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So far we have been considering the doctrine of God. We now turn to the doctrine of Man. The Christian doctrine of Man is as distinctive as the Christian doctrine of God upon which it depends. Christians differ from non-Christians as sharply in their belief about Man as in their belief about God.
Man is made up of three parts closely connected together. The material part of man belongs to the animal kingdom in the material world. Man is a living being and therefore has, besides his body, a life or soul which other animals have too. But he is also spirit as well as soul and body, which the other animals are not. We say that man "has" a body, a soul, and a spirit, but strictly speaking, we ought to say that he "is" body, soul, and spirit. Without any one of the three he is not a living man. All three were created by God, and are therefore in themselves, and in God,s intention, good.
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The first words of the Bible are, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." These words are not the result of speculation but of revelation. Man cannot by himself know anything about the origin of the universe. Many men have speculated about it. We have the result, from the crude stories of the origin of the world told by savages to the sublime myths of Plato. But the Hebrews were the only people to whom God revealed that He had created the universe. They did not know this until late in their history. In earlier centuries they thought that God had no power outside their own land (Judges 11:24, I Sam. 26:19). But the prophets, especially the Second Isaiah,1 taught that God was the creator of all things (Isa. 42:5, etc.), and they knew it by revelation. So the Hebrews began at a point which other nations did not reach, for they knew that God had created all things, and that He had made them good (Gen. 1:31, cf. Wisdom 1:14). God is perfectly good, and nothing that He has made can be evil.
"Create" means "make out of nothing". It is not directly stated in the canonical Scriptures that God made all things out of nothing (Heb. 11:3 comes near it, compare II Macc. 7:28), but both Hebrews and Christians have always seen that it is implied by the doctrine that God made all things. As the medieval carol says:
"Then let us all with one accord
Sing praises to our heavenly Lord,
Who hath made heaven and earth of nought,
And with His blood mankind hath bought."2
When we say that "God looked upon all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31), we do not mean by "good" profitable to man. Many things that God has made do not affect man at all, and many do him harm. In any case man has only existed for a tiny fraction of the time during which the universe has existed. God created the universe for Himself, not for us.
Therefore "good" is not what profits man, and "evil" is not what
1
The writer of Isa. 40. ff.2
"The Word at the beginning made all things out of nothing." St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 6.
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injures him. "Good" is what is in accordance with the will and character of God. "Evil" is what is contrary to His will.
Nothing is evil, or can be evil, but a personal will disobeying God. The will is not material. No material thing can be evil. There is therefore no such thing as evil in the flesh. Our bodies, like other material things, can be misused by an evil will. But in themselves they are good and cannot be anything but good.
How did evil come into the world which God had created good? Nobody knows. The origin of evil is one of the greatest of mysteries. According to the story of Gen. 3, the first man and woman were tempted by the first serpent. It does not explain how the serpent became evil.1 We can only guess at the reasons which God had for allowing evil to exist. But two reasons may be suggested.
1) No Virtue without Free Will, no Free Will unless Evil is Possible All virtue depends on choice between good and evil. Heroic courage could not exist if it were not possible to be cowardly. Heroic purity could not exist if it were not possible to be impure. If evil were not possible, there would be no heroic goodness.
2) Necessity of Temptation to Development of Character Besides, the development of human character requires that it should resist evil. No man can become what man ought to be if he is protected from all temptation.
St. Augustine taught that evil is not a substance, not a positive thing, but the perversion of a substance, a kind of disease. This theory is not part of the Christian faith, and many Christian theologians have denied it. But it is a most attractive theory. God created all things. He did not create evil, for evil is not a thing. But He made man capable of disobeying Him, that he might be also capable of heroic obedience. The meaning of Isa. 45:7, "I form good and create evil", is that God sends sorrow as well as joy. It does not mean moral evil.
1
We do not, of course, believe that serpents are evil. Even the devil was not created evil but became evil.
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In the early chapters of Genesis we find the doctrine of creation and of the nature of man revealed in the form of a story. That story is not historical, but it is profoundly true in the same sense as that in which our Lord,s parables are true. (It does not matter whether the Prodigal Son actually existed. What matters is the truth conveyed by the parable.) The story of Adam and Eve was originally a creation legend like other creation legends found among primitive peoples, a crude guess at the origin of the world, of man, and of human institutions. It probably implied belief in many gods, for there are traces of such a belief in the story as we have it (Gen. 1:26, 3:22, 11:7). But God the Holy Ghost inspired some prophet, or some Hebrew under the influence of the prophets, to rewrite this legend in such a way as to convey revealed truth to the human mind. No better way could have been found than a story; for the story told in the first three chapters of Genesis cannot perish, and it is simple enough for a child or a savage to understand, while it contains all that is really important about the origin of the world; for it teaches the following doctrines:
There is only one God
He made all things that exist.
He made them good.
He made man, the last and noblest of His creatures.
He gave him free will, the power of choice.
He made sex, which is therefore good, and part of His plan for man.
Man, having been given free will, misused it.
Man is therefore a fallen being, subject to God,s anger.
The human family, one man with one woman, is what God intended, and the husband is the head of it.
All these doctrines are permanently true, and the experience of mankind has confirmed what God has revealed. Gen. 1-3 is an admirable example of what we mean by the inspiration of Scripture. A human story is used by God the Holy Ghost to reveal to man what otherwise he could not have known. Its value is not in the details of the story, least of all in those parts of it which survive from its original form (such as Adam,s rib), but in the Divine truth which it reveals.
In Gen. 1:27 we read: "God made man in His own image". The author may have thought of God as having a visible form like man, for the Hebrews thought in pictures and not in abstract ideas. But
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Christians accept this passage in the sense that God gave to man alone of all His visible creatures (so far as we know) the power of free will.
All men have this power. It belongs to man, as man, to be able to choose between right and wrong; and this distinguishes men sharply and fundamentally from other animals. The power of choice is nowhere found in nature except in man. We know from revelation that it was also given to the angels (Jude 6). He who can choose right can also choose wrong. It was impossible, because contrary to reason, for God to give man the power to choose to obey without giving him also the power to disobey. This power of choice is limited. We cannot do whatever we please. We are subject to various limitations, moral as well as physical. Those who deny the existence of free will usually assume that those who believe in it believe it to be unlimited, which is absurd. But without free will there could be no virtue and no sin. Other animals, vegetables, and minerals cannot sin, nor can they be moral because they do not possess free will. (Some animals, long domesticated by man, appear to have a certain rudimentary power of moral choice, but it is certainly not shared by wild animals.)
Three objections have been raised to the existence of free will. The first is the scientific objection. Natural science assumes that the same effect will always follow the same cause; and wherever persons are not concerned that is, in all the "pure" sciences such as chemistry, physics, astronomy this assumption is justified. Some scientists assume that it is justified in the affairs of men; and that if we knew all the facts, we could predict the course of history as we can predict an eclipse of the sun. But there is no reason for making such an assumption. Those who make it leave the possibility of free will out of their premises and naturally do not find it in their conclusion.
The second objection is the psychological objection which is a special case of the first. Those psychologists who begin with the assumption that the human mind works like a machine naturally find no room for free will in their systems. Both these objections are really due to an unconscious argument in a circle.
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The third objection is of a different kind. Muhammad and Calvin held that God,s will is absolutely supreme and irresistible. Calvin based his theory on such texts as Rom. 9:19: "Who hath resisted His will?" But this interpretation is contrary to the general teaching of Holy Scripture that man is responsible for what he does (Ezek. 3:19, St. Matt. 7:24, etc.).
God has limited His own sovereign power by giving free will to His creatures. Otherwise there could be no morality. Sin is disobedience to the will of God. Virtue is to follow the will of God in spite of difficulties and temptations. Since God has chosen to limit His power by giving us free will, He cannot take it away from us without altering His purpose; and "with Him is no variableness" (St. James 1:17; cf. Mal. 3:6). This way God does not stop the wars and other follies which man commits.
Was it worth while to give us free will which has been the cause of so much sin and misery? We do not know enough to be able to answer this question except by saying that it must have been worth while since God did it. St. Paul tells us (I Cor. 1:25) that the foolishness of God is wiser than men. If it were not for free will, all that men most admire the glory of the martyr, the hero, the statesman, the reformer, the missionary would not exist. Men would be no more than wild animals. And we only see the results of free will in this world, not those in the world to come: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man whatsoever things God prepared for them that love Him" (I Cor. 2:9).
God can and does overrule our disobedience for His purposes. St. John tells us (11:51-52) that Caiaphas, in the very act of deciding to put our Lord to death, prophesied unconsciously that His death would bring all the children of God into one, and the treachery of Judas was made to be the means of the salvation of mankind. And so we must believe that God permits the Devil to exist in order that by some means unknown to us the sum of goodness may be increased. Longfellow wrote of Lucifer ("Golden Legend", lasts lines):
"Since God suffers him to be,
He too is God,s minister,
And labors for some good,
By us not understood."
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Free will brings us to the problem of suffering which cannot be discussed at length here.
God takes no pleasure in suffering, but suffering is not contrary to His will in the same way as sin. Sin is always evil: "God gives to no man licence to sin" (Ecclus. 15:20). But pain may be indirectly good. Some pain is given for a warning. If there were no toothache, our teeth would decay without our knowing it. Some pain is a necessary condition of progress. Experience of life teaches us that nothing worth doing is done without pain to someone. Action for which no one has suffered has no lasting effect. Revelation confirms our experience. The Son of God had to die if mankind was to be redeemed. No human character is fully developed which has not suffered pain. We cannot say whether this is due to the fall of man, or whether it belongs to human nature as God made it. But it is certain that human nature as it is needs pain. It is our duty to relieve pain wherever we find it, as our Lord did, recognizing that pain is not necessarily contrary to God,s will, but that it is not for us to say whether it is or not. We must not, for instance, refuse to heal a sick man on the ground that his character needs the discipline of sickness. It is our duty to relieve his pain, but God will perhaps not allow us to be successful. The notion that pain is always contrary to the will of God, as sin is, was the fundamental error of Dr. Percy Dearmer (see his Body and Soul).
There is also suffering which is not according to God,s will, but is due to human folly or ignorance. As Charles Kingsley was always teaching, if men choose to ignore the Divine laws of health, it is not God,s fault if they suffer from disease. If they choose to live at the foot of a volcano, they must expect to suffer from earthquakes and eruptions. And we are linked together so closely that the folly or sin of one man may lead to the sufferings of others who do not share it; hence the pain of so many innocent children. "Whatever folly the kings commit, the people suffer" (quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi: Horace, Epistles, ¥. 2, 14).
But all these considerations do not explain all the suffering of the world. There is much that still remains mysterious. Some think that the devils have power to interfere in the material world (a belief generally held and grossly exaggerated in the Middle Ages). Others think that there is a World-Soul which itself is fallen. Such
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speculations are not our business here. We cannot fully understand why there is so much suffering, but we have sufficient evidence to cling to our belief that, nevertheless, God is love.1
Human beings are, so far as we know, the only creatures in the material world possessing free will. But we are taught that God also created spiritual beings without bodies who like us possess free will and who are called angels.
We know this by revelation only. We have no means of perceiving angels by our senses because they have no bodies. The Greeks call them @Ê Ff:"J@4, the bodiless ones. Since they are invisible, pictures of them can only be symbolic. Angels are represented in human form to show that they are persons like us, and sometimes with wings to represent their swiftness. They are usually described in Scripture as appearing in the form of men without wings (St. Mark 16:5; St. Luke 24:4, 23). They appear with wings only in apocalyptic passages such as Isa. 6:2; Ezek. 1. They are sexless (St. Mark 12:25).
We need not discuss the history of the Hebrew belief in angels. It appears in its most highly developed form in Daniel where each nation has a patron angel, Michael being the patron of Israel.2 Our principal reason for believing in the existence of angels is the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ who frequently spoke of both good and evil angels.
In what did not affect His mission, we may believe that the human knowledge of our Lord was that of His age. But in all that concerned His mission He could not be mistaken.3 He deliberately and habitually spoke of the angels and warned His disciples against the devil. We cannot reject belief in angels and devils without rejecting His authority. There is no reasonable argument against this belief. We must believe that God could create bodiless spirits and use them
1
On this subject, see C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.2
This belief is said to be due to the influence of Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Persia.3
See pp. 935.
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to help us, and we have the authority of our Lord for believing that He did. We have also, in the Acts of the Apostles, good evidence for the appearance of angels to St. Peter and others. The appearance of angels is always a special act of Divine power. They are not otherwise visible or audible.
The angels were created beings (Col. 1:16) and therefore finite, and they were created good (Gen.1:31). St. Augustine identified them with the light created on the first day (De Civitate Dei, 11. 9). It is generally held that they were created before man (Job 38:7). They possess free will (Jude 6) and see the Beatific Vision of God (St. Matt. 18:10); and they are immortal (St. Luke 20:36). But they have to learn of the mysteries of grace through the Church (Eph. 3:8-10; I St. Peter 1:12), and they do not know the date of the Day of Judgment (St. Mark 13:32). Their number is very great, for our Lord spoke of "more than twelve legions of angels" (St. Matt. 26:53; cf. St. Luke 2:13; Heb. 12:22).
Their work is to be the messengers of God (St. Luke 1:26; Heb. 1:14; etc.), to guard His children (St. Matt. 18:10, which is the basis of the belief in guardian angels, cf. Dan.10:21), and to fight against evil angels (Rev. 12:7). The Pseudo-Dionysius1 classified them in nine orders by putting together various passages of Scripture. Among their duties are to bear the souls of the faithful to their rest (St. Luke 16:22) and the prayers of the Church to heaven (Rev. 8:3). They are witnesses of the conduct of men (I Cor. 4:9) and of the judgment (St. Matt. 25:31; St. Luke 12:8), which they also execute (St. Matt. 13:39, 49; 16:27; 24:31; II Thess. 1:7). They came to the help of our Lord in time of trouble (St. Matt. 4:11; St. Luke 22:43, but the latter passage may be a later addition), and to the help of His servants (Acts 5:19; 8:26; 12:7). There are also many references to them in the Old Testament.
So far only good angels have been mentioned, but there are also evil angels or devils. They were originally good angels, but they disobeyed God and lost their place in Heaven. This seems to have been before the fall of man. Duns Scotus (d. 1308) supposed that these angels revolted when the future Incarnation was revealed to them. Milton in "Paradise Lost" makes Satan revolt because
1
A writer of the fifth century (see p. 87).
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God gave to Jesus Christ the place which Satan coveted, but this implies an Arian doctrine of Christ, contrary to the teaching of St. John that the Word was "in the beginning with God". (Milton,s Arianism is still more explicit in his prose writings.)
The chief of the devils is Satan (The Adversary), also called Apollyon, the Destroyer (Rev. 9:11), and Diabolos, the slanderer (Rev. 12:9, etc.). He is not to be identified with the serpent of Gen. 3, or with the Satan in the Book of Job, for belief in the devil was not then fully developed.
Our Lord was tempted by the devil (St. Matt. 4:1; St. Luke 4:2); and the story must have come from His own lips, for He seems to have been alone. He mentioned the devil in the parable of the tares (St. Matt. 13:39). He bade his disciples pray to be delivered from the Evil One (St. Matt. 6:13). He warned them that an evil spirit, when cast out of a man may, if his place is not filled, return with others worse than himself (St. Luke 11:26). There are many references to the devil in His discourses in the Fourth Gospel.
Both He and His disciples cast out devils which were in possession of human beings. Some modern Christians find it difficult to believe that a devil can occupy the body of a man; but there are innumerable modern instances of devil-possession, found chiefly in heathen countries but not unknown in England, and the devils are cast out by the ministers of the Church precisely in the same way as by our Lord. It is perhaps possible to explain the facts otherwise, but the facts themselves are beyond any possibility of doubt. I have myself met many people who have known persons with all the symptoms of devil-possession, with whom the doctors could do nothing, but who were cured by exorcism. Those who believe that there are devils find no difficulty in accepting their power to take possession of human beings, though it is possible that some of the cases mentioned in the Gospels and Acts were not genuine cases, but were only thought to be so.
The devil is not a rival god, still less evil personified. He is not omnipresent: "Then the devil leaveth Him" (St. Matt. 4:11). Devils are not even wholly evil; for existence is in itself good, and nothing that exists can be wholly evil (Gen.1:31). God made the devils, and all that He made was good. The devils are spirits who have disobeyed God, as wicked men are spirits who have disobeyed God. It is not more difficult to believe that Satan exists than to believe that Nero existed. The latter was a wicked spirit in a body, the former a wicked spirit without a body.
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We believe in the existence of devils, and of Satan their chief, because our Lord taught it, and because experience shows that all human sin cannot be attributed to human beings. There is no doctrine of the Christian faith which I find easier to believe than that of an organized kingdom of spiritual evil, which our Lord plainly taught (St. Mark 3:22; St. Luke 11:18), and which we can experience for ourselves if we examine either our own hearts or the world around us. St. Paul tells us that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual things of wickedness in the heavenly regions (Eph. 6:12).
Our belief in the existence of both good and evil angels, which is founded on the teaching of the Bible and the Church and in particular on the words of our Lord, is confirmed by modern experience. There are many well-authenticated cases of help given to human beings by angels in modern times. We ought not to offer these cases as proofs to those who will not accept the teaching of the Bible, for "if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead" (St. Luke 16:31). But those who accept that teaching find their belief confirmed by the modern evidence.
In the case of evil angels or devils the modern evidence is far stronger. It is difficult to explain the facts of devil-possession as it appears in India, China, Africa, Melanesia, and even England, unless the teaching of the Gospels on this subject is true. The same may be said of the facts of Spiritism. It is not without excellent reason that both the Bible and the Church condemn all attempts to communicate directly with the dead, whether by séances, table-turning, automatic writing, planchette, or any other means. We have no power to communicate with the dead; but the devils take advantage of those who try to do so, as is shown by the number of them who have become insane or committed suicide, and by the silliness, or worse, of the communications received. Not one message has ever been received by such means that has been of any benefit to mankind.
We believe, then, that the universe is full of good and evil angels, perpetually at war until the final victory of God; that the evil angels, organized under their chief, Satan, make it their principal object to destroy us, and that the good angels are sent by God to protect us. The devils cannot hurt us except by our own will; but our will is weak, and they are stronger and cleverer than we are. Our Lord by His death and resurrection broke the power of Satan, and He will
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protect us if we ask for His protection. In fighting against temptation we are the front line of the army of God arrayed against the kingdom of darkness; but that kingdom of darkness could not exist for a moment without God,s permission, and the time will come when He will destroy it. Meanwhile the fighting instincts of our nature are given us to be used, not against one another, but against the enemies of God and man, the devils; for even the worst of men are enslaved victims to be delivered from the devils. The virtues of the soldier are even more the virtues of the missionary. We look forward to the time when patriotism will be sublimated into the defense and extension of the kingdom of God on earth. In this war we have always behind us St. Michael and his hosts, the warriors and messengers of God.
Most doctrines of the nature of man are either optimistic or pessimistic. Some hold with Rousseau that man is naturally kind and good and that his present miserable state is due to ignorance and false guides. Others [hold] with Hobbes and Freud that he is a vile, savage creature whose apparent goodness is always the product of selfishness or lust.
The Christian doctrine of man differs profoundly from both. It is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Man was created wholly good but undeveloped. He has by his own fault become a fallen being, but even so he is not totally corrupt. (Calvin thought he was, but Calvinism is not orthodox Christianity.) Nevertheless, he is so far fallen from what God meant him to be that it cost the death of the Son of God to restore him.
Sin came into human nature through the Fall. It was not there before. Sin is defined as deliberate conscious disobedience to God. Therefore it can only exist in the will of a person. It is not any kind
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of material taint. And there could be no sin if there were no free will.
(Sin is to be distinguished from crime and from tabu. Crime is disobedience to the State. Sin is disobedience to God. There are very grave sins which are not crimes; and there are crimes which, but for the positive law forbidding them, would not be sins.
Tabu is a Polynesian word meaning something forbidden by custom. No society can get on without tabus. In all primitive societies there are innumerable tabus, some of which appear irrational because they spring from beliefs which civilized men do not share, or because they are survivals from earlier conditions which have long been forgotten. But civilized societies have their tabus too. For instance, the police in England would not allow a man to walk through a town stripped to the waist, which was quite usual in Switzerland. The rules of society should be observed unless there is some very good reason for disobeying them. The difference between sin and breach of tabu is that sin is a matter of motive, whereas tabu has nothing to do with motive. Oedipus in the Greek legend, the foundling who killed his father in self-defense and married his mother not knowing who they were, was punished for breaking tabus. If he had been a Christian, we could not accuse him of patricide and incest because he acted in ignorance.)
As there could be no sin without free will, so there could be no free will without the power to sin that is, deliberately to disobey God. Our experience tells us that free will is universal, and that not only the power to sin but sin itself is universal. As St. Paul says, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God". Everybody finds it easier to do wrong than to do right. It is not merely that everyone misuses the power of free will, but that everyone has a bias in the direction of evil. Free will is not quite free. It is possible to deny this, but there are good grounds for believing it to be true. It is certainly the teaching of both the Bible and the Church.
In Genesis 3 we find the story of the Fall of Man. We cannot regard this story as historical. The first man and the first woman,
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we are told, were placed by God in a garden and forbidden to eat the fruit of one tree. (That one detail should have been enough to show the true character of the story, for the tree is "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil". It is an allegorical tree. It would be as useless to look for it in the botany books as to search the atlas for Bunyan,s Hill Difficulty or Valley of Humiliation.) There the man and woman were persuaded by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit. The serpent was not the Devil; that is a later interpretation. He was simply the first snake which was punished by being made to crawl on the earth and eat dust.
But because this story is not historical, let no one think that it is not important. It is necessary to the Christian Faith, and therefore the chapter which contains it is the most important in the Old Testament. For if man has not fallen, he needs no Redeemer; and if man needs no Redeemer, the Gospel is preached in vain.
Genesis 3 is an origin-myth, a story told by primitive people to explain the origin of something. But it is an inspired origin-myth, for it conveys the truth which man could not have found for himself that he is a fallen being. To ask how man fell is useless. Man has been on the earth for at least 100,000 years. Of his spiritual life and progress before the beginning of history (at most 6000 years ago) we know hardly anything. We know something about the shape of his head, the food on which he lived, and the kind of pots that he used. But no research can tell us anything about his moral condition. The origin of sin, as of almost everything else which is common to the whole human race, is unknown.
We do not find any doctrine based on Genesis 3 in other parts of the Old Testament. The doctrine of the Fall is found in St. Paul,s letters: Rom. 5-7; I Cor. 15; Gal. 5. He does not prove it but assumes it. We do not find any mention of it in our Lord,s teaching, but this is not a sound argument against it. The evidence for our religion is the whole of the New Testament, not the Gospels alone.
St. Paul took Genesis 3 as literal history. So did St. Augustine and nearly all Christian theologians until quite recently. But we cannot do so any longer, and we, therefore, have to reconstruct the Christian doctrine of the Fall in the light of what we know about the real character of the story of Adam and Eve.
St. Paul taught that sin entered into the human race by means of
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Adam, and that, since death was the punishment of sin, all men are subject to death. The sinful condition of men is the direct consequence of their descent from Adam. "Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam,s transgression" (Rom. 5:14); and the law of Moses (for St. Paul thought the whole of the Law as it stands in Leviticus and Deuteronomy to be the work of Moses) only had the effect of putting those who knew it and did not keep it in a worse position than they were before to keep it completely was found to be impossible. But our Lord set mankind free by breaking the chain of sin; so that, as Adam introduced sin, Christ, the second Adam, freed mankind from it. This doctrine, which in St. Paul is very obscure, has been the subject of controversy ever since. We cannot accept St. Paul,s belief that the story of Adam is historical, nor can we believe that the seat of sin is the body (though when St. Paul speaks of the flesh, he appears to mean human nature as a whole, not merely the body). Clearly it is the will alone that is the seat of sin. On the other hand, we must accept his teaching that all men have sinned and therefore need redemption; for it is confirmed by universal experience and is necessary to belief in universal redemption.
The Church, following St. Paul,s teaching, has always maintained that everybody is born with a tendency to sin, a weakness of the will which, if not checked, will result in sin. This weakness was called by the Latin Fathers "original sin" (originale peccatum). It is not a good name because, strictly speaking, original sin is not sin at all but a weakness leading to sin, just as a weak chest is not consumption, or weak eyes blindness. The Church teaches that this weakness is hereditary; though it is increased by the sinful conditions, bad examples, etc., to which we are all exposed, more or less, throughout our lives, and also by the direct attacks of the Devil. We promised at our baptism to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil. The flesh is our own nature, weakened by the flaw we have inherited. The world is the bad example and influence of other human beings. The Devil is the unseen enemy who continually tempts us to disobey God.
It is not enough, then, to believe that all men (except, of course, our Lord Jesus Christ) have actually sinned. We must believe also that all men are born with a weakness of will which inclines them
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towards sin, and which requires to be healed by the power of God, won for us by the death and resurrection of our Lord, and applied to each person by baptism.
The principal rival to this doctrine is the "evolutionary" theory of sin. Evolution, since the discoveries of Charles Darwin, has colored all modern thought. Whereas our ancestors thought that all things remained as they were until they were changed, we think of all things as being in a continual state of change and development. What Darwin discovered was that living beings were not always as they are now, but that all kinds of animals and vegetables have developed from a single and very simple living being. He held that the cause of the change was natural selection and the survival of the fittest, meaning by the fittest, not the "best", either physically or morally, but the form most suited to the environment in which it found itself. For instance, fishes living for centuries in a dark cave lose at least their power of sight because, according to Darwin, blind fish were more suited to darkness than seeing fish.
But when we apply the theory of evolution, which properly belongs to the material world, to things which belong to the spiritual world, we cannot be sure that it works in the same way. What is true of the physical nature of man is not necessarily true of his spiritual nature. Human teeth, for instance, can be compared with the teeth of apes; but we cannot compare the human conscience with the conscience of apes, for, as far as we know, neither the ape nor any other animal except man has got a conscience.
The evolutionary theory of sin is that sin is a relic of our animal nature. When our remote ancestors were beasts, they had to be angry, jealous, lustful, and so on. Human beings do not need these qualities, but they survive from an earlier stage, just as our wisdom teeth, which we no longer use or need, survive from a period when our ancestors had much larger mouths. They no longer fit our environment as men, and will therefore ultimately die out; as the legs which the whale had when he lived on land have ceased to be legs since he took to the sea, and the eyes of the fish in the cave, because they were useless, have decayed and disappeared.
Those who believe in free will advise us to assist nature by hastening the inevitable process. Our remote descendants, they say, will become
1
[Some of the content of this section is controversial. Much of the evolutionary hypothesis of Creation is being renounced by scientists at the end of the 20th century and was renounced by Darwin himself before his death. Wp Ed.]
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perfectly virtuous at last, but we can make them become perfectly virtuous sooner by resisting temptations to behave like a beast. Thus Tennyson bids us
"Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die." In Memoriam, 118
Such a theory is quite contrary to the traditional Christian doctrine of sin, but those who hold it say that the traditional Christian doctrine of sin is based on the story of Adam and Eve which we now know to be a legend.
There are, however, very serious objections to the "evolutionary" theory of sin. In the first place, if it were true, we should expect some evidence that sin is decreasing. Unfortunately, there is none. We have no reason to suppose that civilized men are more moral than savages, or that moral progress is ever or anywhere inevitable. On the contrary, moral progress can only be preserved by constant effort, assisted, as Christians believe, by the special power of God. Where that effort is lacking, men sink back at once into worse than beasts.
Second, the upholders of this theory think of sin as chiefly bodily sin. But spiritual sins, such as pride, are more deeply rooted than bodily sins; and since they belong to human nature as such, they cannot be relics of animal nature. An ape may appear to be cruel or lustful; he cannot even appear to be proud. To speak of an idolatrous wolf or an irreverent sheep means nothing. Yet idolatry and irreverence are grave sins.
Third, even sins of the flesh cannot be committed by the other animals because they have no free will. Gluttony is the sin of choosing deliberately to eat more than is good for you. A tame dog may eat more than is good for him (I doubt whether a wild one would); but he cannot commit gluttony because the sin is not the eating, but the choosing to eat. The dog does not choose but acts by instinct.
The "evolutionary" theory of sin is based on a doctrine of human nature which we believe to be false. Man is partly spiritual and partly material. Our animal nature is the material part of us. But
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sin is a defect in the spiritual part of us. Therefore it cannot be a relic surviving in our animal nature.
The "evolutionary" nature of sin also implies a false view of the nature of sin which is a disorder of the will. The other animals, so far as we can see, have no free will. Therefore sin, which can only exist in a being possessing free will, cannot exist in the other animals, and cannot in man be a survival from a period when man presumably did not possess free will either. This argument is, we must admit, speculative, because we know nothing about the ancestors of the human race before it became human. But it is certain that no man can behave like an animal (unless he loses his reason). A man must be either better or worse than an animal. A wicked man does not behave like an animal but like a devil (who is also a being possessing free will).
The "evolutionary" theory of sin is subject to a further difficulty if we are to believe in God. For if sin is a relic of our animal nature, God made it. Either sin is good because God made it, or God who made sin is not good.
We believe, on the contrary, that all that God made is good. He did not make sin, for sin is always contrary to His will. Therefore sin is not part of nature, animal or human. It is always and necessarily unnatural.
But the Christian doctrine of the Fall has been interpreted in many different ways. The power of God and the free will of man form an "antinomy", a contrast which cannot be completely reconciled. As there have always been two tendencies in the belief held about the Incarnation the tendency to emphasize the Godhead of our Lord, which in its extreme form led to the Monophysite heresy, and the tendency to emphasize His Manhood, which in its extreme form led to the Nestorian heresy so there have always been two tendencies in the belief held about the Fall the tendency to emphasize human free will, the extreme form of which is Pelagianism, and the tendency to emphasize the power of God, the extreme form of which is Calvinism. The controversies about the Incarnation have always
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been Greek controversies; the controversies about the Fall, Latin controversies. Nestorius and Eutyches were Greeks. Pelagius and Calvin were Latins.
There is a middle way between these two tendencies, corresponding to the way marked out by the Council of Chalcedon in the controversies about the Incarnation. It is the way followed by the Greek Fathers, by the Council of Trent, and by the best Anglican divines such as Jeremy Taylor.
According to Dr. N. P. Williams, this middle way may be summed up in seven propositions, here somewhat simplified (Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin, pp. 452-460):
1) God is perfectly good, and there is no evil in anything which He has made.
2) The origin of evil is to be sought in the voluntary rebellion of created wills, not only human wills, but those of devils also.
3) Man, when he first appeared, was weak, imperfect, ignorant, and non-moral, but possessed self-consciousness and free will as a starting point for progress towards union with God.
4) Man, as his moral ideas grew, disobeyed God, and thereby threw in his lot with the devils and diverged from the path marked out for him by God. This is called the Fall.
5) Ever since the Fall human nature has shown an inherent weakness or bias towards sin.
6) This bias is the effect and symptom of weakness of will or defective control of the lower nature by the higher.
7) This weakness of will is hereditary and not merely due to environment. It is inherited by every child from its parents.
We may accept this position without committing ourselves to the historical character of the story of Adam and Eve, or to any of the theories which have been derived from it. For instance, the theory of "original righteousness" that is, the belief that man in the Garden of Eden before the Fall was not merely innocent but morally and intellectually perfect plays a large part in the literature of this subject.1 The extreme form of it was expressed by Dr. Robert South
1
It is assumed by Article 9 in the phrase "very far gone from original righteousness" which was intended to satisfy the Calvinists without surrendering to them.
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(1634-1716) in the words: "Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam" that is, Adam had all the intellectual powers of the wisest of his descendants, and lost them through the Fall. We are not committed to any such belief for which neither Scripture nor reason provides any basis. We know nothing about man before the Fall. We may be sure that he was a very primitive and undeveloped creature, little removed from the other animals.
But we must believe that there was a Fall, that at some remote period man began to disobey God. He could not have disobeyed God without possessing, in however crude a form, the power of free will. He might have resisted temptation. In order to do so, he required God,s help; for temptation must have come from the Devil, and the Devil is stronger and cleverer than man, especially primitive and innocent man. By yielding to temptation, he lost the divine help; and this is the state of fallen man. It is not, then, necessary to believe that we inherit particular characteristics from our first parents, but merely that we, like them, are in a fallen condition and that from our birth.
As we saw in the last chapter, human beings are, through their own fault, fallen beings. God made us for union with Himself in which alone is our hope of happiness and peace. But we misused the free will which He gave us.
Since we could not save ourselves from the state into which we had fallen, God determined to save us by reconciling us to Himself. This reconciliation is called the Atonement. The doctrine of the Atonement is the third of the three fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion. The other two, without both of which belief in the Atonement is impossible, are the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
The word Atonement (at-one-ment) appears to have been invented
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by William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into modern English (1525-31). It means the reconciliation of two who have been separated, and it represents the Greek word 6"J"88"(Z (Rom. 5:11; II Cor. 5:18). The corresponding verb, 6"J"88VFF,4<, to reconcile, is found in Col. 1:20.
In the Old Testament "atonement" represents the word "kapper", which means the removal of what causes anger and is more commonly translated "propitiation". (See pp.1868.)
Men of all ages and races have felt the need for reconciliation with God. The three questions which every religion which is to attempt to satisfy the needs of man must answer are: 1) What am I to believe about God? 2) How am I to get rid of sin? 3) What is going to become of me after death?
The only true answer to all three questions is found in the Christian doctrine of the Atonement: 1) God is Love and showed it by becoming Man and giving His life for men. 2) I can get rid of sin by accepting Jesus Christ as my Savior and obeying His commands. 3) If I follow Him to the end, He will take me to dwell with Him in Heaven.
A typical case of the need for reconciliation with God is found in the Book of Job (23:3 ff.): "Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seat!"; and (31:35): "Oh that I had one to hear me! and that I had the indictment which mine adversary hath written!"; cf. 9:33: "There is no daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both".
The result on the mind of the sense of sin is found already in Gen. 3:7-8 and is described in Rom. 7:7-25 with which the Confessions of St. Augustine may be compared. It was the Law of Moses, as St. Paul knew, that deepened the sense of sin, and therefore made the need of a Redeemer urgent. A similar need is found in the "Bhakti"
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sects of Hinduism and in the cult of Amida in Japanese Buddhism (which may be due to Christian influence).
In the Old Testament one purpose of sacrifice was the reconciliation of man to God, but it is not confined to the Old Testament. Sacrifice was almost universal in ancient religions. However, the Hebrew sacrifices were not even supposed to do more than take away the guilt of sin committed ignorantly. "If one man sin against another, God1 shall judge him; but if a man sin against the Lord, who shall intreat for him?" (I Sam. 2:25).
But what neither the Hebrew nor any other sacrifice could do, our Lord Jesus Christ has done (Heb. 7:25, and indeed the whole Epistle to the Hebrews; Rom. 5:11, and the argument of Romans).
Other religious teachers have sought to find the means of freedom from sin. The Buddha claimed to have discovered the Way. Muhammad preached what he said was the Truth. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and also the Life (St. John 14:6). "No man", He said, "cometh unto the Father but by Me." Mankind needs not only a Teacher but a Redeemer. No religion satisfies that need but the religion of Christ.
The principal work of our Lord on earth was not what He said but what He did, being who He was. He was God the Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. He came to die and rise again that He might save us. His teaching is of great importance, but it is entirely secondary to His death and resurrection.
One quarter of each of the Gospels is devoted to the last week of His life: St. Matt. 21-28; St. Mark 11-16; St. Luke 19-24; St. John 12-20. The Apostles in their preaching seldom referred to His teaching but always to His resurrection (Acts 2:24; 3:15; 4:10; 10:40; 13:30; 17:31; 23:6; 26:8).
1
According to some, "the judge shall judge him."
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Our Lord foretold His own death and resurrection, first in mysterious hints (St. Mark 2:20: "The bridegroom shall be taken away"), but after St. Peter,s confession much more clearly (St. Mark 8:31; St. Matt. 16:21; St. Luke 9:22), and sternly rebuked St. Peter for protesting. After the Transfiguration His prophecy was repeated (St. Mark 9:12; 10:33).
But we have no clear reason given for His coming death. The only hint in the Synoptic Gospels before the Last Supper is "to give His life a ransom for many" (St. Mark 10:45; St. Matt. 20:28). In St. John we find Him saying, "The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep" (St. John 10:11, 15, 17, 18); cf. 12:24: "if it die, it beareth much fruit".
At the Last Supper according to St. Mark 14:24, our Lord said to His disciples, "This is My blood of the covenant, which is shed for many". Behind these words lies a long history. The early Hebrews could not conceive of a binding covenant which was not accompanied by sacrifice. When our Lord said that the wine was "the blood of the covenant which is shed for many", He knew that His death was imminent. His blood was to reconcile man to God, which was the purpose never fulfilled of the old sacrifices, and the wine that was poured out was in some sense a sacrifice. In what sense we shall see later. In the parallel passage, St. Matt. 26:28, the words "unto remission of sins" are added. It is sin that prevents man,s reconciliation with God and which must be removed if reconciliation is to take place. According to one reading the covenant is here the "new" covenant. The passage also occurs in St. Luke (22:20), but it is not certain whether it is there part of the original text.
St. Luke tells us that in His walk with the two disciples to Emmaus after the Resurrection, our Lord showed from Scripture that the Christ must suffer (St. Luke 24:25, 44). No doubt it was Isa. 53 that was chiefly used for this purpose, but the Law was also used. The reference may be to Gen. 3:15; Num. 21:9, mystically interpreted; Micah 5:2; Zech. 9:9, 12:10; Mal. 3:1; etc.)
There does not appear to be any more evidence from the Gospels. Our Lord said that He would die for men and that His death would be a sacrifice. So far as we know, He did not say how.
But when we turn to the Acts and to the Epistles of St. Paul, we find much more definite evidence. St. Paul says, "I delivered unto
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you first of all that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures" (I Cor. 15:3). This shows that his teaching was what he had been taught at the time of his conversion, and confirms what we find in the early chapters of the Acts. The Apostles from the very first proclaimed that the death of their Master was the fulfillment of Isa. 53: He is the Suffering Servant foretold by the prophet (Acts 8:32-35). He is the Servant of the Lord who has raised Him from the dead (Acts 3:13, 26; 4:27, 30). There is no salvation in any other but Him (Acts 4:12).
This is the Gospel which St. Paul preached to the Galatians and for which he claimed, in what is probably his earliest epistle, absolute exclusiveness (Gal. 1:9). He did not receive it from man but through revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:12)
The teaching of St. Paul, which can be only summarized here, is the chief basis of the doctrine of the Atonement. Jesus Christ is the Son of God, "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15). He was sent forth by God "to redeem them that were under the Law" (Gal. 4:5). He is the second Adam who came to restore what had been lost by the fault of the first Adam (Rom. 5:14-17). He died "for us" (Rom. 5:6-8: the word used is ßBXD, on behalf of, not <J\, instead of. As we shall see, the distinction is important. It was the intention of God the Father "through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, having made peace through the blood of His Cross" (Col. 1:20). "He gave Himself up for us as an offering to God" (Eph. 5:2). "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (II Cor. 5:18-19). It was not by His death only but also by His resurrection that He redeemed us, for "if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain: ye are yet in your sins" (I Cor. 15:12).
We are not redeemed as separate individuals. We are one body of which Christ is the Head (I Cor. 12:13, 27; Col. 1:18; Eph. 1:22, 2:16, 5:25-30). It is by baptism that we are made members of this body (Rom. 6:3 ff; Eph. 5:26). Baptism represents a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness, which gifts it also conveys. It is both symbolic and instrumental.1
But our redemption by our Lord does not mean that there is nothing for us to do. Without that redemption we could do nothing. His grace is necessary at every stage to our doing anything good. But by the help of that grace we are to work out our own salvation
1
See O. C. Quick, The Sacraments.
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(Phil. 2:12); hence the emphasis constantly laid by St. Paul on right conduct (Rom. 12; etc.).
St. Paul was not a systematic theologian. His teaching is known to us only by a selection from his letters. He taught that our salvation and redemption are due entirely to the death and resurrection of our Lord, but he does not explain how.
St. John confirms this doctrine in a different way. The evidence from the discourses in the Fourth Gospel has here been separated from that of the Synoptic Gospels because we cannot be sure whether these discourses, as we have them, are our Lord,s own words, or whether they are the result of many years of inspired meditation by the author. "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" (3:16). "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in Him may have eternal life" (3:14-15). "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for (ßBXD) his friends: ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you" (15:13). And St. John supports this doctrine in his first Epistle: "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins" (I St. John 2:1-2: cf. 4:10; Rev. 13:8).
St. Peter tells us that our Lord bore our sins on the Cross (I St. Pet. 2:24) and that His resurrection applied to us by baptism saves us (3:21).
The Epistle to the Hebrews represents our Lord as the true High Priest, of the order of Melchizedek, and therefore permanent (6:20 ff.), offering Himself to the Father (7:27), and cleansing us by His blood (9:11-14) cf. I. St. John 1:7; Rev. 7:14. He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself (Heb 9:26). He was offered to bear the sins of many (9:28). His offering perfects them that are sanctified (10:14). Indeed this is the theme of the Epistle to the Hebrews which must be read as whole.
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It is then clearly taught by the New Testament that Christ died and rose again to save us from our sins and to reconcile us to God, and that the means of this salvation is membership of the Church through baptism. Our pardon through His death has two aspects: a) towards God: man is reconciled to God by means of His death; b) towards man: what man has lost through his sin is restored through the power of Christ,s resurrection.
But the New Testament does not tell us precisely how His death saves us, nor has the Church ever defined any dogma on the subject. It is a mystery which cannot be wholly understood. But we are not without material for building up theories to explain it (see pp. 17986).
The writers and the original readers of the New Testament were all familiar with animal sacrifice. Both among Jews and Gentiles, animals were sacrificed every day. Modern Europeans have no experience of animal sacrifice and find the language of the New Testament, which implies familiarity with it, very hard to understand. Nevertheless it must be understood, for otherwise important parts of the New Testament will be meaningless; and we shall not be able to understand many phrases used in Christian worship, especially in hymns. "Washed in the blood of the Lamb" (Rev. 7:14) is a phrase which causes needless difficulty to modern congregations. So does:
"Faith in the only sacrifice
That can for sin atone."
James Montgomery
English Hymnal, 79; Hymns Ancient and Modern, 547.
"When I have sinned, I must repent; if I repent, I expect to be forgiven. Where does sacrifice come in, and why was the death of Christ necessary? Cannot God forgive me without anyone,s death?" So anyone might argue. But to think in this way is to be completely out of touch with the religion of the Bible.
Sacrifice, or offering to God, has an important place in all religious systems except that of Muhammad who deliberately rejected it. (The modern misuse of the word "sacrifice" as meaning loss shows how difficult the meaning of sacrifice is for most people to grasp. A man sacrifices his life for his country. He loses, or may lose, his life for his country,s good. But sacrifice does not mean loss; it means offering. He has offered his life to his country. He may not be called upon to lose it, but in that case it has been offered just as much as if he had lost it. Sacrifice therefore means neither loss nor killing. It may, on the contrary, mean gain and more abundant life. The essential idea of sacrifice is offering, usually to God.)
The sacrificial system of Israel, which is the background of all that is said about sacrifice in the New Testament, had a long and complex history. We need not discuss the earlier stages of that history. We are only concerned with the last stage which was reached under the influence of the prophets and particularly the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement.
At this period sacrifice was not a bribe to God to make Him give help or refrain from punishment. No doubt that had been one purpose of heathen sacrifice (as in II Kings 3:27) and of early Hebrew sacrifice (Gen. 28:22; Judges 11:30), but the prophets had rejected such ideas (Mic. 6:7: Shall I give the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?).
What was needed to reconcile sinful man with the righteous God was not a change in God but a change in man. God is always the same. He cannot be bribed. But man has sinned and therefore requires to be changed. What must be changed is the guilt of man
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before God and his weakness in the presence of sin. Toplady wrote:
"Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power."
(English Hymnal, 477; Hymns Ancient and Modern, 184).
And St. Augustine taught that fallen man suffers from "reatus", guilt, and "vitium", fault.
The Hebrews did not claim that their sacrifices removed the power of sin, but only that they availed for sins of ignorance and weakness, not for sins deliberately committed. The sinner had to overcome the power of sin by his own strength, and it was believed that he could. St. Paul rejected Judaism for this very reason because he found by experience that he could not (Rom. 7:23).
The purpose of the sacrifices, then, was to remove the guilt of man. This was done by means of the sin-offering. The greatest sin-offering was made on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16) which belonged to the last stage of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament. It does not appear to have existed before the Exile, though there were features in it which must have been older.
The slaying of the victim was the duty of its owner in private sacrifices. The victim must be the property of the sacrificer or at least have been bought with his money, and it must be a living creature that would otherwise have been used for food. Unclean animals, not being suitable for food, might not be offered, nor might wild game since it was not the property of the sacrificer and had cost him nothing.
The sacrifices on the Day of Atonement were national sacrifices for the national sins of Israel. The place of the man who made the sacrifice was taken by the High Priest representing the whole people.
There were five victims on the Day of Atonement: a bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering, for the priests; a goat for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering, for the people; and the goat for Azazel (mentioned in the Book of Enoch as a fallen angel), formerly called the "scapegoat". With the last, which was taken into the wilderness and let go and was supposed to carry away with it the sins of the people, we are not here concerned except to say that it was in no sense a type of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that there is nowhere in the New Testament any evidence for such a
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notion; nor is it supported by any of the ancient translations nor by any of the Fathers.1
The "atonement" that is, reconciliation was made for the priests first, then for the people. The High Priest, acting not as priest but as sacrificer, presented the bullock and the first goat, and then slew them, representing first the family of the priests and then the whole people. Having done this, he offered the blood, which was his work, not as sacrificer but as priest. He entered into the Holy of Holies carrying with him the blood of the victim and the lighted censer full of incense, the smoke from which rose between him and the mercy seat. He sprinkled the blood on the mercy seat seven times, and he went out and sprinkled the blood on the horns of the altar of burnt offering in the court outside. Then he laid his hands on the head of the live goat, confessed over him the sins of the people, and sent him away to a solitary place. After this he changed his linen garments for the priestly vestments as a sign that the penitential ceremonies were over, and he proceeded to offer the two rams as burnt offerings to show that reconciliation with God was now effected.
There were altogether in the complete sacrifice six stages:
(1) The "drawing near" of the sacrificer with the victim.
(2) The laying of the sacrificer,s hands on the victim,s head, by which he identified himself with the victim.
(3) The slaying of the victim by the sacrificer.
(4) The entry of the priest into the sanctuary carrying the blood.
(5) The burning of the flesh of the victim which was thereby transformed and carried into the Divine life.
(6) The feast of the offerers on part of the flesh (but not on the Day of Atonement since these offerings were too holy to be eaten).
The two chief ideas which underlay these ceremonies were the removal of sin and reconciliation with God. There was no reparation of any kind. The victim represented the sacrificer (in this case the people of Israel), and was regarded as part of him because, if it had not been sacrificed, it would have been eaten by him. But instead
1
S. C. Gayford, Sacrifice and Priesthood, p. 98.
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of being eaten and becoming part of his life, it was surrendered to God. It was not a substitute for the sacrificer, but in a sense it was he, for his whole life represented by the blood was offered to God.
Then the blood was taken into the Holy of Holies, the innermost shrine that is, it was accepted by God. It was the high priest who carried the blood. He was the intermediary between the sacrificer and God. But since he also was a sinner, he had to carry in the blood for himself and his family, and thereby be himself reconciled to God, before he could perform the same office for the people.
Then the altar and the temple were cleansed. "Almost all things are by the law purged with blood" (Heb. 9:22). Reconciliation with God meant that the sins of the sacrificer were erased. They were said to be washed with the blood which was the means of reconciliation. This is the origin of such expressions as "washed in the blood of the Lamb".
By the reconciliation with God, which was now accomplished, the sacrificer became entitled to share the Divine life. This was represented by the feast on the flesh of the victims with which some forms of sacrifice (but not those of the Day of Atonement) were concluded.
But of what value is all this to us? Could the sins of men really be removed by animal sacrifice? Certainly not. That is why the system of animal sacrifice was brought to an end. There has never been animal sacrifice in the Christian Church (except where, as in some Eastern churches, it is a survival of pre-Christian Semitic custom).
The sacrificial system did not effect its purpose. It did not remove man,s guilt in the sight of God. It did nothing to make him capable of overcoming temptation. In the first place, the animal sacrificed was not really equivalent to the sacrificer. It could only be regarded as equivalent in the age before the development of the idea of personality when a man, his family, his slaves, and his property were regarded as one indivisible thing, so that if he committed a crime, his family and cattle were slain with him as in the case of Achan (Josh. 7:24; cf. Dan. 6:24)
Second, the priest was a sinner and had to offer sacrifice for his own sins, so that he was not really competent to act as a mediator (Heb. 10:1-11; etc.).
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But the animal sacrifices were merely a type and prophecy of what was to be done by Jesus Christ. What they did not and could not do, He did. He is at once Sacrificer (St. John 10:17), Victim (I Cor. 5:7; Heb. 9:12), and Priest (Heb. 5:10, 6:20, 7:26).
His sacrifice in its different stages corresponds to the Hebrew sacrifices which foreshadowed it. The presentation took place when He was crucified; the slaying at His death; the entry into the sanctuary with the blood at His Ascension; the cleansing with the blood at our baptism; the feast on the flesh at the Holy Communion. We must carefully distinguish between these different stages. What took place once for all was the death on the Cross. There is no more immolation or slaying. Our medieval ancestors, who wrongly identified sacrifice with slaying, supposed that in some sense Christ was slain again at every Eucharist. It was against this idea that the Reformers rightly protested. What was done on Calvary was done once for all, but that was not the offering but the slaying. The seventh-century hymn1 which says, "Upon the altar of the Cross", is wrong. The Cross was not an altar. The altar is in heaven where our Lord, the Priest after the order or Melchizedek, offers His sacrifice continually. It cannot be repeated because it never ceases to be offered.
What He offers is His living body and blood, not His dead body and blood, for He is not dead but risen. Those who have held that what He offers and what we feed on in the Eucharist is His dead body are profoundly mistaken. Such an idea is really inconsistent with His resurrection.
His death on the Cross was voluntary. He gave Himself for us. Therefore it effected what the involuntary death of bulls and goats could not effect. But it was not penal; He did not suffer punishment. For the purpose of punishment is reformation, and He needed no reformation.
The priest in the Hebrew system was a sinner liable to death.
1
Ad cenam Agni providi: English Hymnal, 125; Hymns A. And M., 128.
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Our Priest is not a sinner and not liable to death. Hence He is truly what the old priests were by type.
Now we can see in what sense the Christian Eucharist is a sacrifice. Our Lord said at the Last Super, "This is My blood of the covenant" (St. Mark 14:24). A covenant was inseparable from sacrifice. The blood of the covenant must be poured out in sacrifice, and the Christian Church has always regarded the Eucharist as sacrificial. It is true that the usual words, such as Ê,D,bH, priest, are not used of any officer of the Church in the New Testament. If they had been, its readers would have supposed that Christians, like the adherents of every other religion in that age, offered animal sacrifices. But the Christian Eucharist is not sacrificial in that sense. It corresponds to the lasts stages in the old sacrifices. In it we take our part in the sacrifice which is being perpetually offered by our Lord in heaven. In it we receive the Divine life with which our Lord,s human life is united. It is not a whole sacrifice, still less a repetition of what was done on Calvary. It is the means by which each member of the Church can take his or her part in the one sacrifice of Christ. And the earthly priest who officiates is a priest only in a secondary sense. He is not all that the priests in the Old Testament were. The whole Church is a royal priesthood (I St. Peter 2:9) because she shares the priesthood of her Head, and the official priest is the means by which the priesthood of the Church is exercised.1
But though it has been shown that the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ fulfill the idea of the Hebrew sacrifices, has that idea any meaning for us today? Why should God,s forgiveness require sacrifice?
We find this question difficult because most of us have an insufficient sense of the terrible and deep-rooted nature of sin. It is only by fixing our eyes on the Cross that we learn what sin is. Neither the guilt nor the power of sin can be removed by a mere apology. The sinner is guilty before the Divine Justice. He is bound by the chain of sinful habit. God cannot simply forgive him and let him go. It is a fact of experience that nothing of any value
1
See pp. 368373, 393.
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is carried out without suffering. The removal of man,s guilt and man,s sinful habits could not be effected without the suffering of God Himself. This is the truth that underlies the sacrifice of our Lord. "Without shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. 9:22) is profoundly true. It is not a notion which has passed away with Semitic sacrifices.
Man is bound by the chains of his sins and guilty in the sight of God. The guilt and the power of sin had to be removed, and he could not remove them for himself. Our Lord Jesus Christ has removed them, but not in such a way that man has no more to do. Man is like a prisoner in a dungeon, the door of which is locked on the inside. He is too weak to rise and turn the key. Indeed he often does not even wish to get free or believe that freedom is possible or even desirable. It is not enough to force the door and break the chains. The prisoner must be changed from within, or he is not really free. And this is what God the Son did when He became Man.
The language of Hebrew sacrifice, therefore, is true if it is understood, and we must understand it if we are to make sense of the New Testament. But most of us are not, as the writers of the New Testament were, and as many of our hymn writers were, soaked in the thought of the Old Testament. If we are to sing with sincerity,
"There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel,s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains"
Hymns Ancient and Modern, 633; English Hymnal, 332;
or
"Oft as it is sprinkled
On our guilty hearts,
Satan, in confusion,
Terror-struck departs"1
Hymns Ancient and Modern, 107; English Hymnal, 99;
we must both believe the truth which these metaphors signify, and understand how they apply to it. But many people in our congregations do neither, and it is a question whether, until they do, they should be encouraged to sing such hymns.
1
The first verse was written by the Evangelical, William Cowper; the second was translated from the Italian by Edward Caswall of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.
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As we have seen, the New Testament teaches that our Lord died for us and redeemed us by His blood, but it does not tell us how (see Chapter 28). Nor has the Church defined any dogma on the subject. Very different theories have been put forward at different times. The Atonement is a mystery which perhaps we shall never completely understand.
In this chapter the principal theories of the Atonement will be briefly described.
The first theory of the Atonement is that to which Dr. Gustav Aulén,1 Bishop of Strängnäs2 in Sweden, has given the title "classical". Christ saves men who have fallen through their own fault into the power of the Devil by breaking that power. He became Man for this purpose. He lived and died and rose again that He might break the chains by which men were bound. It is not His death alone but the entire Incarnation of which His death was a necessary part that freed men from their captivity to Satan. By becoming Man, living a sinless life, and rising from the dead (which He could not have done unless He had first died), He introduced a new power into human nature. This power is bestowed on all men who are willing to receive it through the Holy Ghost. Those who receive it are united with Christ in His mystical body, the Church. The corrupted human nature (the bad habits and evil desires which St. Paul calls "the old man": Rom. 6:6; Eph. 4:22; Col. 3:9) is driven out by degrees until at last it is expelled altogether, and the redeemed person becomes entirely obedient to the will of God as our Lord Himself was when on earth. The prisoner who was mentioned in the last chapter is set free from the inside. His mind and body are both changed. He comes to know what freedom is, to desire it, and by the Holy Ghost working within him, to break his chains, turn the key, and leave the dungeon. Thus he is freed from the power of sin. God forgives him as an act of pure love, but the condition of his forgiveness is that he must sin no more. "While we were yet sinners
1
Pronounced Owl-ain.2
Pronounced Streng-nace, to rhyme with face.
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Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8), but if we continue to be sinners, Christ,s death for us will have been in vain; and we are made capable of ceasing to be sinners by the power of Christ,s resurrection.
The advantage of this theory is that it is firmly based on the New Testament. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (II Cor. 5:19). The act of reconciliation is effected by God in the Person of His Son, for it is man that needs to be reconciled to God, not God that needs to be reconciled to man. The expression in Article 2, to reconcile His Father to us, is not based on Scripture but on later theories of the Atonement (its immediate source is the Augsburg Confession, cf. Irenaeus, v. 17. 1). Throughout the New Testament we find the proclamation that Christ has broken the power of the Devil to which mankind was subject: see St. Luke 10:17-18, 11:22; Rom. 6:22; I Cor. 15:25; Gal. 1:4; Col. 2:15; II Tim. 1:10; Heb. 2:14; St. John 10:11, 12:31, 16:11; I St. John 3:8; and frequently in Revelation. Moreover, the classical theory of the Atonement requires no "legal fiction", and attributes no immoral or unrighteous action to God. Man is not made suddenly good or treated as good when he is not good. He is forgiven not because he deserves to be forgiven but because God loves him, and he is made fit for union with God by God,s power, his own will cooperating1 (no one is saved against his will). He is saved from the power of sin by the risen life of Christ within him, and from guilt of sin by God,s forgiveness of which his own repentance is a condition.
Dr. Aulén claims for the "classical" theory the support of all the Greek Fathers from St. Irenaeus to St. John of Damascus, and some of the Latin Fathers including St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Leo, and St. Gregory the Great.2
Two minor theories, or corollaries, were sometimes held along with the "classical" theory. One, the "recapitulation", contains an important element of truth. The other, the "ransom paid to the Devil" has long been universally discredited.
St. Irenaeus (Against all Heresies, 3. 18) says, "The Son of God, when He was incarnate and was made man, summed up in Himself the long explanations of men in one brief work achieving salvation for us, that what we had lost in Adam, our being in the image and likeness of God, we might recover in Christ Jesus. Thus, because it was not possible for that man who had once been conquered and thrust out by disobedience to be new molded and obtain the prize
1
His own will can only cooperate by means of Divine grace. To deny this is the Semi-Pelagian heresy.2
Christus Victor, pp. 32-76.
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of victory, and again it was impossible for him to obtain salvation who had fallen under sin, the Son accomplished both, being the Word of God coming down from the Father and made flesh, and fulfilling the economy of our salvation." Christ is the second Adam (I Cor. 15:45; cf. Rom. 5:14), and as Adam was all mankind, so Christ is in a sense all mankind. He was made mankind afresh so that mankind is no longer sinful. This doctrine is called the "Recapitulation". But since we know that each man commits sins as an individual and find even the conception of corporate sin difficult, the idea that Christ is identified with all mankind is very difficult for us. But it may none the less be true.
The theory of the "ransom paid to the devil" is an attempt to explain St. Mark 10:45: "to give His life a ransom for many" (cf. I. Tim. 2:6: "having given His life a ransom for all"). The word "for" represents ßBXD, on behalf of, in I Tim., whereas in St. Mark and the parallel passage, St. Matt. 20:28, it represents <J\, instead of. The word for "ransom" is 8bJD@< in the two Gospels, but in I Tim. <J\8LJD@<.
Ransom was a familiar idea to the ancient world. A person carried off by pirates or slave dealers might be freed by the payment of money. Our Lord told His disciples that He would save His people by His death. His blood was the price that must be paid for their deliverance. But if we press this metaphor and ask to whom the price is to be paid, we at once find ourselves in difficulties. The metaphor was not meant to be pressed.
The theory that the ransom was paid to the Devil, though we find the beginning of it in Origen, was first fully developed by St. Gregory of Nyssa; but it was vigorously repudiated by his friend St. Gregory of Nazianzus. Nevertheless, it became the prevailing theory, at any rate in the West, until the eleventh century.
Man through his sin, it was held, fell into the power of the Devil like a person captured by robbers. The Devil, however, had a right to control man because man had deliberately surrendered to him. Christ gave Himself as ransom to the Devil, but the Devil had no right to put Him to death because He was sinless. Thus the Devil overreached himself and lost his rights over mankind. Some held that the Devil,s rights were a usurpation, but, in any case, our Lord deceived the Devil, who did not realize that He was God and, therefore, that he could not keep Him in his power. Some spoke of our Lord,s human nature as the bait by which God caught the Devil on His hook. St. Augustine compared the Atonement to a mouse trap;
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Christ was the bait by which the Devil was caught like a mouse in a trap. This implied by the well-known Passion Hymn of Venantius Fortunatus (English Hymnal, 95; Hymns A. and M., 97).
"Thus the scheme of our salvation
Was of old in order laid,
That the manifold deceiver,s
Art by art might be outweighed,
And the lure the foe put forward
Into means of healing made."
This theory has long ceased to be held by anyone. St. Bernard was perhaps the last great theologian to maintain it. But unfortunately the discredit into which it has fallen has been extended to the "classical" theory in general which is not bound up with it. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, as we have seen, rejected it and would not admit that the ransom was paid to God either. St. John of Damascus taught that the ransom was paid, not to the Devil, but to God.
The second great theory of the Atonement was put forward by St. Anselm. The doctrine of satisfaction or compensation given by man to God is first found in Tertullian as a necessary condition of absolution. St. Cyprian taught that the excess of merit in Christ was applied to the forgiveness of man without injury to the justice of God. But St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1033-1109), in his book Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), was the first to work out these ideas into a consistent theory. He held that human sin was a debt to God which men could not pay; and regarding man as God,s feudal vassal, he taught that as long as this debt remained unpaid, God,s honor was violated. Christ took upon Himself to pay the debt on man,s behalf, which He could only do by identifying Himself with man. Thus man was freed from the debt, and God,s honor was satisfied. Christ had given His life as the ransom for men.
There are several objections to this theory, but it is better than the theory then prevalent that God deceived the Devil by holding out to him Christ,s human nature as a bait. In consequence, the "classical" theory, which was wrongly thought to be bound up with the ransom paid to the Devil, gave way to the theory of St. Anselm.
The Scriptural basis of St. Anselm,s theory is not sufficient, and the feudal ideas with which it is connected make it appear unreal
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now that feudalism has disappeared. The emphasis laid on the personal honor of God, rather than on His justice and His love, reduces Him to the level of an earthly despot.1 Here it is God that is reconciled to man, not man to God. The act of reconciliation does not come from God, but from Christ as Man. The Father and the Son are separated, and this was to have disastrous consequences in the later developments of the theory. Moreover, to regard sin as a debt which can be paid off is to ignore the depth to which sin penetrates. The whole being of a sinner is changed from what it ought to be. Sin affects him internally, not merely externally, like a debt. Also the living union between Christ and His Church is not enough emphasized. According to St. Anselm, the death of Christ alone, not as in the "classical" theory the whole work of the Incarnation, is what saves us. Hence the theory of St. Anselm is not satisfactory; but it has this merit, that it requires the moral position of man to be changed before God,s purpose can be worked out.
The third theory of the Atonement is the theory of penal substitution developed from St. Anselm through St. Thomas Aquinas who confused satisfaction with punishment. The Reformers, particularly Melanchthon and Calvin, taught that Christ,s righteousness was imputed to us and our sin to Him by a kind of legal fiction. Someone had to suffer in order to satisfy the justice of God. Our Lord, though innocent, took upon Himself our sins and our punishment and suffered not merely on our behalf, ßB¥D º:ä<, but instead of us, <JÂ º:ä<. Calvin went so far as to say that at His death He suffered the torment of Hell (Gehenna).2
Wherever the New Testament says that Christ died "for us", the word used is ßB¥D, on behalf of (Rom. 5:6, 14:15; I Cor. 15:3; II Cor. 5:14-15; I Thess. 5:10; I Tim. 2:6), or *4V, because of (I Cor. 8:11), or B,D\ (Acts 20:28). The only places where <J\, instead of, is used are St. Mark 10:45; St. Matt. 20:28. Here, as Swete says,3 the word "instead of" is part of the imagery of ransom. Certainly if Christ had not died, we should have died, but that does not mean that He was a substitute for us. Moreover, it is not even certain that <J\ here means "instead of". In St. Matt. 17:27 it clearly means "on behalf of".
1
F. J. Hall, Dogmatic Theology, v. 7, p. 27.2
Calvin, Institutes, Book 2, xvi. 10.3
H. B. Swete, St. Mark, ad loc.
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Therefore the belief that Christ died as a substitute for us has no Scriptural basis at all.
The belief that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us, though emphasized by the Reformers and by Evangelical theologians ever since and found in the Augsburg Confession, has no Scriptural basis either; for what is imputed or reckoned to us for righteousness, according to Rom. 4, is not Christ,s righteousness but our own faith. Still less are our sins imputed to Him, so that He was punished instead of us. Isa. 53:7-11 cannot mean this.
The justice of God cannot be satisfied by the punishment of the innocent and the escape of the guilty. The belief that this was the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement has driven many to deny that Christ died for us in any sense, and others to repudiate the Christian religion altogether. Legalism is quite out of place in the relations between God and man. It is unfortunate that theologians thinking in Latin have always been inclined to turn theology into a branch of law. The Reformers, by rejecting belief in the visible Church, the perpetual priesthood of Christ, and the Eucharistic sacrifice through which the Church shares in Christ,s continual offering of Himself, made it much harder for their followers to understand the mystery of the Atonement.
The fourth theory of the Atonement was developed by J. McLeod Campbell (1800-72), and R. C. Moberly (1845-1903). They taught that since perfect penitence is required for the removal of sin, and since sinners cannot be perfectly penitent because sin deadens the conscience and the will, Christ, in order to save men, identified Himself so completely with mankind as to become the perfect Penitent. This theory contains the valuable idea that persons are not completely separate, but can penetrate one another. Christ in this way identifies us with Himself. But it has not been accepted by many. It has no Scriptural basis, and the view that the ideal penitent is sinless appears to most people unreal; for penitence is sorrow for one,s own sin which could not exist in Christ.
The fifth theory of the Atonement, if it can be called a theory of the Atonement, is the subjective or exemplarist theory put forward by
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Peter Abelard (1079-1142), and revived by Hastings Rashdall (1858-1924), Dean of Carlisle. Christ, it is said, died not for us but to be an example to us and to increase our love by the contemplation of His sufferings. This is true and important as far as it goes; but if it is regarded as sufficient, it is contrary to fundamental Christian truth for it makes our Lord no more than the greatest of martyrs. He no more died for us than St. Stephen or St. Laurence, and His death did no more to effect our salvation the theirs did. But the belief that Christ died for us has been the very heart of the Gospel ever since the earliest books of the New Testament and is enshrined in the Creed ("who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven"). Rashdall admitted that it was taught by St. Paul, and by the original Apostles before the conversion of St. Paul (I Cor. 15:3), but he held that the Apostles derived this doctrine not from our Lord but from a mistaken interpretation of Isa. 53 (Acts 8:35). He explained away the "ransom for many" (St. Mark 10:45), and he rejected as legendary the walk to Emmaus during which our Lord is said to have given this interpretation (St. Luke 24:27). But a theory which rejects the greater part of the New Testament as fundamentally mistaken cannot be called Christian, and the experience of Christians of all ages and all parties has shown that the Christian religion would not be the Christian religion if it were stripped of the doctrine that Christ died for us. Other theories of the Atonement may be imperfect or unsatisfactory. This one cannot be held by a Christian if he is to remain a Christian. (The opinion that Christ did not die for us, but only as our example, was the subject of perhaps the most serious of the charges brought against Bishop Colenso who was deprived of his bishopric of Natal and excommunicated by the Provincial Synod of the South African Church in 1863.)
The Church has not formally committed herself to any of these theories. The Confession of Augsburg, as we have seen, asserted the imputation of Christ,s merits to us;1 but this doctrine is carefully avoided by the Anglican formularies which are content to say that He "made, by His one oblation of Himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world". The use of the word "satisfaction" seems to imply the theory of St. Anselm, as does the phrase used by the Council of Trent: "He satisfied God for us". But neither the
1
This does not prevent the Bishop of Strängnäs from strongly supporting the "classical" theory which he believes to have been the real teaching of Luther, though others point to passages in Luther,s works in which he takes the same view as Melanchthon.
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Anglican nor the Roman Communion goes farther than this. No theory of the Atonement is completely satisfying; but the "classical" theory of the Greek Fathers appears to be the most firmly based on Scripture and the least open to modern objections. This at any rate is certain, that Scripture and experience alike teach that
"He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood."
English Hymnal, 106; Hymns Ancient and Modern, 332.
Note. The following passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles refer to the Atonement:
Article 2. "One Christ, very God and very Man, who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men."
Article 11. "We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings."
Article 15. "Christ came to be the Lamb without spot, who by sacrifice of Himself once made, should take away the sins of the world."
Article 18. "Holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved."
Article 31. "The offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin, but that alone. Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits."
The word propitiation (Ê8"F:`H) occurs in the New Testament only twice (I St. John 2:2, 4:10), and the similar word Ê8"FJZD4@< once (Rom. 2:25). If we are to understand it, we must go behind the
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Latin and even the Greek to the Hebrew the language in which both St. Paul and St. John thought. It represents the Hebrew "kapper" which means, not to induce one who is angry to relent (which is what we usually mean by propitiation), but to change from outside that which causes anger. Our Lord is the propitiation for our sins (I St. John 2:2) that is, God is angry with us because of our sins, but our Lord takes away our sins so that His Father will be angry with us no more. He does this, as we have seen in the last chapter, by breaking the power of sinful habit (the flesh), sinful association (the world), and sinful control over us (the Devil), and by building up in us, by means of the Holy Ghost, His new and risen life. He changes, not God who does not change and who loves us perfectly in spite of all our sins, but us so that we no longer incur God,s anger but become fit for union with Him.
But all this is not what we commonly mean by propitiation, and it is most unfortunate that this word should have become the recognized translation of Ê8"F:`H. It was commonly taught in the Middle Ages that our Lord,s Death was intended to propitiate God, to offer Him something in compensation for what He had lost through our sin; and the sacrifice of the Mass which became so dominant in popular religion was regarded as a propitiation in this sense, almost such a propitiation as the King of Moab made when he offered his son as a sacrifice to Chemosh to drive away the invaders of his country (II Kings 3:27).
Against such a notion the Reformers were right to protest. But no intelligent Christian today believes that either the death of Christ or the Eucharist is a propitiation in this sense. Unfortunately, many ill-informed people still think that this is what is meant by the Mass. It is this that they reject when they reject the Mass (see, for instance, Bishop E. A. Knox, Sacrament or Sacrifice). The attack upon "the sacrifices of Masses" in Article 31 (see the note at the end of the last chapter) depends on the word "wherefore". Because it is by Christ,s offering only that we are saved and our sins are removed, the idea that we need also to "propitiate" or bribe God by offering the Eucharist in order to obtain redemption is false and dangerous. It is in this sense only that the Anglican Communion rejects "the sacrifices of Masses".
The Council of Trent defined the Eucharist as "a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice". This definition is true if "sacrifice" means offering (not immolation or slaying), and if "propitiatory" means removing the sins of men; for the Eucharist of Mass is the
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means by which the faithful on earth are enabled to share in the perpetual self-offering of our Lord in heaven. But it is very doubtful whether the Council of Trent or its representatives today would accept this interpretation. It is precisely because the Anglican Communion rejects the belief in sacrificing priests in the popular medieval sense, and has carefully removed the references to sacrifice from the Ordinal in order to avoid that sense, that the Papacy says that it refuses to recognize Anglican ordinations (the real reason is probably one of policy rather than of doctrine: see p. 399).
The last chapter contained a summary of several theories of the way in which our Lord by His death and resurrection freed us from the power of sin. But we also have to be freed from the guilt of sin.
"God in Christ hath forgiven you" (Eph. 4:32). The forgiveness of God is not a legal or forensic process. It cannot be understood in terms of justice and reward but only in terms of love. God has forgiven us, and all guilt is wholly wiped away by His pardon. But our repentance is the condition of our pardon, for otherwise pardon would be immoral. Even the Prodigal Son in the parable, whose repentance was superficial, perhaps even pretended (for his reason for returning was that his father,s slaves were well fed, whereas he was living on pigs, food), must be supposed to have been brought to real repentance by his father,s love.1 We cannot, indeed, build our doctrine of forgiveness wholly on this parable which, like most of our Lord,s parables, is meant to illustrate only one point.
The punishment which we have to suffer is not intended to satisfy justice but to reform us. We cannot be freed from our bad habits and desires without pain. This pain, if it is used rightly, will purify us. Experience shows that pain is required for the development of character, especially character that has been marred. And since it is required in this life, it is at least possible that it may be required hereafter. We have not, in most cases, got rid of the "old man" when we die. It is reasonable to suppose that the process will continue after death.
But this opinion (only an opinion, for there is no basis for it in Scripture) is very different from the "Romish doctrine of purgatory" (Article 22), according to which every sin that we commit must receive retribution in this life or the next (see pp. 43840).
1
St. Luke 20:11-24.
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We may close this subject with the consideration of what we see when we look on the crucifix on the figure of the Son of God dying for us.
We see first the love of God for man, which is most completely displayed in the death of God the Son. He loves us not for what we are but simply because He is Love.
Second, we see the righteousness of God, His hatred of sin. He hates it so much that He gave His life to save us from it.
Third, we see more clearly than anywhere else the real nature of sin. The disobedient will comes to hate God. When it was confronted with perfect Goodness, it crucified Him. It was no mere mistake, no "undeveloped form of good", that brought our Lord to His death. It was diabolical hatred, cruelty, and jealousy. We can see it still in the world, indeed ruling over a large part of the world. We can feel it in ourselves if we know ourselves. It was this which our Saviour came to destroy and which we, as His soldiers and servants, are pledged to help Him to destroy.
In the period of the Reformation sharp controversy raged around the mysterious question of predestination and election. We are not now so dogmatic about it, and it may be treated briefly.
Election to the privilege of responsibility for others, or ecclesiastical predestination, is clearly taught by the Bible and by the Church. The Hebrews in the Old Testament were the chosen (elect) people. They were given the privilege of being God,s people, but not for their own merits or for their own advantages only.1 In the New Testament the Christian Church is the chosen people, the new Israel (Phil. 3:3; James 1:1; etc.). The elect are the baptized, as they had been the circumcised; and it is the baptized only who are the elect
1
Jonah 4:11; Zech. 8:23; Mal. 1:11; etc.
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(Rom. 6:3). The language used of Israel in Ex. 19:5, "ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me from among all peoples ... ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation", is applied in Titus 2:14 to the Christian Church, "a people for His own possession", cf. I Peter 2:9: "ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, an holy nation", and Rev. 1:6: "He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father". St. Paul addresses the Roman Christians as "called to be Jesus Christ,s", and the Corinthians as "called to be saints". St. Peter addresses his Epistle to "the elect who are sojourners of the dispersion", and St. Jude to "them that are called". Since the New Testament everywhere assumes that all Christians are baptized, the elect are the same as the baptized.
The Apostolic Fathers also understood the word "elect" in this sense. St. Clement of R