But Christ was an example of perfect health and his health was contagious. By its overflow he healed others. Only a ‘touch’ ( Matthew 9:21) was necessary.”

Edwin P. Parker, on Horace Bushnell: “The two fundamental elements of prophecy are insight and expression. Christian prophecy implies insight or discernment of spiritual things by divine illumination, and expression of them, by inspiration, in terms of Christian truth or in the tones and cadences of Christian testimony. We may define it, then, as the publication, under the impulse of inspiration and for edification of truths perceived by divine illumination, apprehended by faith and assimilated by experience. It requires a natural basis and rational preparation in the human mind, a suitable stock of natural gifts on which to graft the Spiritual gift for support and nourishment. These gifts have had devout culture. Illuminations and inspirations have crowned them. Because insight gives foresight, the prophet will be a seer of things as they are unfolding and becoming will discern far signaling and intimations of Providence will forerun men to prepare the way for them and them for the way of God’s coming kingdom.” 2. The stages of Christ’s prophetic work.

These are four, namely: (a) The preparatory work of the Logos, in enlightening mankind before the time of Christ’s advent in the flesh. All preliminary religious knowledge, whether within or without the bounds of the chosen people, is from Christ, the revealer of God.

Christ’s prophetic work began before he came in the flesh. John 1:9 — “There was the true light even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world” all the natural light of conscience, science, philosophy, art, civilization, is the light of Christ. Tennyson: “Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken bits of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.” Hebrews 12:25,26 — “See that ye refuse not him that speaketh...whose voice then [at Sinai] shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble not the earth only, but also the heaven”; Luke 11:49 — “Therefore said the wisdom of (God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”; cf. Matthew 23:34 — “behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: some of them shall ye kill and crucify” — which shows that Jesus was referring to his own teachings, as well as to those of the earlier prophets. (b) The earthly ministry of Christ incarnate. In his earthly ministry, Christ showed himself the prophet par excellence. While he submitted, like the Old Testament prophets to the direction of the Holy Spirit and unlike them, he found the sources of all knowledge and power within himself. The word of God did not come to him, he was himself the Word. Luke 6:19 — “And all the multitude sought to touch him; for power came forth from him, and healed them all”; John 2:11 — “This beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory” ; 8:38, 58 — “I speak the things which I have seen with my Father...Before Abraham was born, I am”; cf. Jeremiah 2:1 — “the word of Jehovah came to me”; John 1:1 — “In the beginning was the Word.” Matthew 26:53 — “twelve legions of angels”; John 10:18 — of his life: “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; 34 — “Is it not written in your law. I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came say ye of him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest, because I said, I am the Son of God?” Martensen, Dogmatics, 295-301 says of Jesus’ teaching that “its source was not inspiration, but incarnation.”

Jesus was not inspired; he was the Inspirer. Therefore he is the true Master of those who know.” His disciples act in his name; he acts in his own name. (c) The guidance and teaching of his church on earth, since his ascension — Christ’s prophetic activity is continued through the preaching of his apostles and ministers, and by the enlightening influences of his Holy Spirit ( John 16:12-14; Acts 1:1). The apostles unfolded the germs of doctrine put into their hands by Christ. The church is, in a derivative sense, a prophetic institution, established to teach the world by its preaching and its ordinances. But Christians are prophets, only as being proclaimers of Christ’s teaching ( Numbers 11:29; Joel 2:28). John 16:12-14 — “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot hear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is coming, he shall guile you into all the truth...He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you”; Acts 1:1 — “The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach” = Christ’s prophetic work was only begun, during his earthly ministry it is continued since his ascension. The inspiration of the apostles, the illumination of all preachers and Christians to understand and to unfold the meaning of the word they wrote, the conviction of sinners, and the sanctification of believers, all these are parts of Christ’s prophetic work, performed through the Holy Spirit.

By virtue of their union with Christ and participation in Christ’s Spirit, all Christians are made in a secondary sense prophets, as well as priests and kings. Numbers 11:29 — “Would that all Jehovah’s people were prophets, that Jehovah would put his Spirit upon them” Joel 2:23 — “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” All modern prophecy that is true, however, is but the republication of Christ’s message — the proclamation and expounding of truth already revealed in Scripture. “All so called new prophecy, from Montanus to Swedenborg proves its own falsity by its lack of attesting miracles.”

A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 242 — “Every human prophet presupposes an infinite eternal divine Prophet from whom his knowledge is received, just as every stream presupposes a fountain from which it flows. As the telescope of highest power takes into its field the narrowest segment of the sky, so Christ, the prophet, sometimes gives the most intense insight into the glowing center of the heavenly world to those whom this world regards as unlearned and foolish. and The church recognizes these as only babes in Christ.” (d) Christ’s final revelation of the Father to his saints in glory ( John 16:25; 17:24, 26; cf. Isaiah 64:4; 1 Corinthians 13:12). — Thus Christ’s prophetic work will be an endless one, as the Father whom ho reveals is infinite. John 16:25 — “the hour cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in dark sayings, but shall tell you plainly of the Father”; 17:24 — “I desire that where I am, they also may be with me; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me”; 26 — “I made known unto them thy name, and will make it known.” The revelations of his own glory will be the revelation of the Father, in the Son. Isaiah 64:4 — “For from of old men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him” 1 Corinthians 13:2 — “now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known.” Revelations 21:23 — “And the city hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine upon it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the lamp thereof is the Lamb” — not light, but lamp. Light is something generally diffused; one sees by it but one cannot see it. Lamp is the narrowing down, the concentrating, the focusing of light, so that the light becomes definite and visible. So in heaven Christ will be the visible God. We shall never see the Father separate from Christ. No man or angel has at any time seen God, “whom no man hath seen, nor can see.” “The only begotten Son ... he hath declared him,” and he will forever declare him ( John 1:18; 1 Timothy 6:16).

The ministers of the gospel in modern times, so far as they are joined to Christ and possessed by his spirit, have a right to call themselves prophets. The prophet is sent by God and is conscious of his mission with a message from God, which he is under compulsion to deliver. He has a message grounded in the truth of the past, setting it in new lights for the present and making new applications of it for the future. The word of the Lord must come to him, it must be his gospel, and there must be things new as well as old. All mathematics are in the simplest axiom but it needs divine illumination to discover them. All truth was in Jesus’ words, nay, in the first prophecy uttered after the fall but only the apostles brought it out. The prophet’s message must be a message for the place and time, primarily for contemporaries and present needs and it is a message of eternal significance and worldwide influence. As the prophet’s word was for the whole world, so our word may be for other worlds, that “unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God” ( Ephesians 3:10). It must be also a message of the kingdom and triumph of Christ, which puts over against the distractions and calamities of the present time the glowing ideas and the perfect consummation to which God is leading his people: “Blessed be the glory of Jehovah from his place”; “Jehovah is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him” (Ezekial 3:12; Habakkuk 2:20). On the whole subject of Christ’s prophetic office, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:24-27; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 320-330; Shedd, Dogma.. Theol., 2:366-370.

II. THE PRIESTLY OFFICE OF CHRIST.

The priest was a person divinely appointed to transact with God on man’s behalf. He fulfilled his office, first by offering sacrifice, and secondly by making intercession. In both these respects Christ is priest. Hebrews 7:24-28 — “he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable. Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. For such a high priest became us, holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; who needeth not daily, Like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people: for this he did once for all, when he offered up himself. For the law appointeth men high priests, having infirmity but the word of the oath, which was after the law, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore.” The whole race was shut out from God by its sin. But God chose the Israelites as a priestly nation, Levi as a priestly tribe, Aaron as a priestly family, the high priest out of this family as type of the great high priest, Jesus Christ. J. S. Candlish, in Bib. World, Feb. 1897:87-97, cites the following facts with regard to our Lord’s sufferings as proofs of the doctrine of atonement: 1. Christ gave up his life by a perfectly free act, 2. out of regard to God his Father and obedience to his will, 3. the bitterest element of his suffering was that he endured it at time hand of God,4. this divine appointment and infliction of suffering is inexplicable, except as Christ endured the divine judgement against the sin of the race. 1. Christ’s Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.

The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty. This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as follows: (a) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not selfcommunicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.

We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1, pages 268- 275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God’s love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love, which is holiness, conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love, which is benevolence. But we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede selfimpartation and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness and holiness, the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another and this selfmaintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man’s salvation. (b) The universe is a reflection of God and Christ the Logos is its life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.

We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in humanity and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as created, upheld and governed by the same Being who, in the course of history, was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God’s creative activity has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I, page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He makes the universe to reflect God and especially God’s ethical nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil and the demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the fundamental attribute of God’s being. (c) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering, which is its penalty. At the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure the reaction of God’s holiness against sin, which constitutes that penalty.

Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares in Romans 8:3 — “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh? The meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do, namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity. He did this by sending his son in a stature, which in us is identified with sin. In connection with sin peri< aJmarti>av, and as an offering for sin, God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor’s Greek Testament, in loco : “When the question is asked, In what sense did God send his Son ‘in connection with sin’, there is only one answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial death. This is the center and foundation of Paul’s gospel; see Romans 3:25 sq .” But whatever God did in condemning sin he did through Christ. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” ( 2 Corinthians 5:19); Christ was the “condemner,” as well as the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the Sin bearer. (d) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move and have our being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his Love voluntarily endures the suffering, which is sin’s penalty, humanity ratifies the judgement of God, makes full propitiation for sin and satisfies the demands of holiness.

My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men, except as he bridges the gulf between the universe and me. Complete selfconsciousness would be impossible if we did not partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive but which indicate the working in him of an absolute and infinite Intelligence. True love is possible only as God’s love flows into us and takes possession of us so that the poet can truly say: “Our loves in higher love endure.” No human will is truly free, unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free is free indeed. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling: For it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work” ( Philippians 2:12,13). Our moral nature, even more than our intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move and have our being ( Colossians 2:10; Acts 17:28). No man can make a conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and above the finite and individual conscience.

That common conscience is one in all moral beings. John Watson: “There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.” This single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that lighteth every man, and the Life of all that Eves ( John 1:4,9. He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity. (e) While Christ’s love explains his willingness to endure suffering for us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As respects us, his sufferings are substitutive, since his divinity and his sinless nature enable him to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing, not the work of one external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our soul and the life of our life and so responsible with us for the sins of the race.

Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and character but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize the effects by ignoring the cause.

Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the Atonement to be that God “might himself be just” ( Romans 3:26) and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God’s righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal substitution of Christ’s suffering for ours, the payment of our debt by another and upon the ground of that payment we are permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the hymn, “Love’s Redeeming Work is Done,” expressed the believer’s joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true but it is only a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of Christianity, is a fact of life and such facts of life cannot be crowded into our definitions because they are greater than any definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea of substitution the idea of sharing.

Christ’s doing and suffering is not that of one external and foreign to us.

He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the very life of the race. (f) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the atonement, it is rather, the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never have been made comprehensible to men.

The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind, which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin; “in all our affliction he has been afflicted” ( Isaiah 63:9); so that the Psalmist can say: “Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden even the God who is our salvation” ( Psalm 68:19). The historical sacrifice was a burning glass, which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required and of the love that provided, man’s redemption.

Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God’s suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our grief and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H.

Strong, Christ in Creation, 78-80, 177-180. (g) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final revelation of the heart of God but also the manifestation of the law of universal life, the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by entering into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings and Christ’s victory or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.

We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into fellowship with our Lord “fill up... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ... for his body’s sake, which is the church ( Colossians 1:24).

The Christian Church can reign with Christ only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a model and stimulus to self-sacrifice and a test of Christian character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of Christ’s sacrifice may absorb the attention to the exclusion of its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has taken deep hold upon our minds and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that primarily requires it.

The whole evangelical system is weakened when sharing excludes substitution, reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to man. It is also weaken when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner’s heart and no thought is given to that peace with God, which is the first object of the atonement to secure. God’s righteousness is ignored, and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement. We must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of the race to Christ.

A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the atonement and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God. At the same time we appropriate all that is good in the modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God’s constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission. See A.

H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and in Life, 21:213-250.

A. Scripture Methods of Representing the Atonement.

We may classify the Scripture representations according as they conform to moral, commercial, legal or sacrificial analogies. (a) MORAL. — The atonement is described as A provision originating in God’s love, and manifesting this love to the universe but also as an example of disinterested love, to secure our deliverance from selfishness. In these latter passages, Christ’s death is referred to as a source of moral stimulus to men. A provision: John 3:16 — “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”; Romans 5:8 — “God commendeth his own love toward as, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”; 1 John 4:9 — “Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him”; Hebrews 2:9 — “Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God he should taste of death for every man — redemption originated in the love of the Father, as well as in that of the Son. An example: Luke 9:22-24 — “The Son of man must suffer...and be killed...If any man would come after me, let him...take up his cross daily, and follow me... whoever shall lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it”; 2 Corinthians 5:15 — “he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves”; Galatians 1:4. — “art himself for our sins, that he might deliver us out of this present evil world” Ephesians 5:25-27 — “Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it; that he might sanctify it” ( Colossians 1:22 — “reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy”; Titus 2:14 — “gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purity”; 1 Peter 2:21-24 — “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did no sin...who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 181 — “A pious cottager, on hearing the text, ‘God so loved the world,’ exclaimed: ‘Ah that was love! I could have given myself, but I could never have given my son.’” There was a wounding of the Father through the heart of the Son: “they shall look unto me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son” ( Zechariah 12:10). (b) COMMERCIAL. The atonement is described as A ransom, paid to free us from the bondage of sin (note in these passages the use of ajnti> , the preposition of price, bargain, exchange). — In these passages, Christ’s death is represented as the price of our deliverance from sin and death. Matthew 20:28, and Mark 10:45 — “to give his life a ransom for many” — lu>tron ajnti< pollw~n . 1 Timothy 2:6 — “who gave himself a ransom for all” — ajnti>lutron. Anti> (“for,” in the sense of “instead of”) is never confounded with uJpe>r in the sense of “in behalf of,” “for the benefit of “). Anti> is the preposition of price, bargain, exchange and this signification is traceable in every passage where it occurs in the N. T. See Matthew 2:22 — “Archelaus was reigning over Judas in the room of [ajnti>] his father Herod”; shall his son ask...a fish, and he for[ajnti>] a fish give him a serpent?” Hebrews 12:2 — “Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith, who for [ajnti> = as the price of] the joy that was set before him endured the cross”; 16 — “Esau, who for [ajnti> in exchange for] one mess of meat sold his own birthright.” See also Matthew 16:26 — “what shall a man give in exchange for anta>llagma his life” = how shall he buy it back, when once he has lost it? Anti>lutron = substitutive ransom. The connection in 1 Timothy 2:6 requires that uJte>r should mean “instead of.” We should interpret this uJpe>r by the ajnti> in Matthew 20:28. “Something befell Christ, and by reason of that, the same thing need not befall sinners” (E. Y. Mullins).

Meyer, on Matthew 20:28 — “to give his life a ransom for many” — “The yuch> is conceived of as lu>tron, a ransom, for, through the shedding of the blood, it becomes the timh> (price) of redemption.” See also 1 Corinthians 6:20; 7:23 — “ye were bought with a price”; and 2 Peter 2:1 — “denying even the Master that bought them.” The word “redemption,” indeed, means simply “repurchase,” or “the state of being repurchased” — i.e., delivered by the payment of a price. Revelations 5:9 — “thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto God with thy blood men of every tribe.” Winer, N. T. Grammar, 258 — “In Greek, ajnti> is the preposition of price.” Buttmann, N. T. Grammar, 321 — “In the signification of the preposition ajnti> (instead of, for), no deviation occurs from ordinary usage.” See Grimm’s Wilke, Lexicon Græco-Latin: “ajnti>, in vicem, anstatt”; Thayer, Lexicon N. T. — “ajnti> , of that for which anything is given, received, endured; the price of sale (or purchase) Matthew 20:28”; also Cremer, N. T. Lex., on ajnta>llagma .

Pfleiderer, in New World, Sept. 1899, doubts whether Jesus ever really uttered the words “give his life a ransom for many” Matthew 20:28).

He regards them as essentially Pauline, and the result of later Dogmatic reflection on the death of Jesus as a means of redemption. So Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 377-381. But these words occur not in Luke, the Pauline gospel, but in Matthew, which is much earlier. They represent at any rate time apostolic conception of Jesus’ teaching, a conception which Jesus himself promised should be formed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who should bring all things to the remembrance of his apostles and should guide them into all the truth ( John 14:26; 16:13).

As will be seen below, Pfleiderer declares the Pauline doctrine to be that of substitutive suffering. (c) LEGAL. The atonement is described as An act of obedience to the law which sinners had violated, or a penalty borne in order to rescue the guilty, and an exhibition of God’s righteousness, necessary to the vindication of his procedure in the pardon and restoration of sinners. In these passages the death of Christ is represented as demanded by God’s law and government. Obedience: Galatians 4:4,5 — “born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law”: Matthew 3:15 — “thus it becomest us to fulfill all righteousness” — Christ’s baptism prefigured his death and was a consecration to death; cf. Mark 10:38 — “Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? Or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” Luke 12:50 — “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” Matthew 26:39 — “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt”; 5:17 — “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfill” Philippians 2:8 — “becoming obedient even unto death”; Romans 5:19 — “through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous”; 10:4 — “Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to every one that believeth.” — Penalty: Romans 4:25 — “who was delivered up for our trespasses and was raised for our justification”; 8:3 — “God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh”; 2 Corinthians 5:21 — “Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf — here “sin” = a sinner, an accursed one (Meyer); Galatians 1:4 — “gave himself for our sins”; 3:13 — “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree”; cf. Deuteronomy 21:23 — “he that is hanged is accursed of God.” Hebrews 9:28 — “Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many”; cf. Leviticus 5:17 — “if any one sin...yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity”; Numbers 14:34 — “for every day a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years”; Lam. 5:7 — “Our fathers sinned and are not; And we have borne their iniquities.” — Exhibition: Romans 3:25,26 — “whom God set forth to he a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”; cf. Hebrews 9:15 — “a death having taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant.”

On these passages, see an excellent section in Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, 38-53. Pfleiderer severely criticizes Ritschl’s evasion of their natural force and declares Paul’s teaching to be that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law by suffering as a substitute the death threatened by the law against sinners. So Orelli Cone, Paul, 261. On the other hand, L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 288-307, chapter on the New Christian Atonement, holds that Christ taught only reconciliation on condition of repentance. Paul added the idea of mediation drawn from the Platonic dualism of Philo. The Epistle to the Hebrews made Christ a sacrificial victim to propitiate God, so that the reconciliation became Godward instead of man-ward. But Professor Paine’s view that Paul taught an Arian Mediator-ship is incorrect. “God was in Christ” ( 2 Corinthians 5:19) and God “manifested in the flesh” ( 1 Timothy 3:16) are the keynote of Paul’s teaching, and this is identical with John’s doctrine of the Logos: “the Word was God,” and “the Word became flesh” ( John 1:1,14).

The Outlook, December 15, 1900, in criticizing Prof. Paine, states three postulates of the New Trinitarianism as: 1. The essential kinship of God and man. In man there is an essential divinity, in God there is an essential humanness. 2. The divine immanence. This universal presence gives nature its physical unity, and humanity its moral unity. This is not pantheism, any more than the presence of mans spirit in all he thinks and does proves that man’s spirit is only the sum of his experiences. 3. God transcends all phenomena. Though in all, he is greater than all is. He entered perfectly into one man and through this indwelling in one man he is gradually entering into all men and filling all men with his fullness, so that Christ will be the first-born among many brethren. The defects of this view, which contains many elements of truth, are: 1. That it regards Christ as the product instead of the Producer, the divinely formed man instead of the humanly acting God and that Christ is the head man among men instead of the Creator and Life of humanity. 2. That it therefore, renders impossible any divine bearing of the sins of all men by Jesus Christ, and substitutes for it such a histrionic exhibition of God’s feeling and such a beauty of example as are possible within the limits of human nature. In other words, there is no real Deity of Christ and no objective atonement. (d) SACRIFICIAL. The atonement is described as A work of priestly mediation, which reconciles God to men. Notice here that the term ‘reconciliation’ has its usual sense of removing enmity, not from the offending, but from the offended party; a sin-offering, presented on behalf of transgressors or a propitiation, which satisfies the demands of violated holiness and a substitution, of Christ’s obedience and sufferings for ours. These passages, taken together, show that Christ’s death is demanded by God’s attribute of justice, or holiness, if sinners are to be saved. Priestly mediation: Hebrews 9:#12 11:12 — “Christ having come a high priest nor yet through the blood of goats and calves, but through his own blood, entered in once for all into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption”; Romans 5:10 — “while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son”; 2 Corinthians 5:18,19 — “all things are of God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ...God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself; not reckoning unto them their trespasses”; Ephesians 2:16 — “might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby”; cf. 12, 13, 19 — “strangers from the covenants of the promise...far off... no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God”; Colossians 1:20 — “through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross.”

On all these passages, see Meyer, who shows the meaning of the apostle to be that “we were ‘enemies,’ not actively, as hostile to God, but passively, as those with whom God was angry.” The epistle to the Romans begins with the revelation of wrath against Gentile and Jew alike ( Romans 1:18). “While we were enemies” ( Romans 5:10) = “when God was hostile to us.” “Reconciliation” is therefore the removal of God’s wrath toward man. Meyer, on this last passage, says that Christ’s death does not remove man’s wrath toward God [this is not the work of Christ, but of the Holy Spirit]. The offender reconciles the person offended, not himself. See Denney, Com. on Romans 5:9-11, in Expositor’s Gk. Test. Cf. Numbers 25:13, where Phinehas, by slaying Zimri, is said to have “made atonement for the children of Israel.” Surely, the “atonement” here cannot be a reconciliation of Israel. The action terminates, not on the subject, but on the object — God. So, 1Sam. 29:4 — “wherewith should this fellow reconcile himself unto his lord? should it not be with the heads of these men?” Matthew 5:23,24 — “If therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother [i. e., remove his enmity, not thine own], and then come and offer thy gift.” See Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:387-398.

Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, 42 — “ Ecqroi< o[ntev ( Romans 5:10) = not the active disposition of enmity to God on our part, but our passive condition under the enmity or wrath of God.” Paul was not the author of this doctrine. He claims that he received it from Christ himself ( Galatians 1:12). Simon, Reconciliation, 167 — “The idea that only man needs to be reconciled arises from a false conception of the unchangeableness of God. But God would be unjust, if his relation to man were the same after his sin as it was before.” The old hymn expressed the truth: “My God is reconciled; His pardoning voice I hear; he owns me for his child; I can no longer fear; With filial trust I now draw nigh, And ‘Father, Abba, Father’ cry.”

A sin-offering: John 1:29 — “Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world” here ai~rwn means to take away by taking or bearing: to take, and so take away. It is an allusion to the sin-offering of Isaiah 53:6-12 — “when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin as a lamb that is led to the slaughter... Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Matthew 26:28 — “this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many unto remission of sins”; cf. Psalm 50:5 — “made a covenant with me by sacrifice.” 1 John 1:7 — “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin” = not sanctification, but justification; 1 Corinthians 5:7 — “our Passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ”; cf. Deuteronomy 16:2-6 — “thou shalt sacrifice the Passover unto Jehovah thy God.” Ephesians 5:2 — “gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor of a sweet smell” (see Com. of Salmond, in Expositor’s Greek Testament); Hebrews 9:14 — “the blood of Christ who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; 22, 26 — “apart from shedding of blood there is no remission...now once in the end of the ages hath he been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself”; 1 Peter 1:18,19 — “redeemed...with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ.” See Expos. Gk. Test., on Ephesians 1:7.

Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 35, points out that John 6:52-59 — “eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood” — is Christ’s reference to his death in terms of sacrifice. So, as we shall see below, it is a propitiation ( 1 John 2:2). We therefore strongly object to the statement of Wilson, Gospel of Atonement,64 — “Christ’s death is a sacrifice, if sacrifice means the crowning instance of that suffering of the innocent for the guilty which springs from the solidarity of mankind but there is no thought of substitution or expiation.” Wilson forgets that this necessity of suffering arises from God’s righteousness and that, without this suffering man cannot be saved. Christ endures what we, on account of the insensibility of sin, cannot feel or endure so that this suffering takes the place of ours so that we are saved thereby. Wilson holds that the incarnation constituted the Atonement, and that all thought of expiation may be eliminated. Henry B. Smith far better summed up the gospel in the words: “Incarnation in order to Atonement.” We regard as still better the words: “Incarnation in order to reveal the Atonement.” A propitiation: Romans 3:25,26 — “whom God set forth to be a propitiation...in his blood...that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.” A full and critical exposition of this passage will be found under the Ethical Theory of the Atonement, pages 750-760. Here it is sufficient to say that it shows: (1) that Christ’s death is a propitiatory sacrifice, (2) that its first and main effect is upon God, (3) that the particular attributes in God which demands the atonement is his justice, or holiness and (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God’s justifying the believer.

Compare Luke 18:13, margin — “God, be thou merciful unto me the sinner”; lit.: “God be propitiated toward me the sinner” — by the sacrifice, whose smoke was ascending before the publican, even while he prayed. Hebrews 2:17 — “a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people”; John 2:2 — “and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world”; 4:10 — “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins”; cf. Gen. 32:20, LXX. — “I will appease [ejxila>somai , ‘propitiate’] him with the present that goeth before me”; Proverbs 16:14, LXX. — “The wrath of a king is as messengers of death; but a wise man will pacify it”[ejxila>setai, ‘propitiate it’].

On propitiation, see Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 216 — “Something was thereby done which rendered God inclined to pardon the sinner. God is made inclined to forgive sinners by the sacrifice, because his righteousness was exhibited by the infliction of the penalty of sin but not because he needed to be inclined in heart to love the sinner or to exercise his mercy. In fact., it was he himself who ‘set forth’ Jesus as ‘a propitiation’ ( Romans 3:25,26). “Paul never merges the objective atonement in its subjective effects, although no writer of the New Testament has more fully recognized these subjective effects. With him Christ for us upon the Cross is the necessary preparation for Christ in us by his Spirit. Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 74, 75, 89, 172, unwarrantably contrasts Paul’s representation of Christ as priest with what he calls the representation of Christ as prophet in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “The priest says, Man’s return to God is not enough. There must be an expiation of man’s sin. This is Paul’s doctrine. The prophet says, There never was a divine provision for sacrifice. Man’s return to God is the thing wanted. But this return must be completed. Jesus is the perfect prophet who gives us an example of restored obedience and who comes in to perfect man’s imperfect work. This is the doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews.” This recognition of expiation in Paul’s teaching, together with denial of its validity and interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews as prophetic rather than priestly, is a curiosity of modern exegesis.

Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 107-127, goes still further and affirms: “In the N. T. God is never said to be propitiated, nor is it ever said that Jesus Christ propitiates God or satisfies God’s wrath.” Yet Dr. Abbott adds that in the N. T. God is represented as self-propitiated: “Christianity is distinguished from paganism by representing God as appeasing his own wrath and satisfying his own justice by the forth putting of his own love.’ This self-propitiation however must not be thought of as a bearing of penalty: “Nowhere in the O. T. is the idea of a sacrifice coupled with the idea of penalty. It is always coupled with purification — “with his stripes we are healed” ( Isaiah 53:5). And in the N. T., the lamb of God...taketh away the sin of the world’ ( John 1:29); ‘the blood of Jesus... cleanseth’( 1 John 1:7...What humanity needs is not the removal of the penalty, but removal of the sin.” This seems to us a distinct contradiction of both Paul and John, with whom propitiation is an essential of Christian doctrine (see Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2,), while we grant that the propitiation is made, not by sinful man, but by God himself in the person of his Son. See George B. Gow, on The Place of Expiation in Human Redemption, Am. Jour. Theol., 1900:734-756.

A ‘substitution: Luke 22:37 — “he was reckoned with transgressors”: cf. Leviticus 16:21,22 — “and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel...he shall put them upon the head of the goat...and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a solitary land”; Isaiah 53:5,6 — “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” John 10:11 — “the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep”; Romans 5:6-8 — “while we were yet weak, in due season Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: for peradventure for the good man someone would even dare to die. But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”; 1 Peter 3:18 — “Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.”

To these texts we must add all those mentioned under (b) above, in which Christ’s death is described as a ransom. Besides Meyer’s comment, there quoted, on Matthew 20:28 — “to give his life a ransom for many,” lu>tron ajnti< pollw~n — Meyer also says: “ajnti> denotes substitution.

That which is given as a ransom takes the place of, is given instead of, those who are to be set free in consideration thereof. ‘ajnti> can only be understood in the sense of substitution in the act of which the ransom is presented as an equivalent, to secure the deliverance of those on whose behalf the ransom is paid. This is a view, which is only confirmed by the fact that, in other parts of the N. T., this ransom is usually spoken of as an expiatory sacrifice. That which they [those for whom the ransom is paid] are redeemed from, is the eternal ajpw>leia in which, as having the wrath of God abiding upon them, they would remain imprisoned, as in a state of hopeless bondage, unless the guilt of their sins were expiated.”

Cremer, N. T. Lex., says that “in both the N. T. texts, Matthew 16:26 and Mark 8:37, the word ajnta>llogma, like lu>tron , is akin to the conception of atonement: cf . Isaiah 43:3,4; 51:11; Amos 5:12.

This is a confirmation of the fact that satisfaction and substitution essentially belong to the idea of atonement.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:515 (Syst. Doct., 3:414 — “ Matthew 20:28 contains the thought of a substitution. While the whole world is not of equal worth with the soul, and could not purchase it, Christ’s death and work are so valuable, that they can serve as a ransom.”

The sufferings of the righteous were recognized in Rabbinical Judaism as having a substitutive significance for the sins of others; see Weber, Altsynagog. Palestin. Theologie, 314; Schurer, Geschichte des judischen Volkes, 2:466 (translation, div. II, vol. 2:186). But Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:225-262, says this idea of vicarious satisfaction was an addition of Paul to the teaching of Jesus. Wendt grants that both Paul and John taught substitution but he denies that Jesus did. He claims that ajnti> in Matthew 20:28 means simply that Jesus gave his life as a means whereby he obtains the deliverance of many. But this interpretation is a non-natural one, and violates linguistic usage. It holds that Paul and John misunderstood or misrepresented the words of our Lord. We prefer the frank acknowledgement by Pfleiderer that Jesus, as well as Paul and John taught substitution but that neither one of them was correct. Colestock, on Substitution as a Stage in Theological Thought, similarly holds that the idea of substitution must be abandoned. We grant that the idea of substitution needs to be supplemented by the idea of sharing and so relieved of its external and mechanical implications but that to abandon the conception itself is to abandon faith in the evangelist and in Jesus himself.

Dr. W. N. Clarke, in his Christian Theology, rejects the doctrine of retribution for sin and denies the possibility of penal suffering for another.

A proper view of penalty, and of Christ’s vital connection with humanity, would make these rejected ideas not only credible but also inevitable. Dr. Alvah Hovey reviews Dr. Clarke’s Theology, Am. Journ. Theology, Jan. 1899:205 — “If we do not import into the endurance of penalty some degree of sinful feeling or volition, there is no ground for denying that a holy being may bear it in place of a sinner. For nothing but wrongdoing, or approval of wrongdoing, is impossible to a holy being. Indeed, for one to bear for another the just penalty of his sin, provided that other may thereby be saved from it and made a friend of God, is perhaps the highest conceivable function of love or goodwill.” Penney, Studies, 126, shows that “substitution means simply that man is dependent for his acceptance with God upon something which Christ has done for him, and which he could never have done and never needs to do for himself. The forfeiting of his free life has freed our forfeited lives. This substitution can be preached and it binds men to Christ by making them forever dependent on him. The condemnation of our sins in Christ upon his cross is the barb on the hook. Without it your bait will be taken, but you will not catch men; you will not annihilate pride, and make Christ the Alpha and Omega in man’s redemption.” On the Scripture proofs, see Crawford, Atonement. 1:1-193: Dale, Atonement, 65-256; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, iv. 2:243- 342; Smeaton, Our Lord’s and the Apostles’ Doctrine of Atonement.

An examination of the passages referred to shows that, while the forms in which the atoning work of Christ is described are in part derived from moral, commercial and legal relations, the prevailing language is that of sacrifice. A correct view of the atonement must therefore be grounded upon a proper interpretation of the institution of sacrifice, especially as found in the Mosaic system.

The question is sometimes asked: Why is there so little in Jesus’ own words about atonement? Dr. R. W. Dale replies, Because Christ did not come to preach the gospel because he came that there might be a gospel to preach. The Cross had to be endured before it could be explained. Jesus came to be the sacrifice and not to speak about it. But his reticence is just what he told us we should find in his words, he proclaimed their incompleteness and referred us to a subsequent Teacher — the Holy Spirit. The testimony of the Holy Spirit we have in the words of the apostles. We must remember that the gospels were supplementary to the epistles, not the epistles to the gospels.

The gospels merely fill out our knowledge of Christ. It is not for the Redeemer to magnify the cost of salvation but for the redeemed. “None of the ransomed ever knew.” The doer of a great deed has the least to say about it.

Harnack: “There is an inner law which compels the sinner to look upon God as a wrathful Judge...Yet no other feeling is possible.” We regard this confession as a demonstration of the psychological correctness of Paul’s doctrine of a vicarious atonement. Human nature has been so constituted by God that it reflects the demand of his holiness. That conscience needs to be appeased is proof that God needs to be appeased.

When Whiton declares that propitiation is offered only to our conscience.

This is the wrath of that which is of God within us and that Christ bore our sins, not in substitution for us, but in fellowship with us. To rouse our consciences to hatred of them, he forgets that God is not only immanent in the conscience but also transcendent, and that the verdicts of conscience are only indications of the higher verdicts of God. 1 John 3:20 — “If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 57 — “A people half emancipated from the paganism that imagines that God must be placated by sacrifice before he can forgive sins. This gave to the sacrificial system that Israel had borrowed from paganism the same divine authority which they gave to those revolutionary elements in the system, which were destined eventually to sweep it entirely out of existence.” So Bowne, Atonement,74 — “The essential moral fact is that, if God is to forgive unrighteous men, some way must be found of making them righteous. The difficulty is not forensic, but moral.” Both Abbott and Bowne regard righteousness as a mere forms of benevolence and the atonement as only a means to a utilitarian end, namely, the restoration and happiness of the creature. A more correct view of God’s righteousness as the fundamental attribute of his being, as inwrought into the constitution of the universe, and as infallibly connecting suffering with sin, would have led these writers to see a divine wisdom and inspiration in the institution of sacrifice. These writers would see a divine necessity that God should suffer if man is to go free.

B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic system. (a) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann, Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity and on the other hand, the theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil) or of the grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper (Bahr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim and brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.

For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib. Archalologie, sec. 43, 47; Bahr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bahr’s view, in Bib. Sac,, Oct. 1870:593; Jan. 1871:171. Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 228-240; Lange, Introduction to Com. on Exodus, 38 — “The heathen change God’s symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God’s sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).”

Westcott, Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo: “God receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back part of the sacrifice.”

Compare with this the ghosts in Homer’s Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the sacrifices. Bahr’s view is only half of the truth. Reunion presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281 — “The sinner must first expiate his sin by suffering, then only can he give to God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.” Jahn, Bib.

Archæology, sec. 373, 378 — “It is of the very idea of the sacrifice that the victim shall be presented directly to God and in the presentation shall be destroyed.” Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253, speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon: “Hieroglyphics came before letters and parables before arguments.” “The old dispensation was God’s great parable to man. The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these hieroglyphics?

The shadows, that have been shortening up into definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.” On Ephesians 1:7 — “the blood of Christ” as an expiatory sacrifice which secures our justification. See Salmond, in Expositor’s Greek Testament. (b) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements. First, there was that of satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated holiness. Secondly, there was that of substitution of suffering and death on the part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty and thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice: satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin involves guilt, that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God, that without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness and that through the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his sin.

Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nagelsbach, Nachhomerische, Theologie, 338 sq . — “The essence of punishment is retribution (Vergeltung) and retribution is a fundamental law of the world order. In retribution lies the atoning power of punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands retribution. In other words, this certainty that there is in Deity a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for atonement.” This is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil, Æneid, 5:815 — “Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi — “Cor pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus.”

Stahl, Christliche Philosophic, 146 — “Every non-perverted conscience declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way of satisfying righteousness — that of atonement. This differs from punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation, which is the moral authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice, that must be done by the priest.” In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes says to Prometheus: “Hope not for an end to such oppression, until a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of Tartarus.” And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.

Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer’s Iliad, in its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to Phúbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G.

Robinson held that there is “no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.” But in approaching either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented itself before the layer. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801 — “The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of Israelites but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered into covenant with him by sacrifice.

The Oriental sovereign was accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the firstborn of the house only when there was no covenanting at the door.” We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This always had in it the idea of reparation for wrongdoing by substitutive suffering.

Curtis. Primitive Semitic Religion of Today, on the Significance of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine prepossessed by Robertson Smith’s explanation that sacrifice was a feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the primary element but that there was a substitutive value in the offering. Gift and feast are not excluded but these are sequences and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim. The “bursting forth of the blood” satisfied and bought off the Deity. George Adam Smith on Isaiah 53 (2:361) — “Innocent as he is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice. In God’s intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353 — The substitution of the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.” Satisfaction means simply that there is a principle in God’s being, which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it actively. The judge, if he is upright, must repel a bribe with indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an infamous proposal. K. W. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.” But the judge and the woman do not enjoy this repelling; rather, they suffer. So God’s satisfaction is no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to inflict. God has a wrath, which is calm, judicial, inevitable, the natural reaction of holiness against that which is unholy. Christ suffers both as one with the “inflicter” and as one with those on whom punishment is inflicted. “For Christ also pleased not himself but, as it is written, the reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me” ( Romans 15:3; cf. Psalm 69:9). (c) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratic, and their spiritual offices.

They were, on the one hand, the appointed means whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect or transgression and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in true penitence, and with faith in God’s method of salvation. Hebrews 9:13,14 — “For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” 10:3, 4 — “But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.” Christ’s death, also like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.

Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea and Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed that these prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its command: “An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings” ( Exodus 20:24). Or, if it is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship. It would even reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection he says: “new moon and Sabbath...I cannot away with...when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you” ( Isaiah 1:13-15). Isaiah was condemning simply heartless sacrifice, else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple. Micah 6:8 — “what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?”

This does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates the time when “the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains...And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah” ( Micah 4:1,2). Hosea 6:6 — “I desire goodness and not sacrifice,” is interpreted by what follows, “and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” Compare Proverbs 8:10; 17:12; and Samuel’s words: “to obey is better than sacrifice” ( 1Sam. 15:23). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his description of God’s theophany and from which was taken the live coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? ( Isaiah 6:1-8). Jeremiah 7:22 — “I spake not...concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices...but this thing... Hearken unto my voice.” Jeremiah Insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where there is no heart. (d) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a victim to atone for the sin. It involved the laying of the hand of the giver upon the victim’s head, the confession of sin by the giver, the slaying of the beast, the sprinkling or pouring out of the blood upon the altar and the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The sin offering and the scapegoat of the great day of atonement symbolized yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely, satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered. Leviticus 1:4 — And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him”; 4:20 — “Thus shall he do with the bullock; as be did with the bullock of the sin offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven”; so 31 and 35 — “and the priest shall make atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he shall be forgiven”; so 5:10,16; 6:7. Leviticus 17:11 — “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.”

The patriarchal sacrifices were sin offerings, as the sacrifice of Job for his friends witnesses: Job 42:7-9 — “My wrath is kindled against thee [Eliphaz]... therefore, take unto you seven bullocks...and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering”; cf. 33:24 — “Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom”; 1:5 — Job offered burnt offerings for his sons, for he said, “It maybe that my sons have sinned and renounced God in their hearts”; Gen. 8:20 — Noah “offered burnt offerings on the altar”; 21 — “and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not again the curse the ground any more for man’s sake.”

That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is plain from Leviticus 16:1-34 — the account of the sin offering and the scapegoat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of which we give below; also from Gen. 22:13 — “Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a bunt offering in the stead of his son”; Exodus 32:30-32 — where Moses says: “Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive our sin — ; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” See also Deuteronomy 21:1-9 — the expiation of an uncertain murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer, where Oehler, O. T.

Theology, 1:389, says: “Evidently the punishment of death incurred by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.” In Isaiah 53:1-12 — “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all...stripes...offering for sin” — the ideas of both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.

Wallace, Representative Responsibility: “The animals offered in sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man, subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the sacrifice human hands must be laid, the hands of the giver and the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the giver. The priest is the substitute of the giver. The priest and the sacrifice were one symbol... [Hence, in the new dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one; both are found in Christ.] The high priest must enter the Holy of Holies with his own finger dipped in blood; the blood must be in contact with his own person which is another indication of the identification of the two. Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled on the ground. ‘In the blood is the life.’ God reserved the life. It is given for man, but not to him. Life for life is the law of the creation. So the life of Christ also, for our life. Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race but he lost his representative character by the one act of disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative.

The subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be not the natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body and the blood are both required and indicates the demand that the death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but Christ’s death.”

This following is a tentative scheme of the JEWISH SACRIFICES.

The general reason for sacrifice is expressed in Leviticus 17:11 (quoted above).

I. For the individual: 1. The sin offering = sacrifice to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible temptation): Leviticus 4:14,20,31. 2. The trespass offering sacrifice to expiate sins of omission: Leviticus 5:5,6. 3. The burnt offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness: Leviticus 1:3 (the offering of Mary, Luke 2:24).

II. For the family: The Passover: Exodus 12:27. III. For the people: 1. The daily morning and evening sacrifice: Exodus 29:38-46. 2. The offering of the great day of atonement: Leviticus 16:6-10. In this last, two victims were employed, one to represent the means — death, and the other to represent the result — forgiveness. One victim could not represent both the atonement (by shedding of blood) and the justification (by putting away sin).

Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30, 1901:801 — “Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and nourishing himself thereby: ‘My flesh...which I will give...for the life of the world...he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me’ ( John 6:51,57).”

Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34 — On the great day of atonement “the double offering — one for Jehovah and the other for Azazel — typified not only the removing of the guilt of the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being who was the first cause of its existence,” i. e., Satan, Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113 — “It was not the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the scapegoat. It bears the sin — the whole unfaithfulness of the community, which had defiled the holy places — out from them, so that henceforth they may be pure. The sin offering — representing the sinner by receiving the burden of his sin — makes expiation by yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions which represent at once the wrath and the propitiation of God.”

On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223; Wunsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton, Apostle’s Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introduction to Leviticus; Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180. On passages in Leviticus, see Com., of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d. Alt. Test. (e) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man’s expulsion from Eden, can be proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may, without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained of God. The well nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude man’s own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.

Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history. Hebrews 11:4 — “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts. Here it may be argued that since Abel’s faith was not presumption, it must have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon. Gen. 4:3, 4 — “Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto Abel and to his offering but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”

It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated in Gen. 3:21 — “And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.” Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards ( Gen. 9:3 — to Noah: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”). The inference has been drawn that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice. This clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ, which secures our restoration to God’s favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ, which secures for us remission of punishment.

We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the nonperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God’s will, Abel’s faith may have consisted in trusting these rather than the prompting of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin.

Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bibliotheca Sacra, Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281 — “There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation. It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in pre-Christian times. In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.” We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.

On Gen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M. — “The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God’s holiness or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, and death and brought the bloody sacrifice, the sacrifice of another, the sacrifice provided by God to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith, the faith that looks away from self to Christ or God’s appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God ‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’ ( Hebrews 11:4). To Cain it is said, ‘if thou doest well (LXX: ojrqw~v prosene>gkhv — if thou offerest correctly) shalt thou not be accepted?’ But Cain desired to get away from God and from God’s way, and to lose himself in the world.

This is ‘the way of Cain’ (Jude 11).” Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259 — “Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel’s faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God’s acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve, ‘This is now bone of my bones....’ (Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruption of primitive sacrifice.” Von Lasaulx, Die Suhnopfer der Griechen und Romer, und ihr Verhaltniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, — “The first word of the original man was probably a prayer, the first action of fallen man a sacrifice”; see translation in Bibliotheca Sacra, 1:365-408. Bishop Butler: “By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.” (f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ’s work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought. Since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles did, in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God’s love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness.

Christ’s death removed an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners. ‘The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement: for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it but instead of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’ ( John 1:29).”

A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247 — “The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold, which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it became functum officio and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”

For denial that Christ’s death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154 — “The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479 — “The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not than what it was.” Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ’s sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual, e.g ., qusi>a prosfora> iJlasmo>v aJgia>zw kaqai>rw , iJla>skomai. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art, on Sacrifice, in Smith’s Bible Dictionary.

With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261 — “The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion. But to Paul, the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering and especially in the martyr-death of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross, in the same way as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world? “We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man. He takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils, which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists. In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, death with Jesus, regeneration.

The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone.

How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his natural power but the effect of the divine Spirit. From the beginning of human history, the Spirit put forth his activity as the Power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It “as the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the Individual becoming good.”

C. Theories of the Atonement. 1. The Socinian, or Example Theory of the Atonement.

This theory holds that subjective sinfulness is the sole barrier between man and God. Not God, but only man, needs to be reconciled. The only method of reconciliation is to better man’s moral condition. This can be effected by man’s own will through repentance and reformation. The death of Christ is but the death of a noble martyr. He redeems us, only as his human example of faithfulness to truth and duty has a powerful influence upon our moral improvement. This fact the apostles, either consciously or unconsciously clothed in the language of the Greek and Jewish sacrifices. This theory was fully elaborated by Lælius Socinus and Faustus Socinus of Poland, in the 16th century. Its modern advocates are found in the Unitarian body.

The Socinian theory may be found stated, and advocated, in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 1:566-600; Martineau, Studies of Christianity, 83- 176; J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, Its Truths and Errors, 235-265; Ellis, Unitarianism and Orthodoxy; Sheldon, Sin and Redemption, 146-210.

The text, which at first sight, that seems to favor this view is 1 Peter 2:21 — “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps.” But see under (c) below. When Correggio saw Raphael’s picture of St. Cecilia, he exclaimed: “I too am a painter.” So Socinus held that Christ’s example roused our humanity to imitation. He regarded expiation as heathenish and impossible; every one must receive according to his deeds; God is ready to grant forgiveness on simple repentance. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 277 — “The theory first insists on the inviolability of moral sequences in the conduct of every moral agent and then insists that, on a given condition, the consequences of transgression may be arrested by almighty fiat. Unitarianism errs in giving a transforming power to that which works beneficently only after the transformation has been wrought.” In ascribing to human nature a power of self-reformation, it ignores man’s need of regeneration by the Holy Spirit. But even this renewing work of the Holy Spirit presupposes the atoning work of Christ. “Ye must be born anew” ( John 3:7) necessitates “Even so must the Son of man be lifted up” ( John 3:14).

It is only the Cross that satisfies man’s instinct of reparation. Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums, 90 — “Those who regarded Christ’s death soon ceased to bring any other bloody offering to God. This is true both in Judaism and in heathenism. Christ’s death put an end to all bloody offerings in religious history. The impulse to sacrifice found its satisfaction in the Cross of Christ.” We regard this as proof that the Cross is essentially a satisfaction to the divine justice and not a mere example of faithfulness to duty. The Socinian theory is the first of six theories of the Atonement, which roughly correspond with our six previously treated theories of sin and this first theory includes most of the false doctrine which appears in mitigated forms in several of the theories following.

To this theory we make the following objections: (a) It is based upon false philosophical principles. For example, that will is merely the faculty of volition, that the foundation of virtue is in utility, that law is an expression of arbitrary will, that penalty is a means of reforming the offender and that righteousness, in either God or man, is only a manifestation of benevolence.

If the will is simply the faculty of volition, and not also the fundamental determination of the being to an ultimate end, then man can, by a single volition, effect his own reformation and reconciliation to God. If the foundation of virtue is in utility, then there is nothing in the divine being that prevents pardon, the good of the creature, and not the demands of God’s holiness, being the reason for Christ’s suffering. If law is an expression of arbitrary will, instead of being a transcript of the divine nature, it may at any time be dispensed with, and the sinner may be pardoned on mere repentance. If penalty is merely a means of reforming the offender, then sin does not involve objective guilt, or obligation to suffer, and sin may be forgiven, at any moment, to all who forsake it, indeed, must be forgiven, since punishment is out of place when the sinner is reformed. If righteousness is only a form or manifestation of benevolence, then God can show his benevolence as easily through pardon as through penalty and Christ’s death is only intended to attract us toward the good by the force of a noble example.

Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:218-264, is essentially Socinian in his view of Jesus’ death. Yet he ascribes to Jesus the idea that suffering is necessary, even for one who stands in perfect love and blessed fellowship with God, since earthly blessedness is not the true blessedness, and since a true piety is impossible without renunciation and stooping to minister to others. The earthly life-sacrifice of the Messiah was his necessary and greatest act, and was the culminating point of his teaching. Suffering made him a perfect example and so ensured the success of his work. But why God should have made it necessary that the holiest must suffer, Wendt does not explain. This constitution of things we can understand only as a revelation of the holiness of God, and of his punitive relation to human sin. Simon, Reconciliation, 357, shows well that example might have sufficed for a race that merely needed leadership. But what the race needed most was energizing, the fulfillment of the conditions of restoration to God on their behalf by one of themselves, by one whose very essence they shared, who created them, in whom they consisted, and whose work was therefore their work. Christ condemned with the divine condemnation the thoughts and impulses arising from his subconscious life. Before the sin, which for the moment seemed to be his, could become his, he condemned it. He sympathized with, nay, he revealed, the very justice and sorrow of God. Hebrews 2:16-18 — “For verily not to angels doth he give help but he giveth help to the seed of Abraham.

Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.” (b) It is a natural outgrowth from the Pelagian view of sin and logically necessitates a curtailment or surrender of every other characteristic doctrine of Christianity — inspiration, sin, the deity of Christ, justification, regeneration and eternal retribution.

The Socinian theory requires a surrender of the doctrine of inspiration for the idea of vicarious and expiatory sacrifice is woven into the very warp and woof of the Old and New Testaments. It requires an abandonment of the Scripture doctrine of sin for in it all idea of sin as perversion of nature rendering the sinner unable to save himself, and as objective guilt demanding satisfaction to the divine holiness, is denied. It requires us to give up the deity of Christ. For if sin is a slight evil, and man can save himself from its penalty and power, then there is no longer need of either an infinite suffering or an infinite Savior and a human Christ is as good as a divine. It requires us to give up the Scripture doctrine of justification, as God’s act of declaring the sinner just in the eye of the law, solely on account of the righteousness and death of Christ to whom he is united by faith. The Socinian theory cannot permit the counting to a man of any other righteousness than his own. It requires a denial of the doctrine of regeneration for this is no longer the work of God but the work of the sinner. It is no longer a change of the affections below consciousness but a self-reforming volition of the sinner himself. It requires a denial of eternal retribution; for this is no longer appropriate to finite transgression of arbitrary law and to superficial sinning that does not involve nature. (c) It contradicts the Scripture teachings, that sin involves objective guilt as well as subjective defilement in that the holiness of God must punish sin.

The atonement was a bearing of the punishment of sin for men and that this vicarious bearing of punishment was necessary, on the part of God, to make possible the showing of favor to the guilty.

The Scriptures do not make the main object of the atonement to be man’s subjective moral improvement. It is to God that the sacrifice is offered and the object of it is to satisfy the divine holiness and to remove from the divine mind an obstacle to the showing of favor to the guilty. It was something external to man and his happiness or virtue that required that Christ should suffer. What Emerson has said of the martyr is yet truer of Christ: “Though love repine, and reason chafe, There comes a voice without reply, ‘‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.” The truth for which Christ died was truth internal to the nature of God and not simply truth externalized and published among men. What the truth of God required, Christ rendered, full satisfaction to violated justice. “Jesus paid it all” and no obedience or righteousness of ours can be added to his work, as a ground of our salvation.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 276 — “This theory fails of a due recognition of that deep seated, universal and innate sense of ill-desert which in all times and everywhere has prompted men to aim at some expiation of their guilt. For this sense of guilt and its requirements, the moral influence theory makes no adequate provision, either in Christ or in those whom Christ saves. Supposing Christ’s redemptive work to consist merely in winning men to the practice of righteousness, it takes no account of penalty, either as the sanction of the law, as the reaction of the divine holiness against sin or as the upbraiding of the individual conscience. The Socinian theory overlooks the fact that there must be some objective manifestation of God’s wrath and displeasure against sin.” (d) It furnishes no proper explanation of the sufferings and death of Christ.

The non-martyr-like anguish cannot be accounted for and the forsaking by the Father cannot be justified upon the hypothesis that Christ died as a mere witness to truth. If Christ’s sufferings were not propitiatory, they neither furnish us with a perfect example, nor constitute a manifestation of the love of God.

Compare Jesus’ feeling, in view of death, with that of Paul: “having the desire to depart” ( Philippians 1:23). Jesus was filled with anguish: “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour” ( John 12:27). If Christ was simply a martyr, then he is not a perfect example for many a martyr has shown greater courage in prospect of death and, in the final agony has been able to say that the fire that consumed him was “a bed of roses.” Gethsemane, with its mental anguish, is apparently recorded in order to indicate that Christ’s sufferings even on the cross were not mainly physical sufferings. The Roman Catholic Church unduly emphasizes the physical side of our Lord’s passion, but loses sight of its spiritual element. The Christ of Rome indeed is either a babe or dead and the crucifix presents to us not a risen and living Redeemer, but a mangled and lifeless body.

Stroud, in his Physical Cause of our Lord’s Death, has made it probable that Jesus died of a broken heart, and that this alone explains John 19:34 — “one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and straightway there came out blood and water”. The heart had already been ruptured by grief. That grief was grief at the forsaking of the Father ( Matthew 27:46 — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) The resulting death shows that that forsaking was no imaginary one. Did God make the holiest man of all to be the greatest sufferer of all the ages?

This heart broken by the forsaking of the Father means more than martyrdom. If Christ’s death is not propitiatory, it fills me with terror and despair for it presents me not only with a very imperfect example in Christ but also with a proof of measureless injustice on the part of God. Luke 23:28 — “weep not for me, but weep for yourselves” = Jesus rejects all pity that forgets his suffering for others.

To the above view of Scroud, Westcott objects that blood does not readily flow from an ordinary corpse. The separation of the red corpuscles of the blood from the serum, or water, would be the beginning of decomposition and would be inconsistent with the statement in Acts 2:31 — “neither did his flesh see corruption.” But Dr. W. W. Keen of Philadelphia, in his article on The Bloody Sweat of our Lord (Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1897:469-484) endorses Stroud’s view as to the physical cause of our Lord’s death. Christ’s being forsaken by the Father was only the culmination of that relative withdrawal which constituted the source of Christ’s loneliness through life. Through life he was a servant of the Spirit. On the cross the Spirit left him to the weakness of unassisted humanity, destitute of conscious divine resources. Compare the curious reading of Hebrews 2:9 — “that he apart from God cwri~v Qeo~n should taste death for every man.”

If Christ merely supposed himself to be deserted by God, “not only does Christ become an erring man, and, so far as the predicate deity is applicable to him, an erring God. But, if he cherished unfounded distrust of God, how can it be possible still to maintain that his will was in abiding, perfect agreement and identity with the will of God?” See Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl, by Stahlin, 219. Charles C. Everett, Gospel of Paul, says Jesus was not crucified because he was accursed but he was accursed because he was crucified, so that, in wreaking vengeance upon him, Jewish law abrogated itself. This interpretation however contradicts 2 Corinthians 5:21 — “Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf” — where the divine identification of Christ with the race of sinners antedates and explains his sufferings. John 1:29 — “the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world” — does not refer to Jesus as a lamb for gentleness but rather as a lamb for sacrifice. Maclaren: “How does Christ’s death prove God’s love? Only on one supposition, namely, that Christ is the incarnate Son of God, sent by the Father’s love and being his express image” and, we may add, suffering vicariously for us and removing the obstacle in God’s mind to our pardon. (e) The influence of Christ’s example is neither declared in Scripture nor found in Christian experience to be the chief result secured by his death.

Mere example is but a new preaching of the law, which repels and condemns. The cross has power to lead men to holiness, only as it first shows a satisfaction made for their sins. Accordingly, most of the passages, which represent Christ as an example, also contain references to his propitiatory work.

There is no virtue in simply setting an example. Christ did nothing, simply for the sake of example. Even his baptism was the symbol of his propitiatory death (see pages 761, 762). The apostle’s exhortation is not “abstain from all appearance of evil” (1Thess. 5:22, Authorized Version) but “abstain from every form of evil” (Revised Version). Christ’s death is the payment of a real debt due to God and the convicted sinner needs first to see the debt, which he owes to the divine justice paid by Christ, before he can think hopefully of reforming his life. The hymns of the church: “I lay my sins on Jesus,” and “Not all the blood of beasts,” represents the view of Christ’s sufferings, which Christians have derived from the Scriptures. When the sinner sees that the mortgage is cancelled, that the penalty has been borne, he can devote himself freely to the service of his Redeemer. Hebrews 12:11 — “they overcame him [Satan] because of the blood of the Lamb.” As Christ overcame Satan by his propitiatory sacrifice, so we overcome by appropriating to ourselves Christ’s atonement and his Spirit; cf. 1 John 5:4 — “this is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith.” The very text, upon which Socinians most rely, when it is taken in connection with the context, proves their theory to be a misrepresentation of Scripture. 1 Peter 2:21 — “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps” — is succeeded by verse 24 — “Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed” — the latter words being a direct quotation from Isaiah’s description of the substitutive sufferings of the Messiah ( Isaiah 53:5).

When a deeply convicted sinner was told that God could cleanse his heart and make him over anew, he replied with righteous impatience: “That is not what I want, I have a debt to pay first!” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 28, 89 — “Nowhere in tabernacle or temple shall we ever find the laver placed before the altar. The altar is Calvary and the laver is Pentecost; one stands for the sacrificial blood, the other for the sanctifying Spirit. So the oil which symbolized the sanctifying Spirit was always put ‘upon the blood of the trespass-offering’ ( Leviticus 14:17).” The extremity of Christ’s suffering on the Cross was coincident with the most extreme manifestation of the guilt of the race. The greatness of this he theoretically knew from the beginning of his ministry. His baptism was not intended merely to set an example. It was a recognition that sin deserved death, that he was numbered with the transgressors and that he was sent to die for the sin of the world. He was not so much a teacher as he was the subject of all teaching. In him the great suffering of the holy God on account of sin is exhibited to the universe. The pain of a few brief hours saves a world, only because it sets forth an eternal fact in God’s being and opens to us God’s very heart.

Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:1 — “There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distil it out.” It is well to preach on Christ as an example. Lyman Abbott says that Jesus’ blood purchases our pardon and redeems us to God, just as a patriot’s blood redeems his country from servitude and purchases its liberty. But even Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 2, goes beyond this, when he says: “Those who advocate the example theory should remember that Jesus withdraws himself from imitation when he sets himself over against his disciples as the Author of forgiveness. And they perceive that pardon must first be appropriated, before it is possible for them to imitate his piety and moral achievement.” This is a partial recognition of the truth that the removal of objective guilt by Christ’s atonement must precede the removal of subjective defilement by Christ’s regenerating and sanctifying Spirit. Lidgett, Spir. Prince, of Atonement, 265-280, shows that there is a fatherly demand for satisfaction, which must be met by the filial response of the child. Thomas Chalmers at the beginning of his ministry urged on his people the reformation of their lives. But he confesses: “I never heard of any such reformations being effected amongst them.” Only when he preached the alienation of men from God and forgiveness through the blood of Christ, did he hear of their betterment.

Gordon, Christ of Today. 129 — “The consciousness of sin is largely the creation of Christ.” Men like Paul, Luther and Edwards show this impressively. Foster, Christian life and Theology, 198-201 — “There is of course a sense in which the Christian must imitate Christ’s death, for he is to ‘take up his cross daily’ ( Luke 9:23) and follow his Master but in its highest meaning and fullest scope the death of Christ is no more an object set for our imitation than is the creation of the world. Christ does for man in his sacrifice what man could not do for himself. We see in the Cross the magnitude of the guilt of sin, our own self-condemnation, the adequate remedy, for the object of law is gained in the display of righteousness and the objective ground of forgiveness.” Maclaren: “Christianity without a dying Christ is a dying Christianity.” (f) This theory contradicts the whole tenor of the New Testament, in making the life, and not the death, of Christ the most significant and important feature of his work. The constant allusions to the death of Christ as the source of our salvation, as well as the symbolism of the ordinances, cannot be explained upon a theory which regards Christ as a mere example and considers his sufferings as incidents, rather than essentials, of his work.

Dr. H. B. Hackett frequently called attention to the fact that the gospels recorded only three years of Jesus’ life and the prominence given in the record to the closing scenes of that life are evidences that the great work of our Lord was not his life, but rather his death. Christ’s death, and not his life, is the central truth of Christianity. The cross is par excellence the Christian symbol. In both the ordinances (in Baptism as well as in the Lords Supper) it is the death of Christ that is primarily set forth. Neither Christ’s example, nor his teaching, reveals God as his death does. It is the death of Christ that links together all Christian doctrines. The mark of Christ’s blood is upon them all, as the scarlet thread running through every cord and rope of the British navy gives sign that it is the property of the crown.

Did Jesus’ death have no other relation to our salvation than Paul’s death had? Paul was a martyr but his death is not even recorded. Gould, Bib.

Theol. N. T., 92 — “Paul does not dwell in any way upon the life or work of our Lord, except as they are involved in his death and resurrection.”

What did Jesus’ words; “It is finished” ( John 19:30) mean? What was finished on the Socinian theory? The Socinian salvation had not yet begun. Why did not Jesus make the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to be memorials of his birth rather than of his death? Why was not the veil of the temple rent at his baptism or at the Sermon on the Mount?

It was because only his death opened the way to God. In talking with Nicodemus, Jesus brushed aside the complimentary: “We know that thou art a teacher come from God” ( John 3:2). Recognizing Jesus as teacher is not enough. There must be a renewal by the Spirit of God so that one recognizes also the lifting up of the Son of man as atoning Savior ( John 3:14,15). And to Peter, Jesus said, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me” ( John 13:8). One cannot have part with Christ as Teacher, while one rejects him as Redeemer from sin. On the Socinian doctrine of the Atonement, see Crawford, Atonement, 279-296; Shedd, History of Doctrine, 2:376-386; Doctrines of the Early Socinians, in Princeton Essays, 1:194-211; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:156-180; Fock, Socinianismus. 2. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.

This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine nature, which is propitiated by Christ’s death but that this death is a manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his creatures. Christ’s atonement, therefore, is the merely natural consequence of his taking human nature upon him and is a suffering, not of penalty in man’s stead, but of the combined woes and grief which the living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and to lead them to repentance. In other words, Christ’s sufferings were necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners, which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that there exists no such obstacle.

This theory, for substance, has been advocated by Bushnell, in America, in Great Britain by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell and Young and in Germany by Schleiermacher and Ritschl.

Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It may be found stated in Bushnell’s Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell’s later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticism upon his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what he had se strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ’s death has effect upon God u well as upon man, and that God cannot forgive without thus “making cost to himself.”

He makes open confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert sinners and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law, however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground of the Atonement in God’s punitive holiness. Since the original form of Bushnell’s doctrine is the only one, which has met with wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.

F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ’s sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel and was crushed by it, he planted his heel upon the cockatrice’s den and was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol. Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ’s sufferings as an illustration. This illustration, given by the ideal man of the self-sacrifice due to God from the humanity, of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed in him, irrespective of their faith and needing only to have brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson’s. Christ’s death is the necessary result of his collision with evil, and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God’s self-sacrificing love.

Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1) by an infinite punishment, (2) by an adequate repentance. This last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell, denying substitution and emphasizing Christ’s oneness with the race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our Lord bore penalty but only in the sense that he realized how great was the condemnation and penalty of the race, Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He puts in its place an influence of Christ’s personality on men so that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement is purely subjective.

Yet it is the work of Christ, in that only Christ’s oneness with God has taught men that they can be one with God. Christ’s consciousness of his being in God and knowing God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation compensation, satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense of the holiness of God or of the guilt of man as would make necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.

Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found in his Rechtfertigung und Versohnung, or in English translation, Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with seriousness for he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion of which it is the part of Christ to dispel.

There is an inadequate conception of Christ’s person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and work of objective atonement, indeed, the work of Christ is hardly put into any precise relation to sin at all. See Denney Studies in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson: “Many Ritschlians deny both the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Sin does not particularly concern God, Christ is Savior only as Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to it. He is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T. teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was with the Father before the work was, that he made expiation of sins to God and that sin is that abominable thing that God hates.” For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr, Ritschlian Theology, 231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M. Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440- 461; Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:22-44 (art by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement. 297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.

To this theory we object as follows: (a) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral influence upon men of the sufferings of the God-man, it is false by defect.

It substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for its chief aim and yet unfairly appropriates the name ‘vicarious,’ which belongs only to the latter.

Suffering with the sinner is by no means suffering in his stead.

Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell’s view by the loyal wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband. He further illustrates his view by the philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries from which he would rescue them and by the Moravian missionary, who enters for life the lepers’ enclosure, that he may convert its inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of the atonement, not the atonement itself.

But we reply that such suffering as these does not make Christ’s sacrifice vicarious. The word ‘vicarious’ (from vicis) implies substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is not necessarily one who performs service with and in sympathy with, the rector but rather, he is one who stands in the rector’s place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president. ‘A. B., appointed consul, vice C. D., resigned,’ implies that A. B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a ‘vicarious sacrifice,’ then he makes atonement to God in the place and stead of sinners. Christ’s suffering in and with sinners, though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though suffering in and with sinners may be in part the medium through which Christ was enabled to endure God’s wrath against sin, it is not to be confounded with the reason why God lays this suffering upon him. It should not blind us to the fact that this reason is his standing in the sinner’s place to answer for sin to the retributive holiness of God. (b) It rests upon false philosophical principles. Righteousness is identical with benevolence instead of conditioning it, that God is subject to an eternal law of love instead of being himself the source of all law and that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.

Hovey, God with Us. 181-271, has given one of the best replies to Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of love, then God is necessarily a Savior. He must have created man as soon as he could, that he makes men holy as fast as possible. He does all the good he can and that he is no better than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature power.

The conception of God as subject to law imperils God’s self-sufficiency and freedom. For Bushnell’s statements with regard to the identity of righteousness and love and for criticisms upon them, see our treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.

Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell’s principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B. Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that God is only love and that all that is required as ground of the sinner’s forgiveness is penitence, either Christ’s, his own or both together.

Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ’s incarnation.

Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351 — “Atonement by suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the necessary and suffering the incidental element of that result. But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance and does not necessarily involve the thought of pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfillment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life consecrated and fulfilled, is the same in us as in Jesus and inasmuch as his consecration and fulfillment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfillment of it which he achieved, therefore, his atonement, his sacrifice and his suffering, become vicarious.

For not that they make unnecessary but that They make possible and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in him.” (c) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ’s suffering. While it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin. The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.

B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the atonement, shows this defect of apprehension: “God in Christ reconciled the world to himself, Christ did not reconcile God to man but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men but God enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious nature of God. A revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature, it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his creatures in his eternal love and pity. It is a revelation, moreover, that the law, which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of godlike souls, prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can influence each other.”

While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ’s suffering. That reason is to be found only it that holiness of God, which expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but also upon him who is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God’s holiness brings suffering to God and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the suffering but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement of Lockhart above gives account of the effect, which is reconciliation but it fails to recognize propitiation as the cause. The words of E. G. Robinson furnish the needed complement: “The work of Christ has two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the necessity of a subjective change in man but makes no provision of at objective agency to secure it.” (d) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture that the atonement is necessary but simply to reveal God’s love, but to satisfy his justice that Christ’s sufferings are propitiatory and penal. The human conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ’s sacrifice before it can feel the moral influence of his sufferings.

That the atonement is primarily an offering to God and not to the sinner appears in Ephesians 5:2 — “gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God”; Hebrews 9:14 — “offered himself without blemish unto God.” Only by propitiating holiness can conscience, the reflection of God’s holiness, be propitiated. Mere love and sympathy are maudlin and powerless to move unless there is a background of righteousness. Spear: “An appeal to man without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal, will never touch the heart. The mere appearance of an atonement has no moral influence.” Crawford Atonement, 358-367 — “Instead of delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this theory makes Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture. And Dr. Bushnell concedes, the end, that the moral view of the atonement is morally powerless and that the objective view he condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of sinners.”

Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended. The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for and no propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled. Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is atonement made by repentance to the human conscience. Shedd says well: “All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order to the satisfaction of God himself.” Walter Besant: “It is not enough to be forgiven, one has also to forgive one’s self.” The converse proposition is yet truer. It is not enough to forgive one’s self, one has also to be forgiven. Indeed, one cannot rightly forgive one’s self, unless one has been first forgiven; John 3:26 — “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 201 — “As the high priest, under the old dispensation, carried the blood into the Holy of Holies, so does the Spirit, in the new dispensation, take the blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in order that he may ‘cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’ ( Hebrews 9:14).” (e) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning, those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our sins, those which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in heaven when presented there by our intercessor, those which declare forgiveness to be a remitting of past offenses upon the ground of Christ’s death and those which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.

We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe Christ’s death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell’s acknowledgment that these “altar forms” are the most vivid and effective methods of presenting Christ’s work and that the preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense with them, it the meaning has gone out of them is not so clear.

In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears to recognize this inconsistency and represents God as affected by the atonement, after all. In other words, the atonement has an objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only by “making cost to himself.” He “works down his resentment, by suffering for us. This verges toward the true view, but it does not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction and it attributes passion, weakness and imperfection to God. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to an enemy is already forgiving love so that the benefit to the enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, a condition of the forgiveness.

To Campbell’s view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of the world, we reply that no confession or penitence is possible without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutive office, the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he bore our curse and became a ransom in our place. There was more in the sufferings of Christ than in “a perfect A men in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.” Not Phinehas’s zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement ( <19A630> Psalm 106:30 — “executed judgment” — LXX. Ejxila>sato, “made propitiation”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the contrast between the priestly atonement of Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead, and the judicial atonement of Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away wrath. In neither case did mere confession surface to take away sin. On Campbell’s view see further, on page 760.

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the fact that our personality has its ground in him but he has failed to indicate that this sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God’s righteousness. He tells us that “Christ sanctified the present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.” This modification of Campbell’s view can be rationally maintained only by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental attribute of God is holiness.

Holiness is self-affirming righteousness and that this righteousness necessarily expresses itself in the punishment of sin. Christ’s relation to the race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate aim of the atonement to be that God “might himself be just” ( Romans 3:26) and no theory of the atonement will meet the demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity in God’s righteousness, rather than in his love.

E. Y. Mullins: “If Christ’s union with humanity made it possible for him to be ‘the representative Penitent’ and to be the Amen of humanity to God’s just condemnation of sin, his union with God made it also possible for him to be the representative of the Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as the expression of condemnation.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 102, 103 — “The serious element in sin is not man’s dislike, suspicion, alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of vice in human nature but rather, God’s condemnation of man.

This Christ endured and died that the condemnation might be removed. ‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood; Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’” Bushnell regards Matthew 8:17 — “Himself took our iniquities, and bare our diseases” — as indicating the nature of Christ’s atoning work.

The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean rather: “His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him, that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering which was to expiate the sins of men.” His sighing when he cured the deaf man ( Mark 7:34) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus ( John 11:35) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he was one with the humanity which was under the curse and that he too had ‘become a curse for us” ( Galatians 3:13). The great error of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of Jesus’ death and all Scripture, which points to an influence of the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory. (f) This theory confounds God’s method of saving men with men’s experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its effects in the believer’s union with Christ and the purifying influence of that union upon the character and life.

Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He says: “The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement, that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive. To satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive or to move upon man’s heart to induce him to accept forgiveness have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in Christianity. To me the words ‘eternal atonement’ denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin. They mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer, that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love, alike from its holiness and from its sympathy, that ‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’ Atonement on its ‘God-ward side’ is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of us divine Sorrow for sin, the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.”

All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is regarded as a form of love and the primary offense of sin is regarded as the grieving of the Father’s heart. Dr. Stevens fails to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer. Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are “forever irreconcilable”; they are “based on radically different conceptions of God.” The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905 — “The doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is deliverance from sin. This deliverance is the work of God, a work the motive of which is God’s love for men and these are truths, which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explain how this work is done. Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its fulfillment. He grants that we have in Paul ‘the theory of a substitutive expiation.’ But he finds something else in Paul which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle’s Christian experience — the Idea, namely, of dying with Christ and rising with him and on the strength of accepting this last he feels at liberty to drop the substitutive expiation overboard, something to be explained from Paul’s controversial position or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which has no permanent value for the Christian mind. The experience is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning carried by the last two words — the meaning unfolded in the theory of substitutive expiation — which had the moral motive in it to draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death. On Dr. Stevens’ own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side for him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to do.” (g) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those who have heard of it, thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men in the sense of securing them grace which, but for his atoning work, could never have been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.

Hovey: “The man-ward influence of the atonement is far more extensive than the moral influence of it.” Christ is Advocate, not with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit’s work has moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can come only from God ( 1 John 2:1 — “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous and he is the propitiation for our sins). Hence 1:9 — “If we confess our sins, he [God] is faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ] to forgive us our sins.” Hence the publican does not first pray for change of heart but for mercy upon the ground of sacrifice ( Luke 18:13 — “God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,” but literally: God be propitiated toward me the sinner”). See Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin, Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.

Gravitation kept the universe stable long before man discovered it. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The “Light of the world” ( John 8:12) has many “X rays,” beyond the visible spectrum but able to impress the image of Christ upon patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the ages, but “the darkness apprehended it not” ( John 1:5). Its rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to receive them.

Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the pre-existent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the many imbeciles, outcasts and heathen who in this world do not hear of Christ’s atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way undermines the doctrine of future retribution.

To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God’s love and its influence is exerted through education. In his Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the atonement is “a true reconciliation between God and man. Reconciliation makes them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ, who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment but to purify and perfect them in God’s likeness by uniting them to God. Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer for guilty men, a doctrine for which there is no authority either in Scripture or in life ( 1 Peter 3:18?) — but a laying down of one’s life in love, that another may receive life.

Redemption is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be presented before his Father ‘not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing’ ( Ephesians 5:27). We believe not in the propitiation of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father’s wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it. Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and restoring him to purity.” And yet in all this there is no mention of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and the object of the propitiation!

It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us, Horace Bushnell said: “I fear what I have written and said upon the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and it will do great harm.” As he thought of it further, he cried, “Oh Lord Jesus, I trust for mercy only in the shed blood that thou didst offer on Calvary!” Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family and a few friends and himself administered the Lord’s Supper.

After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the words: “This is my body, broken for you,” he added: “This is our foundation!”

As he started to bless the cup, he cried: “Quick, quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!” Then he sank quietly back, and was no more. See life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl, in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul Gerhardt’s hymn: “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,” as describing physical suffering but he begged his son to repeat the two last verses of that hymn: “O sacred head now wounded!” when he came to die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead. 3. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.

This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of government. God’s government of the universe cannot be maintained nor can the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects unless the pardon of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which God sets upon his law and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty. This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can pardon the guilty, upon their repentance, without detriment to the interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic of the New England theology and is generally held by those who accept the New School view of sin.

Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at nine years of age, was ripe for the University at twelve and edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus early he went with an embassy to the court of France where he spent a year.

Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus and wrote three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer of the United Provinces, then advocategeneral of the fisc for Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law, was appointed deputy to England. He was imprisoned for his theological opinions, escaped to Paris and became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, as well as history, theology, and poetry. He was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, and an unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman than as a theologian was. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say: “It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”

Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of political expediency — a device to procure practical governmental results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory, is Isaiah 42:21 — “It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness” sake, to magnify the law, and make it honorable.” Strangely enough, the explanation is added: “even when its demands are unfulfilled.” Park: “Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law. Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins. Christ was cursed for Adam’s sin, just as the heavens and the earth were cursed for Adam’s sin, that is, he bore pains and sufferings on account of it.”

Grotius used the word acceptilatio, by which he meant God’s sovereign provision of a suffering which was not of itself penalty, but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty. Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God’s nature that requires Christ to suffer.

If penalty may be remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole and the reason why Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God’s holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these sufferings upon man so that in principle this theory is allied to the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already mentioned.

Notice the difference between holding to a substitute for penalty, as Grotius did, and holding to an equivalent substituted penalty, as the Scriptures do. Grotius’s own statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395 and of Albert Barnes on the Atonement. The history of New England thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President Woolsey: “Christ’s suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God, but suffering as the only way of redemption so far as men’s own feeling of sin was concerned and so far as the government of God was concerned.” This unites the Governmental and the Moral Influence theories.

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227 — “Grotius emphasized the idea of law rather than that of justice and made the sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the relaxation of the law and not the strict penalty demanded by justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met with no general reception and left little trace of itself among those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical theological descent.”

To this theory we urge the following objections: (a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God’s government, it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement one which is only subordinate and incidental.

In our discussion of Penalty (pages 655, 656), we have seen that the object of punishment is not primarily the security of government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial effect on society. Punishment must follow wrongdoing or the punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment, that is not just and right, can work to the good of society. (b) It rests upon false philosophical principles, as that utility is the ground of moral obligation; law is an expression of the will, rather than of the nature, of God. The aim of penalty is to deter from the commission of offenses and that righteousness is resolvable into benevolence.

Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:573-581; 3:188, 189 — “For God to take that as satisfaction, which is not really such, is to say that there is no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and goats might take away sins and Christ is dead in vain.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct.. 4:38-40) — “Acceptilatio implies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is indifferent to good or evil and, authority and force bind that man alone.

There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.” (c) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.

No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with government.

Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God, but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the sinner prays: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” ( Psalm 51:4); “God be propitiated toward me the sinner” (literal translation of Luke 18:13), propitiated through God’s own appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even while he prays.

In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is grounded in no necessity of God’s nature. Only in expediency or in God’s arbitrary will, law may be abrogated for merely economic reasons if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J. M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144 — “No awakened sinner, into whose spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only. Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice and so throws the mind back on that absolute justice that the idea of an atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the other, is a delusion.”

N. W. Taylor’s Theology was entitled: “Moral Government,” and C. G.

Finney’s Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral Government, although it called itself by another name. Because New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in God’s holiness but were rather based upon utility, expediency or happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New School theology. Its advocates with well-nigh one accord have gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the theological world and needs to have no large amount of space devoted to it. (d) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it is unsuspected.

To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment. Potwin: “How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.” The Socinian view of Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman Abbott: “If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on me.” William Ashmore: “A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy. This tragedy, the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities — a stage trick for the same effect.”

The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey. But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother’s grief is a reality and the last state of that child is worse than the first. Christ’s atonement is not a play of passion. Hell cannot be cured by homeopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on awe-stricken spectators. It is an object lesson only because it is a reality. All God’s justice and all God’s love are focused in the Cross so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all space and time beside.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of “mist, the common gloss of theologians.” Such mist is the legal fiction by which Christ’s suffering is taken in place of legal penalty while yet it is not the legal penalty itself. E.

G. Robinson: “Atonement is not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go scot-free.” Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ. (e) The intensity of Christ’s sufferings in the garden and on the cross is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic exhibition of God’s regard for his government and can be explained only upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human sin.

Christ refused the “wine mingled with myrrh” ( Mark 15:23) that he might, to the last, have full possession of his powers and speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” ( Matthew 27:46), was not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding of the countenance of God from him who was “made to be sin on our behalf” ( 2 Corinthians 5:21). In the case of Christ, above that of all others, finis coronat, and dying words are undying words. “The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When words are scarce they’re seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.” Versus Park, Discourses, 328-355.

A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry. Psalm 97:10 — “O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil” — Ephesians 4:26 — “Be ye angry, and sin not.” So it belongs to the holiness of God not to let sin go unchallenged. God not only shows anger but he ‘is angry. It is the wrath of God, which sin must meet and which Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death was the cup of which he was to drink ( Matthew 20:22; John 18:11) and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 196 — “Jesus alone of all men truly ‘tasted death’ ( Hebrews 2:9). Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it To Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ died and rose again But to Jesus its terrors were as yet undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the depths the dreadfulness of dying.”

We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the following quotations. Wendt. Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250 — “The forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still called him ‘My God’ ( Matthew 27:46). Jesus felt the failing of that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once more grant him his power and assistance.” E.

H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 143, 144 — “It is not even necessary to believe that God hid his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to admit that Christ no longer saw the Father’s face. He felt that it was so; but it was not so.” These explanations make Christ’s sufferings and Christ’s words unreal and to our mind they are inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement. (f) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and heart is due, not to its exhibiting God’s regard for law, but to its exhibiting an actual execution of law and an actual satisfaction of violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner’s stead.

Whiton. Gloria Patri, 143, 14Æ claims that Christ is the propitiation for all sin only by bringing peace to the conscience and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that this view merges God’s transcendence in his immanence, we urge the words of Matthew Henry: “Nothing can satisfy an offended conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.” C. J.

Baldwin: “The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the mill wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men only when it is concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.” (g) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture, which represent the atonement as necessary. God himself, as being a revelation of righteousness, by being an execution of the penalty of the law and making salvation a matter of debt to the believer on the ground of what Christ has done by actually purging our sins instead of making that purging possible, simply assures the sinner that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done. Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation and will bestow it upon all of those who come to him.

John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, chapter vi — “Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden.”

John Bunyan’s story is truer to Christian experience than is the Governmental theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God with a distant respect to Christ but by coming directly to the “Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” ( John 1:29). Christ’s words to every conscious sinner are simply: “Come unto me” ( Matthew 11:28).

Upon the ground of what Christ has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer. 1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins” — faithful to his promise and righteous to Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to discourage the sinner’s direct access to Christ and to render the way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less certain.

When The Outlook says: “Not even to the Son of God must we come instead of coming to God,” we can see only plain denial of the validity of Christ’s demands and promises. He demands immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him and he promises immediate salvation when he assures all of those who come to him that he will not cast them out.

The theory of Grotius is legal and speculative but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes’s doctrine, see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford, Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture. 194-196; S. H.

Tyng, Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir.

Prin. of Atonement, 151-154. 4. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.

This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in Adam, not before, but after the Fall. Human nature, therefore, with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil that, notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit or of his divine nature, not only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or personal sin. Christ gradually purified sin, through struggle and suffering until, in his death, he completely extirpated its original depravity and reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith partakers of Christ’s new humanity. Edward Irving, of London (1792-1834) elaborated this theory and Menken and Dippel in Germany have held it in substance.

Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain (818), whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human nature without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later years a preacher of the National Church of Scotland in London. For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs. Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351sq ; Guericke, in Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:264 sq ., and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.

Irving’s followers differ in their representation of his views. Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85 — “If indeed we made Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are worthy to die the death of blasphemers. The miraculous conception depriveth him of human personality and it also depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for by another. It doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful flesh and blood, that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh and blood of his brethren.” 2:14 — Freer says: “So that, despite it was fallen flesh, he had assumed he was, through the Eternal Spirit, born into the world ‘the Holy Thing’.” 11-15, 282-305 — “Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus did not take it. He took fallen humanity but purged it in the act of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the lump, but in his person most holy.”

So, says an Irvingian tract, “Being part of the very nature that had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having committed or even thought it, part of the common humanity could suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that nature, though he who took it knew no sin.” Dr. Curry, quoted in McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664 — “The Godhead came into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last thought carried, to Irving’s realistic mode of thinking, the notion of Christ’s participation in the fallen character of humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of that idea by saying that this was overborne and at length wholly expelled by the indwelling Godhead.”

We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most characteristic feature. The following quotation from Irving’s own words will show this.

Works, 5:115 — “That Christ took our fallen nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.” 123 — “The human nature is thoroughly fallen. The mere apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.” 128 — “His soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually that it might be delivered from the mortality, corruption and temptation, which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.” 152 — “These sufferings came not by imputation merely but by actual participation of the sinful and cursed thing.” Irving frequently quoted Hebrews 2:10 — “make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”

Irving’s followers deny Christ’s sinfulness, only by assuming that inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin, in other words, that not native depravity but only actual transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgement, was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ’s human nature and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland, Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after the opening of his new church in Regent’s Square in 1827, he found that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of Satan; he became a fanatical millenarian so he gave himself wholly to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts were revived and he held to the hope of a restoration of the primitive church although he himself was relegated to a comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies and died at the age of forty-two. “If I had married Irving,” said Mrs. Thomas Carlyle, “there would have been no tongues.”

To this theory we offer the following objections: (a) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement, which makes the subjective application possible.

Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of “redemption by sample.” It is a purely subjective atonement, which Irving has in mind.

Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet this deliverance from sin, in Irving’s view, was to be secured in an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old Testament economy, which should abide, while the New Testament economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace as essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope, they find it in their new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering orders mentioned in Ephesians 4:11 — “apostles...prophets...evangelists...pastors...teachers.” But the N. T. mark of an apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving’s apostles cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Errinerungen aus vergangenen Tagen, 237. (b) It rests upon false fundamental principles such as, that law is identical with the natural order of the universe and as such, is an exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God. Sin is merely a power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an objective guilt and desert of punishment. Penalty is the mere reaction of law against the transgressor instead of being also the revelation of a personal wrath against sin. The evil taint of human nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences, penalty in this way reforming the transgressor.

Dower, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362) — “On Irving’s theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness belongs only to evil acts.

The loose connection between the Logos and humanity savors Nestorianism. It is the work of the person to rid himself of something in the humanity, which does not render it really sinful. If Jesus’ sinfulness of nature did not render his person sinful, this must be true of us, which is a Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take a sinful nature, unless sin is essential to human nature. In Irving’s view, the death of Christ’s body works the regeneration of his sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing, and the body the only part of man needing redemption.” Penalty would thus become a reformer and death a Savior.

Irving held that there are two kinds of sin:1. guiltless sin and 2. guilty sin.

Passive depravity is not guilty but it is a part of man’s sensual nature.

Without it we would not be human. But the moment this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty. Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature inactive and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin and guilt. Christ took this passive sin that he might be like unto his brethren and that he might be able to suffer. (c) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of Scripture with regard to Christ’s freedom from all taint of hereditary depravity. It misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane and Calvary. It denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none were to be saved thereby. “I shall maintain until death.” said Irving, “that the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours. Human nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell and this is the human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed with.” The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in Scripture and held from the first by the church.

Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183 — “All others, as they grow in holiness, grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the Father, he asks ‘Why?’ well knowing that the reason is not in his sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the preface is an assertion of righteousness: ‘I glorified thee’ ( John 17:4). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation from Psalm 31:5 — ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’ ( Luke 23:46), but he does not add, as the Psalm does, ‘thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth,’ for he needed no redemption, being himself the Redeemer.” (d) It makes the active obedience of Christ and the subjective purification of his human nature to be the chief features of his work, while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the center of all.

The Scriptures ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.

In Irving’s theory there is no imputation or representation or substitution.

His only Idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall be sacrificed or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the atonement show that the offense of the cross has not ceased ( Galatians 5:11 — “then hath the stumbling block of the cross been done away”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling block to modern speculation. Yet it is, as of old, “the power of God unto salvation” ( Romans 1:16; cf. 1 Corinthians 1:23,24 — “we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling block and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”).

As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is the sense of defilement but no sense of guilt, subjective pollution, but no objective condemnation.

We take precisely opposite ground from that of Irving. Christ had, not hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the upholder, and the life. He was “made to be sin on our behalf” ( 2 Corinthians 5:21), not in the sense of one defiled as Irving thought but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to “cleanse that red right hand” of Lady Macbeth. In other words, its power to satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is only the reflection.

The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr. E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving’s view, when he claimed that “Christ took human nature as he found it.” (e) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a merely declaratory act of God and requires such a view of the divine holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained only upon principles of pantheism.

Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by another. The question suggests a larger one; whether God has constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former. For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken, 1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April, 1863:207; Christian Rev., 28:234 sq .; Ullmann, Sinless nature of Jesus, 2l9-232 5. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.

This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment. The majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty. This conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners. This suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ’s death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. This view is held by many Scottish theologians and by the Princeton School in this country.

The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ’s humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ’s deity and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19 — “What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mousetrap and in it he set, as a bait, his blood.” Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile, which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.

These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which even the early church regarded the atonement. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129 — “Atha hasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.” Gregory Nazianzen ( 390) “retained the figure of a ransom but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”

But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm’s acute, brief and beautiful treatise entitled “Cur Deus Homo” constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that “whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil. He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him and this is sin. It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.” Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God — “a sinner cannot justify a sinner.” Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God. “If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.” The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all of mankind, must “give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.” Such a gift of infinite value was his death.

The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man and thus, the justice and love of God are reconciled.

The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bibliotheca Sacra, 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger’s Encyclopedie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander and Charles Hodge (Systematic Theology, 2:470-540) represent the theory.

To this theory we make the following objections: (a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner. This makes the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.

The theory has been called the “Criminal theory” of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the “Military theory.” It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen lúsú majestatis) was the highest offense known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm’schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.

Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89 — “From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It, therefore, constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism when Anselm, for the first time in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481 — “In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830 — “The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination.

They called the cruelty ‘retributive justice,’ and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But today we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted. Arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he “had not only a conviction, but a ‘delightful conviction,’ as of a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’ appears to us, if sovereign anything, sovereign irrational and mean.” (b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ’s passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.

Neither Christ’s active obedience alone, nor Christ’s obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted, the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm’s view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3 — “God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.” ...II, 16:7 — “It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.” ...II, 16:2 — “Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgement of God, was impending over sinners, with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God. This expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father, by this intercession appeased his anger and on this basis founded peace between God and men. This tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”

It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ’s death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas ( Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach “the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,” and says: “We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva; he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.” Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ’s sufferings as penalty: “The justice of man demands satisfaction, and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite, i e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God’s justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.” The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ’s obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God’s justice by enduring punishment, which the sinner deserved. He held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.

Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462 — “Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured. Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes ‘ten thousand talents’ and has not wherewith to pay’ ( Matthew 18:24,25). But Christ did both and therefore he ‘magnified the law and made it honorable’ ( Isaiah 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.” Cf. Edwards, Works, 1:406. (c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.

Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212 — “Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other. able and as willing. Pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.” The main text relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory is Matthew 20:28 — “give his life a ransom for many.”

Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257 — “The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258 — “The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ’s sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.” Encyc.

Brit., 2:93 (art: Anselm) — “This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God. It puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.” (d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.

Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that “so precious is the shedding of Christ’s blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil would hold them” (Crippen, 132).

Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903: “Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.” The Bishop says: “I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”

Foster, Christian Life and Theology. 221 — “Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is ‘fitting’ that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners. Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.” (e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ’s work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8 furnished this needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ.

The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another’s pain inures to my account. Christ, being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.

Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 132-189 — “As Anselm represents it, Christ’s death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it.

Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.” For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172- 193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, xv, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416 sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versohnungslehre, 176-178. 6. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.

In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory can be satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1. What did the atonement accomplish? In other words, what was the object of Christ’s death? The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means used? In other words, how could Christ justly die?

The answer to this question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ’s relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.

Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ’s sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves, (2) the union between him and them, or the propriety of his being accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner. Christ bore God’s wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment, (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the atonement but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in that they do not distinctly assert Christ’s endurance of penalty itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.

Adolphe Monod said well: “Save first the holy law of my God and after that you shall save me.” Edwards felt the first of these needs, for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542 — “The necessity of Christ’s satisfaction to divine justice is, as it were, the center and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation. Other doctrine is comparatively of little importance, except as they have respect to this.” And in his Work of Redemption, Works, 1:412 — “Christ was born to the end that he might die and therefore he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.”

See John 12:32 — “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself But this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die. Christ was “lifted up” as propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and peace within. Additionally he was lifted up as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men. Jesus being as “the serpent lifted up in the wilderness” ( John 3:14), and we overcoming “because of the blood of the Lamb’ ( Revelation 12:11). First, the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.

The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection. There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially deserves ill. As we who are made in God’s image mark our growth in purity by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our natures that not only others’ wickedness, but also our own wickedness, be visited with punishment. A keen conscience cannot rest till it has made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical demand of God’s nature that penalty follow sin.

The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates and consequences. Gordon, Christ of Today, 210 — “In old Athens, the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state, had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.” Shakespeare knew human nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last Will and Testament he writes: “First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.” Richard III, 1:4 — “I charge you, as you hope to have redemption by Christ’s dear blood shed for our grievous sins, That you depart and lay no hands on me.” Richard II, 4:1 — “The world’s Ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.” Henry VI, 2d part, 3: — “That dread King took our state upon him, To free us from his Father’s wrathful curse.” Henry IV. 1st part, 1:1 — “Those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.” Measure for Measure, 2:2 — “Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.” Henry VI, 2d part. 1:1 — “Now, by the death of him that died for all!” All’s Well that Ends Well, 3:4 — “What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.” See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God’s holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.

Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God’s being against moral evil — the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion and is consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine nature, by the substitution of Christ’s penal sufferings for the punishment of the guilty.

John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489): “ipse deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi satisfecit” = “Himself being at the same time God, priest and sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself. [I.e., for the sins of men to whom he had united himself] and by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].”

Quarles’s Emblems: “O groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set the offender free!”

Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:95 — “When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, as that I feared sin and all the while I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God’s name and the integrity of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question: ‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty? The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel?”

This substitution is unknown to mere law and above and beyond the powers of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or suspend law but takes it up into itself and fulfills it. The righteousness of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and “punisher”, he voluntarily submits to bear the penalty and bears it in the human nature that has sinned.

Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221 — “In conscience, man condemns and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and sacrificial victim (5Th. 9:12). He is ‘full of grace’ — forgiving grace — but he is ‘full of truth’ also, and so ‘the only-begotten from the Father’ ( John 1:14). Not forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has any mercy. He forgave the sinner because he bore the sin.” Kaftan, referring to some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of propitiation. It is affirmed as follows: “On the contrary, the highest ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this away and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity.

Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for the sake of the ethical consciousness.

The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness, which is not experienced as at the same time, a condemnation of sin. Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on the Cross at the hand of sinners.

Consequently for the good of man he bore all that which man had deserved, and thereby has man escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of God. This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which faith recognizes and knows is.

Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression. While, as a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human nature. On the one hand, the need of an objective satisfaction to its ethical demand of punishment for sin and, on the other, the need of a manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move it to repentance.

The great classical passage with reference to the atonement is Romans 3:25,28 — “whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.” Or, somewhat more freely translated, the passage would read: “whom God hath set forth in his blood as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith to show forth his righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in the forbearance of God, to declare his righteousness in the time now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who believeth in Jesus.”

EXPOSITION OF ROMANS 3:25, 26. These verses are an expanded statement of the subject of the epistle, the revelation of the “righteousness of God” ( = the righteousness which God provides and which God accepts), which had been mentioned in 1:17, but which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in 1:18-3:20 both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer’s comments upon this passage. “Verse 25. ‘God has set forth Christ as an effectual propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood,’ i.e. , in that he caused him to shed his blood. Ejn tw~| aujtou~ ai]mati belongs to proe>qeto , not to pi>stewv .

The purpose of this setting forth in his blood is eijv e]ndeixin th~v dikaiosu>nhv aujtou~, ‘for the display of his [judicial and punitive] righteousness,’ which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a propitiatory offering and was thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited. ‘On account of the passing by of sins that had previously taken place,’ i.e., because he had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to need an e]ndeixiv , or exhibition to men.

Omission is not acquittal. Pa>resiv passing by is intermediate between pardon and punishment. ‘In virtue of the forbearance of God, expresses the motive of the pa>resiv. Before Christ’s sacrifice, God’s administration was a scandal; it needed vindication. The atonement is God’s answer to the charge of freeing the guilty. “Verse 26. Eijv to< ei=nai is not epexegetical of eijv e]ndeixin, but presents the teleology of the iJ;asth>rion, the final aim of the whole affirmation from o[n proe>qeto to kairw~| — namely, first, God’s being just, and secondly, his appearing just in consequence of this. Justus et justificans, instead of justus et condemnans , this is the summumum paradoxon evangelicum. Of this revelation of righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement, grace is the determining ground.”

We repeat what was said on pages 719, 720, with regard to the teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows that Christ’s death is a propitiatory sacrifice. Its first and main effect is upon God. The particular attribute in God that demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness and that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God’s justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately that the atonement is a necessity to man. Paul speaks of it here mainly as a necessity to God.

Christ suffers, indeed, that God may appear righteous but behind the appearance lies the reality; the main object of Christ’s suffering is that God may be righteous while he pardons the believing sinner. In other words, the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself.

See Hebrews 2:10 — it “became” God = it was morally fitting in God, to make Christ suffer; cf. Zechariah 6:8 — “they that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country” = the judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.

Charnock: “He who once ‘quenched the violence of fire’ for those Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God’s anger against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.” The same God who is a God of holiness and who, in virtue of his holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy and in virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin. Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 93 — “Christ is not only mediator between God and man but between the just God and the merciful God” — cf. Psalm 85:10 — “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” Conscience demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous pardon would not be just.” See Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.

Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304 — “The Atonement has God-ward significance. It consists in our Lord’s endurance of death on our behalf and the spirit in which he endured death is of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely, obedience. God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives atonement, yet requires it. ‘Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift’ ( 2 Corinthians 9:15).” Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for substance) — “As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us to obey his law and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying in us and for us. As we pray for strength in affliction and find him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer stand or fall together.”

See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324, Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463; Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice,27,53, 253; Edwards’s Works, 4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, iv, 2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-363; Schoberlein, in Studien und Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog, Encyclopadie, art.:

Versohnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and 8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bibliotheca Sacra, 20:332-339: Kreibig, Versohnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev., 1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct., 4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought. Secondly, the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.

The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such relation to humanity, that what God’s holiness demands that Christ is under obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully, in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is satisfied. The sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf is saved.

Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question before us: “What must be Christ’s relation to men, in order to make it possible that he should die for them?” We would change the form of the question, so that it should read: “What must be Christ’s relation to men, in order to make it not only possible, but just and necessary, that he should die for them?” Dale replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and central relation to the human race and to every member of it. See Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism of the Trinity and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity, laden with responsibility for human sin while yet he personally knows no sin. Of this raceresponsibility and race-guilt which Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had sinned, Christ’s obedience and suffering in the flesh were the visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ’s organic union with the race can we find the vital relation, which will make his vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can we see how the suffering of those few hours upon the Cross could suffice to save the millions of mankind.

Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in five propositions: “1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of those he would redeem that he could break the power of their captor. The human race may be likened to many sparrows that had been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly struggling against their fate. A great eagle swoops down from the sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net and then spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and captives and breaking its meshes, he delivers himself and them. Christ, the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the redeemed and causing them to share in the experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin and death. This is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put away and man is united to God.”

Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow, inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ, arising from his sinless nature and his deity, and men. He adds therefore that “2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. He became the representative of men before God; 4. He gained power over human hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5. He became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of sins consistent with the divine holiness.” If Christ’s union with the race be one, which begins with creation and antedates the Fall, all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural correlates and consequences of the first. Substitution, representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and atoned.

We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction. We now show how Christ can justly make it or, in other words, how the innocent can justly suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ’s union with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for men since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld by his power. As the immanent God, he was the life of the race and of every member of it. Christ’s sharing of man’s life justly and inevitably subjected him to man’s exposures and liabilities and especially to God’s condemnation on account of sin.

In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to a finite Creature. A.

J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord’s representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine nature. “He is our representative not because he was in the loins of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins. Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the sinner, and that, whether the simmer is saved or not. This is not, as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.” J. C. C. Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 337 — “Vicarious atonement does not consist in any single act. No one act embraces it all, and no one definition can compass it.” In this sense we may adopt the words of Forsyth: “In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a world’s sin on (not in) a world-soul.”

G. B. Foster, on Matthew 26:52,54 — “Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures he fulfilled, that thus it must be?” “On this ‘must be’ the Scripture is based, not this ‘must be’ on the Scripture. The ‘must be’ was the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of the organism is that from each according to ability; to each according to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus goes scot-free? But Jesus can contribute atonement and because he can, he must. Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but also of each part, Ram. 12:5 — ‘members one of another.’ As membership of the whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”

Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484 — “There is a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did suffer; though it was not as the Son that he suffered, but in modes distinct and different through his pity the misery of man became his sorrow. There is a disclosure of his suffering in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are out of place. Were it not, we might say that the Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it. One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all suffering. The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.” The Andover Theory, represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the Moral Influence of the Atonement but also that the whole race of mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and by his suffering and death. Quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 269; see Hovey’s own view, 270-276, though he does not seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the incarnation.

Christ’s share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each number of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which Adam fell.

The consequences of Adam’s sin, both to himself and to his posterity, are (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature, (2) guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness, (3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that holiness upon the guilty.

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 117 — “Christ had taken upon him, as the living expression of himself, a nature which was weighed down, not merely by present incapacity, but by present incapacity as part of the judicial necessary result of accepted and inherent sinfulness. Human nature was not only disabled but also guilty, and the disabilities were themselves a consequence and aspect of the guilt”; see review of Moberly by Rashdall, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 3:198-211. Lidgett, Spir. Princ. of Atonement, 166-168, criticizes Dr. Dale for neglecting the fatherly purpose of the Atonement to serve the moral training of the child — punishment marking ill-desert in order to bring this ill-desert to the consciousness of the offender, and for neglecting also the positive assertion in the atonement that the law is holy and just and good, which is something more than the negative expression of sin’s ill-desert. See especially Lidgett’s chapter on the relation of our Lord to the human race, 351-378, in which he grounds the atonement in the solidarity of mankind, its organic union with the Son of God, and Christ’s immanence in humanity.

Bowne, The Atonement, 101 — “Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family and reflections upon his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive of God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not love at all, but only a reflex of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing upon us out of his infinite fullness but at no real cost to himself, he sinks before the moral heroes of the race.

There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in all self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and love and moral heroism and condescension filled up, so that nothing higher remains. The work of Christ himself must be viewed not merely as a piece of history but as an historical event and as a manifestation of that Cross, which hides the divine love from the foundation of the world and which is involved in the existence of the human world.”

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:90, 91 — “Conceive of the ideal of moral perfection incarnate in a human personality, and at the same time one who loves us with a love so absolute that he identifies himself with us and makes our good and evil his own. Bring together these elements in a living, conscious human spirit, and you have in it a capacity of shame and anguish, a possibility of bearing the burden of human guilt and wretchedness, which lost and guilty humanity can never bear for itself.

If Christ had been born into the world by ordinary generation, he too would have had depravity, guilt and penalty. But he was not so born. In the womb of the Virgin, the human nature, which he took was purged from its depravity. But this purging away of depravity did not take away guilt or penalty. There was still left the just exposure to the penalty of violated law.

Although Christ’s nature was purified, his obligation to suffer yet remained. He might have declined to join himself to humanity and then he need not have suffered. He might have sundered his connection with the race and then he need not have suffered. But once born of the Virgin, once possessed of the human nature that was under the curse, he was bound to suffer. The whole mass and weight of God’s displeasure against the race fell on him, when once he became a member of the race.

Because Christ is essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race, he is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him: “thee, thee only, have I sinned” ( Psalm 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, he must bear in his own person all the burdens of humanity, and must be “the Lamb of God that” taketh, and so “taketh away, the sin of the world” ( John 1:29). Simms Reeves, the great English tenor, said that the passion-music was too much for him; he was found completely overcome after singing the prophet’s words in Lam. 1:12 — “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is brought upon me, Wherewith Jehovah afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.” - Father Damien gave his life in ministry to the lepers’ colony of the Hawaiian Islands. Though free from the disease when he entered, he was at last himself stricken with the leprosy, and then wrote: “I must now stay with my own people.” Once a leper, there was no release. When Christ once joined himself to humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Through himself personally without sin, he was made sin for us. Christ inherited guilt and penalty. Hebrews 2:14, — “Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”

Only God can forgive sin, because only God can feel it in its true heinousness and rate it at its true worth. Christ could forgive sin because he added to the divine feeling with regard to sin the anguish of a pure humanity on account of it. Shelley, Julian and Maddolo: “Me, whose heart a stranger’s tear might wear, As water-drops the sandy fountainstone; Me, who am as a nerve o’er which do creep The Else unfelt oppressions of the earth.” S. W. Culver: “We cannot be saved, as we are taught geometry, by lecture and diagram. No person ever yet saved another from drowning by standing coolly by and telling him the importance of rising to the surface and the necessity of respiration. No, he must plunge into the destructive element and take upon himself the very condition of the drowning man and by the exertion of his own strength, by the vigor of his own life, save him from the impending death. When, your child is encompassed by flames that consume your dwelling, you will not save him by calling to him from without. You must make your way through the devouring flame, till you come personally into the very conditions of his peril and danger, and, thence returning, bear him forth to freedom and safety.”

Notice, however, that this guilt which Christ took upon himself by his union with humanity was not the guilt of personal sin (such guilt belongs to every adult member of the race). It was not even the guilt of inherited depravity (such guilt as belongs to infants and to those who have not come to moral consciousness). It was solely the guilt of Adam’s sin, which belongs, prior to personal transgression and apart from inherited depravity, to every member of the race who has derived his life from Adam. This original sin and inherited guilt but without the depravity that ordinarily accompanies them, Christ takes and so takes away. He can justly bear penalty, because he inherits guilt. And since this guilt is not his personal guilt but the guilt of that one sin in which “all sinned” — the guilt of the common transgression of the race in Adam, the guilt of the root-sin from which all other sins have sprung — he who is personally pure can vicariously bear the penalty due to the sin of all.

Christ was conscious of innocence in his personal relations, but not in his race relations. He gathered into himself all the penalties of humanity, as Winkelried gathered into his own bosom at Sempach the pikes of the Austrians and so made a way for the victorious Swiss. Christ took to himself the shame of humanity, as the mother takes upon her the daughter’s shame, repenting of it and suffering on account of it. But this could not be in the case of Christ unless there had been a tie uniting him to men far more vital, organic, and profound than that which unites mother and daughter. Christ as naturally the life of all men, before he becomes spiritually the life of true believers. Matheson, Spir. Devel. of St. Paul, 197-215, 244, speaks of Christ’s secular priesthood, of an outer as well as an inner membership in the body of Christ. He is sacrificial head of the world as well as sacrificial head of the church. In Paul’s latest letters, he declares of Christ that he is “the Savior of all men, specially of them that believe” ( 1 Timothy 4:10). There is a grace that “hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men” ( Titus 2:11). He “gave gifts unto men” ( Ephesians 4:8); “Yea, among the rebellious also, that Jehovah God might dwell with them” ( Psalm 68:18). “Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected” ( 1 Timothy 4:4).

Royce, World and Individual, 2:408 — “Our sorrows are identically God’s own sorrows; I sorrow, but the sorrow is not only mine. This same sorrow, just as it is for me, is God’s sorrow. The divine fulfillment can be won only through the sorrows of time. Unless God knows sorrow, he knows not the highest good, which consists in the overcoming of sorrow.”

Godet, in The Atonement, 331-351 — “Jesus condemned sin as God condemned it. When he felt forsaken on the Cross, he performed that act by which the offender himself condemns his sin, and by that condemnation, so far as it depends on himself, makes it to disappear.

There is but one conscience in all moral beings. This echo in Christ of God’s judgment against sin was to re-echo in all other human consciences.

This has transformed God’s love of compassion into a love of satisfaction.

Holiness joins suffering to sin. But the element of reparation in the Cross was not in the suffering but in the submission. The child who revolts against its punishment has made no reparation at all. We appropriate Christ’s work when we by faith ourselves condemn sin and accept him.”

If it is asked whether this is not simply a suffering for his own sin, or rather for his own share of the sin of the race, we reply that his own share in the sin of the race is not the sole reason why he suffers. It furnishes only the subjective reason and ground for the proper laying upon him of the sin of all. Christ’s union with the race in his incarnation is only the outward and visible expression of a prior union with the race, which began when he created the race. As “in him were all things created,” and as “in him all things consist,” or hold together ( Colossians 1:16,17), it follows that he who is the life of humanity must, though personally pure, be involved in responsibility for all human sin, and “it was necessary that the Christ should suffer” ( Acts 17:3). This suffering was an enduring of the reaction of the divine holiness against sin and so was a bearing of penalty ( Isaiah 53:6; Galatians 3:13), but it was also the voluntary execution of a plan that antedated creation ( Philippians 2:6,7), and Christ’s sacrifice in time showed what had been in the heart of God from eternity ( Hebrews 9:14; Revelations 13:8).

Our treatment is intended to meet the chief modern objection to the atonement. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:222, speaks of “the strangely inconsistent doctrine that God is so just that he could not let sin go unpunished, yet so unjust that he could punish it in the person of the innocent. It is for orthodox dialectics to explain how the divine justice can be impugned by pardoning the guilty, and yet vindicated by punishing the innocent” (quoted in Lias, Atonement,16). In order to meet this difficulty, the following accounts of Christ’s identification with humanity have been given: 1. That of Isaac Watts (see Bibliotheca Sacra, 1875:421). This holds that the humanity of Christ, both in body and soul, preexisted before the incarnation, and was manifested to the patriarchs. We reply that Christ’s human nature is declared to be derived from the Virgin. 2. That of R. W. Dale (Atonement, 265-440). This holds that Christ is responsible for human sin because, as the Upholder and Life of all, he is naturally one with all men, and is spiritually one with all believers ( Acts 17:28 — “in him we live, and move and have our being”; Colossians l:l7 — “in him all things consist”. John 14:20 — “I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”). If Christ’s bearing our sins, however, is to be explained by the union of the believer with Christ the effect is made to explain the cause and Christ could have died only for the elect (see a review of Dale, in Brit. Quar. Rev., Apr., 1876:221-225). The union of Christ with the race by creation, a union which recognizes Christ’s purity and man’s sin, still remains as a most valuable element of truth in the theory of Dr. Dale. 3. That of Edward Irving. Christ has a corrupted nature, an inborn infirmity and depravity, which he gradually overcomes. But the Scriptures, on the contrary, assert his holiness and separateness from sinners. (See references, on pages 744-747.) 4. That of John Miller, Theology, 114-128; also in his chapter: Was Christ in Adam? in Questions Awakened by the Bible. Christ, as to his human nature, although created pure, was yet, as one of Adam’s posterity, conceived of as a sinner in Adam. To him attached “the guilt of the act in which all men stood together in a federal relation. He was decreed to be guilty for the sins of all mankind.” Although there is a truth contained in this statement, it is vitiated by Miller’s federalism and creationism. Arbitrary imputation and legal fiction do not help us here.

We need such an actual union of Christ with humanity and such a derivation of the substance of his being, by natural generation from Adam, as will make him not simply the constructive heir, but the natural heir, of the guilt of the race. We come, therefore, to what we regard as the true view, namely: 5. That the humanity of Christ was not a new creation, but was derived from Adam, through Mary his mother so that Christ, so far as his humanity was concerned, was in Adam just as we were, and had the same race-responsibility with ourselves. As Adam’s descendant, he was responsible for Adam’s sin, like every other member of the race. The chief difference being, that while we inherit from Adam both guilt and depravity, he whom the Holy Spirit purified, inherited not the depravity, but only the guilt. Christ took to himself, not sin (depravity), but the consequences of sin. In him there was abolition of sin, without abolition of obligation to suffer for sin while in the believer, there is abolition of obligation to suffer without abolition of sin itself.

The justice of Christ’s sufferings has been imperfectly illustrated by the obligation of the silent partner of a business firm to pay debts of the firm which he did not personally contract or by the obligation of the husband to pay the debts of his wife. Another imperfect illustration is the obligation of a purchasing country to assume the debts of the province, which it purchases (Wm. Ashmore). There have been men who have spent the strength of a lifetime in clearing off the indebtedness of an insolvent father, long since deceased. They recognized an organic unity of the family, which morally, if not legally, made their father’s liabilities their own. So, it is said, Christ recognized the organic unity of the race, and saw that, having become one of that sinning race, he had involved himself in all its liabilities, even to the suffering of death, the great penalty of sin.

The fault of all the analogies just mentioned is that they are purely commercial. A transference of pecuniary obligation is easier to understand than a transference of criminal liability. I cannot justly bear another’s penalty, unless I can in some way share his guilt. The theory we advocate shows how such a sharing of our guilt on the part of Christ was possible.

All believers in substitution hold that Christ bore our guilt: “My soul looks back to see The burdens thou didst bear When hanging on the accursed tree, And hopes her guilt was there.” But we claim that, by virtue of Christ’s union with humanity, that guilt was not only an imputed, but also an imparted, guilt.

With Christ’s obligation to suffer, there were connected two other, though minor results of his assumption of humanity. First, the longing to suffer and secondly, the inevitableness of his suffering. He felt the longing to suffer. Perfect love to God must feel, in view of the demands upon the race, of that holiness of God, which he loved more than he loved the race itself and which perfect love to man must feel in view of the fact that bearing the penalty of man’s sin was the only way to save him. Hence we see Christ pressing forward to the cross with such majestic determination that the disciples were amazed and afraid ( Mark 10:32). Hence we hear him saying: “With desire have I desired to eat this Passover” (Luke 28:15); “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” ( Luke 12:50).

Here is the truth in Campbell’s theory of the atonement. Christ is the great Penitent before God, making confession of the sin of the race, which others of that race could neither see nor feel. But the view we present is a larger and more complete one than that of Campbell, in that it makes this confession and reparation obligatory upon Christ, as Campbell’s view does not and recognizes the penal nature of Christ’s sufferings, which Campbell’s view denies. Lias, Atonement, 79 — “The head of a clan, himself intensely loyal to his King, finds that his clan has been involved in rebellion. The more intense and perfect his loyalty, the more thorough his nobleness of heart and affection for his people, the more inexcusable and flagrant the rebellion of those for whom he pleads, the more acute would be his agony, as their representative and head. Nothing would be more true to human nature, in the best sense of those words, than that the conflict between loyalty to his king and affection for his vassals should induce him to offer his life for theirs, to ask that the punishment they deserved should be inflicted on him.”

The second minor consequence of Christ’s assumption of humanity was that, being such as he was, he could not help suffering; in other words, the obligatory and the desired were also the inevitable. Since he was a being of perfect purity, contact with the sin of the race, of which he was a member, necessarily involved an actual suffering of a more intense kind than we can conceive. Sin is self-isolating, but love and righteousness have in them the instinct of human unity. In Christ all the nerves and sensibilities of humanity met. He was the only healthy member of the race. When life returns to a frozen limb, there is pain. So Christ, as the only sensitive member of a benumbed and stupefied humanity, felt all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully belonged to sinners but which they could not feel, simply because of the’ depth of their depravity.

Because Christ was pure, yet had united himself to a sinful and guilty race, therefore “it must needs be that Christ should suffer” (A. V.) or, “it behooved the Christ to suffer” (Revised Version, Acts 17:3); see also John 3:14 — “so must the Son of man be lifted up” = “The Incarnation, under the actual circumstances of humanity, carried with it the necessity of the Passion” (Westcott, in Bib. Com., in loco).

Compare John Woolman’s Journal, 4, 5 — “O Lord, my God, the amazing horrors of darkness were gathered about me, and covered me all over, and I saw no way to go forth. I felt the depth and extent of the misery of my fellow creatures, separated from the divine harmony, and it was greater than I could bear, and I was crushed down under it. I lifted up my head, I stretched out my arm, but there was none to help me and as I looked round about, and was amazed. In the depths of misery, I remembered that thou art omnipotent and that I had called thee Father.”

He had vision of a “dull, gloomy mass,” darkening half the heavens, and that he was told that it was human beings, in as great misery as they could be and live and he was mixed with them, and henceforth he might not consider himself a distinct and separate being.”

This suffering in and with the sins of men, which Dr. Bushnell emphasized so strongly, though it is not, as he thought, the principal element, is notwithstanding an indispensable element in the- atonement of Christ. Suffering in and with the sinner is one way, though not the only way, in which Christ is enabled to bear the wrath of God, which constitutes the real penalty of sin.

EXPOSITION OF 2 Corinthians 5:21 — It remains for us to adduce the Scriptural proof of this natural assumption of human guilt by Christ.

We find it in 2 Corinthians 5:21 — “Him who knew no sin he made to he sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” “Righteousness” here cannot mean subjective purity, for then “made to be sin” would mean that God made Christ to be subjectively depraved. As Christ was not made unholy , the meaning cannot be that we are made holy persons in him. Meyer calls attention to this parallel between “righteousness” and “sin” — “that we might become the righteousness of God in him = “that we might become justified persons.

Correspondingly, “made to be sin on our behalf” must = made to be a condemned person. “Him who knew no sin = “Christ had no experience of sin — this was the necessary postulate of his work of atonement. “Made sin for us,” therefore, is the abstract for the concrete, and made a sinner, in the sense that the penalty of sin fell upon him. See Meyer for substance.

We must, however, regard this interpretation of Meyer’s as coming short of the full meaning of the apostle. As justification is not simply remission of actual punishment but is also deliverance from the obligation to suffer punishment, in other words, as righteousness” in the text = persons delivered from the quilt as well as from the penalty of sin, so the contrasted term “sin,” in the text, = a person not only actually punished, but also under obligation to suffer punishment. In other words, Christ is “made sin,” not only in the sense of being put under penalty, but also in the sense of being put under quilt. (Cf. Symington, Atonement,17.)

In a note to the last edition of Meyer, this is substantially granted. “It is to be noted,” he says, “that ajmarti>an, like kata>ra in Galatians 3:13, necessarily includes in itself the notion of guilt.” Meyer adds, however: “The guilt of which Christ appears as bearer was not his own mh< gnonta aJmarti>an ; hence the guilt of men was transferred to him. Consequently the justification of men is by imputation.” Here the implication that the guilt, which Christ bears, is his simply by imputation seems to us contrary to the analogy of faith. As Adam’s sin is ours only because we are actually one with Adam, and as Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us only as we are actually united to Christ, so our sins are imputed to Christ only as Christ is actually one with the race. He was “made sin” by being made one with the sinners: he took our guilt by taking our nature. He who “knew no sin” came to be “sin for us” by being born of a sinful stock; by inheritance the common guilt of the race became his. Guilt was not simply imputed to Christ; it was imparted also.

This exposition may, more clearly be made, by putting the two contrasted thoughts in parallel columns as follows:

Made righteousness in him = Made sin for us = righteous persons a sinful person justified persons a condemned person freed from guilt, or obligation to suffer put under guilt, or obligation to suffer by spiritual union with Christ. by natural union with the race.

For a good exposition of 2 Corinthians 5:21, Galatians 3:13, and Romans 3:25,26, see Denney, Studies in Theology, 109-124.

The Atonement, then, on the part of God, has its ground (1) in the holiness of God, which must visit sin with condemnation, even though this condemnation brings death to his Son. (2) In the love of God, which itself provides the sacrifice, by suffering in and with his Son for the sins of men, but through that suffering opening a way and means of salvation.

The Atonement, on the part of man, is accomplished through (1) the solidarity of the race of which (2) Christ is the life, and so its representative and surety and (3) justly yet voluntarily bearing its guilt and shame and condemnation as his own.

Melanchthon: “Christ was made sin for us, not only in respect to punishment, but primarily by being chargeable with guilt also (culpæ et reatus)” — quoted by Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 3:95, 102, 108, 107, also 1:307, 314 sq . Thomasius says that “Christ bore the guilt of the race by imputation. As in the case of the imputation of Adam’s sin to us, imputation of our sins to Christ presupposes a real relationship.

Christ appropriated our sin. He sank himself into our guilt.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:442 (Syst. Doct., 3:350, 351), agrees with Thomasius, that “Christ entered into our natural mortality, which for us is a penal condition, and into the state of collective guilt, so far as it is an evil, a burden to be borne; not that he had personal guilt. Rather, he entered into our guilt-laden common life, not as a stranger, but as one actually belonging to it — put under its law, according to the will of the Father and of his own love.”

When, and how, did Christ take this guilt and this penalty upon him? With regard to penalty, we have no difficulty in answering that, as his whole life of suffering was propitiatory, so penalty rested upon him from the very beginning of his life. This penalty was inherited, and was the consequence of Christ’s taking human nature ( Galatians 4:4,5 — “born of a woman, born under the law”). But penalty and guilt are correlates; if Christ inherited penalty, it must have been because he inherited guilt. This subjection to the common guilt of the race was intimated in Jesus’ circumcision ( Luke 2:21); in his ritual purification ( Luke 2:22 — “their purification” — i .e., the purification of Mary and the babe; see Lange, Life of Christ; Commentaries of Alford, Webster and Wilkinson; and An. Par. Bible); in his legal redemption ( Luke 2:23,24; cf. Exodus 13:2,13); and in his baptism ( Matthew 3:15 — “thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness”). The baptized person went down into the water, as one laden with sin and guilt, in order that this sin and guilt” might be buried forever, and that he might rise from the typical grave to a new and holy life. (Ebrard: “Baptism = death.”) So Christ’s submission to John’s baptism of repentance was not only a consecration to death, but also a recognition and confession of his implication in that guilt of the race for which death was the appointed and inevitable penalty (cf. Matthew 10:33; Luke 12:50; Matthew 20:39). As his baptism was a pre-figuration of his death, we may learn from his baptism something with regard to the meaning of his death. See further, under The Symbolism of Baptism.

As one who had had guilt, Christ was “justified in the spirit” ( Timothy 3:16) and this justification appears to have taken place after he “was manifested in the flesh” ( 1 Timothy 3:16) and when “he was raised for our justification” ( Romans 4:25). Compare Romans 1:4 — “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead”; 6:7-10 — “he that hath died is justified from sin. But if we died with Christ we believe that we shall also live with him knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more. Death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” All Christians are conceived of as ideally justified in the justification of Christ, when Christ died for our sins and rose again. 8:3 — “God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” Meyer says: “The sending does not precede the condemnation; but the condemnation is effected in and with the sending.” John 16:10 — “of righteousness, because I go to the Father”; 19:30 — “It is finished.” On 1 Timothy 3:16, see the Commentary of Bengel.

If it be asked whether Jesus, then, before his death, was an unjustified person, we answer that, while personally pure and well-pleasing to God ( Matthew 3:17), he himself was conscious of a race-responsibility and a race-guilt which must be atoned for ( John 12:27 — “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour”); and that guilty human nature in him endured at the last the separation from God which constitutes the essence of death, sin’s penalty ( Matthew 27:46 — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). We must remember that, as even the believer must “be judged according to men in the flesh” ( 1 Peter 4:6), that is, must suffer the death, which to unbelievers, is the penalty of sin, although he “live according to God in the Spirit,” so Christ, in order that we might be delivered from both guilt and penalty, was “put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (3:18). In other words, as Christ was man, the penalty due to human guilt belonged to him to bear but, because he was God, he could exhaust that penalty and could be a proper substitute for others.

If it be asked whether he, who from the moment of the conception “sanctified himself” ( John 17:19), did not from that moment also justify himself. We reply that although, through the retroactive efficacy of his atonement and upon the ground of it, human nature in him was purged of its depravity from the moment that he took that nature. Although, upon the ground of that atonement, believers before his advent were both sanctified and justified, yet his own justification could not have proceeded upon the ground of his atonement and also his atonement have proceeded upon the ground of his justification. This would be a vicious circle; somewhere we must have a beginning. That beginning was in the cross where guilt was first purged ( Hebrews 1:3 — “when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”; Matthew 27:42 — “He saved others; himself he cannot save”; cf.

Revelations 13:8 — “the Iamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”).

If it be said that guilt and depravity are practically inseparable, and that, if Christ had guilt, he must have had depravity also, we reply that in civil law we distinguish between them, the conversion of a murderer would not remove his obligation to suffer upon the gallows. We reply further, that in justification we distinguish between them, depravity still remaining, though guilt is removed. So we may say that Christ takes guilt without depravity, in order that we may have depravity without guilt. See page 645; also Bohl, Incarnation des gottlichen Wortes; Pope, Higher Catechism, 118; A. H. Strong, on the Necessity of the Atonement, in Philosophy and Religion, 213-219. Per contra, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol, 2:59 note, 82.

Christ therefore, as incarnate, rather revealed the atonement than made it.

The historical work of atonement was finished upon the Cross but, that historical work only revealed to men the atonement made both before and since by the extra-mundane Logos. The eternal Love of God suffering the necessary reaction of his own Holiness against the sin of his creatures and with a view to their salvation — this is the essence of the Atonement.

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 252, 253 — “Christ, as God’s atonement, is the revelation and discovery of the fact that sacrifice is as deep in God as his being. He is a holy Creator. He must take upon himself the shame and pain of sin.” The earthly tabernacle and its sacrifices were only the shadow of those in the heavens, and Moses was bidden to make the earthly after the pattern, which he saw in the mount. So the historical atonement was but the shadowing forth to dull and finite minds of an infinite demand of the divine holiness and an infinite satisfaction rendered by the divine love. Godet, S. S. Times, Oct. 16, 1886 — “Christ so identified himself with the race he came to save, by sharing its life or its very blood, that when the race itself was redeemed from the curse of sin, his resurrection followed as the first fruits of that redemption.” Romans 4:25 — “delivered up for our trespasses...raised for our justification.”

Simon, Redemption of Man, 322 — “If the Logos is generally the Mediator of the divine immanence in Creation, especially in man, if men are differentiation of the effluent divine energy and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation, (i.e., the principle of all form) then must not the self-perversion of these human differentiation necessarily react on him who is their constitutive principle?” 339 — Remember that men do not first have to engraft themselves into Christ, the living whole. They subsist naturally in him and they have to separate themselves, cut themselves off from him, if they are to be separate. This is the mistake made in the ‘Life in Christ’ theory. Men are treated as in some sense out of Christ, and as having to get into connection with Christ is not that we have to create the relation. We have simply to accept, to recognize, to ratify it. Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to become one with Christ, as in is refusal to remain one with him, refusal to let him be our life.”

A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation,33, 172 — “When God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, he communicated freedom and made possible the creature’s self-chosen alienation from himself, the giver of that life. While man could never break the natural bond, which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond and could introduce even into the life of God a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger and you partially isolate the finger and to diminish its nutrition will bring about atrophy and disease. Yet the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. The illustration is far from adequate but it helps at a single point. There has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually, to isolate himself from God, while yet he is naturally joined to God, and is wholly dependent upon God for the removal of the sins, which has so separated him from his Maker. Sin is the act of the creature, but salvation is the act of the Creator. “If you could imagine a finger endowed with free will and trying to sunder its connection with the body by tying a string around itself, you would have a picture of man trying to sunder his connection with Christ. What is the result of such an attempt? Why, pain, decay and possible, nay, incipient death, to the finger. By what law? By the law of the organism, which is so constituted as to maintain itself against its own disruption by the revolt of the members. The pain and death of the finger is the reaction of the whole against the treason of the part. The finger suffers pain. But are there no results of pain to the body? Does not the body feel pain also?

How plain it is that no such pain can be confined to the single part! The heart feels, aye, the whole organism feels, because all the parts are members one of another. It not only suffers but that suffering tends to remedy the evil and to remove its cause. The body summons its forces, pours new tides of life into the dying member, strives to rid the finger of the ligature that binds it. So through all the course of history, Christ, the natural life of the race, has been afflicted in the affliction of humanity and has suffered for human sin. This suffering has been an atoning suffering, since it has been due to righteousness. If God had not been holy, if God had not made all nature express the holiness of his being, if God had not made pain and loss the necessary consequences of sin, then Christ would not have suffered. But since these things are sin’s penalty and Christ is the life of the sinful race, it must needs be that Christ should suffer. There is nothing arbitrary in laying upon him the iniquities of us all. Original grace, like original sin, is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts.” See also Ames, on Biological Aspects of the Atonement, in Methodist Review, Nov. 1905:943-953.

In favor of the Substitutive or Ethical view of the atonement we may urge the following considerations: (a) It rests upon correct philosophical principles with regard to the nature of will, law, sin, penalty, righteousness.

This theory holds that there are permanent states, as well as transient acts, of the will and that the will is not simply the faculty of volition, but also the fundamental determination of the being to an ultimate end. It regards law as having its basis, not in arbitrary will or in governmental expediency, but rather in the nature of God and as being a necessary transcript of God’s holiness. It considers sin to consist not simply in acts, but in permanent evil states of the affections and will. It makes the object of penalty to be not the reformation of the offender or the prevention of evil doing, but the vindication of justice, outraged by violation of law. It teaches than righteousness is not benevolence or a form of benevolence, but a distinct and separate attribute of the divine nature which demands that sin should be visited with punishment, apart from any consideration of the useful results that will flow therefrom. (b) It combines in itself all the valuable elements in the theories before mentioned, while it avoids their inconsistencies, by showing the deeper principle upon which each of these elements is based.

The Ethical theory admits the indispensableness of Christ’s example, advocated by the Socinian theory, the moral influence of his suffering.

The Bushnellian theory urged the securing of the safety of government.

The Grotian theory insisted on by the participation of the believer in Christ’s new humanity, taught by the Irvingian theory and the satisfaction to God’s majesty for the elect, made so much of by the Anselmic theory.

But the Ethical theory claims that all these other theories require, as a presupposition for their effective working, that ethical satisfaction to the holiness of God, which is rendered in guilty human nature by the Son of God who took that nature to redeem at. (c) It most fully meets the requirements of Scripture by holding that the necessity of the atonement is absolute, since it rests upon the demands of immanent holiness, the fundamental attribute of God. Acts 17:3 — “it behooved the Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead” — lit.: “It was necessary for the Christ to suffer”; Luke 24:26 — “Behooved it not the Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into his glory?” — lit.: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things?” It is not enough to say that Christ must suffer in order that the prophecies might be fulfilled. Why was it prophesied that he should suffer? Why did God purpose that he should suffer? The ultimate necessity is a necessity in the nature of God.

Plato, Republic, 2:361 — “The righteous man who is thought to be unrighteous will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out and finally, having endured all sorts of evil, will be impaled.” This means that, as human society is at present constituted, even a righteous person must suffer for the sins of the world. “Mors mortis Morti mortem ms morte dedisset, Æternæ vitæ janua clausa foret” — “Had not the Death- of-death to Death his death-blow given, Forever closed were the gate, the gate of life and heaven.” (d) It shows most satisfactorily how the demands of holiness are met, namely by the propitiatory offering of one who is personally pure, but who by union with the human race has inherited its guilt and penalty. “Quo non ascendam?” — “Whither shall I not rise?” exclaimed the greatest minister of modern kings, in a moment of intoxication. “Whither shall I not stoop?” says the Lord Jesus. King Humbert, during the scourge of cholera in Italy: “In Castellammare they make merry; in Naples they die: I go to Naples.”

Wrightnour: “The illustration of Powhatan raising his club to slay John Smith while Pocahontas flings herself between the uplifted club and the victim, is not a good one. God is not an angry being, bound to strike something, no matter what. If Powhatan could have taken the blow himself, out of a desire to spare the victim, it would be better. The Father and the Son are one. Bronson Alcott, in his school at Concord, when punishment was necessary, sometimes placed the rod in the hand of the offender and bade him strike his (Alcott’s) hand, rather than that the law of the school should be broken without punishment following. The result was that very few rules were broken. So God in Christ bore the sins of the world, and endured the penalty for man’s violation of his law.” (e) It furnishes the only proper explanation of the sacrificial language of the New Testament, and of the sacrificial rites of the Old, considered as prophetic of Christ’s atoning work.

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 207-211 — “The imposition of hands on the head of the victim is entirely unexplained, except in the account of the great Day of Atonement. When, by the same gesture and by distinct confession the sins of the people, were ‘put upon the head of the goat’ ( Leviticus 16:21) to be borne away into the wilderness. The blood was sacred and was to be poured out before the Lord, evidently in place of the forfeited life of the sinner which should have been rendered up.” Watts, New Apologetics, 205 — “‘The Lord will provide’ was the truth taught when Abraham found a ram provided by God which he ‘offered up as a burnt offering in the stead of his son’ ( Gen. 22:13, 14). As the ram was not Abraham’s ram, the sacrifice of it could not teach that all Abraham had belonged to God and should, with entire faith in his goodness, be devoted to him but it did teach that ‘apart from shedding of blood there is no remission’ ( Hebrews 9:22).” 2Chron. 29:27 — “when the burnt offering began, the song of Jehovah began also.” (f) It alone gives proper place to the death of Christ as the central feature of his work, set forth in the ordinances, and of chief power in Christian experience.

Martin Luther, when he had realized the truth of the Atonement, was found sobbing before a crucifix and moaning: “Fur mich! fur mich!” — “For me! for me!” Elisha Kane, the Arctic explorer, while searching for signs of Sir John Franklin and his party, sent out eight or ten men to explore the surrounding region. After several days three returned, almost crazed with the cold — thermometer fifty degrees below zero — and reported that the other men were dying miles away. Dr. Kane organized a company of ten and though suffering himself, with an old heart-trouble, led them to the rescue. Three times he fainted during the eighteen hours of marching and suffering but he found the men. “We knew you would come! We knew you would come, brother!” whispered one of them, hardly able to speak. Why was he sure Dr. Kane would come? Because he knew the stuff Dr. Kane was made of and knew that he would risk his life for any one of them. It is a parable of Christ’s relation to our salvation. He is our elder brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and he not only risks death, but he endures death, in order to save us. (g) It gives us the only means of understanding the sufferings of Christ in the garden and on the cross, or of reconciling them with the divine justice.

Kreibig, Versohnungslehre: “Man has a guilt that demands the punitive sufferings of a mediator. Christ shows a suffering that cannot be justified except by reference to some other guilt than his own. Combine these two facts, and you have the problem of the atonement solved.” J. G. Whittier: “Through all the depths of sin and loss Drops the plummet of the Cross; Never yet abyss was found Deeper than the Cross could sound.” Alcestis purchased life for Admetus her husband by dying in his stead; Marcus Curtius saved Rome by leaping into the yawning chasm; the Russian servant threw himself to the wolves to rescue his master. Berdoe, Robert Browning, 47 — “To know God as the theist knows him may suffice for pure spirits, for those who have never sinned, suffered, nor felt the need of a Savior but for fallen and sinful men the Christ of Christianity is an imperative necessity. Those who have never surrendered themselves to him have never known what it is to experience the rest he gives to the heavy-laden soul.” (h) As no other theory does, this view satisfies the ethical demand of human nature, pacifies the convicted conscience and assures the sinner that he may find instant salvation in Christ. And so makes possible a new life of holiness, while at the same time it furnishes the highest incentives to such a life.

Shedd: “The offended party (1) permits a substitution, (2) provides a substitute, (3) substitutes himself.” George Eliot: “Justice is like the kingdom of God; it is not without us, as a fact, it is ‘within us,’ as a great yearning.” But it is both without and within, and the inward is only the reflection of the outward; the subjective demands of conscience only reflect the objective demands of holiness.

And yet, while this view of the atonement exalts the holiness of God, it surpasses every other view in its moving exhibition of God’s love, a love that is not satisfied with suffering in and with the sinner, or with making that suffering a demonstration of God’s regard for law. It is a love that sinks itself into the sinner’s guilt and bears his penalty, comes down so low as to make itself one with him in all but his depravity. It makes every sacrifice but the sacrifice of God’s holiness — a sacrifice which God could not make, without ceasing to be God; see 1 John 4:10 — “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

The soldier who had been thought reprobate was moved to complete reform when he was once forgiven. William Huntington, in his Autobiography, says that one of his sharpest sensations of pain, after he had been quickened by divine grace, was that he felt such pity for God.

Never was man abused as God has been. Romans 2:4 — “the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”; 12:1 — “the mercies of God lead you “to present your bodies a living sacrifice”; 2 Corinthians 5:14,15 — “the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again.” The effect of Christ’s atonement on Christian character and life may be illustrated from the proclamation of Garabaldi: “He that loves Italy, let him follow me! I promise him hardship, I promise him suffering, and I promise him death. But he that loves Italy, let him follow me:” D. Objections to the Ethical Theory of the Atonement.

On the general subject of these objections, Philippi, Glaubenslehre, iv, 2:156-180, remarks: (1) That it rests with God alone to say whether he will pardon sin, and in what way he will pardon it. (2) That human instincts are a very unsafe standard by which to judge the procedure of the Governor of the universe and (3) that one plain declaration of God, with regard to the plan of salvation, proves the fallacy and error of all reasoning against it. We must correct our watches and clocks by astronomic standards. (a) A God who does not pardon sin without atonement must lack either omnipotence or love. We answer, on the one hand, that God’s omnipotence is the revelation of his nature and not a matter of arbitrary will and, on the other hand, that God’s love is ever exercised consistently with his fundamental attribute of holiness, so that while holiness demands the sacrifice, love provides it. Mercy is shown, not by trampling upon the claims of justice, but by vicariously satisfying them.

Because man does not need to avenge personal wrongs, it does not follow that God must not. In fact, such avenging is forbidden to us upon the ground that it belongs to God. Romans 12:19 — “Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will recompense, saith the Lord” But there are limits even to our passing over of offenses. Even the father must sometimes chastise and although this chastisement is not properly punishment, it becomes punishment, when the father becomes a teacher or a governor. Then, other than personal interests come in. “Because a father can forgive without atonement, it does not follow that the state can do the same” (Shedd). But God is more than Father, more than Teacher is, more than Governor is. In him, person and right are identical. For him to let sin go unpunished is to approve of it, which is the same as a denial of holiness.

Whatever pardon is granted, then, must be pardon through punishment.

Mere repentance never expiates crime, even under civil government. The truly penitent man never feels that his repentance constitutes a round of acceptance; the more he repents, the more he recognizes his need of reparation and expiation. Hence God meets the demand of man’s conscience, as well as of his own holiness, when he provides a substituted punishment. God shows his love by meeting the demands of holiness, and by meeting them with the sacrifice of himself. See Mozley on Predestination, 390.

The publican prays not that God may be merciful without sacrifice, but: “God he propitiated toward me, the sinner!” ( Luke 18:13); in other words, he asks for mercy only through and upon the ground of, sacrifice.

We cannot atone to others for the wrong we have done to them nor can we even atone to our own souls. A third party, and an infinite being, must make atonement, as we cannot. It is only upon the ground that God himself has made provision for satisfying the claims of justice, that we are bidden to forgive others. Should Othello then forgive Iago? Yes, if Iago repents; Luke 17:3 — “If thy brother sin, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him.” But what if he does not repent? Yes, so far as Othello’s own disposition is concerned. He must not hate Iago, but must wish him well; Luke 6:27 — “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” But he cannot receive Iago to his fellowship till he repents. On the duty and ground of forgiving one another, see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 613, 614; Straffen, Hulsean Lectures on the Propitiation for Sin. (b) Satisfaction and forgiveness are mutually exclusive. We answer that, since it is not a third party, but the Judge himself, who makes satisfaction to his own violated holiness, forgiveness is still optional, and may be offered upon terms agreeable to himself. Christ’s sacrifice is not a pecuniary, but a penal, satisfaction. The objection is valid against the merely commercial view of the atonement not against the ethical view of it.

Forgiveness is something beyond the mere taking away of penalty. When a man bears the penalty of his crime, has the community no right to be indignant with him? There is a distinction between pecuniary and penal satisfaction. Pecuniary satisfaction has respect only to the thing due; penal satisfaction has respect also to the person of the offender. If pardon is a matter of justice in God’s government, it is so only as respects Christ.

To the recipient it is only mercy. “Faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins ( 1 John 1:9) = faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ.

Neither the atonement nor the promise gives the offender any personal claim.

Philemon must forgive Onesimus the pecuniary debt, when Paul pays it but not so with the personal injury Onesimus has done to Philemon. There is no forgiveness of this, until Onesimus repents and asks pardon. An amnesty may be offered to all, but upon conditions. Instance Amos Lawrence’s offering to the forger the forged paper he had bought up, upon condition that he would confess himself bankrupt and put all his affairs into the hands of his benefactor. So the fact that Christ has paid our debts does not preclude his offering to us the benefit of what he has done upon condition of our repentance and faith. The equivalent is not furnished by man, but by God. God may therefore offer the results of it upon his own terms. Did then the entire race fairly pay its penalty when one suffered, just as all incurred the penalty when one sinned? Yes, all who receive their life from each — Adam on the one hand and Christ on the other. See under Union with Christ — its Consequences; see also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 295 note, 321, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:383-389; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:614-615 (Syst. Doct., 4:82, 83). Versus Current Discussions in Theology, 5:281.

Hovey calls Christ’s relation to human sin a vice-penal one. Just as viceregal position carries with it all the responsibility, care, and anxiety of regal authority, so does a vice-penal relation to sin carry with it all the suffering and loss of the original punishment. The person on whom it falls is different, but his punishment is the same, at least in penal value. Viceregal authority may be superseded by regal, so vice-penal suffering, if despised, may be superseded by the original penalty. Is there a waste of vice-penal suffering when any are lost for whom it was endured? On the same principle we might object to any suffering on the part of Christ for those who refuse to be saved by him. Such suffering may benefit others, if not those for whom it was in the first instance endured.

If compensation is made, it is said, there is nothing to forgive; if forgiveness is granted, no compensation can be required. This reminds us of Narvaez, who saw no reason for forgiving his enemies until he had shot them all. When the offended party furnishes the compensation, he can offer its benefits upon his own terms. Dr. Pentecost: ‘A prisoner in Scotland was brought before the Judge. As the culprit entered the box, he looked into the face of the Judge to see if he could discover mercy there.

The Judge and the prisoner exchanged glances, and then there came a mutual recognition. The prisoner said to himself: ‘It is all right this time,’ for the Judge had been his classmate in Edinburgh University twenty-five years before. When sentence was pronounced, it was five pounds sterling, the limit of the law for the misdemeanor charged, and the culprit was sorely disappointed as he was led away to prison. But the Judge went at once and paid the fine, telling the clerk to write the man’s discharge. This the Judge delivered in person, explaining that the demands of the law must be met, and having been met, the man was free.” (c) There can be no real propitiation, since the judge and the sacrifice are one. We answer that this objection ignores the existence of personal relations within the divine nature, and the fact that the God-man is distinguishable from God. The satisfaction is grounded in the distinction of persons in the Godhead while the love in which it originates belongs to the unity of the divine essence.

The satisfaction is not rendered to a part of the Godhead, for the whole Godhead is in the Father, in a certain manner; as omnipresence = totus in omni parte. So the offering is perfect, because the whole Godhead is also in Christ ( 2 Corinthians 5:19 — “God was in Christ reconciling the wall unto himself”). Lyman Abbott says that the word “propitiate” is used in the New Testament only in the middle voice, to show that God propitiates himself. Lyttelton, in Lux Mundi, 302 — “The Atonement is undoubtedly a mystery, but all forgiveness is a mystery. It avails to lift the load of guilt that presses upon an offender. A change passes over him that can only be described as regenerative or life giving and thus the assurance of pardon, however conveyed, may be said to obliterate in some degree the consequences of the past. 310 — Christ bore sufferings, not that we might be freed from them, for we have deserved them, but that we might be enabled to bear them, as he did, victoriously and in unbroken union with God.” (d) The suffering of the innocent for the guilty is not an execution of justice, but an act of manifest injustice. We answer that this is true only upon the supposition that the Son bears the penalty of our sins, not voluntarily, but compulsorily or upon the supposition that one who is personally innocent can in no way become involved in the guilt and penalty of others. Both of these hypothesis are contrary to Scripture and to fact.

The mystery of the atonement lies in the fact of unmerited sufferings on the part of Christ. Over against this stands the corresponding mystery of unmerited pardon to believers. We have attempted to show that, while Christ was personally innocent, he was so involved with others in the consequences of the Fall, that the guilt and penalty of the race belonged to him to bear. When we discuss the doctrine of Justification, we shall see that, by a similar union of the believer with Christ, Christ’s justification becomes ours.

To one who believes in Christ as the immanent God, the life of humanity, the Creator and Upholder of mankind, the bearing by Christ of the just punishment of human sin seems inevitable. The very laws of nature are only the manifestation of his holiness, and he who thus reveals God is also subject to God’s law. The historical process, which culminated on Calvary, was the manifestation of an age-long suffering endured by Christ on account of his connection with the race from the very first moment of their sin. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 80-83 — “A God of love and holiness must be a God of suffering just so certainly as there is sin. Paul declares that he fills up “that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body’s sake, which is the church” ( Colossians 1:24); in other words, Christ still suffers in the believers who are his body. The historical suffering indeed is ended, the agony of Golgotha is finished, the days when joy was swallowed up in sorrow are past, and death has no more dominion over our Lord. But sorrow for sin is not ended; it still continues and will continue so long as sin exists. But it does not now militate against Christ’s blessedness, because the sorrow is overbalanced and overborne by the infinite knowledge and glory of his divine nature.

Bushnell and Beecher were right when they maintained that suffering for sin was the natural consequence of Christ’s relation to the sinning creation. They were wrong in mistaking the nature of that suffering and in not seeing that the constitution of things which necessitates it, since it is the expression of God’s holiness, gives that suffering a penal character and makes Christ a substitutive offering for the sins of the world.” (e) That there can be no transfer of punishment or merit, since these are personal. We answer that the idea of representation and surety-ship is common in human society and government and that such representation and surety-ship are inevitable, wherever there is community of life between the innocent and the guilty. When Christ took our nature, he could not do otherwise than take our responsibilities also.

Christ became responsible for the humanity with which he was organically one. Both poets and historians have recognized the propriety of one member of a house, or a race, answering for another. Antigone expiates the crime of her house. Marcus Curtius holds himself ready to die for his nation. Louis XVI has been called a “sacrificial lamb,” offered up for the crimes of his race. So Christ’s sacrifice is of benefit to the whole family of man, because he is one with that family. But here is the limitation also. It does not extend to angels, because he took not on him the nature of angels ( Hebrews 2:16 — “For verily not of the angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”) “A strange thing happened recently in one of our courts of justice. A young man was asked why the extreme penalty should not be passed upon him. At that moment, a gray-haired man, his face furrowed with sorrow, stepped into the prisoner’s box unhindered, placed his hand affectionately upon the culprit’s shoulder, and said: ‘Your honor, we have nothing to say. The verdict, which has been found against us is just. We have only to ask for mercy.’ ‘We!’ There was nothing against this old father. Yet, at that moment he lost himself. He identified his very being with that of his wayward boy. Do you not pity the criminal son because of your pity for his aged and sorrowing father? Because he has so suffered, is not your demand that the son should suffer somewhat mitigated? Will not the judge modify his sentence on that account? Nature knows no forgiveness but human nature does and it is not nature, but human nature, that is made in the image of God”; see Prof. A. S. Coats, in The Examiner, Sept. 12, 1889. (f) Christ could not have suffered remorse, as a part of the penalty of sin.

We answer, on the one hand, that it may not be essential to the idea of penalty that Christ should have borne the identical pangs which the lost would have endured. On the other hand, we do not know how completely a perfectly holy being, possessed of superhuman knowledge and love, might have felt even the pangs of remorse for the condition of that humanity of which he was the central conscience and heart.

Instance the lawyer, mourning the fall of a star of his profession, the woman, filled with shame by the degradation of one of her own sex, the father, anguished by his daughter’s waywardness, the Christian, crushed by the sins of the church and the world. The self-isolating spirit cannot conceive how perfectly love and holiness can make their own the sin of the race of which they are a part.

Simon, Reconciliation, 366 — “Inasmuch as the sin of the human race culminated in the crucifixion which crowned Christ’s own sufferings.

Clearly the life of humanity entering him subconsciously must have been most completely laden with sin and with the fear of death, which is its fruit, at the very moment when he himself was enduring death in its most terrible form. Of necessity therefore he felt as if he were the sinner of sinners, and cried out in agony: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ( Matthew 27:46).”

Christ could realize our penal condition. Beings who have a like spiritual nature can realize and bear the spiritual sufferings of one another. David’s sorrow was not unjust, when he cried: “Would I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2Sam. 18:33). Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 117 — “Is penitence possible in the personally sinless? We answer that only one who is perfectly sinless can perfectly repent, and this identification of the sinless with the sinner is vital to the gospel.” Lucy Larcom: “There be sad women, sick and poor. And those who walk in garments soiled; Their shame, their sorrow I endure; By their defeat my hope is foiled; The blot they bear is on my name; Who sins, and I am not to blame?” (g) The sufferings of Christ, as finite in time, do not constitute a satisfaction to the infinite demands of the law. We answer that the infinite dignity of the sufferer constitutes his sufferings a full equivalent, in the eye of infinite justice. Substitution excludes identity of suffering; it does not exclude equivalence. Since justice aims its penalties not so much at the person as at the sin, it may admit equivalent suffering when this is endured in the very nature that has sinned.

The sufferings of a dog and of a man have different values. Death is the wages of sin and Christ, in suffering death, suffered our penalty. Eternity of suffering is unessential to the idea of penalty. A finite being cannot exhaust an infinite curse but an infinite being can exhaust it, in a few brief hours. Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 307 — “A golden eagle is worth a thousand copper cents. The penalty paid by Christ is strictly and literally equivalent to that which the sinner would have borne although it is not identical. The vicarious bearing of it excludes the latter.” Andrew Fuller thought Christ would have had to suffer just as much, if only one sinner were to have been saved thereby.

The atonement is a unique fact, only partially illustrated by debt and penalty. Yet the terms ‘purchase’ and ‘ransom’ are Scriptural, and mean simply that the justice of God punishes sin as it deserves and that, having determined what is deserved, God cannot change. See Owen, quoted in Campbell on Atonement,58,59. Christ’s sacrifice, since it is absolutely infinite, can have nothing added to it. If Christ’s sacrifice satisfies the Judge of all, it may well satisfy us. (h) If Christ’s passive obedience made satisfaction to the divine justice, then his active obedience was superfluous. We answer that the active obedience and the passive obedience are inseparable. The latter is essential to the former and both are needed to secure for the sinner, on the one hand, pardon and on the other hand, that, which goes beyond pardon, namely, restoration to the divine favor. The objection holds only against a superficial and external view of the atonement.

For more full exposition of this point, see our treatment of Justification and also, Owen, in Works, 5:175-204. The apostle Paul insists on both the active and the passive obedience of Christ. Opposition to the Pauline theology is opposition to the gospel of Christ. Charles Cuthbert Hall, Universal Elements of the Christian Religion, 140 — “The effects of this are already appearing in the impoverished religious values of the sermons produced by the younger generation of preachers and the deplorable decline of spiritual life and knowledge in many churches. Results open to observation show that the movement to simplify the Christian essence by discarding the theology of St. Paul easily carries the teaching of the Christian pulpit to a position where, for those who submit to that teaching, the characteristic experiences of the Christian life became practically impossible. The Christian sense of sin, Christian penitence at the foot of the Cross, Christian faith in an atoning Savior, Christian peace with God through the mediation of Jesus Christ and other experiences, which were the very life of apostles and apostolic souls, fade from the view of the ministry. These have no meaning for the younger generation.” (i) The doctrine is immoral in its practical tendencies, since Christ’s obedience takes the place of ours, and renders ours unnecessary. We answer that the objection ignores not only the method by which the benefits of the atonement are appropriated, namely, repentance and faith, but also the regenerating and sanctifying power bestowed upon all who believe. Faith in the atonement does not induce license, but “works by love” ( Galatians 5:6) and “cleanses the heart” ( Acts 15:9).

Water is of little use to a thirsty man, if he will not drink. The faith, which accepts Christ, ratifies all that Christ has done and takes Christ as a new principle of life. Paul bids Philemon receive Onesimus as himself, not the old Onesimus, but a new Onesimus into whom the spirit of Paul has entered (Philemon 17). So God receives us as new creatures in Christ.

Though we cannot earn salvation, we must take it and this taking it involves a surrender of heart and life which ensures union with Christ and moral progress.

What shall be done to the convicted murderer who tears up the pardon, which his wife’s prayers and tears have scoured from the Governor?

Nothing remains but to execute the sentence of the law. Hon. George F.

Danforth, Justice of the New York State Court of Appeals, in a private letter says: “Although it may be stated in a general way that a pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed for the offense and the guilt of the offender. In the eye of the law he is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense, the pardon making him as it were a new man with a new credit and capacity, yet a delivery of the pardon is essential to its validity. Delivery is not complete without acceptance. It cannot be forced upon him. In that respect it is like a deed. The delivery may be in person to the offender or to his agent and its acceptance may be proved by circumstances like any other fact.” (j) If the atonement requires faith as its complement, then it does not in itself furnish a complete satisfaction to God’s justice. We answer that faith is not the ground of our acceptance with God, as the atonement is, and so is not a work at all; faith is only the medium of appropriation. We are saved not by faith, or on account of faith, but only through faith. It is not faith but the atonement which faith accepts that satisfies the justice of God.

Illustrate by the amnesty granted to a city, upon conditions to be accepted by each inhabitant. The acceptance is not the ground upon which the amnesty is granted; it is the medium through which the benefits of the amnesty are enjoyed. With regard to the difficulties connected with the atonement, we may say with Bishop Butler in conclusion: “If the Scripture has, as surely it has, left this matter of the satisfaction of Christ mysterious, left somewhat in it unrevealed, all conjectures about it must be, if not evidently absurd, yet at least uncertain. Nor has any one reason to complain for want of further information, unless he can show his claim to it.” While we cannot say with President Stearns: “Christ’s work removed the hindrances in the eternal justice of the universe to the pardon of the sinner, but how we cannot tell.” We cannot say this, because we believe the main outlines of the plan of salvation to be revealed in Scripture — yet we grant that many questions remain unsolved. But, as bread nourishes even those who know nothing of its chemical constituents or of the method of its digestion and assimilation, so the atonement of Christ saves those who accept it, even though they do not know how it saves them. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 264-267 — “Heat was once thought to be a form of matter now it is regarded as a mode of motion.

We can get the good of it, whichever theory we adopt, or even if we have no theory. So we may get the good of reconciliation with God, even though we differ as to our theory of the Atonement.” — “One of the Roman Emperors commanded his fleet to bring from Alexandria sand for the arena although his people at Rome were visited with famine. But a certain shipmaster declared that, whatever the emperor commanded, his ship should bring wheat. So, whatever sand others may bring to starving human souls, let us bring to them the wheat of the gospel — the substitutive atonement of Jesus Christ.” For answers to objections, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, iv, 2:156-180; Crawford, Atonement, 384-468; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:526-543; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 623 sq .; Wm. Thomson, The Atoning Work of Christ; Hopkins, Works, 1:321.

E. The Extent of the Atonement.

The Scriptures represent the atonement as having been made for all men and as sufficient for the salvation of all. The atonement therefore is not limited but the application of the atonement, is through the work of the Holy Spirit.

Upon this principle of a universal atonement, but a special application of it to the elect, we must interpret such passages as Ephesians 1:4,7; Timothy 1:9, 10; John 17:9,20,21 — asserting a special efficacy of the atonement in the case of the elect; and also such passages as 1 Peter 2:1; 1 John 2:2; 1 Timothy 2:6; 4:10; Titus 2:11 — asserting that the death of Christ is for all.

Passages asserting special efficacy of the atonement, in the case of the elect, are the following: Ephesians 1:4 — “chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love”; 7 — “in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace”; 2 Timothy 1:9,10 — God “who saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal, but hath now been manifested by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel “; John 17:9 — “I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for those whom thou hast given me”; 20 — “Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on me through their word”; 24 — “Father, that which thou hast given me, I desire that where I am, they also may be with me; that they may behold my glory, which thou best given me.”

Passages asserting that the death of Christ is for all are the following: 2 Peter 2:1 — “false teachers, who shall privily bring in destructive heresies, denying even the Master that bought them”; 1 John 2:2 — “and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world”; 1 Timothy 2:6 — Christ Jesus “who gave himself a ransom for all”; 4:10 — “the living God, who is the Savior of all men, specially of them that believe”; Titus 2:11 — For the grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men.” Romans 3:22 (A. V.) — “unto all and upon all them that believe — has sometimes been interpreted as meaning “unto all men, and upon all believers” (eijv = destination; ejpi> = extent). But the Revised Version omits the words “and upon all,” and Meyer, who retains the words, remarks that touontav belongs to pa>ntav in both instances.

Unconscious participation in the atonement of Christ, by virtue of our common humanity in him, makes us the heirs of much temporal blessing.

Conscious participation in the atonement of Christ, by virtue of our faith in him and his work for us, gives us justification and eternal life. Matthew Henry said that the Atonement is “sufficient for all; effectual for many.”

J. M. Whiton, in The Outlook, Sept. 25, 1897 — “It was Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island (1721 — 1803) who first declared that Christ had made atonement for all men, not for the elect part alone, as Calvinists affirmed.” We should say “as some Calvinists affirmed” for, as we shall see, John Calvin himself declared that “Christ suffered for the sins of the whole world.” Alfred Tennyson once asked an old Methodist woman what was the news. “Why, Mr. Tennyson, there’s only one piece of news that I know — that Christ died for all men.” And he said to her: “That is old news and good news and new news.”

If it is asked in what sense Christ is the Savior of all men, we reply: (a) That the atonement of Christ secures for all men a delay in the execution of the sentence against sin and a space for repentance together with a continuance of the common blessings of life which have been forfeited by transgression.

If strict justice had been executed, the race would have been cut off at the first sin. That man lives after sinning is due wholly to the Cross. There is a pretermission, or passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God. ( Romans 3:25), the justification of which is found only in the sacrifice of Calvary. This ‘‘passing over,” however, is limited in its duration. See Acts 17:30,31 — “The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked but now he commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent: inasmuch as he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”

One may get the benefit of the law of gravitation without understanding much about its nature and patriarchs and heathen have doubtless been saved through Christ’s atonement although they have never heard his name but have only cast themselves as helpless sinners upon the mercy of God. The mercy of God was Christ though they did not know it. Our modern pious Jews will experience a strange surprise when they find that not only forgiveness of sin but every other blessing of life has come to them through the crucified Jesus. Matthew 8:11 — “many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.”

Dr. G. W. Northrup held that the work of Christ is universal in three respects: 1. It reconciled God to the whole race, apart from personal transgression. 2. It secured the bestowment upon all of common grace and the means of common grace. 3. It rendered certain the bestowment of eternal life upon all who would so use common grace and the means of common grace as to make it morally possible for God as a wise and holy Governor to grant his special and renewing grace. (b) The atonement of Christ has made objective provision for the salvation of all, by removing from the divine mind every obstacle to the pardon and restoration of sinners, except their willful opposition to God and refusal to turn to him.

Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 604 — “On God’s side, all is now taken away which could make a separation, unless any should themselves choose to remain separated from him,” The gospel message is not that God will forgive if you return but rather that God has shown mercy. Only believe this and it is your portion in Christ.

Ashmore, The New Trial of the Sinner, in Christian Review, 26:245-264 — “The atonement has come to all men and upon all men. Its coextensiveness with the effects of Adam’s sin is seen in that all creatures, such as infants and insane persons, incapable of refusing it, are saved without their consent, just as they were involved in the sin of Adam without their consent. The reason why others are not saved is because when the atonement comes to them and upon them, instead of consenting to be included in it, they reject it. If they are born under the curse, so likewise they are born under the atonement, which is intended to remove that curse. They remain under its shelter till they are old enough to repudiate it. They shut out its influences as a man closes his window — blind to shut out the beams of the sun or they ward them off by direct opposition, as a man builds dykes around his field to keep out the streams which would otherwise flow in and fertilize the soil.” (c) The atonement of Christ has procured for all men the powerful incentives to repentance presented in the Cross and the combined agency of the Christian church and of the Holy Spirit, by which these incentives are brought to bear upon them.

Just as much sun and rain would be needed, even if only one farmer on earth was to be benefited. Christ would not need to suffer more, if all were to be saved. His sufferings, as we have seen, were not the payment of a pecuniary debt. Having endured the penalty of the sinner, justice permits the sinner’s discharge, but does not require it, except as the fulfillment of a promise to his substitute and then only upon the appointed condition of repentance and faith. The atonement is unlimited, the whole human race might be saved through it; the application of the atonement is limited, only those who repent and believe are actually saved by it.

Robert G. Farley: “The prospective mother prepares a complete and beautiful outfit for her expected child. But the child is stillborn. Yet the outfit was prepared just the same as if it had lived, And Christ’s work is completed as much for one man as for another, as much for the unbeliever as for the believer.”

Christ is specially the Savior of those who believe, in that he exerts a special power of his Spirit to procure their acceptance of his salvation. This is not, however, a part of his work of atonement, it is the application of the atonement, and as such is hereafter to be considered.

Among those who hold to a limited atonement is Owen. Campbell quotes him as saying: “Christ did not die for all the sins of all men. For if this were so, why are not all freed from the punishment of all their sins? You will say, ‘Because of their unbelief — they will not believe.’ But this unbelief is a sin and Christ was punished for it. Why then does this, more than other sins, hinder them from partaking of the fruits of his death?”

So also Turretin, loc. 4, quæs. 10 and 17; Symington, Atonement, 184- 234; Candlish on the Atonement; Cunnningham. Hist. Theol., 2:323-370; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology; 2:464-489. For the view presented in the text, see Andrew Fuller, Works, 2:373, 374; 689-698; 704-709; Wardlaw, Systematic Theology, 2:485-549; Jenkyn, Extent of the Atonement; E. P.

Griffin, Extent of the Atonement; Woods, Works, 2:490-521; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 302-327. 2. Christ’s Intercessory Work.

The Priesthood of Christ does not cease with his work of atonement but continues forever. In the presence of God he fulfills the second office of the priest, namely that of intercession. Hebrews 7:23-25 — “priests many in number, because that by death they are hindered from continuing: but he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable. Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.” C. H. M. on Exodus 17:12 — “The hands of our great Intercessor never hang down, as Moses’ did, nor does he need any one to hold them up. The same rod of God’s power which was used by Moses to smite the rock (Atonement) was in Moses’ hand on the hill (Intercession).”

Denney’s Studies in Theology, 166 — “If we see nothing unnatural in the fact that Christ prayed for Peter on earth, we need not make any difficulty about his praying for us in heaven. The relation is the same. The only difference is that Christ is now exalted and prays, not with strong crying and tears, but in the sovereignty and prevailing power of one who has achieved eternal redemption for his people.”

A. Nature of Christ’s Intercession. This is not to be conceived of either as an external and vocal petitioning nor as a mere figure of speech for the natural and continuous influence of his sacrifice. Rather, conceive of this as a special activity of Christ in securing upon the ground of that sacrifice whatever of blessing comes to men, whether that blessing be temporal or spiritual. 1 John 2:1 — “if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”; Romans 8:34 — “It is Jesus Christ that died, yea rather, that he was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” — here Meyer seems to favor the meaning of external and vocal petitioning, as of the glorified God-man: Hebrews 7:25 — “ever liveth to make intercession for them.” On the ground of this effectual intercession he can pronounce the true sacerdotal benediction and all the benedictions of his ministers and apostles are but fruits and emblems of this (see the Aaronic benediction in Numbers 6:24-26, and the apostolic benedictions in 1 Corinthians 1:3 and 2 Corinthians 13:14).

B. Objects of Christ’s Intercession. We may distinguish (a) that general intercession which secures to all men certain temporal benefits of his atoning work, and (b) that special intercession which secures the divine acceptance of the persons of believers and the divine bestowment of all gifts needful for their salvation. (a) General intercession for all men: Isaiah 53:12 — “he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” Luke 23:34 — “And Jesus said, Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do” — a beginning of his priestly intercession, even while he was being nailed to the cross. (b) Special intercession for his saints: Matthew 18:19,20 — “if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them”; Luke 22:31,32 — “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you that he might sift you as wheat: but I made supplication for thee that thy faith fail not”; John 14:16 — “I will pray the Father and he shall give you another Comforter”; 17:9 — “I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for those whom thou hast given me”; Acts 2:33 — “Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he hath poured forth this, which ye see and hear”; Ephesians 1:6 — “the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved”; 2:18 — “through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”; 3:12 — “in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in him”; Hebrews 2:17,18 — “Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”; 4:15, 16 — “For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities but one that hath been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”; 1 Peter 2:5 — “a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ”; Revelation 5:6 — “And I saw on the midst of the throne...a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, having seven horns, and seven eyes which are the seven Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth”; 7:16, 17 — “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun strike upon them, nor any heat: for the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall guide them unto fountains of waters of life: and God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

C. Relation of Christ’s Intercession to that of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is an advocate within us, teaching us how to pray as we ought; Christ is an advocate in heaven, securing from the Father the answer of our prayers. Thus the work of Christ and of the Holy Spirit are complements to each other, and parts of one whole. John 14:26 — “But the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you”; Romans 8:26 — “And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us with groaning which cannot be uttered”; 27 — “and he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”

The intercession of the Holy Spirit may be illustrated by the work of the mother, who teaches her child to pray by putting words into his mouth or by suggesting subjects for prayer. “The whole Trinity is present in the Christian’s closet; the Father hears, the Son advocates his cause at the Father’s right hand, the Holy Spirit intercedes in the heart of the believer.”

Therefore “When God inclines the heart to pray, He hath an ear to hear.”

The impulse to prayer, within our hearts, is evidence that Christ is urging our claims in heaven.

D. Relation of Christ’s Intercession to that of saints. All true intercession is either directly or indirectly the intercession of Christ. Christians are organs of Christ’s Spirit. To suppose Christ in us to offer prayer to one of his saints, instead of directly to the Father, is to blaspheme Christ and utterly misconceive the nature of prayer.

Saints on earth, by their union with Christ, the great high priest, are themselves constituted intercessors and as the high priest of old bore upon his bosom the breastplate engraven with the names of the tribes of Israel ( Exodus 28:9-12), so the Christian is to bear upon his heart in prayer before God the interests of his family, the church and the world ( <540201> Timothy 2:1 — “I exhort therefore first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings be made for all men”). See Symington on Intercession, in Atonement and Intercession, 256-303; Milligan, Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord.

Luckock, After Death, finds evidence of belief in the intercession of the saints in heaven as early as the second century. Invocation of the saints he regards as beginning not earlier than the fourth century. He approves the doctrine that the saints pray for us , but rejects the doctrine that we are to pray to them. Prayers for the dead he strongly advocates. Bramhall, Works, 1:57 — Invocation of the saints is “not necessary, for two reasons. First, no saint doth love us so well as Christ, no saint hath given us such assurance of his love, or done so much for us as Christ and no saint is so willing to help us as Christ. Secondly, we have no command from God to invocate them.” A. B. Cave: “The system of human mediation falls away in the advent to our souls of the living Christ. Who wants stars or even the moon after the sun is up?”

III. THE KINGLY OFFICE OF CHRIST

This is to be distinguished from the sovereignty, which Christ originally possessed in virtue of his divine nature. Christ’s kingship is the sovereignty of the divine-human Redeemer, which belonged to him right from the moment of his birth, but which was fully exercised only from the time of his entrance upon the state of exaltation. By virtue of this kingly office, Christ rules all things in heaven and earth, for the glory of God and the execution of God’s purpose of salvation. (a) With respect to the universe at large, Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of power; he upholds, governs and judges the world. Psalm 2:6-8 — “I have set my king...Thou art my son...uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession”; 8:6 — “madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”; cf. Hebrews 2:8,9 — “we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold...Jesus...crowned with glory and honor”; Matthew 25:31,32 — “when the Son of man shall come in his glory...then shall he sit on the throne of his glory and before him shall be gathered all the nations”; 28:18 — “All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth”; Hebrews 1:3 — “upholding all things by the word of his power”; Revelations 19:15, 16 — “smite the nations...rule them with a rod of iron...King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

Julius Muller. Proof-texts, 34, says incorrectly (or so we think) that “the regnum naturú of the theory is unsupported. There are only the regnum gratiú and the regnum gloriú. ” A. J. Gordon: “Christ is now creation’s scepter bearer, as he was once creations burden bearer.” (b) With respect to his militant church, it is a kingdom of grace. He rounds, legislates for, administers, defends and augments his church on earth. Luke 2:11 — “born to you...a Savior, who is Christ the Lord”; 19:38 — “Blessed is the King that cometh in the name of the Lord”; John 18:36,37 — “My kingdom is not of this world...Thou sayest it, for I am a king...Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice”; Ephesians 1:22 — “he put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all”, Hebrews 1:5 — “of the Son he saith Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”

Dorner, Glaubenslehre. 2:677 (Syst. Doct., 4:142, 143) — “All great men can be said to have an after-influence (Nachwirkung) after their death, but only of Christ can it be said that he has an after-activity (Fortwirkung ).

The sending of the Spirit is part of Christ’s work as King.” P. S. Moxom, Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1886:25-56 — “Preeminence of Christ, as source of the church’s being, ground of the church’s unity, source of the church’s law, mould of the church’s life.” A. J. Gordon: “As the church endures hardness and humiliation as united to him who was on the cross, so she should exhibit something of supernatural energy as united with him who is on the throne.” Luther: “We tell our Lord God, that if he will have his church, he must look after it himself. We cannot sustain it, and, if we could, we should become the proudest asses under heaven...If it had been possible for pope, priest or minister to destroy the church of Jesus Christ, it would have been destroyed long ago.” Luther, watching the proceedings of the Diet of Augsburg, made a noteworthy discovery. He saw the stars bestud the canopy of the sky and, though there were no pillars to hold them up, they kept their place and the sky fell not. The business of holding up the sky and its stars has been on the minds of men in all ages. But we do not need to provide props to hold on the sky. God will look after his church and after Christian doctrine. For of Christ it has been written in 1 Corinthians 15:25 — “For he must rein, till he hath out all his enemies under his feet.” “Thrice blessed is he to whom is given The instinct that can tell That God is in the field when he Is most invisible.” Since Christ is King, it is a duty never to despair of church or of the world. Dr. E. G. Robinson declared that Christian character was never more complete than now nor more nearly approaching the ideal man. We may add that modern education, modern commerce, modern invention, modern civilization, are to be regarded as revelations of Christ, the Light of the world and the Rules of the nations. All progress of knowledge, government, society, is progress of his truth and a prophecy of the complete establishment of his kingdom. (c) With respect to his church triumphant it is a kingdom of glory. He rewards his redeemed people with the full revelation of himself, upon the completion of his kingdom in the resurrection and the judgment. John 17:24 — “Father, that which thou hast given me, I desire that where I am, they also may be with me, that they may behold my glory”; 1 Peter 3:21,22 — “Jesus Christ; who is on the right hand of God, having gone into heaven; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him”; 2 Peter 1:11 — “thus shall be richly supplied unto you the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” See Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer, preface, vi — “ Revelation 1:6 — “made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father.” Both in the king and the priest, the chief thing is power, influence, and blessing. In the King, it is the power coming downward, in the priest, it is the power rising upward and prevailing with God. As in Christ, so in us, the kingly power is founded on the priestly. Hebrews 7:25 — “able to save to the uttermost... seeing he ever liveth to make intercession.”

Watts, New Apologetic, preface, ix — “We cannot have Christ as King without having him also as Priest. It is as the Lamb that he sits upon the throne in the Apocalypse, as the Lamb that he conducts his conflict with the kings of the earth. It is from the throne of God on which the Lamb appears that the water of life flows forth that carries refreshing throughout the Paradise of God.”