OtALil tH 9LD & H::'^ books 12, MO»flFt£LM, Ch Intcmatbital Cljtnlogxca:! yibrarg. ■ UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF The Eev. CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.Lit., Professor of Tlieological Encijclopa'dia and Symbolics, Union ThMlogical Seminary, New York; The late Rev. STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D., Principal, and Professor of Systematic Theology and NeiB Testament Exegesis, United Free Church College, Aberdeen. This Librari/ is designed to cover tlie whole field of Christian Theology. Each volume is to be complete in itself, ivhile, at the same time, it will form part of a carefully planned wlwle. It is intended to form a Series of Text-Books fvr Students of Theology. The Authors toill be sclwlars of recognised reputation in the several branches of study assigned to them. They will he associated loith each otlier and ivith the Editors in the effort to provide a series of volum.es lohich may adequately represent the pre^nt condition of investigation. Twelve Volumes of the Series are now ready, viz. An latroduction to the Literature of tbe Old Testament. Christian Ethics. Apologetics. History of Christian Doctrine. A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age. Christian Institutions. The Christian Pastor. The Theology of the New Testament. By S. R. Driver, D.D., D.Litt., Regius Professor of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. [Seventh Edition. 12s. By Newman Smyth, D.D., Pastor of the First Congregational Church, New Haven, Conn. [Third Edition. los. 6d. By the late A. B. Bruce, D.D., Professor of New Testament Exegesis, Free Church College, Glasgow. [Third Edition. los. 6d. By G. P. Fisher, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. [Second Edition. 12s. By Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Ph.D., D.D., Professor of Church History, Union Theological Seminary, New York. [12s. By A. y. G. An.EN, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Episcopal Theo- logical School, Cambridge, Mass. [12s. By Washington Gladden, D.D., LL.D , Pastor of Congregational Church, Colum- bus, Ohio. [los. 6d. By George B. Stevens, D.D., LL.D., Pro- fessor of Systematic Theology in Yale University, U.S.A. [12s. C^e Jiiternat'mital C^^olcgkal j^ibram — continued. The Ancient Catbollc Church. Old Testament History. The Theology of the Old Testament. Doctrine of Salvation. By Robert Rainy, D.D., Principal of The New College, Edinburgh. [12s. By H. P. Smith, D.D., Professor of Biblical History, Amherst College, U.S.A. [12s. By the late A. B. Davidson, D.D., LL.D. Edited by the late Principal Salmond, D.D. [i2S. By George B. Stevens, D.D., LL.D., Professor of S)-stematic Theology, Yale University. [12s. Volumes in Preparation :- The Reformation. The Literature of the New Testament Contemporary History of the Old Testa- ment. The Early Latin Church. Canon and Text of the New Testament. Contemporary History of the New Testa- ment. Philosophy of Religion. Later Latin Church. The Christian Preacher. The Greek and Oriental Churches. Biblical Archasology. The History of Religions. Doctrine of God. Doctrine of Man. Canon and Text of the Old Testament. The Life of Christ. Christian Symbolics. Rabbinical Literature. By T. M. Lindsay, D.D., Principal of the United Free College, Glasgow. By James Moffatt, D.D., United Free Church, Dundonald, Scotland. By Francis Brown, D.D., D.Lit., Pro- fessor of Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Union Theological Seminary, New York. By Chari.es Bigg, D.D., Regius Professor of Church Historj-, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. By Caspar Ren^ Gregory, D.D., LL.D., Professor in the University of Leipzig. By Frank C. Porter, Ph.D., Yale Uni- versity, New Haven, Conn. By Robert Flint, D.D., LL.D., Emeritus Professor of Divinity, University of Edin- burgh. By E. \V. Watson, M.A., Professor of Church History, King's College, London. By W. T. Davison, D.D., Tutor in System- atic Theologj', Richmond College, Surrey. By W. F. Adeney, D.D., Principal, Uni- versity of Manchester. By G. Buchanan Gray, D.D., Professor of Hebrew, Mansfield College, Oxford. By George F. Moore, D.D., LL.D., Pro- fessor in Harvard University. By William N. Clarke, D.D., Professor of Systematic Theology, Hamilton Theo- logical Seminary, N.Y. By William P. Paterson, D.D., Pro- fessor of Divinity, Universityof Edinburgh. By F. C. Burkitt, M.A., University Lec- turer on Palaography, Trinity College, Cambridge. By William Sanday, D.D., LL.D., Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. By C. A. Briggs, D.D., D.Lit., Professor of Theological Encyclopsedia and Symbolics, Union Theological Seminary, New York. By S. Schechter, M.A., President of the Jewish Theological Seminary, N.Y. EDINBURGH: T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET. ^be Jnternattonal ZTbeolooical Xibrar^, EDITED BY CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.LiT., Professor of Theological Encyclopcedia and Symbolics, Union Theological Seminary, JVeiv York; The late STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D., Principal, and Professor of Systematic Theology and Neiu Testament Exegesis, United Free Cliurch College, Aberdeen. THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SALVATION. By GEORGE BARKER STEVENS, Ph.D., D.D., LL.D. Printed by Morrison & Oibb Limited, FOR T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH LONDON : 8IMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED. NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. International Theological Library THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SALVATION BY GEORGE BARKER STEVENS Ph.D., D.D., LL.D. DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY IN YALE UNIVER.SITY EDINBURGH T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 1905 TO JULIUS KAFTAN, D.D., PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN AND TO EUGENE MENEGOZ, D.D. DEAN OF THE THEOLOGICAL FACULTY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS I DEDICATE THIS BOOK IX CORDIAL REGARD AND GRATITUDE PREFACE The aim of the present work is to present a biblical, historical, and constructive discussion of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The theme has been regarded and treated primarily as a subject of investigation. I have accordingly approached it from the historical side, and have aimed to state the problems to be considered and to define my positions respecting them in an historical and inductive method. I have tried to judge the various opinions reviewed and to test my own by means of the fundamental Christian concepts of God and of man. The treatment has been made as objective as possible. It has been my aim to describe and estimate conflicting theories with fairness. My own judgments, with the reasons for them, have been frankly given. It is not to be expected, of course, that they will commend them- selves to the acceptance of all readers, but I trust that those who may dissent from them may still find some- thing in the book by which they may be interested or instructed. The present discussion presupposes a general knowl- edge of Biblical Theology and of the History of Christian Doctrine, such as is furnished by the relevant sections of my Tlieology of the New Testament and Professor Fisher's History of Christian Doctrine, earlier volumes of the International Theological Library. Vlll PREFACE I cannot more appropriately indicate my own attitude toward the results which I have reached than by citing the words with which Anselm closes his discussion of the same subject : " Si quid diximus quod corrigendum sit, non renuo correctionem, si rationabiliter fit." GEORGE BARKER STEVENS. Yale University, July 13, 1905. CONTENTS PART I THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE CHAPTER I PAGE The Sacrificial System 1 CHAPTER II The Prophetic Doctrine of Salvation .... 17 CHAPTER III The Teaching of Jesus according to the Synoptic Gospels 35 CHAPTER TV The Pauline Doctrine 54 CHAPTER Y The Doctrine of the Epistle to the HEBRE\ys . . 76 CHAPTER VI The Johannine Doctrine 93 CHAPTER YII Summary and Conclusions Ill PART II THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE CHAPTER I The Commercial Theory of Anselm 136 X CONTENTS CHAPTER II PAGE The Governmental Theory of Grotius .... 157 CHAPTER ni Modern Penal Satisfaction Theories .... 174 CHAPTER IV Modern Ethical Satisfaction or Ethicized Govern- mental Theories 198 CHAPTER V Modern "Subjective" Theories 221 CHAPTER VI Summary and Conclusions 239 PART III CONSTEUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE CHAPTER I The Christian Concept of God 262 CHAPTER II The Personality of the Saviour 287 CHAPTER III The Sin from which Jesus Saves 304 CHAPTER IV The Nature and Ends of Punishment .... 322 CHAPTER V The Forgiveness of Sins 340 CONTENTS XI CHAPTER VI PAGE The Relation of Christ to ^Mankind 357 CHAPTER VH The Relation of Christ to Human Six .... 377 CHAPTER VHI The Necessity of Ciiuist's Death 396 CHAPTER IX The Satisfaction of God in the Work of Christ . . 414 CHAPTER X Eternal Atonement 433 CHAPTER XI Salvation uy Union with Christ 451 CHAPTER XII The Christian Character 470 CHAPTER XIII Salvation and the Kingdom of God ..... 492 CHAPTER XIV Salvation and Human Destiny 509 CHAPTER XV Summary and Conclusions 529 General Index 537 Index of Texts 542 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OP SALVATION PAET I THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE CHAPTER I THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM The historical study of Christian doctrine should begin in the Old Testament. There we must seek the germs of which that teaching is the full development. Accordingly, in undertaking an investigation of the Christian doctrine of salvation, it is necessary, first of all, to glance back at the Jewish religion and seek for the points of contact between it and its fulfilment in the gospel. The New Testament constantly assumes a genetic connection be- tween Judaism and Christianity. Its writers unfold their teachings in terms more or less distinctly Jewish and with frequent reference to the Old Testament thought-world. For our present purpose, two inquiries respecting the Old Testament are especially pertinent. The first con- cerns the religious import of the joriestly, or sacrificial system ; the second relates to the prophetic conception of the nature and conditions of salvation. Legalism and prophetism are the two most prominent features of the Jewish religion. They existed side by side and acted and reacted upon each other. In important respects they were I 1 2 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE rival forces. Both have had their effect in the genesis and development of Christian doctrine. To a considera- tion of the religious import of these two forces the present chapter and the following one will be devoted. It should, however, be made distinctly clear in advance, that the historic connection between the Old and the New Testaments to which I have referred, does not warrant the conclusion that Old Testament ideas, as such, are directly normative for Christian belief. The New Testament does not sustain any such supposition. Christianity is the ful- filment, not the republication, of Judaism. The more systematic writers of the New Testament, such as the apostle Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, insist upon the rudimentary character of the Old Cove- nant, in consequence of which its teaching and practices fall below the Christian plane of moral and spiritual truth. To Christian thought Judaism represents an earlier stage of revelation. It is preparatory and provisional, and there- fore imperfect. It furnished, indeed, the historical basis of Christianity, but the two are not identical, nor is the former an adequate test and measure of the latter. In important particulars they are even radically different. For the apostle Paul the law and the gospel are sharply contrasted terms, and our Lord diverges widely from certain Old Testament maxims and practices in applying his principle of fulfilment. What, then, is the Christian theologian to seek in the Old Testament ? I answer that he is to seek the histori- cal presuppositions of Christian doctrine. Old Testament conceptions will always be suggestive and historically instructive for the study of Christian teaching, but a direct source of such teaching they cannot be.^ Christi- anity rises high above that national and ritualistic religion on whose soil it took its rise. In a study like the present, 1 "The real use of the record of the earliest stages of revelation is not to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth." — W. Robertson Smith, ITie Prophets of Israel, p. 6. I THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 8 then, our inquiry is this : What presumptions concerning the Christian doctrine of salvation are created by the ideas prevailing in the Hebrew religion ? Or, to take a specific topic : To what conceptions of atonement through Christ's death would Jewish ideas of sacrifice naturally lend them- selves ? But any result which we may attain in this field will be of indirect, rather than of direct, value to us. Suppose, for example, that it could be shown that the Jews had a perfectly definite theory of the import of sacrifice. It would not follow that the Christian doctrine of atone- ment could be deduced from it. We should still have to ask : Does the New Testament directly adopt and sanction this Jewish conception ? Does it in no essential respect transcend it, and, if so, does it not in transcending it annul some of its elements ? And we should also be war- ranted in asking the still more fundamental question : To what extent are these Jewish ideas accordant or recon- cilable with the essential principles of the Christian religion which we may derive from the life and teaching of Jesus ? I am well aware that all such considerations make our task vastly more difficult than it is popularly supposed to be, but nothing can be gained by evading difficulties which belong, in the nature of the case, to the historical investigation of the subject. There are two classes of inquiries concerning the sacri- fices which, for our purpose, should be broadly distin- guished. One relates to the origin and original import of Semitic sacrifice in general; the other to the religious meaning and value of the sacrifices for the Jews, who practised them under the developed Levitical system. Within recent years great industry and learning have been devoted to the first class of questions. While these investigations are not without their importance, it cannot be said that they have reached any very clear or definite results. Such problems are involved in the obscurity which always besets inquiries into the origin and motives of rites and customs which are not only ancient, but which probably arose from naive conceptions and undefined feelings of which we possess no clear expression. But 4 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTEINE even if the problems concerning the origin of Semitic sacrifice could be solved, we should not be greatly aided in determining what the sacrifices meant for the Jews in the Levitical period. Such practices as that of sacrifice undergo great modifications of meaning in the course of time and in the developing moral and institutional life of nations. The old dispute as to whether sacrifice was instituted by divine command or arose naturally out of the religious nature and wants of man, is an interesting one from the point of view of historical revelation, but our purpose could not be greatly furthered by any theory concerning it. The practical import of a religious ritual could not be determined by the mode in which it originated, even if known. It is scarcely needful to say that the latter of the two conceptions mentioned is so strongly favored by the history of religion, and by the critical investigation of the Old Testament books as to have become practically universal among modern scholars. In regard to the question. What was the primary motive which prompted the offering of sacrifices ? a considerable variety of opinion prevails. The theory that sacrifices were originally gifts to the divinity has been espoused, for example, by Herbert Spencer and E. B. Tylor among anthropologists and by Hermann Schultz and George F. Moore among theologians. We are reminded that in primitive times men thought of their gods in an anthro- pomorphic way and conceived of them as enjoying gifts of food and drink, after the manner of an earthly chieftain or king. In illustration of this view, reference is made to the offering in the Jewish system of the fruits of the soil, to the thank offerings and covenant sacrifices made in connection with festive or solemn meals, and to the fact that the burning flesh of the sacrificial animal is regarded as a sweet-smelling savor unto Yahweh. Even the expiatory sacrifices are held to have been primarily presents, whereby it was believed that the anger of the Deity was appeased and his favor recovered. ^ 1 C/. Schultz, 0. T. Theol. J. 388. THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM & Others have found in the native tendency of man to worship the motive of sacrifice. In this view, tlie offerings are acts of homage to the Deity, indicative of man's con- sciousness of dependence and desire for obedience. The sacrifices are virtually prayers and, as such, may express a variety of sentiments and aspirations, such as adoration, repentance, and supplication. This theory has been ad- vocated by Karl Bahr, F. D. Maurice, and R. Smend, who traces sacrifice in Israel through these stages : service or worship (2 Sam. xv. 8), eating together, communion, and reparation or atonement for sin. Somewhat akin to this view is the opinion that sacrifices were primarily com- mon meals, of which the divinity partook with his worship- pers. This conception is sometimes so carried out as to denote a mystic sacramental communion between the Deity and men. The theory is thought to be confirmed by the frequent association of sacrifices with sacred feasts, by the widespread idea of the sacredness of animals, and by the phenomena of totemism. It numbers among its advocates some of the most eminent specialists in this field of inquiry, among them Wellhausen, W. Robertson Smith, Tiele, J. G. Frazer, and F. B. Jevons. Albrecht Ritschl advanced a view differing from all the foregoing, to the effect that the sacrifice was conceived of as " cover- ing " or protecting the offerer not from the holy displeas- ure, but from the glory of Yahweh. In this view there underlay the sacrifices the idea that the presence of Yahweh was so terrible that man must perish unless hidden or covered before it (^ef. Gen. xxxii. 30 ; Judg. vi. 22, 23; xiii. 22). Ritschl, accordingly^ denied that the sacrifices have special reference to man's sins ; they relate rather to his weakness and creaturehood. Thus they are conceived as referring rather to the natural attributes of both man and God — the creaturely condition of man and the majesty of God — than to their moral nature and relations.^ Finally, there remains the substitutionary or penal sat- isfaction theory of sacrifice, according to which the animal 1 See Rcchtfertirjung unci Versohnung, II. 201-203. 6 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE is conceived of as taking the place of the sinner and suffer- ing death in his stead. This theory is commonly, though not necessarily, associated with the belief that the sacrifi- cial system was of direct divine appointment. This has long been the popular view in Protestant theology and has been regarded as one of the chief supports of the penal interpretation of the death of Christ. The argument is : As the sacrificial animal suffered a vicarious death for the sinner whom he represented, so Christ endured the penalty due to the sins of those whose place he assumed before the divine law, and, as God was pleased to accept the animal's death in substitution for the death of the sinner, so he looks upon the death of Christ as the equivalent of the sin- ner's punishment whereby the possibility of forgiveness is opened to him. It will be noticed that the argument proceeds on two assumptions, which we shall have to consider later, namely : (1) that the notion of a poena vicaria is the fundamental idea of the sacrificial system, and (2) that this idea and its associations, supposed to underlie the Jewish system of animal sacrifice, are directly available as categories with which to explain the occasion and import of the sufferings and death of Christ. The theory in question may be called the common, or tradi- tional, view of the subject, and is expounded in such earlier treatises on the subject as Fairbairn's Typology and Kurtz's Der alttestamentliche Opfercultus. Some recent writers who cannot be regarded as theologically predis- posed in its favor, have also given it their sanction. ^ Paul 1 Principal A. M. Fairbairn expresses the opinion that the Jewish sacri- fices were propitiatoiy, but that it does not follow that the sacritice of Christ had that character: "In the Levitical, as in other religious systems, the sacrifice was offered to please God, to win his favor, to propitiate him by the surrender of some object precious to man. But in the Christian system this standpoint is transcended ; the initiative lies with God. Whatever the death of Christ may signify, it does not mean an expedient for quenching the wrath of God, or for buying off man from his vengeance. This was a great gain for religion." — TTie Philosophy of the Christian Beligion, p. 500. Whether this view of Jewish sacrifice, which seems to place it on a level with the propitiatory offerings of heathen religions, is warranted, will be considered as we proceed. If correct, it is certainly a welcome assurance that it has been discarded by Christianity. THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 7 Volz defends it in the Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentUche Wissenschaft for 1901, and H. J. Holtzmann, though hold- ing that the idea of substitution was originally foreign to the ritual, declares that in the popular thought, especially in the late Jewish period, " everything pressed toward the assumption that the offering of a life, substituted for sinners according to God's appointment, cancelled the death penalty which they had incurred, and that conse- quently the offered blood of the sacrificial victims expiated sin as a surrogate for the life of the guilty." ^ Many plausible considerations are urged in favor of each of these theories, and yet no one of them seems entirely adequate. The probability is that the origin and motives of sacrifice are not so simple as any one theory in regard to them would imply. Religion is a complex affair, and various motives are operative in the develop- ment of its beliefs and practices. Moreover, these motives, though distinguishable, are more or less closely akin to each other. Let us assume for the moment the correct- ness of the simplest theory of sacrifice, the gift theory. But the idea of a present to the Deity is itself an act of homage or worship. The gift of what has value for the giver is made in recognition of the superior rights or claims of the divinity. And this idea of homage, in turn, would naturally deepen into the feeling of fellowship or communion. If the offered gift is regarded as sacred ; if, for example, the idea obtains that there is some mysterious connection between the life of the divinity and the life or blood of the animal, then the conviction will naturally arise that in offering the animal in sacrifice the worshipper enters into communion with the Power whom he would honor. Then, again, when the sense of sin is deepened in men ; when the conception of the divine holiness arises and man appreciates the moral separation between liimself and the Deit}^ it will then be natural that sacrifice should assume a more distinct reference to sin. It will become the means whereby sin is confessed and reconciliation with the offended divinity sought. Thus it would naturally 1 Neutest. Theol. I. 68. 8 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OP THE DOCTRINE happen that gifts which in a more naive religious condi- tion were merely presents, should come to be regarded as the means of a mystic communion or even as a cover or protection from the displeasure felt by the Deity toward the sins of his worshippers. The phenomena of the developed sacrificial system in Judaism seem to sustain some such general view as this. Different offerings are seen to reflect differing moods and motives in the worshipper. In more primitive times we find the peace offering associated with the sacrificial feast, expressive of gladness and rejoicing, while the burnt offer- ing is associated with occasions of solemnity, awe, and fear. In the developed Levitical system we have, for example,^ the sacrifices of worship, such as the burnt offering expres- sive of the people's reverence for Yahweh ; the thank offer- ings presented on special festive occasions as expressions of gratitude to God, and the sin and guilt offermgs whose special object is to express the sense of sin and to obtain reconciliation with God. Now, even if it were possible by psychological analysis or historic research to trace these various forms of sacri- fice back to a common original motive, the result would not greatly aid us in our present purpose. The actual working system of sacrifice in Judaism was complex. It was many-sided, like the religious life out of which it sprang. It expressed, in its various parts, gratitude, rejoicing, fellowship, penitence. So far as it influenced primitive Christian thought and supplied the categories for its expression, it would naturally emphasize no one single element of religious experience, but rather that whole range of emotions and convictions of which it was the ceremonial expression. We shall see that this general view of the case is warranted by the testimony of the New Testament in which we find those various illustrative uses made of sacrificial ideas wliich the many- sided system of offerings would lead us to anticipate. One question requires a more particular consideration : Was the sacrificial victim's life regarded as taking the place 1 1 follow here the classification of Schultz, O. T. Theol. I. 370 sq. THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 9 of the offerer's life? Was the animal conceived of as a penal substitute for the sinner? As has been already indicated, this view has been widely held among scholars and is, of course, the popular assumption regarding the meaning of sacrifice. Let us review the arguments which are advanced in its support. The main reliance for the theory is placed upon the description in Lev. xvi. of the ceremony of sending away the scapegoat into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement. There we read : " And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, even all their sins ; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a man that is in readiness into the wilderness ; and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a solitary land ; and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness" (yv. 21, 22). It is further stated that he who thus dismisses the goat in the wilderness incurs defilement and must wash his clothes and bathe his flesh before he returns to the camp (y. 26). Now, it is argued, we have here the most distinct state- ment that the sins of the people are put by the priest upon the head of this victim for Azazel and by him borne away into the desert. In the same connection (y. 28) we are told that a similar defilement was contracted by him who burned the flesh of the sin offerings. The inference is that this contamination was due to the fact that these victims were regarded as laden with the people's guilt, and their death conceived as a substitute for the people's penalty. An argument closely related to the foregoing is derived from the supposed import of the laying on of hands upon sacrificial victims. It is repeatedly enjoined in the Le- vitical ritual that in the making of private offerings the offerer shall place his hands upon the head of his obla- tion (Lev. iii. 2, 8, 13 ; iv. 4), and in case of certain sin offerings on belialf of the whole congregation, that "the elders of the congregation shall lay their hands upon the head of the bullock before the Lord " (Lev. iv. 15). In other instances this ceremony is performed, 10 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE as in the case of the scapegoat, by the priests (Lev. viii. 14). The theory in question regards it as self- evident or, at any rate, as well established, that the laying on of hands implies, in such cases, the substitu- tion of the victim for the sinner and directly denotes the imposition of the offerer's sins and the transfer of his guilt. Thus the animal's death would replace the sinner's punishment. His sin is punished vicariously and its penalty is therefore remitted. Further, it is contended that the natural import of the whole ritual is substitutionary. The slaughter of a pure victim on whose head the owner places his hands ; the sprinkling of the blood on the altar by the priest ; the con- sumption of the victim's flesh by fire — what can this so naturally mean — what, indeed, can it mean at all, except the substitution of the animal's death for the offerer's punishment, whereby he is, either symbolically or really, freed from the penalty of his sins? In this interpretation of the import of sacrifice we find the elements of the penal substitution theory of the death of Christ. One has but to transfer this explanation, mutatis mutandis^ to the problem of the saving value of Christ's sufferings and death and carry out its logical implications, in order to construct the theory in detail. From this Old Testament source that theory always de- rived plausible support, especially in the popular mind. The categories of the theory in question naturally lend themselves to the development of a theory of salvation by substitute through a system of equivalences and imputa- tions. The explanation is clear, striking, and realistic. There is nothing vague, nothing mysterious about it. As the sacrificial animal died in place of the sinner, so Christ's death was the penal equivalent and substitute of the eternal death which our sins deserved, and having been thus endured by him vicariously, need not be again en- dured by us; whence arises the possibility of our for- giveness. I am only concerned here to point out three things : So far as this argument derives confirmation from the sacrificial ritual, it assumes (1) the indisputable cor- THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 11 rectness of the substitutionary interpretation ; (2) the appropriation by Christ himself and the apostolic Church of this conception and its corollaries in their application to his death ; and (3) the entire legitimacy of transferring over the ideas underlying a system of animal sacrifice to the interpretation of Christ's saving work. These points we must carefully keep in mind as we proceed. With regard to the first point it must be noted that a decided and increasing majority of specialists in the study of the subject would greatly modify or entirely deny the theory of the substitutionary import of Jewish sacrifice. Some of the difficulties which it encounters are as follows : (1) The ceremonies connected with the sending of the scapegoat into the wilderness prove nothing concerning the import of sacrifice. The flesh of this goat was not burned ; atonement was not made by its blood ; it was not a sacrifice at all. The origin and meaning of the goat "for Azazel" are indeed obscure. Azazel, who is not mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament,^ appears to have been conceived as a demon-prince who inhabited the desert, and the ceremony of delivering over to him the goat, laden with the sins of the people, was probably a realistic way of representing their sins as now borne away to the evil spirit to whom they belonged. The Levitical ritual thus preserves, probably, an earlier, popular be- lief to which there are many analogies among primitive peoples. " The carrying away of the people's guilt to an isolated and desert region has its nearest analogies, not in ordinary atoning sacrifices, but in those physical methods of getting rid of an infectious taboo which characterize the lowest forms of superstition. The same form of dis- infection recurs in the Levitical legislation, where a live bird is made to fly away with the contagion of leprosy (Lev. xi'v. 7, 53).'' 2 We turn, next, to the rite of the laying on of hands. Outside the sacrificial ritual we meet with several uses of 1 lie appears in The Book of Enoch, ch. x., as the leader of the evil angels who formed unions with the daughters of men (c/. Gen. vi. 2-4). 2 VV. R. Smith, Beligion of the Somites, p. 422. 12 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE this ceremony. It is a symbol of blessing when Jacob places his hands upon the heads of his sons (Gen. xlviii. 14). The witnesses laid their hands upon those whom they had heard to blaspheme, apparently in solemn attes- tation of their testimony (Lev. xxiv. 14). The Levites were set apart to priestly functions by the imposition of hands (Num. viii. 10), and by the same rite Moses set ajpart Joshua as his successor (Num. xxvii. 18, 23 ; Deut. xxxiv. 9). Now the general idea underlying this cere- mony can hardly be doubtful ; it is that of benediction or dedication. What the precise idea is in case of the wit- nesses is not quite clear. The act may denote the devo- tion of the accused to the death penalty, or serve to identify the witnesses as those who are responsible for the accusation. But what is of principal importance to be noted is that, so far as the act symbolizes impartation, it is the impartation of good; no instances are found in which any evil, such as guilt or a curse, is conceived to be transferred to any person by the laying on of hands. The presumption, therefore, is that such is not the case in the sacrificial ritual. But there is no intimation in connec- tion with any sacrifice that the offerer's guilt is regarded as transferred to the animal. Were that the case it would seem that the victim's flesh would be unclean ; on the con- trary, it is " most holy " (Lev. x. 17) and is eaten by the priest. The probability, therefore, is that the laying on of hands does not denote, in the case of the sacrifices, the transfer of guilt, but some other idea, such as the devotion of the victim to God or the worshipper's acknowledgment of it as his own.^ The substitutionary theory encounters a further difRculty in the fact that offerings were not accepted in atonement 1 " In ordinary burnt-offerings and sin-offerings the imposition of hands is not oflBcially interpreted by the Law as a transference of sin to the victim, but rather has the same sense as in acts of blessing or conse- cration (Gen. xlviii. 14 ; Num. viii. 10; Deut. xxxiv. 9), where the idea, no doubt, is that the physical contact between the parties serves to identify them, but not specially to transfer guilt from the one to the other." "W. R. Smith, op. cit., p. 423. Similarly, Schultz says that "by the laying on of the hand sin is not transferred to the victim," but by THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 13 for sins meriting death (Num. xv. 30), whereas this would be most natural if the system contemplated the substitution of the victim's death for that of the offerer. In this case also it would seem necessary that the animal should be slain by the priest or God's representative and not, as he was, by the owner. Moreover, we find that all the offerings atone — the gift of fine flour (the offering of the poor), as well as the animal sacrifice (Lev. v. 11-13). How could such be the case if the notion of a death substituted were the underlying idea of the sin offering ? It may be pointed out, further, that the penal interpreta- tion of the laying on of hands finds no parallel in the case of Christ since no hands were laid on him. Why, then, we are led to ask, has the theory of penal substitution been so widely accepted ? Why has it been so generally regarded as embodying the natural and obvi- ous meaning of the sin offerings ? We must answer that this conception furnishes a groove into which religious reflection may easily slip and thereafter run smoothly with no sense of the vagueness and perplexity which attach to more subjective and mystical interpretations. The later Judaism furnishes us the classical example of the applica- tion to sacrifice of those physical and mechanical catego- ries with which was built up the Pharisaic system of satisfactions, imputations, and merit-treasuries. It is an illustration of the externalizing of religious conceptions and of their translation into terms of mathematical equiv- alence and pecuniary debit and credit. To this process of externalizing the whole Jewish system of sacrifice was subjected by talmudic reflection. To assign precise dates to the beginning or completion of this process of thought this act "the sacrificer dedicates each victim, as his own property, to some higher object." — 0. T. Tlieol. I. 391. DlUmann writes : "Die Hand- auflegung kommt bei alien Opfern vor und will nicht die Siinden iiber- tragen auf das Tier (wie Lev. xvi. 21 beim Asaselbock), sondern nur die Intention des Opfernden, hier das Siihneverlangen, mitgeben." Alttest. llieoL, p. 408. " The theory that the victim's life is put in the place of the owner's is nowhere hinted at." G. F. Moore, Art. Sacri- fice in Encycl. Bibh Cf. J. C. Matthes, Zeitschr. fur d. alttest. Wis- sensch., 1903. 14 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTKINE is, of course, impossible. Some think that it had attained a considerable development while the temple was still stand- ing and that traces of it are even visible in the Priestly Code,^ while others hold that, so far as the Old Testament is concerned, the idea of a poena vicaria is a pure importa- tion.2 But, whenever the penal substitution theory arose, it is quite certain that it was foreign to the original mean- ing of the sacrifices. It is a late theory of their signifi- cance, the product of Pharisaic scholasticism, and is without attestation in the Old Testament itself. The utmost that can be granted to the theory in question would be to ad- mit the opinion of Holtzmann that, while tlie penal in- terpretation of sacrifice is historically unwarranted, it was, nevertheless, popularly entertained Avithin the Old Testa- ment period,^ or the judgment of Dillmann that the ritual did contemplate a substitution, not indeed a substitution in kind, but the gracious substitution for the penalty of something (the Kopher, \vrpov, blood of the offering) which was not itself penal or sin-bearing.* We must con- clude, therefore, that whatever may have been the popular interpretation of Jewish sacrifice, neither its original nor its intended and prevailing meaning was penal or substi- tutionary. What, then, did it mean ? What was the object of the sin offerings if not penal satisfaction? It must be ad- mitted that no answer has ever been given which is so 1 So Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. I. 6G. 2 So G. F. Moore, Art. Sacrifice in Encycl. Bihl. ; cf. Smend, Alttest. Beligionsgeschichte, p. 128: *'Es ist zweifelhaft ob die Israeliten stellvertretende Hinrichtuug kannten." Professor A. B. Davidson writes : "Tlie traditional explanation (tliat the life given atones for sin) has been that the death of the victim was a poena vicaria for the sin of the offerer. And it is probable that this idea did become attached to sacrifice. It is questionable, however, when other things are considered, if it be found in the law." After summarizing the reasons to the con- trary, which are, briefly : (1) that sacrifices were gifts, (2) that they were offered for sins of inadvertency, and (3) that they were offered mainly for a people already in covenant fellowship with God, Dr. Davidson con- cludes: "It does not appear probable that the death of the victim was regarded by the law as a penalty, death being the highest possible pen- alty." Theol. of O. T., p. 353. 3 Op. cit. I. 68. * Op. cit., pp. 468, 469. THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 15 simple and clear as that of the popular, late Jewish theory. But the simplicity of an explanation does not necessarily commend it. That quality may be due to the superficial- ity or coarseness of the theory. The difficulty of propos- ing a perfectly definite answer to the question arises from the uncertainty as to what was the primary and dominant motive of sacrifice, and from the evident complexity of the ideas associated with it. We can here hardly do more than indicate certain conclusions which modern research seems to warrant : (1) The original and prevailing idea of sacrifice was probably that of a gift — a gift for the divinity to eat or drink or smell, or a gift to be eaten by him and his worshippers in common. With the develop- ment of the religious consciousness this gift-idea would naturally expand into the expression of such sentiments as gratitude, homage, and fellowship. ^ (2) A series of mys- tical ideas attached themselves to the blood. This element was conceived to be the seat of life and, as such, was sacred and possessed of a mystical power. From this idea would easily arise the conviction that God has given to man this sacred gift as the means whereby he should approach him in worship and penitence, and which God should accept as a covering for his sins.^ (3) It is probable that the idea of the solidarity of the tribe or race, which was so strong in Semitic antiquity, had its part in the development of the sacrificial system. The sins of parents were regarded as entailed upon children. Yahweh's suffering Servant might make reparation for the sins of his fellows. On the analogy of these ideas the sacred animal might be con- ceived as representing the life of the community, which is given up to God in consecration or (as in the later and popular conception) in penal suffering. (4) In the Levit- ical Code the sacrificial system has a special connection with the confession and forgiveness of sin. There can be 1 "Freude war der Grundzug des althebraischen Cultus," Smend, op. ciL, p. 125. 2 For an elaborate description of the mystic meanings and uses of blood in Semitic antiquity, see Dr. H. C. Trumbull's books, The Blood Covenant and TJie Threshold Covenant. 16 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTBINE no doubt that certain offerings were particularly designed to emphasize the reality and guilt of sin and to keep alive in the people the sense of God's displeasure toward it. If these offerings did not appease God by affording penal satisfaction, they did express contrition and were regarded as the divinely appointed means whereby sin's heinousness should be confessed and attested. (5) It is clear, however, that the Levitical Code assumes that God is not hostile to man or indisposed to forgive, but that, of his own accord, he approaches the sinner in mercy, and himself provides the ways and means of reconciliation. Here is the radical difference between the heathen and the biblical conceptions of sacrifice. Whatever the sacrifices may have been conceived to accomplish, and in whatever way they may have been regarded as operating, it is evident that they assume the antecedent graciousness of God, who, though prescrib- ing conditions, offers a free forgiveness. (6) The substitu- tion which was involved in the sacrifices was of the nature of a scenic or symbolic representation rather than of a strict literal or penal character. It is the gracious substi- tution of one way of accepting the sinner for another. In place of his actual obedience (that is, despite his sin) God accepts him in his offering which expresses his intention of obedience and his yearning for salvation. It thus appears that the Priestly Code, though having many out- ward features in common with heathen sacrificial systems and differing in its emphasis widely from the prophetic teaching, is not wanting in ethical elements. Its outward ritual, though exposed to great misconception and misuse, is the pictorial expression of truths concerning God and man and sin, which are fundamental to the Christian doc- trine of salvation. How this ritual stood related to the doctrine of the prophets and how far it supplied materials for early Christian teaching we have next to consider. ^ 1 For detailed information concerning the sacrifices I would refer the reader to the very thorough article Sacrifice by Professor W. P. Paterson in Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible, to which I acknowledge my indebtedness. The development of the sacrificial system in Israel is traced in a clear and masterly manner by Professor Smend in his Alttest. Seligionsgeschichte, § 9. CHAPTER II THE rROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION In passing from the Levitical ritual to the teaching of the prophets we enter a new workl. The former gives the impression that the cultus is the chief vehicle of God's grace to man, especially that forgiveness is mediated solely through sacrifice. The writer of Hebrews did not overstate the case in saying that "under the law almost everything was purified with blood ; and unless blood was shed, no forgiveness was to be obtained." ^ The prophets recognize no such necessity. They never imply, or even admit, that the divine favor or forgive- ness is inseparably linked with sacrifice or any other ceremony. " Ritual has no place in the prophetic teach- ing ; that which is moral alone has any meaning." ^ Indeed, we meet in the prophets with sharp criticism of the sacrifices as practised at the time. Speaking on be- half of Yahweh, Hosea exclaims, " I desire mercy, and not sacrifice ; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings " (Hos. vi. 6). Amos is more vehe- ment : " I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them ; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts" (Amos v. 21, 22). The word of Yahweh by Isaiah is to the same effect : " To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? I delight not in the blood of bullocks, and of lambs, and of he-goats " (Is. i. 11) ; and echoes of these thoughts are found in other prophets and in poets who 1 Ileb. ix. 22. Twentieth Century New Testament. 2 A. B. Davidson, Art. Prophecy in Hastings's D. B. 2 17 18 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OP THE DOCTRINE share the prophetic spirit. ^ What, then, was the pro- phetic estimate of sacrifice? It would be an exaggera- tion to say that the prophets condemned the institution of sacrifice in general. In many expressions they assumed its legitimacy. The question is commonly answered by saying that they regarded sacrifice, if un- accompanied by a righteous life, as an abomination to Yahweh. Dr. Davidson calls in question the correct- ness of this answer and defines their position thus : that sacrifice as a substitute for a righteous life is an abomina- tion .^ This may be the more accurate statement, but it is difficult to see how the practice of sacrifice apart from righteousness could fail to result in the substitution of sacrifice for righteousness. "When the ritual is formal and unreal, it inevitably usurps the place of reality in worship. But in any case two points cannot be doubt- ful : (1) that the prophets inveighed against the exag- gerated importance of ritual, declaring that sacrifice, for example, was of small value in comparison with sincerity, uprightness, and obedience, and from this position it must follow, (2) that they could not have regarded the sacrifices as essential accompaniments of repentance or necessary media of forgiveness. They place no emphasis upon them. To the question, What does Yahweh require of man? they answer in the spirit of Micah's reply, "To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God" (Mi. vi. 8). In the view of many, the prophets did not regard sacrifice as one of the primitive, divinely established institutions of Israel. There are passages (Jer. vii. 22 ; Amos v. 25) which seem to declare that " in the wilderness God prescribed no ritual to Israel."^ But if these passages do not in- tend to make so sweeping an assertion, they cannot mean less than to affirm the relative unimportance of sacrificial rites. We shall best approach the prophetic doctrine by rais- 1 E.g. 1 Sam. xv. 22 ; Jer. vii. 22, 23 ; Mi. vi. 6-8 ; Ps. xl. 6 ; li. 16. 2 2). B. IV. 119. 8 G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, 1. 171. THE PROPHETIC DOCTEINE OF SALVATION 19 ing the question as to the nature of salvation. Salvation from what? We must remember that in the Old Testa- ment the idea of salvation was the subject of a long development, and is therefore many-sided. The typical case of salvation in early Israel was the deliverance of the nation from bondage in Egypt. Echoes of this idea of salvation are heard throughout their whole history. Sal- vation is deliverance from perils, victory over enemies, the achievement of security and prosperity .^ This conception of salvation has two characteristic notes ; the deliverance is primarily (1) external and (2) national. Let us now observe the influence of the prophetic spirit upon this idea. The material and national aspects of salvation are still prominent in the prophets. When the figure of Messiah emerges into view, he Avears the appearance of a national Deliverer. He is a kind of second David, a King who shall reign and prosper and execute justice in the earth, in whose days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely (Jer. xxiii. 5, 6). Another prophet had de- scribed the glorious coming age as a time of deliverance from enemies, a period of happiness and prosperity under a wise and just government (Amos ix. 11-15). Especially did the experiences of the exile sharpen this conception and quicken the hope of national salvation. This hope finds classic expression in Jeremiah, " Fear not thou, O Jacob my servant, neither be dismayed, O Israel : for lo ! I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from the land of their captivity; and Jacob shall return and be quiet and at ease, and none shall make him afraid" (Jer. xlvi. 27). In like manner Ezekiel depicts the salvation of the scattered flock of Israel when Yahweh shall set up one shepherd over them who shall feed them, even his servant David (Ezek. xxxiv. 22, 23), and Zechariah's message takes a similar form, " Thus saith the Lord of hosts : Behold, I will save my people from the east country and the west country: and I will bring them, and they shall dwell in the midst of Jerusalem ; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God, in truth and in righteousness " (Zech. 1 Cf. Deut. XX. 2-4 ; 1 Sam. iv. 3 ; x. 19 ; Ps. cvi. 4, 5. 20 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE viii. 7, 8). The blessedness of this happy time when Yahweh shall accomplish the salvation of the nation was one of the favorite themes of poets. Viewed in anticipa- tion it inspired the prayer : " Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from among the nations " (Ps. cvi. 47) ; viewed from the standpoint of its accomplishment, it prompted the song, "Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid : for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and song ; and he is become my salvation " (Is. xii. 2). But it will be readily seen that this national salvation is not a mere political deliverance. Not in freedom and prosperity alone shall the people dwell, but in truth and righteousness. Ethical and spiritual conditions are prom- inent characteristics of the Messianic era. The coming King shall be a just judge, as well as a tender shepherd (Is. xi. 4). He shall right the wrongs of earth not only by binding up the brokenhearted and proclaiming liberty to the captives, but by announcing the day of vengeance of our God (Is. Ixi. 1, 2). But perhaps the most striking expression of the moral character of the promised salva- tion is found in Jeremiah's oracle of the New Covenant where we are told that the law of that happy era is to be the inner law of free obedience : " I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it ; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people " (Jer. xxxi. 33). It is clear that notwithstanding the promi- nence given to external features, such as outward pros- perity and peace, the salvation of the nation and real moral righteousness go hand in hand.^ What, now, was the nature of that righteousness which accompanied salvation and gave to it its deeper meaning ? Formally considered, righteousness in the Old Testament is a forensic conception. To be righteous is to be " in the right," as in a controversy or a suit at law.^ But this 1 See Professor William Adams Brown's article Salvation in Hast- ings's D. B. To this admirable article I am much indebted. 2 See W. R. Smith, The Prophets of Israel, pp. 71, 72, and J. Skinner, Art. Highteousness in 0. T. in Hastings's D. B. THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 21 definition does not greatly aid us in determining the actual content of the term. To say that righteousness in men is accord with the Avill of God who is alw^ays " in the right," does not help us to any real explanation. We need to know something of the contents of Yahweh's sovereign will, and something of its relation to his moral cliaracter before righteousness will mean anything tangi- ble. With what moral ideas, we ask, did the prophets clothe this conception of Yahweh's rightness, and what do these ideas involve for human conduct and character ? We must answer, first of all, that they conceived the will of God as stable and consistent, incapable of being moved from the strict line of rectitude by fickle passions on his own part or by appeals or entreaties on the part of his worshippers. In other words, they based the purposes of God in his ethical nature, and conceived of his righteous- ness as the perfect harmony of his will with that nature. In this way the term " righteousness " as applied to God acquired a distinctly moral character. Righteousness in men is conformity to the will of God, or, what is the same thing, likeness to him in character. But the thoughts of the prophets are never presented in abstract form. What concrete acts and qualities consti- tuted for them true righteousness ? We shall see that they were such as could not be determined by legal rules or traditional customs. The prophets appealed to the moral sense, and measured matters of right and wrong by tests which were purely ethical. God's righteousness is seen, for example, in his absolutely equitable dealings with men, and the righteousness of the nation consists, in part, in a correspondingly correct administration of justice. A righteous government will "relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow" (Is. i. 17). Simi- larly, God's righteousness is seen not only in executing judgment upon sin, but in saving his people and in blessing the penitent. He is "a just God and a Saviour" (Is. xlv. 21). In like manner righteousness in men will require not only that they shall "do justice," but that they shall "love mercy" (Mi. vi. 8). "The Old Testa- 22 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE ment writers know nothing of the sharp contrast often drawn by theologians between the righteousness and the mercy of God."^ To the same effect Dr. Davidson writes: " God is righteous in forgiving the penitent : ' Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, tliou God of my salvation ; and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness ' (Ps. li. 14). There is no antithesis between righteousness and grace. The exercise of grace, goodness, forgiveness, may be called righteousness in God. Thus : ' Answer me in thy faithfulness and in thy righteousness, and enter not into judgment with thy servant ; for in thy sight shall no man living be found righteous ' (Ps. cxliii. 1). Here right- eousness is opposed to entering into judgment, i.e. to the very thing which technically and dogmatically is called righteousness." ^ Without pursuing the subject further it is evident that the prophetic conception of that righteous- ness in which and to which the nation is to be saved has a strongly ethical cast. It stands in contrast to all such sins as partiality, cruelty, and oppression. It is a broad conception. It is, at once, uprightness and equitable- ness ; hostility to the wrongs and defence of the rights of man ; it is, in a word, a due regard for all the interests of mankind, a moral kinship to him who exercises and delights in lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth (Jer. ix. 24). While, therefore, we must recognize the external and political features of the con- ception of salvation even in the prophets, we must also recognize the deepening and ethicizing which the concep- tion experienced at their hands. In the classic period of prophecy the conception of Israel's salvation was dominated by the Messianic idea in its various forms. The conception varied in breadth and spirituality according as the coming One was conceived as an ideal King, or a moral Hero, or was foreshadowed as a suffering Servant of God. But in their highest flights of inspiration the great prophets catch glimpses not only of a universal peace, but of a world-wide worship and ser- 1 Skinner, D. B. IV. 280. 2 The Theology of the Old Testament, p. 134. THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 23 vice of Yaliweli. " The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose " (Is. xxxv. 1). The voice of weeping shall no more be heard, and darkness and gloom shall be banished from the world (Is. Ixv. 19 ; Ix. 19, 20). The knowl- edge of Yahweh shall no more be confined to Israel, but shall fill the earth (Jer. xxxi. 34; Hab. ii. 14). Egypt and Assyria shall be worshippers with Israel of the one true God (Is. xix. 24, 25). God shall make the faithful remnant not only a means of restoring the nation but also a light to the Gentiles, the medium of his salvation to the ends of the earth (Is. xlix. 6). Here the prophetic idea of the purpose of Israel's elec- tion comes clearly into view. Why, of all the families of the earth, had Yahweh known only Israel ? (Amos iii. 2.) Hosea answers that the choice w^as an act of love (Hos. xi. 1). Love to whom ? Was it love to Israel alone ? Is the love of Yahweh narrow and partial ? Is he a respecter of persons ? The prophets' answer to this question is founded on their conception of Yahweh's universal sway. The God of the whole earth cannot love Israel alone, and cannot have chosen him for his own sake alone. If Israel is chosen to privilege, he is chosen, much more, to service. If he is chosen to be the favorite of heaven, he is made such only that he may be the dispenser of blessing to mankind. His election does not mean a monopoly of the divine favor ; it means rather appointment to a world-historical mission. God has set his love upon the nation in order that he might make it the vehicle of conveying the knowledge of his saving grace to mankind. " Israel is elect for the sake of the non-elect." ^ This enlargement and deepening of the conception of salvation, on the one hand, and the nation's experience of misfortune, disappointment, and suffering on the other, doubtless account for the tendency to remand the realiza- tion of the Messianic blessedness to a new world-age with changed conditions. The conception of a new heaven and a new earth (Is. Ixv. 17; Ixvi. 22), a renovated 1 Cf. Bruce, A2:)oIor/etics, Bk, II. cli, iii. 24 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE nature in the era of redemption, can hardly have been purely figurative for the prophet's mind. It reappears in a highly realistic form in Paul's picture of tlie Messi- anic time (Rom. viii. 21, 22), As this distinction between the present and the coming age was sharpened, it became the basis of the wide separation which was made in tlie apocalyptic books and in the popular thought of later Ju- daism, between the present period of suffering and expect- ancy and the glorious coming era of victory and peace which the Messiah shall inaugurate. In early Christian thought, in turn, this same sharp contrast was applied to the distinction between " this present evil age " (Gal. i. 4) and the happy time which shall follow Christ's parousia. Echoes of this late prophetic conception of the Messianic era as radically different from the present, are heard in the eschatological passages of the New Testament, such as the Pauline apocalypse (2 Thess. ii. 1-12), and in the popu- lar language of religion which still refers salvation to a future world. Let us turn now from these more general considerations to those elements of prophetic teaching which are more closely akin to Christian doctrine. One of these is the conception of individual salvation. The frustration of the national hopes consequent upon the exile tended to draw attention away from the people as a whole and to awaken interest in the individual. This growing individualism was accompanied by a stronger sense of personal responsi- bility. Under its influence men shall not say : " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But every man shall die for his own in- iquity ; every man that eateth the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge" (Jer. xxxi. 29, 30). This same proverb is cited and refuted by Ezekiel (xviii. 2) to whom Yahweh's word came saying, " Behold, all souls are mine ; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine ; the soul that sinneth, it shall die " (Ezek. xviii. 4). This whole chapter is devoted to disproving the idea of hereditary sin and to enforcing the truth of individual re- sponsibility to God. " The son shall not bear the iniquity THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 25 of the father, neitlier shall the father bear the iniquity of the son ; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him" (Ezek. xviii. 20). One of the most important religious consequences of this increased sense of the responsibility and worth of the individual was the strengthening of the idea of personal immortality. The Old Testament, taken as a whole, illus- trates a surprising indifference to the question of a life beyond the grave. Except by somewhat precarious in- ferences from the stories of Enoch and Elijah, we obtain no intimation of personal immortality in the historical books. All interest centres on the prosperity and per- petuity of the tribe or the nation. The same silence per- vades the writings of the prophets. We meet with the most fervid descriptions of God's faithfulness to his people and with the most glowing pictures of the nation's future ; but of personal immortality beyond death there is not one clear word.^ In the Psalms and Wisdom books the out- look into the future, for the individual, is little, if any, clearer. Now and again the poets of Israel strike a strain of hope and sing of God's power over death and Sheol,^ but the triumphant strain is soon lost in uncertainty and sad- ness.^ The faith expressed in passages like Ps. xvi. 10 and xvii. 15 is not sustained. The glimpse which Job has of his vindication in another life (Job xix. 25-27) is mo- mentary, and he quickly turns back to seek a solution of 1 The resurrection and bestowment of life described in Hosea (vi. 1-3 ; xiii. 14) and Ezekiel (ch. xxxvii) quite obviously refer to the recovery of the nation from disaster. Two passages in Isaiah appear to refer to a future life : "He hath swallowed up death forever" (xxv. 8), and " Thy dead shall live ; my dead bodies (i.e. the departed members of the nation) shall arise" (xxvi, 19). But the critical difficulties surrounding these passages are great. The whole section, chs. xxiv-xxvii, is very late. Duhni regards the first passage cited as a " Kandbemerkung eines Les- ers" (Comni. in loco). But, in any case, it is questionable whether it carries us beyond the idea of exemption from death in the Messianic age ; while the second passage is still dominated by the idea of national salvation. The prediction (or wish) seems to mean that the members of the nation who shall have died before the consummation shall be recov- ered from Sheol to participate in tha promised blessedness. 2 E.g. Ps. xlix. 15 ; Ixxiii. 23-26, 3 See Ps. vi. 5 ; cxv. 17. 26 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRIXE his problem here in this world. It is only in the late Book of Daniel that we meet the culmination of the devel- oping individualism which we have been tracing. Here, at last, we find the explicit assertion of that conviction which the truths of God's boundless sway and infinite love seem to us so obviously to require — the conviction of a resurrection to a life of rewards and punishments in the coming age (Dan. xii. 2, 3). How is this eclipse of the belief in personal immortality to be explained ? And what is the secret of its final emergence? While neither question can be adequately answered in a single word, I cannot doubt that the over- shadowing importance which was attached to the national life and the national salvation tended powerfully to retard the development of this belief. And when, at length, largely through tlie work of the prophets, the religious value of the individual came to be better appreciated, the way was opened to the logical conclusion of Israel's faith ; namely, the conviction of a personal life beyond death. Whatever, then, be the precise history of the idea of immortality in Israel, whatever be the exact force of the rather obscure references to the subject, one point is clear ; namely, that the belief in a future life was a logical out- come of the Jewish religion ; it was a natural and war- ranted, even if slowly developed, conclusion from Israel's faith in God and estimate of man. In this development we note two significant approximations to Christian con- ceptions : (1) salvation is not national or corporate only, but individual ; and (2) salvation has reference not only to this life, but to that which is to come. We must now consider two questions which have been already suggested : How far was salvation regarded as salvation from sin ? and. How was recovery from sin to be accomplished ? The changes which we have sketched — the weakening of tlie national idea, the disappointment and suffering of the people in exile, and the increased importance whicli was attached to the relation of the individual to God — would all tend to deepen the sense of personal sinfulness and to correlate the idea of salvation THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 27 with that sinfulness. Naturally enough, it is in the Jewish Hymn-book where this conception of salvation comes to its most intense expression. ^ But it is prominent also in the prophets, especially in the "prophets of indi- vidualism " (W. A. Brown), Jeremiah and Ezekiel. A prominent feature of the New Covenant will be that each man will directly and personally know Yahweh, and he will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more (Jer. xxxi. 34). The promise of individual forgive- ness is coupled with the promise of national restoration, " I will cleanse them from all their iniquity, whereby they have sinned against me ; and I will pardon all their iniquities, whereby they have sinned against me, and whereby they have transgressed against me " (Jer. xxxiii. 8). The thought of personal salvation from sin is promi- nent in Ezekiel. Salvation is cleansing, the bestowal of a new heart, the gift of a new spirit (Ezek. xxxvi. 25-27; xxxvii. 23). Scarcely less pervading is the thought of salvation from sin in Deutero-Isaiah. Yahweh is the Saviour of his people ; he delights in forgiveness, " I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake ; and I will not remember thy sins " (Is. xliii. 25. Cf. xliv. 22 ; Zech. xiii. 1). Here we have a distinct approximation to the Christian doctrine which always conceives of salvation as being, primarily, salvation from sin and its consequences. Much more difficult, however, is our second inquiry : How is salvation accomplished ? On what grounds and conditions is it realized ? In an effort to answer we shall have to consider the place in the prophetic conceptions of four elements : (1) the divine grace ; (2) repentance ; (3) inward renewal ; and (4) vicarious suffering. The grace of God is the ground of salvation. It is according to God's nature to show mercy to mankind. The prophets express this idea by saying that God saves men " for his own sake " (Is. xliii. 25), or " for his name's sake " (Jer. xiv. 7 ; Ps. cvi. 8), that is, by reason of what he is, because it is his nature so to do. ^ See, e.g. Ps, xxxix. 8 ; li. 10-12 ; Ixxix. 9 ; cxxx. 7, 8. 28 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE The " name " in the Hebrew mode of thought is the symbol of the meaning or essence of that for which it stands. Accordingly we read that it was for his name's sake that he delivered Israel from Egypt (Ezek. xx. 9). The description of the religion of Israel as a legal sys- tem is apt to imply some exaggeration of this element in its character. As the spirit of prophecy died out in the centuries immediately preceding the advent of Christ, legalism and ritualism more and more prevailed and became the dominant characteristics of religion. These tendencies came to their full fruitage in Pharisaism. The current popular theories of this later time which con- ceived religion to consist in tithings, fastings, and the like are frequently reflected in the pages of the New Testa- ment. This was the legalism which Jesus denounced and against which Paul inveighed. But it would be quite erroneous to impute the character of this legalism, without qualification, to the Old Tes- tament religion as such. Even the law, including the sacrificial system, was based on the principle of grace. The contention of the apostle Paul that, as between grace and law, the former was primary and fundamental (Gal. iii. 17, 18), is amply justified by the Old Testament in all its parts. It is out of his mercy that God gives the law and prescribes and accepts the sacrifices. The whole system assumes that God is inlierently merciful. That he was propitiated by the sacrifices or by any other means, in the sense of being rendered merciful or of being thereby made willing to forgive, is a conception which is not only unwarranted by any Old Testament statement, but fun- damentally opposed to all the presuppositions of Israel's religion. The absence of any such conception of propitia- tion is one of the marks which distinguishes Judaism from heathenism. Nor was this mercifulness or undeserved favor of God conceived by the prophets as a rival or antithetic principle to his rectitude or severity toward sin. On the contrary, they are often associated in such a way as to suggest that they are regarded as two aspects of the same character. THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OP SALVATION 29 Amos deduces the penal severity of God from his love, " You (Israel) only have I known of all the families of the earth : therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities " (Amos iii. 2). For Hosea the motives of God's choice of Israel are righteousness, judgment, lovingkindness, and mercy (Hos. ii. 19), as if they belonged inseparably together. To Joel the God whose anger flames out against sin is, at the same time, "gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy " (Joel ii. 13). In wrath he remembers mercy (Hab. iii. 2). The conception that retributive justice is the fundamental, essential quality of God, and that mercy is a secondary and optional attribute whose operation has to be secured or provided for by means of some "plan" or "scheme," is not only without warrant in the Old Testament, but is entirely irreconcilable with the Hebrew idea of God in the classic period of Israel's religion. It is more accordant with the conceptions of late Jewish theology as illus- trated in popular Pharisaism. The only conditions of salvation which the prophets prescribe are such as are expressed in the words " repent- ance," "faith," and "obedience." While assuming the legitimacy of sacrifice, they do not, as we have seen, recog- nize its necessity for salvation. Their attitude is reflected in the Psalmist's words : " Sacrifice and offering thou hast no delight in ; Burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required." (Ps. xl. G ; (/. Ii. 16.) To them, also, "the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart" (Ps. Ii. 17). The Deuteronomic legislation evinces the prophetic spirit in teaching tliat so soon as Israel turns to the Lord and obeys his voice, he will pour out upon the people the fulness of his favor (Deut. xxx. 1-10). Isaiah calls upon the people not to offer sacrifices, but to forsake their sins, which, though they be as scarlet, shall be made white as snow (Is. i. 11-18). Ezekiel is equally emphatic in teaching that repentance and renunciation of sin are 30 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRI^^E the indispensable conditions of securing the divine blessing (Ezek. ch, xxxvi). Not that there is any merit in re- pentance ; not that it establishes any claim upon God. His favor is free and undeserved (Is. xliii. 25). For- giveness is according to his nature, and repentance for the sin which bars its exercise is simply its necessary correlative. We have only another aspect of the same doctrine in the teaching which emphasizes faith or trust, since faith is only the positive side of repentance. As repentance is remorse and sorrow for sin, so faith is the assurance of forgiveness and acceptance with God. It was from an Old Testament prophet that Paul derived his motto text, "The just shall live by his faith" (Hab. ii. 4), that is, by his constancy, his fidelity, his trust in Yahweh. In the prophets, as in the Psalms, this idea is expressed in no technical form, but in a considerable variety of phrases, such as trusting Yahweh, trusting in his name, waiting upon him, and the like (Nah. i. 7 ; Zeph. iii. 12 ; Is. viii. 17). While we have not here the formal doctrine of justification by faith, we have its essential elements in the teaching that God's chief requirement is that men should put their trust in him and cleave to him in hope and confidence. Another element of the same teaching is that which insists upon the necessity of obedience. Here the pro- phetic spirit is well expressed in the saying, " To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams " (1 Sam. XV. 22). No single word better summarizes what God requires of man than the word "obedience." Jeremiah depicts Yahweh as perpetually calling to his people every morning, saying, " Obey my voice " (Jer. xi. 7). The most grievous sins will be forgiven to those who amend their ways and obey the voice of the Lord (Jer. xxvi. 13). Obedience is readily seen to be the counterpart of repentance and the consequence of faitli. One who turns from sin must turn to holiness, that is, to the life of obedience to God. So trust in God necessarily passes over into obedience, the making of the divine will THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 31 at once the law and the delight of the soul. What obedi- ence is conceived to include will depend upon the religious conceptions which are dominant at an}'" given time. We have already seen that for the prophets it consisted, pri- marily, not in outward rites, but in a good life. True obedience, as conceived by them, cannot be better de- scribed than by the words : " To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God " (Mi. vi. 8). We turn next to the inquiry : What place do the prophets assign to the idea of an inward renewal by a divine operation? We find that the righteous life is not regarded merely as a matter of human striving and achievement. ISIan must, indeed, freely turn to God, but he turns in response to influences and incentives which always anticipate his choice and action. " Turn thou me, and I will turn " ( Jer. xxxi. 18) is the prayer of the peni- tent. Yahweh writes his law in the heart (Jer. xxxi. 33) ; he bestows a new heart, and puts his spirit within men, causing them to walk in his statutes and keep his judgments (Ezek. xxxvi. 26, 27). He imparts the breath of a new life to the dry bones which the prophet saw in vision (Ezek. xxxvii. 1-14), and they live again. This conviction that God must renew the heart by the work of his Spirit comes to its most striking expression in the Psalmist's prayer : " Create in me a clean heart, O God ; And renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence ; And take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation ; And uphold me with a willing spirit." (Ps. li. 10-12.) This whole Psalm illustrates a close approximation, in Old Testament piety, to the Christian doctrine of regenera- tion. The sense of sin is here so deepened that the sup- pliant feels keenly his OAvn impotence. God must cleanse him if he is to be cleansed. Hence the prayers : " Blot out my transgressions ; wash me from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin " (yv. 1, 2). 32 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE It is doubtless true that a considerable part of this language has a collective, rather than a personal, reference.^ Such is clearly the case, for example, in Ezekiel's descrip- tion of the revival of the dry bones. The exilic prophets never lost sight of the national prospects and the national ideal. Still, the deepening and ethicizing of the idea of salvation could not but give that idea a bearing for the life of the individual. It is impossible to conceive of men repenting, obeying, and trusting Yahweh merely en masse. The very inwardness of the righteous life, as the prophets conceived it, gave it a personal character. A nation may be ceremonially righteous, but it cannot be morally so except by the purification in heart and life of the indi- viduals which compose it. One other prophetic idea claims our attention : salvation by vicarious suffering. The classical illustration of this idea is found in the picture of the suffering Servant of Yahweh in Deutero-Isaiah. Adumbrations of the idea are found in Jeremiah. The faithful and true were suffer- ing the consequences of others' sins. " Our fathers have sinned, and are not ; and we have borne their iniquities " (Lam. V. 7). But it is only in the exilic Isaiah that the conception is elaborated. In his earlier chapters he intro- duces Yahweh's Servant Israel, as fulfilling a divinely ap- pointed mission of revelation and salvation to the world. ^ As the description proceeds, darker colors play into the picture. The Servant sees the trials which must attend his work. His very fidelity will involve him in contempt and suffering. The description culminates in that ideal- ization of Israel as the oppressed and suffering, but victori- ous and saving Servant of God which we find in chapters lii. 13-liii. 12. This description has its historical motive in the experi- ence of Israel in exile. The disobedient did not suffer ; they did not lament the national disaster or interpret it as a divine chastisement. It was the faithful who felt the exile as a calamity and a punishment upon the nation ; it 1 See J. V. Bartlet, Art. Segeneration in Hastings's D. B. '^ E.g. xlii. 6 ; xlix. 6. THE PROPHETIC DOCTKIXE OF SALVATION 33 was they who smarted keenly under the severity of their heathen masters. Thus the good portion of the nation suffered what the faithless really deserved. But Yahweh must have a purpose to serve in this experience of liis faithful ones. By this fiery trial he must intend to purify and save the nation as a whole and, specifically, to recover the careless and faithless. Thus the faithful remnant — those who represent the ideal Israel — become the sav- iours of the rest. They thus accomplish the divine will in the redemption of the nation, and so in the accomplishment of the nation's mission to the world. This company of God's true servants, collectively and ideally viewed, are here personified as an individual. He shall deal wisely and achieve victory (lii. 13-15). Men shall see that though despised and rejected, he had borne not his own but their sins and sorrows in order to bring to them peace and salvation (liii. 1-6). For no fault of his own did he suffer, but only for others' good. It was the divine will that he should thus pass through the depths of humiliation and chastisement in order to win the triumph of suffering love in the salvation of many (liii. 7-12). ^ We have here a new element in Jewish Messianism : the idea of the righteous suffering with and for the guilty in order to secure their salvation. It is to be noted that the office of the Servant is prophetic, not priestly. It is the suffering of actual experience which falls upon him. The vicariousness is ethical. The blood of this offering is the blood of real life. If we are to use the word " sub- stitution " we should say that the substitution here involved 1 It is not intended to suggest that the Servant designates merely the pious kernel within Israel. I understand the term to designate the nation as a whole, not, indeed, in its concrete character, but in its ideal intention and destination as God's messenger to the nations. But this conception of the nation as a whole appears to have been developed from the experience of the few in their endurance of suffering on account of, and on behalf of, the many. See the thorough investigation of F. Giese- brecht, Der Knecht Jahves des DeiUerojesaia (Konigsberg, 1902), whose view (like that of Kautsch, D.B., Vol. V., p. 707 sfj.) is that Is. liii. 1 sq. is to be understood as spoken by the Gentiles, and that Israel's sufferings in exile are thought to be designed for their benefit, rather than for the benefit of Israel itself. 34 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE is that which takes place when one puts himself under another's burden, and from love and sympathy makes that other's suffering lot his own. This idealization of God's holy Servant is not created out of materials drawn from the Levitical ritual, but was produced out of Israel's experi- ence of trial and suffering, illumined by an invincible faith in God's purpose of grace. ^ Let us now summarize the elements of prophetic teach- ing which approximate most closely to the Christian doc- trine of salvation. They are chiefly these : (1) Salvation is not primarily a national or collective, but an individual, affair. (2) It is, above all, an ethical process — the re- covery of the life from sin to harmony with God through moral likeness to him. (3) The conditions on which this salvation must be realized are, accordingly, moral. Man cannot be set right before God by any ceremony or trans- action performed on his behalf. He must personally re- pent of his sin and forsake it. (4) But in so doing man can never anticipate the grace of God, nor does he achieve his salvation without the divine aid. (5) The experience of the righteous bearing the sins of the unrighteous in Israel is adapted to suggest the thought of a divine vica- rious suffering in which a greater than human love should take the woes and burdens of sinful men upon itself. 1 One reference only to the ritual is found. His soul is made a guilt offering (liii. 10) (not "offering for sin," as in our versions). This offer- ing was an act of reparation. The reference to it here contemplates the sin as an affront to God's honor which, however, is sustained, as if in reparation, by the life of the righteous Servant. Tlie textual diffi- culties of the verse as a whole are very great. Duhm says, "Es ist zweifelhaft, ob wir jemals den urspriinglichen Wortlaut und Sinn herausbringen," Comm. in loco. The apparent reference to the cultus in lii. 15 (Eng. vss., "So shall he sprinkle many nations ") disappears in the translation adopted by almost all exegetes, "so shall he cause to rise up in admiration, that is, startle (R, V. marg.) many nations." CHAPTER III THE TEACHING OF JESUS ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS We now approacli the question : What does salvation mean in the teaching of Jesus ? He declared that he came to seek and to save the lost. Just what was it which he came to do, and by what means did he propose to accomplish it ? He frequently expressed the purpose of his mission in another set of terms of which we should here take account. He came to found the Kingdom of God and to induce men to enter it.^ To be saved and to enter the Kingdom of God must mean substantially the same. He also spoke of men becoming sons of God and of being like God. In view of such expressions there is hardly room for doubt as to what the idea of salvation was as it lay in the mind of Jesus. It is the life of obedi- ence to God, or, more fundamentally stated, it is the life of sonship or moral likeness to God. Jesus came into the world to save men in the sense that he came to win them.; to help them to the living of the life of fellowship with God and of likeness to him. Now this general and rather formal statement requires for its elucidation a study of several questions : What is man to be saved from and why does he need to be saved ? What is he saved to ? If to obedience or likeness to God, what does that involve ? On what terms and conditions may this deliverance take place ? What must a man do to be saved ? And finally : How does Jesus effect this salvation ? By what means does he promote or procure 1 1 have reviewed in detail the passages bearing on our present sub- ject in Tlie Theology of the Nnu Testament, Pt. I., chs. ix. and x., to which I refer the reader. I shall take for granted a general familiarity with the texts. 35 36 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE that harmony with God which constitutes man's true blessedness, here and hereafter ? We shall try to answer these questions in the light of the teaching of Jesus as reported in the Synoptic Gospels, reserving for later con- sideration the Johannine version. The reason why men need to be saved is that they are morally lost. They need to be saved from sin. Jesus, indeed, spoke of men being saved from sickness and from suffering, but prevailingly he described salvation as a moral recovery from an evil life. He did not speak of sin and sinners in that technical sense common in his time, according to which "sinners" denoted a class almost as definite as " publicans." For Jesus the term " sinner " did not classify a man in public estimation or social standing ; it described his moral state in the sight of God. Sin is a corrupt state of the heart, a perversion of the will and the affections, a radical disharmony with God. More con- cretely, it is lovelessness, that is selfishness, with the evils which it engenders. Jesus did not give definitions or theoretic descriptions of sin, but his treatment of individ- ual cases leaves us in no doubt as to what sin is. It is seen in the unfilial life of that lost son who repudiates all liis natural obligations to his father and friends, abandons all restraints, and gives himself over to a life of selfish gratification. It is seen in the Pharisee with his counter- feit piety, trying for social advantage to seem what he inwardly knows he is not. It is seen in the hardness, the cruelty, the intolerance of the rich and ruling classes of the age ; in the pitilessness of a priest and a Levite who put social distinctions above humanity, and in a people who carefully observe their inherited traditions and tithe mint and anise and cummin to the neglect of judgment, mercy, and the love of God. These are examples of sin as Jesus views it. They are the " lost " who are forfeiting their lives in selfishness in its various forms, — pride, hypocrisy, sensuality, cruelty, hatred. All these sins are but various phases of that self-gratification or self-will in which man loses his real, true self. From this kind of life men need to be saved. This can THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 37 be done in but one way, — by a change in their motives and purposes. The sinful life can only be abandoned by being replaced. Love must supplant selfishness ; kind- ness, humility, and sympathy must replace hardness, arrogance, and indifference. Men are to be saved to the life of service and helpfulness; they must learn that to give their lives is to save them. Jesus' idea of salvation centres in his idea of God. His most characteristic description of God is as the bountiful Giver. With liberal hand he pours out his blessings upon all mankind. His love is large and generous. He is ready and eager to bestow his gifts. This impulse to give and to bless springs from God's boundless, universal love. Jesus' favorite expression for this aspect of God's character is the term " Father." As the Father he loves and blesses all men — even his disobedient and sinful children. He yearns for the lost son and waits and watches for his return ; he continues to love those who are indifferent, or even hostile, to his will, and sends his Son to seek and to save them. Now salvation means a life corresponding to this char- acter of God. Jesus expressed it by the phrase " becom- ing sons of the Father " (Mt. v. 45). Sonship in the Hebraistic mode of thought denotes moral kinship and likeness. Jesus shows how by niggardliness, pride, and hatred men prove themselves to be no true sons of God. When they love only those who serve them, hate their enemies, and revenge every injury, they show themselves no better than the despised publicans and heathen. Such is not the Godlike life. He is the righteous, the truly saved man who has become like the Father in love and self-giving. Jesus illustrates in detail the elements which constitute this true righteousness or salvation. They are such as humility, meekness, aspiration after goodness, mercifulness, purity, peacemaking. These qualities con- stitute that real righteousness which is the passport into the Kingdom of heaven (Mt. v. 3-9, 20). Other descriptions tally with this. In the judgment parable the accepted are those who have loved and served 38 TflE BIBLICAL BASIS OP THE DOCTRINE others ; the rejected are those who have neglected and despised their fellow-men (Mt. xxv. 35 sq.). The man who fulfilled Jesus' law of neighbor love was he, social outcast though he was, who ministered to the poor sufferer at the roadside (Lk. x. 36, 37). The first and great commandment, which summarizes the whole import of the law and the prophets, is the law of love. In comparison with the requirements of this law all sacrifices and other religious ceremonies are of slight consequence. Love is the law, not, primarily, because God enjoins it, but because it is the principle of his own moral perfection. His requirements are grounded in his nature. The life of love is the Godlike life ; it is the life of sonship ; it con- stitutes men members of the Kingdom of heaven ; it is salvation. This teaching of Jesus which I have thus sought to sum- marize is no mere sentimental doctrine. It is not wanting in strictness and severity. It does not minimize the require- ments of holiness. If the statement of it appears to do so, this is due to the fact that Jesus does not separate right- eousness and love, as later thought has done. To him these are never contrasted and rival terms. He knows nothing of a love which is not holy and morally exacting ; nothing of a righteousness which is mere retributive jus- tice. For him purity is as truly a part of love as mer- cifulness. Love exacts confession and repentance for wilful injustice as truly as it demands readiness to for- give (Lk. xvii. 4). Love is no mere easy good nature. It rebukes and punishes evil, while it yearns to forgive and cure it. There is no lack of strenuousness in our Lord's doctrine of salvation. The divine love repudiates and condemns sin, and there is no salvation which is not salvation from sin to holiness. What, then, must a man do in order to be saved ? He must repent of his sins and forsake them. The first word in Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom was, " Repent ye " (Mk. i. 15). But not only must men repent ; they must turn (Mt. xviii. 3) — turn away from the old life, and in humility and self-surrender take up the life of obedience THE SYKOMIC TEACHING OP JEStJS 3d to God. Both these aspects of the matter are expressed m the terra "faith" — faith in God or belief on Christ himself. Faith is the positive counterpart of repentance. In the parable of the Lost Son penitence is illustrated in the prodigal's remorse and misery ; faith is the resolution and act of returning to his home and his father. Our Lord's descriptions of the conditions of salvation are not abstract and formal, but concrete and realistic. Men must become as little children in humility and trustfulness, must take his yoke of instruction and discipline upon them, must bear his cross of sacrifice and service, must do the will of the Father, must take up the duties of membership in his Kingdom and cultivate the virtues required by its law, must become like the Father himself whose perfection is love. Such are some of the principal ways in which Jesus spoke of salvation. Men must become and live as God's true sons, obedient to his will, trustful in his care, morally like him in motive and purpose. Jesus had no favorite formula by which he expressed the nature and conditions of salvation, such, for example, as justification by faith. It may be due, in part, to this fact that so far as our popu- lar and theological terminology for the discussion of the subject is scriptural, it is derived much more largely from the language of others than from that of Jesus himself. But neither did Jesus analyze the process of attaining sal- vation nor define its various steps and stages. He made no attempt to describe the cooperation of the divine and hu- man factors in the saved life. He pictured the Father's house as standing open, and the Father's heart as ready and waiting to receive the wandering, lost son. It lay within the power of the erring son to forsake his evil life and escape his wretchedness by returning to his Father with a penitent and obedient heart. When one recalls the subtleties connected with the theological discussions of the ordo salutis, the teaching of Jesus on the subject does seem, in comparison, very simple. One cannot read the- ological books without meeting frequent intimations of its inadequacy. We are told, for example, that Jesus could not unfold his full doctrine of salvation until his 40 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE own saving mission to mankind was completed, or, even, that the final doctrine of salvation could not be unfolded by our Lord at all, but only by those who came after and could look back upon what he had done to save men. To expect an adequate doctrine of salvation in the teaching of Jesus (it is said) is to look for an unnatural anticipation ; it is to require an anachronism. Is this contention in- tended as an indirect confession that the current theologi- cal theories have only a slight or uncertain connection with the teaching of Jesus ? We shall keep these questions in mind as we proceed. Meantime, they suggest our next inquiry: In what way did Jesus present himself as the Saviour of men ? By what means did he seek to bring men into the life of son- ship to God ? To this question, as to the preceding, we can give no one definite, explicit answer. The saving work of Jesus is expressed in a great variety of forms. He came to call sinners to repentance. He bade men learn of him that they might find rest unto their souls. In his mountain sermon he depicted the nature and re- quirements of true righteousness, the conditions of en- trance into the Kingdom of God, and the characteristics of its members. These cannot be easily summarized in any formula; but we may say, in general, that the discourse demands moral purity, humility, charitableness, and kin- dred virtues, and does not scruple to require "good works" in one who would glorify the Father in heaven (Mt. V. 16). In one place he declares that only he who does the will of God can enter his Kingdom, and elsewhere he prescribes the law of service as the law of that King- dom. When we further observe that he conceives his own mission as a mission of service to humanity, we see that one of his saving works was to induce men by ex- ample and influence to live the Godlike life of self-giving, in which man's true greatness and glory are found. He appeared among men as their servant ; he came to min- ister and to give his life for others. He must have re- garded it as a part of his saving work to induce others thus to save their lives by giving them. THE SYKOI'TIO TEACHING OF JESUS 41 Jesus evidently contemplated his teaching and example as saving in their effect upon men. He sought by these means to quicken in men desires and efforts for a better life — the life of sonship to God, which is salvation. He presented a conception of God which was attractive and adapted to move the heart to penitence for sin and to gratitude and obedience. He illustrated the Godlike life among men in his benevolent works, in his sympathy with suffering, and in the encouragement which he gave to every good aspiration and endeavor. He set the highest value upon small deeds, if done from love or pity, and declared that lie who even received into his favor a righteous man because he was a righteous man, should receive a right- eous man's reward. The life of Jesus, with its various expressions of itself in word and act, was a power- ful saving agency in his time, and still remains such. The teaching of Jesus gives us no warrant to speak so slightingly as is commonly done of his mere example. Theology is generally so eager to hurry on into its own special sphere that it can barely take time to mention in passing the saving power of the personal influence of Jesus, making haste to assure us in the midst of the allusion that this is not all. We shall reach the favorite province of theology in due course ; only let us not mini- mize by silence or by qualifying words what Jesus placed in the very forefront of his message to mankind, — the declaration that the door of God's Kingdom stood open before them that they might enter then and there if they would, and that he had come to show them the way. I am the world's light ; by me men know the Father ; God's Kingdom is in your midst — by such words as these Jesus announced a present salvation, available at the moment, and himself as the guide to its realization. Now, at length, we come to the question with which theology has been chiefly occupied : What significance for his saving work did Jesus attribute to his sufferings and death? Let us first review the passages in which he speaks of his death, and then inquire into their signifi- cance. It Avas quite late in his public career, according 42 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OP THE DOCTRINE to our sources, wlien he began to teach his disciples that he must suffer death (Mk. viii. 31 ; Mt. xvi. 21). His Galilean ministry was nearing its close, and he was soon to set his face toward Jerusalem. While he was on a journey through the north country, occurred the memorable con- fession of his messiahship by Peter at Csesarea Philippi. It was at this turning-point in his own career, and at this crisis in his disciples' faith, that he took occasion to tell them plainly that he was destined to suffer and to die. After this time the same announcement is repeatedly made.i All the Synoptics also report in the narrative of the early Galilean ministry a figurative saying which appears to contain a reference to his approaching fate : " But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then will they fast in that day " (Mk. ii. 20 = Mt. ix. 15 = Lk. v. 35). If the refer- ence in this passage as it stands is to his own death, as seems probable, it is difficult to reconcile it with the long silence of Jesus which follows, with the disciples' resistance to the idea, and with the statement that it was at Caesarea Philippi that Jesus "began to teach" his disciples about his death. It is probable, then, that this verse either belongs in some later connection, or is an allegorizing application of the parabolic saying to which it is appended, the product of subsequent reflec- tion on the part of the disciples. ^ Other passages,^ some- times appealed to in support of the idea that Jesus early foretold his death, are seen, on examination, to be quite irrelevant. The evidence, however, is sufficient to show that from Peter's confession onward, Jesus explicitly fore- told his death,* and it is extremely probable that his con- viction in regard to his fate was not new Avhen, for the first time, he announced it at Csesarea Philippi. The passages thus far referred to, hoAvever, say nothing about 1 Lk. ix. 31 ; Mk. ix. 31 and par. ; x. 33 and par. ; xii. 8 and par. ; xiv. 8. ^ Cf. Hollmann, Die Bedeutung des Todes Jesu, p. 16 sq. 3 E.g. Mt. V. 10-12 ; Lk. vi. 22 sq. * The genuineness of the passages which constitute this evidence is well discussed by W. L. Walker in The Cross and the Kingdom, pp. 37-63. THE SYNOPTIC TEACHIKG OF JESUS 43 the saving import of liis death. But tliere are two others which explicitly connect his death with his saving work — the saying in which he declares that he came to give his life " a ransom for many " (Mk. x. 45 = ]\f t. xx. 28), and his reference to the purpose of his death at the institution of the memorial Supper (Mk. xiv. 24 ; Mt. xxvi. 28 ; Lk. xxii. 19, 20). Now the questions which one would like to answer regarding this subject are these : Can we derive from the general teaching of Jesus, or from the course of his life, any plausible view of the significance which he would naturally attribute to his death? What is the meaning of the phrase, " a ransom for many " (Xvrpov avrl TToWcov^? In what sense was his body broken (or " given ") and his blood shed " for " (yirep^ the dis- ciples (Lk. " for you ") or " for many " (Mk. and Mt.)? In what connection, if any, do these expressions stand with Old Testament conceptions? How far do we have here, or in other relevant passages in the Synoptics, materials for a theory respecting the saving power of the cross? Let us start from a point on which all will be agreed. Jesus often represented the true life of sonship to God as a life of humility and of service, and referred to his own career as the typical illustration of it. The giving of life is not to him the mere experience of dying. It is rather that self-giving for others, which ends in larger life. There can be no doubt that Jesus connected his death with the idea of his service, his self-giving, to mankind. He came to minister and to give his life. He is to die in the service of men. If, now, we ask in what way Jesus would naturally have been led to the conviction that he must die a violent death at Jerusalem, the most reasonable answer is that he would reach this conclusion from the increased hostility which he met with in his work. He saw the jealousy and hatred of the rulers and influential classes deepening around him day by day. What more natural than for him to conclude that his career must end in a violent 44 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OP THE DOCTRINE death ? This supposition agrees with the actual course of events, and our sources suggest no other explanation. If it was in this way that the prospect of being put to deatli opened before him, it would be altogether natural that he should see that experience as a part, or culmination, of his service of self-denying love to mankind. And this, as we have seen, is the light in which he contemplates his death. We should expect, however, that one who, like Jesus, regarded his life-work and experience as providentially appointed, would look upon even this violent death which he saw impending over him, in the light of a divinely ordered event, and such we find to be the case. The necessity that he should suffer many things and be killed is, to his consciousness, something more than a certainty arising from the circumstances in which he finds liimself placed ; it is included in the divine purpose which is the source and warrant of his mission. The effort to deter- mine the ground of that necessity and to show what was accomplished by our Lord's submission to it, is the great motive of the various theories regarding the saving import of his death. So far as these theories have made use of materials derived from the Synoptics, they have been con- structed almost exclusively upon inferences drawn from the ransom passage, the words of Jesus at the Supper, and the exclamation on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " Before we turn our atten- tion to these sayings, however, I would suggest the inquiry whether we may not best approach these particular texts and our general problem from a consideration of Jesus' conception of his life-work as a whole. Leaving aside for the moment our immediate subject, I will illustrate the method which I have in mind. Every student of the Gospels knows the difficulty of reaching any clear and con- sistent view of Jesus' teaching concerning his parousia from a study of the relevant texts taken by themselves. The only hope of a solution for the difficulties is found in a study of Jesus' conception of the nature and coming of his Kingdom. In this way we obtain a test or measure by means of which the various individual apocalyptic sayings THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 45 may be estimated and interpreted. In like manner, is it not more probable that we shall find the right clew to Jesus' own thought of the import of his death by keeping close to his own predominant conception, than it is that we shall find it by inferences derived from word studies of Xvrpov and hLaOrjKi] ? But let us turn to the much-debated words and phrases. ^ Jesus and a company of his disciples were making their way toward Jerusalem. He knew that the end was near. There, under the very shadow of the cross, James and John proffered their ambitious request. In reply he told tliem that to exercise power was the prerogative of world rulers, but that tlie law of his Kingdom was service, and then added, " For verily the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Mk. x. 45 = Mt. xx. 28). What does the plirase " ransom for, or instead of, many " (Xvrpov clvtI TToXkoiv^ mean ? It would seem from the occasion which gave rise to the saying of which it is a part, as well as from the connection, amounting almost to parallelism, in which it stands, that it must be intended to express some phase or aspect of that ministry or service in which Jesus sums up the purpose of his mission. But, in fact, exegetes and theologians have generally isolated the phrase and have made it the subject of painstaking special study. For its explanation, recourse has commonly been had to the Old Testament through the Septuagint. There the word Xvrpou is most frequently the translation of one or the other of two Hebrew words, one of which denotes the redemption price paid to secure the freedom of a slave, the other the " covering " or sacrificial gift (kopher') which was made to atone for sin. Now, the theories of the meaning of our phrase have usually been 1 Tlie topics which, in the remainder of this chapter, are briefly dis- cussed, are treated at length from different points of view by Holhnann, op. cit.; R. A. Hoffmann, Der Tod Chriati in seiner Bedeutung fur die Erlosumi ; Feine, Jesus Chrishis nnd Fmihis ; R. J. Drummond, Apos- tolic Teachimj and Christ's Teaching ; Babut, La Pensee de Jesus sur sa Mort d'apres les Evangiles Synoptiques, and Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol., in which the literature of the subject is extensively cited. 46 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE drawn from one or the other of these supposed Old Tes- tament references. But when it had been decided which of these two possible meanings to adopt, nothing was really settled. If the former, it still remained to ask : Is Xvrpov to be taken literally or figuratively, and is avrl to be joined with Xvrpov only or with the whole phrase ? If with the latter, the question remained whether Xvrpov denotes a covering by expiation or by protection ? But one's con- fidence in this whole method of explanation is somewhat shaken when he observes that Xvrpov is used by the Sev- enty to translate four different Hebrew words. Moreover, when we recall that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and not Greek, it is clear that the question which is of real importance here is not which Septuagint meaning of Xvrpov is most feasi- ble, but of what Aramaic word Xvrpov is the probable translation or equivalent. Hollmann has, I think, given cogent reasons for believing that it was not the Aramaic cognate of kopher.^ If this view be taken, then the ex- planation would need to be derived either from the other Septuagint terms most frequently translated Xvrpov (some form of the roots itib, to ransom, or bw, to deliver or save'), or (if the explanation of the word be no longer sought in the Septuagint) from the Aramaic equivalent for the actual Syriac renderings of Xvrpov (akin to the Hebrew root pns, to set free).^ In either of these cases the mean- ing of the term would be a purchase price, a payment to obtain freedom, or, dropping the figure, a means of freeing or saving. If Xvrpov meant a sacrifice, then avrC might naturally mean " instead of " ; if, however, it denotes a purchase price, the force of avrC would probably be, " for " in the sense of " in exchange, or compensation, for," as in Heb. xii. 2 : " who for (avrl^ the joy that was set before him," that is, in order to obtain the joy, " endured the cross," etc. The passage in question would then mean : He gave himself as a ransom price for (the sake of purchasing or obtaining) the freedom of many ; through giving his life he procured the deliverance of many. On general grounds this seems to me to be the more reason- 1 Op. cit., p. 105 sq. 2 So Hollmann, op. ciU, pp. 108, 109. THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESFS 47 able view. It is much more natural that, in the connec- tion in which he is speaking, Jesus should introduce a figurative expression like that of giving his life to procure men's freedom, than that he should define his work in terms drawn from the Levitical ritual. The occasion and context of the phrase in question should not be lost out of mind. He is contrasting worldly greatness with true greatness. Worldly rulers find their greatness in " lording it " over others, that is, in subjecting them ; he, on the contrary, achieves his greatness through ministering and setting men free. They enslave ; he liberates. But if we conclude that the natural meaning of the phrase is : I came to give my life as a means of procur- ing the liberty of many, it still remains to ask : From what does Jesus liberate men by means of his death, and how does his death accomplish or aid that liberation ? Our sources afford no direct answer, and we are left to infer- ence and conjecture. The most various replies have been given : From the wrath of God ; from the guilt of sin ; from sin itself ; from the fear of suffering and death ; from bondage to such worldly and selfish thoughts as James and John had just been expressing. If, now, we lay aside the figurative form of the expression, the idea with which we have to deal is this : the death of Jesus is a means of de- livering men. We have seen that he regarded his death as part and parcel of his saving mission, the culmination of his life of service and self-giving. It is obvious, then, that we cannot ascribe to his death some meaning which isolates it from his life and work in general. Jesus not only never made any such separation between his life and his death, but he distinctly connected and correlated them. The saving import of his death is generically the same as that of his life. Now the purpose of his life was to save men from sin, or, in other words, to make them members of the Kingdom of God. How did Jesus conceive that his death would serve this end ? Did he mean that after his death, and largely in consequence of it, many who liad thus far re- jected him would repent of their sin and so fulfil the 48 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE condition of entrance into the Kingdom of God ? Did he foresee that, though his death seemed at the moment to be the disproof of his messiahship, it would soon be seen to be the chief evidence of it ? Was liis thought that his death incurred in absolute fidelity to his divinely ap- pointed life-work, was the consummate proof of the divine love and so the highest expression of love's constraining power ? Did he conceive of his experience of death as a victory over death, alike for himself and for those who would choose and live the kind of life which he had illus- trated ? As I have said, we are here in the field of infer- ence. What is clear to me is that the saving power of his death is to be understood in the light of the aim and import of his life of which it is the consummation. In this view we shall seek for the meaning of such language as we are considering neither in the popular Jewish notions associated with the sacrificial ritual, nor in the dogmatic reflections of later times, but in Jesus' own explanations of his coming and his work. He came to found the King- dom of God in the world. He died in the achievement of that result, and his death was a potent means to its achieve- ment. He came to die, if his death was necessary to that result, as it proved to be. But the direct aim of his com- ing is uniformly represented as the recovery of men to sonship to God. How his death, in point of fact, has served this end, and still serves it, is a pertinent inquiry which we shall keep in mind. The result to which we are brought is, negatively stated, that the whole circle of later dogmatic ideas — atonement, penalty, substitution, satisfaction — has no place in the teaching of Jesus, so far as we have followed its development. But shall we, perhaps, find these conceptions in his language at the Sup- per or in his exclamation on the cross ? The earliest account of the words of Jesus spoken at the Last Supper is that given by Paul (1 Cor. xi. 23-26). Assuming that the bread and wine are re- garded as symbolic or representative, the sayings which lie reports would contain these two points of importance for our inquiry : (1) the bread is to remind the disciples THE SYNOtTiC TEACHING OF JfiSCS 4^ of his death for (vTrep) them, on their behalf, or for their benefit ; and (2) in the shedding of his blood the New Covenant is established and sealed. Luke's version is almost identical with Paul's (xxii. 19, 20). Mark (xiv. 23, 24) has formal variations, but no really different features. In these three ^ earliest forms of narration the sense in which he is to die " for them " or " for many " is as undefined as is that of the statement that by his death he would procure the release of many. In jNIat- thew, however, the meaning of virep is rendered more precise by the addition of the phrase, " unto (et?) the remission of sins " (xxvi. 28), that is, in order to secure the forgiveness of sins. Various considerations have led many critics to the opinion that this phrase is really an explanatory addition of the author's own.^ The fact that it has no counterpart in any of the three earlier narratives, either in the form or the substance of their rejDorts ; the absence from the account of the covenant sacrifice referred to in the context, of any idea that by its means forgiveness is procured,^ together Avith its apparent kinship to later reflection and its isolation in the teaching of Jesus in general — these facts, I say, do warrant serious doubts as to its authenticity. But if it be treated as genuine, it still requires to be inter- preted. It is not at all evident on the face of the state- ment in wliat sense, or in what way, the death of Jesus secures the forgiveness of sins. Before raising that ques- tion, or even before deciding whether our narratives con- tain anything which requires us to raise it, let us ask two others : (1) What is the relation of the Supper to the Passover meal ? and (2) What is its relation to the cove- nant sacrifice which appears to be alluded to in all the narratives ? The Synoptics place the Supper in evident temporal con- 1 Or two, if Luke's narrative be regarded as a replica of Paul's. 2 "Tlie words 'for the remission of sins' have been added ; they are probably of the nature of a comment, expanding what is implied in the earlier form." Kev. H. L. Wild, in Contentio Veritatis, p. 140. 8 Cf. Ex. xxiv. 8. 4 60 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE nection with the Jewish Passover meal. Paul regards the Supper as a Christian Passover (1 Cor. v. 7), and accord- ing to Luke, it is so designated in advance by Jesus him- self (Lk. xxii. 15). But it is a question which has been much debated, whether the Passover was a sacrifice or not. Assuming, as the more probable view, that it was such, it seems to have lost that character in actual usage in our Lord's time, and to have become only a joyful feast in celebration of the nation's deliverance from bondage. But, apart from that question, it is noticeable that the words of Jesus at the Supper do not seem to allude in any way to the meaning of the Passover festival. The symbolism employed is not derived from the Passover lamb, as it naturally would have been if Jesus had had in mind a parallel to the Passover feast. Many scholars therefore doubt or deny any inner connection between the Supper and the meaning of the Passover. ^ But if we may not be warranted in going so far as this, we may say, with Holtzmann, that the language of Jesus on the occasion in question does not seem to establish any connection with the Passover beyond "the general thought of salvation." ^ It is rather to the sacrifice offered in connection Avith the ratification of the covenant at Sinai (Ex. xxiv) that the words of institution clearly relate. It is generally agreed that this was a sacrifice betokening fellowship with Yahweh. As the blood of that offering was conceived as the symbolic bond of connection between Yahweh and his people, so Jesus pictures his death as the act whereby the New Covenant is inaugurated and his blood as that whereby it was sealed. The Supper is, then, the symbolic ratification of the New Covenant, analogous to the solemn rite by which the ancient covenant was confirmed by an offering denoting the establishment of communion with God and participation in the blessings of his grace. If regard be had solely to the language of our Lord at the institution of the Supper, it must be admitted, I think, that it is adapted to carry our thoughts not in the direc- 1 E.g. Jiilicher, Grafe, Spitta, Haupt, and Hoffmann. 2 Neutest. Theol. I. 299. THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 51 tion of the current Jewish ideas of propitiation by sacri- fice, but rather toward tlie conception of a new relation of fellowship with God and obedience to him constituted by Jesus' death. Apart from the phrase reported by Matthew alone ("for the forgiveness of sins"), we might say, with Titius, that the words of Jesus at the Supper are not to be explained by thoughts which relate to the forgiveness of sins, but by those which relate to the impartation of life.^ This rapid review of the points of exegesis and criticism which are in controversy is sufficient to show what con- siderations are to be kept in mind as we proceed. It must be apparent how limited is the material in our Synoptic Gospels to which we can appeal in our effort to answer the question : What was the saving significance of Jesus' death ? As between the older interpretations which found there tlie idea that his death was regarded by himself as a substitutionary sacrifice which satisfied the divine anger at sin and so procured its forgiveness, and such conclu- sions of modern scholars as have just been cited, the decision must turn mainly on the meaning of the word " ransom," the question of the originality of Matthew's added phrase, and the inference drawn from the cry on the cross. It is well known that the traditional theology has understood that cry as expressing Christ's sense of desertion by God in his experience of bearing the world's sin. 2 To me it seems more accordant with the import of this Old Testament exclamation (for such it is ; Ps. xxii. 1), as well as more congruous with Jesus' view of the reciprocal relation between the Father and himself, to sup- pose that abandonment to suffering, rather than abandon- ment to God's displeasure or to desertion, is meant. It is a word from a Psalm in which the sufferings of the right- 1 Xeutest. Lohre v. der SeligJceit, Th. I. p. 150. Hoffmann reaches a similar conclusion as the result of his investigation. He regards the ele- ments as symbolizing fellowship of life with Christ, 2 So, e.ff. Dale, Atonement, p. 01 sq. : " Exile from the joys of God's presence," etc. A more cautious statement is made by Professor Dcnney, who finds "something unrealizable and even impious" in Calvin's view that "Jesus endured in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man." The Death of Christ, pp. 63, 64. 62 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE eous for tlie wicked are depicted.^ The feeling of the righteous man that God is " far from helping him " (y. 1), which finds strong expression in the exclamation in ques- tion, scarcely warrants the conclusion that God had actually " deserted," that is, turned away his face from him. Such a supposition would be entirely out of har- mony with subsequent expressions of confidence in God's presence and help (vv. 4, 9, 19). That any one, on the basis of Jesus' teaching alone, should have been led to associate with those words the idea that Christ was conscious of God's displeasure or believed that God had withdrawn his presence from him, is to me quite inconceivable. Supposing, now, that we allow the originality of Mat- thew's phrase, it needs, as I have intimated, to be interpreted. How Christ's death promoted or secured the forgiveness of sins is not stated. It may be held that the only natural meaning is that he procured it by making a satisfaction for sin, by dying as the sinner's substitute. Something would here depend, however, on liow far we should read the phrase in the light of subsequent reflection. On every other theory, however, which attaches saving value to Christ's death, it would hold good that his death was et? dcfieaiv dfiapricov. The case, then, stands thus : There are three phrases in ques- tion. The supposed sacrificial reference in the first phrase (Xvrpov avrl ttoWcov^ depends upon a very doubtful view of its connection with Septuagint usage, and the supposed substitutionary idea upon a strict construction of a term which is, in all probability, a figure of speech. The second phrase (" for remission of sins") is of questionable original- ity, having no counterpart in Paul, Mark, or Luke, and is not, in any case, explicit in its bearing on our question. There remains the exclamation noticed, whose relation to our inquiry must be admitted to be remote and uncertain. I have no inclination to minimize the material in our sources which is available for our study; I could wish that it were much more abundant and more explicit. But I 1 Cf. Is. liii. THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 53 desire to estimate it critically for just what it is, neither more nor less. I must say that I return from every review which I make of it with a new impression of the degree in which later theological theories have read their presuppositions and conclusions into the words of Jesus. I cannot help doubting whether the current ideas of dogmatic tradition — that of his death to procure the for- giveness of sins by placating divine justice, for example, could ever have been derived from the words of Jesus which the Synoptists report, if, indeed, they could ever have been suggested by them. Of course these ideas may be true, nevertheless. It is even conceivable that Jesus shared this thought-world in common with the Judaism of the period ; but, if so, the evidence of the fact has not been preserved to us. To me it seems more likely that his thoughts about his death attached themselves to the picture of the Servant of Yahweh, whose function, as we have seen, was prophetic rather than priestly. One conclusion, at least, seems open to no doubt. In treating of our subject, theology has built too exclusively upon a few doubtful phrases and has too much neglected the general drift and content of Jesus' teaching regarding the nature and method of salvation. CHAPTER IV THE PAULINE DOCTRINE Paul's general conception of the nature and conditions of salvation is the same as that of Jesus, although it is de- veloped much more largely with reference to a future day of assize. Salvation is deliverance from sin and is realized in a life of holiness. Its initial conditions are repentance, renunciation of sin, and trust in the grace of God which has been manifested in Christ. But this general concep- tion is developed by the apostle with a fulness and variety of statement which are quite unparalleled in the New Tes- tament. Not only is Paul's teaching the most elaborate which has been preserved to us from the primitive Church; it is also the earliest type of doctrine, if regard be had to the date of the writings in which it is embodied. When, therefore, we raise the question: What were the views of the first Christians regarding the salvation wrought by Christ, and especially respecting the saving value of his death ? it is evident that Paul must be one of the sources of our answer. We may gain some impressions touching the thoughts of the first disciples on this subject from the closing chapters of the Synoptics. More impor- tant still for our purpose are the reports of the apostolic discourses in the early chapters of Acts. But Paul's written statements antedate these sources, and his relation to the primitive apostles was more direct than that of the authors of these narratives. The date and authorship of the Epistle of James are too uncertain and its aim too purely practical to warrant any effort to bring it to bear upon our problem. With respect to 1 Peter it must be admitted that criticism has made so strong a case for the theory that it was produced under Pauline influences, that 04 THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 55 one hesitates to appeal to it as illustrating primitive Christian ideas. ^ Our sources of information for determining what were the primitive Christian views regarding our subject — ■ especially the death of Jesus — are by no means so ade- quate as we could desire. But we shall be likely to learn as much, at least indirectly, from Paul as from any other source. On one capital point he is explicit : The primitive community had established a connection between the death of the Messiah and the salvation of men from sin. Nothing less than this can be meant by the state- ment, " For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins accord- ing to the Scriptures" (1 Cor. xv. 3). He here asserts that the representation of Messiah's death as a means to the forgiveness or removal of sins held a primary place in that trustworthy tradition which he had received — a tra- dition which reached back to Jesus himself. The emphasis which the apostle places upon the cross in his doctrine of salvation is regarded by him as accordant with the belief and teaching of the primitive Christian community. As has been intimated, we have only limited resources for illustrating the views which were taken of their Master's death by the first disciples. The Gospels make it clear that as the prediction of the event had struck them with dismay, so its occurrence had overwhelmed them in despair. It was the resurrection which enabled them to recover from their disappointment and to regain heart and hope. After that the disciples began to see that the death was only the shadow side of an experience through which the Christ must pass to his exaltation. He must pass through death in order to conquer death and achieve his victory and his crown. They began to see the neces- 1 In my Theology of the New Testament (Pt. III. ch. ii ; Pt. IV, cb. vii) I have reviewed the passages which bear upon our present theme more particularly than I here have space to do. To the appropriate chapters of this book I would, once for all, refer the reader for a survey of the texts which relate to each New Testament topic. Similarly I would refer to Iloltzmann's Xeutestamentliche Thcologic for the fullest exhibit of the views of recent (especially German) writers on each subject. 56 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE sity that he should suffer, of which he had spoken, in a new light. "Behoved it not the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into his glory ? " (Lk. xxiv. 26). And now that they have caught sight of the idea that even the catastrophe which they dreaded and deplored had a place in the purpose of Providence, that which lies next to hand is to search the Scriptures and see if death has a place in the prophetic picture of the Messiah. Jesus is said him- self to have set them upon this course of explanation (Lk. xxiv. 27, 44-46) ; but the early chapters of Acts contain the one particular account which we possess of the way in which they developed this scriptural argument. In the earlier discourses the death of Jesus is represented as a great crime on the part of the Jews. God, however, thwarted their purpose to destroy him by raising him from the dead. But even the sins of men may be made to ac- complish the divine designs. Messiah's death, though a crime when viewed from the side of the human motives which prompted it, was, from the divine point of view, according to " the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God " (Acts ii. 23). Next emerge in this preaching traces of the application to Jesus of the picture of the suffering Servant (Acts iv. 27; viii. 32-35). This descrip- tion was not applied to the Messiah by the Jews of our Lord's time,^ and our Gospels amply attest a fact which we know from other sources, that the idea of a suffering Mes- siah was abhorrent to the Jewish mind. But the " logic of events " had opened the way for the Christians to a new view of the nature and method of Messiah's work. Christ's own words about the fate which should befall him had suggested the necessity of this new explanation, and the resurrection had made it possible for the disciples to receive and develop it. And now when they opened the Scriptures and found there the portrait of a Sufferer who gives his life for others, all that had happened emerged into a new light. With the popular Jewish concejDtion of the availability for others of the benefits arising from the sufferings of righteous men, the first disciples were ^ See Schiirer, Jeicish People, Div, II. vol. ii, pp, 184-187. THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 57 familiar. If, then, the great men of Israel have suffered vicariously, why not the JNIessiah ? In this way the very event — Messiah's death — which to the Jewish mind re- futed Jesus' claim, came to be, for the believing commu- nity, the bulwark of their faith, and so the cross became the symbol and the glory of the Christian cause. The early chapters of Acts, then, show us that the first disciples had attained the clear conviction that Messiah's death was a necessary part of his divinely appointed ex- perience. They had not only adjusted their minds to the fact of his death, but had found how to justify its ne- cessity from Scripture. The sayings of Jesus about his life given as a ransom for many and his blood shed for many, the picture of the Servant suffering for others, and the current conceptions of the vicarious sufferings of the righteous, all conspired to the conclusion that he died to save men from their sins. But when we ask : In what way ■? How did they conceive of his death as availing for this end ? — it is not easy to find an answer. Certain it is that these discourses do not represent Messiah's death as a satisfaction for sin, or as, in any sense, a substitute for sin's penalty. The phrases in the description of the suffering Servant which would most naturally lend themselves to the expression of such ideas are not quoted, such as : " The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all ; " " His soul is made a guilt offering for sin." The most definite state- ments which we have are these : God sent his holy Servant to bless men in turning them away from their iniquities (Acts iii. 26) ; God has exalted Jesus to his right hand to give repentance and remission of sins (v. 31) ; every one who believes on him shall receive remission of sins (x. 43). In another place Christ's suffering is appealed to as a reason why men should repent that their sins may be blotted out (iii. 18, 19). In no case, in these discourses, is the death of Christ represented as the ground of forgive- ness. The one condition of salvation which is specified is repentance. The death is described as a motive to re- pentance and a means of turning men away from sin, but its saving value is not more closely defined, The exalta- 58 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE tion is emphasized as strongly as the death in these pas- sages, and repentance is quite as much the consequence of both as is remission. Christ is exalted to give repentance and remission ; he suffered that men might be led to repent in order to obtain remission (v. 31 ; iii. 18, 19). When, therefore, turning back to Paul's statement in 1 Cor. XV. 3, we ask : In what sense did the primi- tive disciples believe that " Christ died for our sins " ? we find no materials which furnish a clear answer. Paul could hardly have meant that his own philosophy of the subject had been defined and held from the beginning. The data in our possession would give no warrant for such a claim, if, indeed, they could be reconciled with it. It is only by a large use of conjecture that we can reconstruct the primitive Christian views of the saving significance of Messiah's death. The argument which would show that in Christ's teaching, and in the apprehension of the first believers, the death was viewed as satisfying the divine wrath against sin and so laying a basis for forgiveness, must rest, primarily, upon a strict construction of the word Xvrpov. It may appeal to the phrase reported by Matthew, " for the forgiveness of sins," but (assuming its genuineness) the early discourses in Acts furnish no warrant for the judicial interpretation. Certain as it is that the first Christians clothed the death of Christ with saving significance, it seems to me equally certain that they did not associate with it ideas of substitution or of penalty. This meaning is found in the few relevant words and phrases in the Synoptics and the Acts only by improbable interpretations, and by reading back into them the concepts afterward wrought out by Paul and by later ecclesiastical theology. This is a conclusion to which the known facts which bear upon it seem to me to lead. It is evident, however, that this conclusion cannot determine our estimate of later developments. In Paul we first find the elements of a philosophy of tlie death of Christ and of its relation to the salvation of men based upon an analysis of the divine attributes. This interpretation is reared upon Jesus' words about liis THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 59 death being necessary on men's behalf, upon the prhnitive apostolic idea that it was included in the divine purpose, and upon the conception of vicarious suffering and merit which was found in Isa. liii, and which had been devel- oped in later Jewish thought.^ Paul's answer to the question, Why does the death of Jesus possess saving value ? is, in its substance, that by it he has satisfied the divine wrath against sin so that it need not now be asserted in the punishment of sinners. In Paul the death of Christ is the primary saving deed. It was for the direct purpose of dying in order to atone for the sins of mankind that he came into the world. What is the apostle's justification of this view? Be- tween God and sinful man there is a mutual hostility. Sinners are the objects of God's enmity (Rom. v. 10 ; xi. 28) 2 and they, in turn, are hostile to God (Rom. viii. 7 ; Col. i. 21). Hence any reconciliation, KaraXkaji], which is accomplished between them must be two-sided. Not only must man renounce his hostility to God, but God must change his attitude toward man — must relinquish 1 On the idea of the vicarious sufferings of the righteous as elaborated in late Judaism, see Bousset, Die Beligion des Jndentiims, p. 181 sq. ; Dalman, Jesaja 53 das Prophetenioort vom Suhnleiden des IleilsmiUlers, especially ch. ii ; Weber, JMische Theologie, chs. xix and xx. I pub- lished a translation and condensation of these chapters of Weber's work in The Old and New Testament Strident (now The Bihlical World) for July and August, 1889. Weber's sources are, for the most part, later than the New Testament period, but they illustrate the development of an idea which must have had a long history. Illustrations may be found in 2 Mac. vii. 38 : "I pray that, for me and my brethren, the wrath of the Almighty may cease, which has justly gone forth upon our whole race " ; 4 Mac. vi. 28: "Be gracious to thy people; let the punishment which we endure on their account suffice thee. Let mj- blood serve for them as a purification ; take my life as a reparation for tlieir life." Cf. i. 11 ; xvii. 20-22; xviii. 4; 4 Ezra viii. 26 sq. According to Josephus, An- tiquities, I. xiii. 3, Abraham expects that the undeserved suffering of Isaac, when he shall have been offered as a sacrifice, will redound to his advantage. 2 In both these cases ix^pol (enemies) is passive, as the context shows. In the first it is explanatory of the state of being objects of God's wrath referred to in the previous verse ; in the second it is the contrast of beloved (of God), ayairrjToi ; the correlation is : objects of wrath (enemies) — ■ objects of gracious favor (beloved). 60 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE his wrath and resentment. Now God himself undertakes to accomplish, in and through Christ, this twofold recon- ciliation (2 Cor. V. 18, 19; Col. i. 20, 21; Eph. ii. 16). He originates and man receives the offer and the gift of reconciliation. Through the death of Christ, God opens the way for man to enter into a new relation to himself. Instead of the former relation of mutual hostility, a new relation has become possible — that of favor, instead of wrath, on God's part, and that of obedience, instead of rebellion, on man's part. In view of what Christ has done, God ceases to reckon the sins of men to their account (2 Cor. V. 19). Since by his death the divine righteousness, which is the principle of penalty, has been adequately expressed and the divine displeasure against sin amply vindicated, God may now restrain the operation of his wrath against sinners and open the way to their accept- ance and forgiveness. Christ was " made sin " on man's account (2 Cor. v. 21), that is, he so came under the action of the divine wrath against sin, so experienced the consequences of sin, that God's justice is thereby vindicated and satisfied. The view maintained by Ritschl ^ and some other theo- logians, that the righteousness of God which Christ ex- presses by his death (Rom. iii. 25), means, in Paul's view, God's gracious purpose of salvation, seems to me to be exegetically untenable. Paul's idea of the right- eousness of God, in this passage, appears to me to be that of self-affirming, governmental justice. Its action as depicted in passages like Rom. ii. 5-10, 16 ; 2 Cor. V. 10 ; 2 Thess. ii. 6-8, illustrates the same general con- ception. The connection of thought in which "the ex- hibition of his righteousness" is set is decisive against the interpretation in question. This manifestation of righteousness in Christ's death is set over against a seem- ing laxity in God's treatment of sin in past times. Now, however, by the shedding of Christ's blood, his hostility to sin is so expressed and vindicated that it need not be further satisfied in punishment. These thoughts proceed 1 Jtechtfert. u. VersoJtn. U. § 15. THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 61 upon the supposition that God can only forgive on the con- dition that the judicial reaction of his nature against sin has been asserted as fully as it would have been in the punishment of sin. It is true that Paul never writes: Christ has reconciled God to us, but that is not because he does not conceive of the death of Christ as founding a new relation of God toward men. It may well have been because Paul is always eager to bring out the fact that it is God who originates the reconciliation. The statement in question would not have emphasized that idea, and might even have seemed inconsistent with it. Nevertheless it does represent an element of the Pauline thought. It might be expressed by saying, God has, by the death of Christ, provided a way for reconciling himself to the sinful world.^ Let us note more particularly the significance which is attached to the shedding of Christ's blood. In his vio- lent death, says the apostle, he was set forth before the world as an iXaarijpiov, which most naturally means either a propitiatory offering (sc. Bv/xa^, or, more generally, a means of expiation. The view of Ritschl, Cremer, and others, that IXaarijpiov is here used as in Heb. ix. 5 and the Septuagint, to denote the kapporeth, or mercy-seat of the ark of the covenant, is, to my mind, quite improb- able. ^ If that meaning had been intended, the word would 1 Commenting on Paul's use of the word IXaa-r-npiov in Rom. iii. 25, Professor Sanday writes : " When we ask, who is propitiated ? the answer can only be ' God.' Nor is it possible to separate this propitia- tion from the death of the Son," Comm. on Eomans, p. 91. Whether this idea, which (if genuinely Pauline) meets us in no other biblical writer, is congruous with the teaching of Jesus, or available for Christian theol- ogy, is a question which, for the present, remains open. 2 Deissmann in his Bibelstudien, p. 121 sq. (Eng. trans., p. 124 sq.), has reenforced the argument against this explanation of the word. He shows that it is not accurate to represent the word IXaa-T'^piop as the equivalent of kapporeth in the Septuagint. The strict equivalent of kapporeth is iKaar-fipiov iirlde/ia. Now it is true that the noun often falls away and the adjective is used substantively to represent kapporeth ; but in such cases a theological word is simply used as a periphrasis or gloss upon the mean- ing of the cover of the ark. It signifies, quite generically, a propitiatory article. From the equation of words (Wortgleichung) it is entirely un- warranted to conclude to an equation of ideas (Begriffsgleichung) . 62 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE have required the article, and perhaps -qfioiv.^ Moreover, the meaning which Ritschl deduces : the manifestation- place of the divine mercy, does not suit the connection of ideas. Christ is set forth as an l\aarr)pLov in the shedding of his blood in order to exhibit the divine righteousness, which demonstration was necessary to show that God was not lax in his treatment of sin, as might seem to be the case from his passing over sins committed in earlier times. The etymological meaning of the word is : a means of rendering favorable (IXdaKea- Oai) expiatorium, Suhnemittel, and that is the only mean- ing which suits the context here. Other passages confirm this view. Men are justified and saved from wrath by the shedding of Christ's blood (Rom. v. 9) ; his giving of his life is regarded as the payment of the price by which men's release from sin is purchased (1 Cor. vi. 20 ; vii. 23 ; Gal. iii. 13; iv. 5). Whatever "ransom" and "covenant offering" may have meant originally, there is no doubt that we have here the idea of satisfaction by substitution. Paul has not, however, expounded this conception in terms of the sacrificial system to any such an extent as might have been expected. It has been possible for some interpreters to maintain, with considerable plausibility, that he did not regard the death of Christ as a sacrifice. ^ Ritschl, on the contrary, reads the whole Pauline doctrine in terms of the sacrificial system, but so explains these terms as to give quite a new interpretation of Paul's teaching. His exclusion from the sacrifices of any reference to sin and its forgiveness yields a view of Paul's doctrine which makes it mean that in Christ God is persistently pursuing his eternal purpose of grace. But whatever the sacri- fices may have meant, this was not what Paul thought to be the sole or immediate import of Christ's death. It appears to me that in his language we may note so many traces of Jewish sacrificial ideas that we must suppose that this system supplied to his mind suggestive illustrations ^ Cf. 1 Cor. V. 7 : rb -jrdffxa VfiQv iridr/ X/)i