anan

1KPm

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

1942

THE
DEATH OF CHRIST
ITS PLACE AND INTERPRETATION
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

BY
JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY
UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW

NEW YORK
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
3 & 5 West 18th Street, nuab 5th Atdhtie
MCMII

PREFACE
The subject of this book must not be ex
tended beyond the promise of the title.
It is not an exhaustive treatise on the
Atonement or on Justification : it is an
examination of the New Testament teach
ing on the Death of Christ.
That the death of Christ has a place in
the New Testament which demands for it
the most careful consideration will not be
questioned by any one ; and though the
ground has often been traversed, in whole
or in part, before, there are reasons which
justify at the present time such a study
as follows. One is that, so far as the
writer can judge, the death of Christ has
not the place assigned to it, either in
preaching or in theology, which it has in
the New Testament. There have been
conspicuous examples of essays and even
treatises on the Atonement, standing in no

vi THE DEATH OF CHRIST
discoverable relation to the New Testa
ment. The proportions of average current
Christianity are not those of apostolic
Christianity ; and if the latter is in any
sense normal, it is desirable that we should
rectify our impressions by it To aid in
this, by setting the death of Christ in that
relief in which it stands out in the New
Testament, is part of the writer's purpose.
Further, the critical investigation of Scrip
ture, which has been the task of the last
two generations, necessitates a fresh survey
of the ground in the light which it con
tributes. It is not possible, in a study
which touches upon almost every book in
the New Testament, to enter in detail into
all the critical questions which might be
raised : this would be to exhaust another
science by way of preliminary. The writer
has tried to say what seemed essential where
the questions raised are of real importance,
and for the rest he can only beg his readers
to believe that he does not write in ignor
ance of them. A further justification for
such a study as this at the present moment
may be found in the fact that an adequate
apprehension of New Testament teaching

PREFACE vii
on Christ's death will be found to contain
the solution, or some contribution towards
the solution, of many practical and theo
logical problems which are exercising the
mind of the Church. On this something
has been said in the last chapter.
Of all subjects, the death of Christ is
probably the one in regard to which it is
least possible to urge the familiar distinc
tion between theology and religion. There
is such a distinction, no doubt ; religion is
one thing, and theology is another. But
it is not an absolute distinction. The two
things are not two which have nothing to
do with one another ; they have a common
root ; there is a point at which they meet
and are inextricably involved in each other,
and that point is the Cross of Christ, in
terpreted as the New Testament interprets
it. Such, at least, is the writer's convic
tion. Hence it has been no part of his
intention to affect an insensibility which he
did not feel, or to discuss the death of
Christ as though it were a matter of entire
indifference whether the apostolic interpre
tation of it had anything in it or not. He
ventures to claim for what he has written

viii THE DEATH OF CHRIST
a scientific character, in the full sense of
the word ; but in Christian science it is
not required that a man be indifferent to
Christianity. When we speak abstractly,
we may distinguish theology and religion ;
when we speak of the death of Christ, if
we are to say anything which has reality
in it, the distinction must disappear. If
kings were philosophers or philosophers
kings, we should have the ideal state,
according to Plato. If evangelists were our
theologians or theologians our evangelists,
we should at least be nearer the ideal
church. The writer would like to believe
that in the following pages he has done
something to bridge the gulf between them.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
PAGE
Conception of the New Testament : its unity not
artificial, ...... I
Misused distinctions : historical and dogmatic,
biblical and systematic, material and formal, . 4
The death of Christ a real subject in the New
Testament, , , , , . 8
Outline of study, . , , , . • 9

CHAPTER I
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
The mind of Christ and the mind of the evangelists, 11
The idea that our Lord's death must have been
foreign to His mind when He entered on His
work, . . . . . .11
Relation to this idea of the narratives of His Bap
tism and Temptation, . . . .13
Significance of the Baptism in particular, . . 18
The first suggestions of our Lord's death and
allusions to it, . . . .22
The taking away of the Bridegroom (Mark ii. 19),
and the sign of Jonah (Matt. xii. 40), . . 23
The express predictions of the Passion : critical
questions connected with them, . 26
(Mark viii. 31, Mark ix. 31, Markx. 32, and parallels)
— their historicity, . . . .28

THE DEATH OF CHRIST

Sense in which Christ's death was necessary :
(a) Inevitable ? . . . . • 29
(b) Indispensable ? . . . .29
Relation of these two conceptions in the mind of
Jesus, ...... 31
Bearing of Old Testament Scripture on this point, . 34
What the unintelligence of the disciples meant, . 35
The Ransom saying :
Its historical context, . . , , 36
Its interpretation —
(a) Hollmann's view criticised, . . 40
(£)Wendt's „ „ . .4'
Clue to the meaning —
(a) In other words of Jesus, . .42
(6) In passages of the Old Testament, . 43
The meaning of Kdfiher as the equivalent of
Xvrpov, ..... 44
The Lord's Supper :
Views of Spitta and Hollmann criticised, . 46
The idea of covenant-blood : relation of sacrifice in
general to propitiation, . . . .50
Exodus xxiv. and Jeremiah xxxi. in relation to the
words of Jesus, 53
The idea that ' the remission of sins ' in Matt.
xxvi. 28 is put into a relation to Christ's death
which is inconsistent with His teaching as a
whole, .... -56
Propitiation a mode of mediation, . , , 58

CHAPTER II
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN PREACHING

Results of last chapter in relation to our Lord's
experience in Gethsemane and on the Cross 
not refuted but illustrated,
Original attitude of the disciples to the words of
Jesus 

61

65

CONTENTS xi
PAG3
The Resurrection : the intercourse of the Risen
Christ with the disciples according to the New
Testament— critical problems, . . .66
The great commission :
Matt, xxviii. 18 ff., Mark xvi. 15 f., Luke xxiv.
47 f., John xx. 21 f., . . . . 68
Refers either (a) to Baptism, or (6) to For
giveness, ..... 73
In the New Testament these are inter-related and
related to the death of Jesus, . . .74
Importance of this for the unity of the New
Testament, ..... 75
The opening chapters of Acts :
Critical problems again, . . • 75
Primitive character of the Christology, . 76
Prominence of the Resurrection — why ? . .77
Refutation of the idea that the death of the Messiah
is only an offence which the Resurrection en
ables the disciples to overcome, . . .78
How the earliest Christian preaching made the
death of Christ intelligible, . . .78
Its connection (1) with a divine purpose, . . 80
(2) with the prophecy of the Servant
ofthe Lord, . . .81
(3) with the forgiveness of sins, . 82
The Sacraments in Acts, and their significance in
this connection, ..... 83
The First Epistle of St. Peter :
Its ' Pauline ' features, . . . .85
A ' witness ' to the sufferings of Christ, . 87
The important passages :
(1) The salutation, i. I f. — the sprinkling of
the blood of Jesus Christ — relation to
Exodus xxiv., .... 89
(2) ' Redeemed from a vain conversation,'
i. 18 f. — originality of this idea — what
it leaves unexplained, . . .91
(3) * Who Himself bore our sins,' ii. 20 ff. —
mingling of prophecy and testimony —

xii THE DEATH OF CHRIST PAGE
Christ's sufferings exemplary, yet more
— what it is to bear sin— sin-bearing
and substitution— the purpose of Christ
in bearing our sins, . . -94
(4) ' Who died for sins once, the just for the
unjust ' — aim of this : to conduct us to
God, ..... 101
Imitation of Christ conditioned by the conscious
ness of redemption, . . . • 105
The Second Epistle ascribed to Peter, . . 106

CHAPTER III
THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL
Preliminary considerations affecting the estimate
of St. Paul's whole treatment of this subject : 108
(1) The assurance with which he preaches
a gospel in which Christ's death is
fundamental — his 'intolerance,' . 109
(2) The relation of his doctrine to the com
mon Christian tradition, . . 1 11
(3) Alleged development in his teaching, and
inferences from such development, . 114
(4) 'Experimental' and 'apologetic' elements
in it — 'testimony' and 'theology' —
'fact' and 'theory': these distinctions
criticised, . . . .117
(5) Connection in St. Paul's mind of Christ's
death and resurrection, . . . 121
Relations in which St. Paul defines Christ's death :
(1) To the love of God, . . . 123
(2) To the love of Christ, . . . 125
(3) To the sin of men. Connection of sin
and death as He conceived it — death
must be interpreted through the con
science — Menegoz on an alleged in
coherence of the apostle, . , 126

CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
The witness of the epistles on these points :
i Thessalonians v. 10, 'Who died for us that
whether we wake or sleep we should
live together with Him,' . .130
I Corinthians — general references — ' the
word of the Cross' — 'bought with a
price ' — the passages on the Sacra
ments in ch. x. and ch. xi. — ex
treme importance of these — Christ our
Passover, .... 132
a Corinthians — 'the sufferings of Christ'
and ' the dying of Jesus ' in ch. i. and
ch. iv., . . . . -139
The locus classicus in v. 14 ff. — professedly
contains a theory : Christ died our
death, ..... 140
Meaning of /caraWayr) (Reconciliation) in
St. Paul — Christ's finished work —
necessity for evangelising that there
should be such a work, . . . 143
Christ made sin for us : meaning and
purpose of this, .... 147
Religious and ethical, theological and psy
chological, expressions of the same
idea : how they support each other, . 149
Galatians — exclusively occupied with this
subject — Christianity asserted as the
sum of the effects produced by Christ's
death, and by that alone, . .150
Rationale of this as St. Paul's experience :
how Christ's death is conceived and
preached so as to have the power
which produces such effects, . . 153
Conception of Christ ' under the law ' :
what it means, . . . .155
The law (a) as expressing God's
will for men, . 155
(b) as expressing God's
judgment on men, . 156

xiv THE DEATH OF CHRIST PAGE
The last is necessary to explain Gal. iii. 13,
and to make it intelligible that Christ's
death is a demonstration of love to
the sinful, ... . . 156
Evasions of this argument :
(1) Only the ceremonial law is in
question in Galatians, . .158
(2) Only the Jews are in question, . 159
(3) Curse is only equivalent to Cross, . 160
The ethical passages in Galatians : v. 24
and vi. 14, ... 162
Romans — the Righteousness of God demon
strated at the Cross, iii. 21 ff., . . 163
The Righteousness of God includes :
(1) the fact that He is Himself righteous, 165
(2) that He justifies (or holds as
righteous) him who believes in
Jesus, .... 165
Jesus Christ set forth in propitiatory power
in His blood is the demonstration of
this righteousness in both its elements, 167
Attempts to obliterate the distinction :
(1) Those which do not see the problem
with which the apostle is dealing, 168
(2) Those which profess to find the key
to St. Paul in 2 Isaiah and the
Psalms — Ritschl's idea that the
righteousness of God always has
its correlate in the righteousness
of His people, . . . 169
(3) Seeberg's view, that God to be
righteous is bound to provide for
fellowship between Himself and
men, and is pleased to do it in
this way, .... 172
To understand St. Paul, we must discern
Law and Necessity in the relation of
Christ's death to sin, . . . 175
Manner in which St. Paul deduces all

CONTENTS xv
PAGE
Christianity from Christ set forth in
His blood as a propitiation, . . 178
Criticism of the current idea that He has
two doctrines of reconciliation, a
'juridical' and an ' ethico-mystical'
one : views of Weiss, Ritschl, Holtz-
mann, ..... 179
True relation of Romans vi. to Romans iii., 183
Faith in Christ Who died includes in it a death :
(1) to sin, ..... 186
(2) to the flesh, . . . .187
(3) to law, ..... 190
Place of the Spirit in St. Paul's teaching in this
connection, ..... 192
The Epistles of the Imprisonment — reconciliation
extended from man to the universe, . .194
Spiritual beings whose fortunes are bound up with
those of men : the Scripture support for such
an idea, ....." 196
An imaginative expression for the absoluteness of
the Christian religion, .... 199
Reconciliation of men to each other as a fruit of
Christ's death, ..... 200
The Pastoral Epistles, . . . . 201

CHAPTER IV
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
Various affinities of this epistle : primitive Chris
tianity, Paulinism, Alexandrian thought, . 204
The most theological writing of the New Testament :
its use of alavios, ..... 207
Relations of Christ's Person and work in it accord
ing as we start from :
(a) the Incarnation — Westcott, . . 209
(b) the Priesthood — Seeberg, . , . 210
Christ's death defined by relation to God and His

xvi THE DEATH OF CHRIST PAGE
love : (a) directly, ii. 9, (6) indirectly by allusion
(1) to His commission, (2) to His obedience, . 212
Christ's death defined by relation to sin (i. 4 and
fiassim) : it is everywhere a sacrificial death, . 214
Sacrifice in this epistle to be interpreted in connec
tion with Priesthood, .... 217
Priesthood represents, embodies, and makes possible
a fellowship of God and man, . . . 218
A priest is necessary in religion to deal with sin by
way of sacrifice, . . . . 219
Ways of interpreting this :
(1) Nature of the relation between Christ's
death and sin deduced from the effect
on man ascribed to the death — mean
ing of d-yiafew, TfXciovv and Ka0api£cw
in Hebrews, .... 220
(2) The effect on man deduced from the con
ception of Christ's sacrificial death as
a finished work, .... 224
What gives Christ's death its propitiatory power ? . 225
Examination of ch. ix. 14 : ' He offered Himself
through eternal spirit,' .... 227
The author held the common Christian view of the
relation of death and sin, .... 229
Examination of the passage in x. 1-10 : ' to do Thy
will, O God,' ..... 230
In what sense obedience is the principle of the
Atonement, ..... 232
Connection between the work of Christ and man's
salvation by it : the relation of the ideas ex
pressed by Substitute and Representative, . 235
Place and meaning of faith in this epistle, . , 239
CHAPTER V
THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS
Critical considerations, .... 241
I. The Apocalypse :
The doxology in i. 5 f. : what inspires the
Christian praise of Christ, . . 242

CONTENTS xvii

PAGE

The Lamb as it had been slain (v. 6-14), . 245
The Blood ofthe Lamb (vii. 14, xii. 11)— con
necting links in thought, . . . 246
The Lamb's Book of Life, . . . 248
II. The Gospel :
General representation : redemption through
revelation rather than revelation through
redemption — current contrasts of St. Paul
and St. John criticised, . . .251
Place of Christ's death in the gospel often
underestimated, .... 253
Examination of explicit references :
(1) i. 29 : Behold the Lamb of God, etc., . 254
(2) ii. 19 : Destroy this Temple, . . 255
(3) iii. 14, viii. 28, xii. 32 : The 'lifting up' of
the Son of Man — death as glorifying, . 255
(4) vi. 51 f. : 'My flesh for the life of the
world,' ..... 257
(5) x. 11 f. : The Good Shepherd, . . 258
(6) xi. 49 : The prophecy of Caiaphas, . 259
(7) xii. 24, 27 : The corn of wheat, etc.j . 260
(8) xii. 38 : The quotation of Isaiah liii., . 260
(9) xv. 13 : 'Greater love hath no man than
this,' ..... 261
(10) xvii. 19: 'For their sakes I sanctify My
self,' ..... 262
(1 1) xviii. -xix. : The story of the Passion, . 262
All this interpreted in relation to the love of God
and the necessity of men as sinners liable to
die in their sins — comparison with St. Paul, . 263
III. The Epistle : comparison and contrast with
the Gospel, ..... 269
(1) It defines Christ's death more explicitly
by relation to sin, i. 7 ; ii. I f. ; iii. 5 ;
iv. 10. Criticism of Westcott's interpre
tation of ' the blood of Christ,' . . 270
(2) Conception of Christ as iXao-^idj— the cor
relatives -of ZXaoTxds are sacrifice, inter
cession, and law, .... 272
b

xviii THE DEATH OF CHRIST PAGE
(3) Propitiation and the love of God defin
able only through each other, . . 275
Place of the Sacraments in the Gospel and First
Epistle of St.John — examination of 1 John v. 6 f., 276
Relation of the historical and the spiritual in Chris
tianity generally, ..... 278

CHAPTER VI
IMPORTANCE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST IN PREACHING
AND IN THEOLOGY
No abstract distinction to be drawn between
theology and preaching, .... 282
Considerations in relation to preaching :
(1) No gospel without Atonement, . . 284
The sense of debt to Christ in the New
Testament, .... 285
The characteristics ofthe Atonement must
be reflected in the gospel :
(a) Perfection — ' full salvation now,' . 287
(3) Assurance — Romish and Protes
tant tendencies, . . . 288
(c) Finality — what justification means, 292
(2) There may be various ways of approach
ing this central truth of the Christian
faith — our Lord's method with His dis
ciples, ..... 294
Kierkegaard on the sense in which the
Father comes before the Son, though
no man comes to the Father but through
the Son, . . . . .297
Relation in Christ of Example and Re
conciler—what is our point of contact
with Christ? .... 299
(3) St. Paul's meaning in delivering ' first of
all ' that Christ died for our sins, . 301

CONTENTS xix
PAGE
(4) Sense of sin in relation to the Atonement
(a) as the condition of accepting or
understanding it ; (b) as its fruit, . 303
(5) The issues of this gospel — life or death, . 309
Theological considerations :
(1) The Atonement is the key to the unity
and therefore to the inspiration of Scrip
ture. The inspiration of Scripture and
its unity are correlative terms, . . 313
(2) The Atonement is the proper evangelical
foundation for a doctrine of the Person
of Christ, . . . . .317
Harnack's attempt to dispense with Chris-
tology — why it is impracticable, . . 319
(3) The Incarnation not intelligible or cred
ible, except when defined by relation to
the Atonement — speculative, ethical, and
dogmatic reasons alleged against this —
view of Westcott carried to its logical
issue by Archdeacon Wilson. Grounds
for rejecting this view : . . . . 320
(a) It shifts the centre of gravity in
the New Testament, . . 324
(b) It puts metaphysical questions in
the place of moral ones, . . 325
(c) It displaces passion by senti-
mentalism, . . . 327
(4) The Atonement is the basis for an adequate
doctrine of God — sense in which the
New Testament teaches that God is
love — sin as that which is proof against
such love, ..... 327
(5) The Atonement at the foundation of
Christian ethics as of Christian life —
Law glorified in the Passion and made
an irresistible, ethical impulse, . . 331

INTRODUCTION
Two assumptions must be made by any one who
writes on the death of Christ in the New Testa
ment. The first is, that there is such a thing
as a New Testament ; and the second, that the
death of Christ is a subject which has a real place
and importance in it. The first may be said to
be the more important of the two, for the denial
of it carries with it the denial of the other.
At the present moment there is a strong
tendency in certain quarters to depreciate the
idea of a New Testament in the sense in which
it has rightly or wrongly been established in the
Church. It is pointed out that the books which
compose our New Testament are in no real
sense a unity. They were not written with a
view to forming the volume in which we now
find them, nor with any view of being related
to each other at all. At first, indeed, they had
no such relation. They are merely the chief
fragments that have survived from a primitive
Christian literature which must have been in
definitely larger, not to say richer. The unity
which they now possess, and in virtue of which
A

2 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
they constitute the New Testament, does not
belong to them inherently ; it is factitious ; it is
the artificial, and to a considerable extent the
illusive result of the action of the Church in
bestowing upon them canonical authority. The
age to which they historically belong is an age at
which the Church had no ' New Testament,' and
hence what is called New Testament theology is
an exhibition of the manner in which Christians
thought before a New Testament existed. As
a self-contradictory thing, therefore, it ought to
be abolished. The ' dogma ' of the New Testa
ment, and the factitious unity which it has
created, ought to be superseded, and instead of
New Testament theology we should aim at a
history of primitive Christian thought and life.
It would not be necessary for the purposes of
such a history to make any assumptions as to
the unity of the ' New Testament ' books ; but
though they would not form a holy island in
the sea of history, they would gain in life and
reality in proportion as the dogmatic tie which
binds them to each other was broken, and their
living relations to the general phenomena of
history revealed.1
There is not only some plausibility in this but
some truth: all I am concerned to point out
1 As typical instances of this mode of thought, reference may
be made to Wrede's Ueber Begriff und Aufgabe der sogenannten
Neutestamentlichen Theologie, and G. Krtlger's Das Dogma vom
Neuen Testament.

UNITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 3
here is that it is not the whole truth, and pos
sibly not the main truth. The unity which
belongs to the books of the New Testament,
whatever be its value, is certainly not fortuitous.
The books did not come together by chance.
They are not held together simply by the art of
the bookbinder. It would be truer to say that
they gravitated toward each other in the course
of the first century of the Church's life, and
imposed their unity on the Christian mind, than
that the Church imposed on them by statute —
for when 'dogma' is used in the abstract sense
which contrasts it with fact or history, this is
what it means — a unity to which they were
inwardly strange. That they are at one in some
essential respects is obvious. They have at least
unity of subject : they are all copcerned with
Jesus Christ, and with the manifestation of God's
redeeming love to men in Him. There is even
a sense in which we may say there is unity of
authorship ; for all the books of the New Testa
ment are works of faith. Whether the unity
goes further, and if so how far, are questions not
to be settled beforehand. It may extend to
modes of thought, to fundamental beliefs or con
victions, in regard to Christ and the meaning of
His presence and work in the world. It is not
assumed here that it does, but neither is it
assumed that it does not. It is not assumed,
with regard to the particular subject before us,

4 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
that in the different New Testament writings we
shall find independent, divergent, or inconsistent
interpretations of Christ's death. The result of
an unprejudiced investigation may be to show
that on this subject the various writings which
go to make up our New Testament are pro
foundly at one, and even that their oneness on
this subject, a oneness not imposed nor artificial,
but essential and inherent, justifies against the
criticism referred to above the common Christian
estimate of the New Testament as a whole.
Without entering on abstract or general
grounds into a discussion in which no abstract
or general conclusion can be reached, it may
be permitted to say, in starting, that in the
region with which the New Testament deals we
should be on our guard against pressing too
strongly some current distinctions which, within
their limits, are real enough, but which, if carried
beyond their limits, make everything in the New
Testament unintelligible. The most important
of these is the distinction of historical and dog
matic, or of historico-religious and dogmatico-
religious. If the distinction between historical
and dogmatic is pressed, it runs back into the dis
tinction betvveen thing and meaning, or between
fact and theory ; and this, as we shall have
occasion to see, is a distinction which it is im
possible to press. There is a point at which the
two sides in such contrasts pass into each other.

HISTORICAL AND DOGMATIC 5
He who does not see the meaning does not see
the thing ; or to use the more imposing words,
he who refuses to take a ' dogmatic ' view proves
by doing so that he falls short of a completely
'historical' one. The same kind of consideration
has sometimes to be applied to the distinction
of 'Biblical' or 'New Testament' and 'syste
matic ' theology. Biblical or New Testament
theology deals with the thoughts, or the mode
of thinking, of the various New Testament
writers ; systematic theology is the independent
construction of Christianity as a whole in the
mind of a later thinker. Here again there is a
broad and valid distinction, but not an absolute
one. It is the Christian thinking of the first
century in the one case, and of the twentieth,
let us say, in the other ; but in both cases there
is Christianity and there is thinking, and if there
is truth in either there is bound to be a place
at which the distinction disappears. It does not
follow from the distinction, with the inevitable
limitations, that nothing in the New Testament
can be accepted by a modern mind simply as it
stands. It does not follow that nothing in St.
Paul or St. John — nothing in their interpretation
of the death of Jesus, for example — has attained
the character of finality. There may be some
thing which has. The thing to be dealt with is
one, and the mind, through the centuries, is one,
and even in the first century it may have struck

6 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
to a final truth which the twentieth will not
transcend. Certainly we cannot deny this before
hand on the ground that Biblical theology is one
thing and Systematic or Philosophical theology
another. They may be taught in separate rooms
in a theological school, but, except to the pedant
or the dilettante, the distinction between them
is a vanishing one. And the same may be said,
finally, about the distinction of matter and form.
There is such a distinction : it is possible to
put the same matter in different forms. But it
does not follow that the form in which a truth
or an experience is put by a New Testament
writer is always unequal to the matter, or that
the matter must always be fused again and cast
into a new mould before it can be appropriated
by us. The higher the reality with which we
deal, the less the distinction of matter and form
holds. If Christianity brings us into contact
with the ultimate truth and reality, we may find
that the ' form ' into which it was cast at first is
more essential to the matter than we had sup
posed. Just as it would be a rash act to venture
to extract the matter of Lycidas, and to exhibit
it in a more adequate form, it may be a rash act
to venture to tell us what St. Paul or St. John
meant in a form more equal to the meaning
than the apostles themselves could supply. It
is not necessary to say that it would be, but
only that it may be. The mind seems to gain

MATTER AND FORM 7
freedom and lucidity by working with such dis
tinctions, but if we forget that they are our own
distinctions, and that in the real world, in the
very nature of things, a point is reached sooner
or later at which they disappear, we are certain
to be led astray. I do not argue against draw
ing them or using them, but against making them
so absolute that in the long-run one of them
must cease to be true, and forfeit all its rights in
favour ofthe other. The chief use, for instance,
to which many writers put them is to appeal to
the historical against the dogmatic; the historical
is employed to drive the dogmatic from the field.
To do the reverse would of course be as bad, and
my object in these introductory remarks is to
deprecate both mistakes. It does not matter, out
side the class-room, whether an interpretation is
called historical or dogmatic, historico-religious
or dogmatico-religious ; it does not matter
whether we put it under the head of Biblical
or of philosophical theology ; what we want to
know is whether it is true. In the truth such
distinctions are apt to disappear.
Without assuming, therefore, the dogmatic
unity of the New Testament, either in its repre
sentation of Christianity as a whole, or of the
death of Christ in particular, we need not feel
precluded from approaching it with a presump
tion that it will exhibit some kind of coherence.
Granting that the Church canonised the books,

8 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
consciously or unconsciously, it did not canonise
them for nothing. It must have felt that they
really represented and therefore safeguarded the
Christian faith, and as the Church of the early
days was acutely conscious of the distinction
between what did and what did not belong to
Christianity, it must have had some sense at
least of a consistency in its Christian Scriptures.
They did not represent for it two gospels or ten,
but one. The view Christians took of the books
they valued was instinctively dogmatic without
ceasing to be historical ; or perhaps we may say,
with a lively sense of their historical relations
the Church had an instinctive feeling of the dog
matic import of the books in its New Testament
It is in this attitude, which is not blind to either
side of the distinction, yet does not let either
annul the other, that we ought to approach the
study of New Testament problems.
It is hardly necessary to prove that in the
New Testament the death of Christ is a real
subject. It is distinctly present to the mind of
New Testament writers, and they have much to
say upon it. It is treated by them as a subject
of central and permanent importance to the
Christian faith, and it is incredible that it should
have filled the place it does fill in the New
Testament had it ever been regarded as of
trifling consequence for the understanding, the
acceptance, or the preaching of the Gospel. It

OUTLINE OF STUDY 9
is hardly necessary to say that in using the
expression ' the death of Christ,' we are not
speaking of a thing, but of an experience.
Whether we view it as action or as passion,
whatever enters into personality has the signi
ficance and the worth of personality. The death
of Christ in the New Testament is the death of
one who is alive for evermore. To every New
Testament writer Christ is the Lord, the living
and exalted Lord, and it is impossible for them
to think of His death except as an experience
the result or virtue of which is perpetuated in His
risen life. Nevertheless, Christ died. His death
is in some sense the centre and consummation
of His work. It is because of it that His risen
life is the hope which it is to sinful men ; and it
needs no apology, therefore, if one who thinks
that it has less than its proper place in preach
ing and in theology endeavours to bring out as
simply as possible its place and meaning in
the New Testament. If our religion is to be
Christian in any sense of the term which history
will justify, it can never afford to ignore what, to
say the least of it, is the primary confession of
Christian faith.
The starting-point in our investigation must
be the life and teaching of Jesus Himself. For
this we shall depend in the first instance on the
synoptic gospels. Next will come an examina
tion of primitive Christian teaching as it bears

io THE DEATH OF CHRIST
on our subject. For this we can only make use
ofthe early chapters in Acts, and with a reserve,
which will be explained at the proper place, of
the first epistle of Peter. It will then be
necessary to go into greater detail, in propor
tion as we have more material at command, in
regard to the teaching of St. Paul. Of all New
Testament writers he is the one who has most
deliberately and continually reflected on Christ's
death ; if there is a conscious theology of it any
where it is with him. A study of the epistle to
the Hebrews and of the Johannine writings —
Apocalypse, Gospel, and Epistle — will bring the
subject proper to a close ; but I shall venture to
add, in a concluding chapter, some reflections on
the importance of the New Testament concep
tion of Christ's death alike to the evangelist and
the theologian.

IN THE NEW TESTAMENT ii

CHAPTER I
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
ALL the gospels describe the sufferings and death
of Christ with a minuteness which has no parallel
in their narratives of other events of His life, and
they all, to a certain extent, by references to the
fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy or other
wise, indicate their sense of its meaning and
importance. This, however, reveals the mind of
the evangelists rather than that of the Lord.
It is in His life, rather than in the record of
His death itself, that we must look for indica
tions of His mind. But here we are at once
confronted with certain preliminary difficulties.
Quite apart from the question whether it is
possible at all to know what Jesus thought or
spoke about His death — a question which it
is taken for granted is to be answered in
the affirmative — it has been asserted, largely
upon general grounds, that Jesus cannot have
entered on His ministry with the thought of His
death present to Him ; that He must, on the
contrary, have begun His work with brilliant

12 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
hopes ot success; that only as these hopes
gradually but irrevocably faded away did first
the possibility and then the certainty of a tragic
issue dawn upon Him ; that it thus became
necessary for Him to reconcile Himself to the
idea of a violent death, and that in various
ways, which can more or less securely be traced
in the gospels, He did so; although, as the
prayer in Gethsemane shows, there seemed a
possibility to Him, even to the last, that a
change might come, and the will of the Father
be done in some less tragic fashion. This is
what is meant by an historical as opposed to a
dogmatic reading of the life of Jesus, a dog
matic reading being one which holds that Jesus
came into the world in order to die ; and it is
insisted on as necessary to secure for that life
the reality of a genuine human experience. To
question or impeach or displace this interpreta
tion is alleged to be docetism; it gives us a
phantom as a Saviour instead of the man Christ
Jesus. In spite of its plausibility, I venture to urge
that this reading of the gospels requires serious
qualification. It is almost as much an a priori
interpretation of the history of Jesus, as if it
were deduced from the Nicene creed. It is
derived from the word 'historical,' in the sense
which that word would bear if it were applied
to an ordinary human life, just as abstractly as

HISTORY AND DOGMA AGAIN 13
another reading of the facts might be derived
from the words ' o/ioovaios t<Z> •jrarpL' If any
one wrote a life of Jesus, in which everything
was subordinated to the idea that Jesus was
'of one substance with the Father,' it would no
doubt be described as dogmatic, but it is quite
as possible to be 'dogmatic' in history as in
theology. It is a dogma, and an unreasoned
dogma besides, that because the life of Jesus
is historical, it neither admits nor requires for
its interpretation any idea or formula that can
not be used in the interpretation of the common
life of man. The Christian religion rests on
the fact that there is not only an identity but
a difference between His life and ours ; and we
cannot allow the difference (and with it the
Christian religion) to be abolished a priori by
a ' dogmatic ' use of the term ' historical.' We
must turn to our historical documents — the
gospels — and when we do, there is much to
give us pause.
All the gospels, we remark in the first place,
begin with an account of the baptism of Jesus.
Whatever may be doubtful about this it cannot
be doubtful that it was the occasion of a great
spiritual experience to Jesus. Ideas, as Dr.
Johnson says, must be given through something ;
and Jesus, we must believe, gave His disciples
an idea of what His experience at baptism was
in the narratives which we now read in the

14 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
gospels. The sum of that experience is often
put by saying that He came then to the con
sciousness of His Sonship. But the manner in
which Jesus Himself puts it is much more re
vealing. 'A voice came from heaven, Thou art
My Son, the Beloved, in Thee I am well pleased.'
A voice from heaven does not mean a voice
from the clouds, but a voice from God ; and
it is important to notice that the voice from
God speaks in familiar Old Testament words.
It does not come unmediated, but mediated
through psalm and prophecy. It is through
the absorption of Old Testament Scripture that
Jesus comes to the consciousness of what He
is ; and the Scriptures which He uses to convey
His experience to the disciples are the second
Psalm, and the forty-second chapter of Isaiah.
The first words of the heavenly voice are from
the Psalm, the next from the prophet. Nothing
could be more suggestive than this. The
Messianic consciousness in Jesus from the very
beginning was one with the consciousness of
the Servant of the Lord. The King, to whom
Jehovah says, Thou art My Son, this day have
I begotten Thee (Psalm ii. 7)1 is at the same

1 In Luke iii. 22, Codex Beza gives the heavenly voice in this
form. Probably Jesus told the stories of His baptism and tempta
tion often, giving more or less fully, with brief allusions to Old
Testament words or fuller citation of them, such hints of His
experience as His hearers could appreciate. Certainly there could

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 15
time (in the mind of Jesus) that mysterious
Servant of Jehovah — 'my beloved, in whom I
am well pleased ' — whose tragic yet glorious
destiny is adumbrated in the second Isaiah
(xiii. 1 ff.). It is not necessary to inquire how
Jesus could combine beforehand two lines of
anticipation which at the first glance seem so
inconsistent with each other ; the point is, that
on the evidence before us, which seems to the
writer as indisputable as anything in the gospels,
He did combine them, and therefore cannot have
started on His ministry with the cloudless hopes
which are sometimes ascribed to Him. How
ever ' unhistorical ' it might seem on general
grounds, on the ground of the evidence which
is here available we must hold that from the
very, beginning of His public work the sense
of something tragic in His destiny — something
which in form might only become definite with
time but in substance was sure — was present to
the mind of Jesus. When it did emerge in
definite form it brought necessities and appeals
along with it which were not there from the
beginning ; it brought demands for definite
action, for assuming a definite attitude, for
be no truer index to His life than a combination of Ps. ii. J
with Isaiah xiii. I if.— the Son of God as King, and the Servant
of the Lord ; and this combination, if we go upon the evidence
and not upon any dogmatic conception of what is or is not
historical, dates from the high hour in which Jesus entered on His
public work, and is not an afterbirth of disappointing experiences.

16 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
giving more or less explicit instruction ; but it
did not bring a monstrous and unanticipated
disappointment to which Jesus had to reconcile
Himself as best He could. It was not a brutal
de'menti to all His hopes. It had a necessary
relation to His consciousness from the be
ginning, just as surely as His consciousness
from the beginning had a necessary relation to
the prophetic conception of the Servant of the
Lord. This is confirmed if we look from the baptism
to that which in all the gospels is closely con
nected with it, and is of equal importance as
illustrating our Lord's conception of Himself
and His work — the temptation. Nothing can
be more gratuitous than to ascribe this wonder
ful narrative to the 'productive activity' of the
Church, and to allege that the temptations which
it records are those which Jesus encountered dur
ing His career, and that they are antedated for
effect, or for catechetical convenience. Psycho
logically, the connection of the temptations with
the baptism is strikingly true, and two of the
three are connected even formally with the divine
voice, Thou art My Son (Matt. iii. 7 ; iv. 3, 6).
The natural supposition is that Jesus spoke often
to His disciples of a terrible spiritual experience
which followed the sublime experience of the
baptism — sometimes without detail, as in Mark,
who mentions only a prolonged conflict with

THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE CHRIST 17
Satan, during which Jesus was sustained by the
ministry of angels; sometimes, as in Matthew
and Luke, with details which gave insight into
the nature of the conflict. It does not matter
that the temptations which are here described
actually assailed Jesus at later stages in His life.
Of course they did. They are the temptations
of the Christ, and they not only assailed Him
at particular moments, some of which we can
still identify (Matt. xvi. 22 f. ; John vi. 15),
they must in some way have haunted Him in
cessantly. But they were present to His mind
from the outset of His career ; that is the very
meaning of the temptation story, standing where
it stands. The Christ sees the two paths that
lie before Him, and He chooses at the outset,
in spiritual conflict, that which He knows will
set Him in irreconcilable antagonism to the
hopes and expectations of those to whom He
is to appeal. A soul which sees its vocation
shadowed out in the Servant of the Lord, which
is driven of the Spirit into the wilderness to face
the dreadful alternatives raised by that vocation,
and which takes the side which Jesus took in
conflict with the enemy, does not enter on its
life-work with any superficial illusions: it has
looked Satan and all he can do in the face; it
is prepared for conflict ; it may shrink from
death, when death confronts it in the path of
its vocation, as hideous and unnatural, but it
B

18 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
cannot be startled by it as by an unthought of,
unfamiliar thing. The possibility, at least, of
a tragic issue to His work — when we remember
the Servant of the Lord, far more than the
possibility — belongs to the consciousness of Jesus
from the first. Not that His ultimate triumph
is compromised, but He knows before He begins
that it will not be attained by any primrose path.
If there was a period in His life during which
He had other thoughts, it is antecedent to that
at which we have any knowledge of Him.
These considerations justify us in emphasising,
in relation to our subject, not merely the fact
of Jesus' baptism, but its meaning. It was a
baptism of repentance with a view to remission
of sins, and there is undoubtedly something
paradoxical, at a first glance, in the idea of Jesus
submitting to such a baptism. Neither here nor
elsewhere in the gospel does He betray any con
sciousness of sin. The opinion of a recent writer
on the life of Jesus,1 who ascribes to the frag
ments of the gospel according to the Hebrews
an authority equal, and at this point superior, to
that of the canonical gospels, is not likely to
find many supporters. Jerome tells us that in
this gospel, which in his day was still used by
the Nazarenes, and could be seen in the library
at Caesarea, the narrative ran : ' Behold the
mother of the Lord and His brethren said to
1 O. Holtzmann.

THE BAPTISM INTERPRETED 19
Him : John Baptist is baptizing with a view to
remission of sins : let us go and be baptized
by him. But He said to them : 'What sin have
I done that I should go and be baptized by him ?
unless, indeed, this very word I have spoken is
ignorantial i.e. a sin of ignorance or inadvertence
(cf. ayvoTj/jba, Heb. ix. 7, and njJB> in Old Testa
ment).1 We should have to suppose in this case
that Jesus went up to Jordan half reluctantly,
His first thought being that a baptism like John's
could mean nothing to Him, His next that
possibly this proud thought, or the utterance of
it, indicated that He might have something to
repent of after all, and more perhaps than He
knew. This mingling of what might not unfairly
be called petulance with a sudden access of mis
giving, as of one who was too sure of himself
and yet not quite sure, is as unlike as anything
could be to the simplicity and truth of Jesus;2
and surely it needs no proof that it is another
mood than this to which the heavens are opened,
and on which divine assurance and divine strength
are bestowed. We must abide by the canonical
1 Hier. Contra Pelag., 3, 2. Nestle, Novi Testamenti Graeci
Supplementum (77, 81), quotes in the same sense from Cyprian
De Rebaptismate : ' Confictus liber qui inscribitur Pauli predicatio
in quo libro contra omnes scripturas et de peccato proprio con-
fitentem invenies Christum, qui solus omnino nihil deliquit et ad
accipiendum Joannis baptisma paene invitum a matre sua esse
compulsum. '
a Soltau, Unsere Evangelien, p. 58 : * Der Zusatz ist nicht
mehr naiv, sondern ganz kasuistisch.'

20 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
narratives as consistent in themselves, and con
sistent with the New Testament as a whole.
What we see there is Jesus, who, according to all
apostolic testimony, and according to the sug
gestion of the Baptist himself in Matt. iii. 14,
knew no sin, submitting to a baptism which is
defined as a baptism of repentance. It would
not have been astonishing if Jesus had come
from Galilee to baptize along with John, if He
had taken His stand by John's side confronting
the people ; the astonishing thing is that being
what He was He came to be baptized, and took
His stand side by side with the people. He
identified Himself with them. As far as the
baptism could express it, He made all that was
theirs His. It is as though He had looked on
them under the oppression of their sin, and said :
On Me let all that burden, all that responsibility
descend. The key to the act is to be found in
the great passage in Isaiah liii. in which the
vocation of the Servant of the Lord, which, as
we have seen, was present to our Lord's mind
at the moment, is most amply unfolded. The
deepest word in that chapter, He was numbered
with the transgressors, is expressly applied to
our Lord by Himself at a later period (Luke xxii.
37) ; and however mysterious that word may be
when we try to define it by relation to the pro
vidence and redemption of God — however appal
ling it may seem to render it as St. Paul does
Him who knew no sin, God made to be sin for

THE BAPTISM INTERPRETED 21
us — here in the baptism we see not the word but
the thing: Jesus numbering Himself with the
transgressors, submitting to be baptized with
their baptism, identifying Himself with them in
their relation to God as sinners, making all their
responsibilities His own. It was ' a great act of
loving communion with our misery,' and in that
hour, in the will and act of Jesus, the work of
atonement was begun. It was no accident that
now, and not at some other hour, the Father's
voice declared Him the beloved Son, the chosen
One in whom His soul delighted. For in so
identifying Himself with sinful men, in so making
their last and most dreadful responsibilities His
own, Jesus approved Himself the true Son of the
Father, the true Servant and Representative of
Him whose name from of old is Redeemer.1 It

1 In The Expositor for May 1902, Mr. Garvie has a notable
article on the baptism of Jesus — 'The Vocation Accepted' — in
which he connects Matt. iii. 15 ('thus it becomes us to fulfil all
righteousness') with Isa. liii. II. 'The righteous servant shall
justify many because He shall bear their iniquities. . It is in His
vicarious consciousness and the sacrifice which this would ulti
mately involve that Jesus fulfilled all righteousness. There is a
higher righteousness than being justified by one's own works, a
higher even than depending on God's forgiveness ; and that
belongs to Him who undertakes by His own loving sacrifice for
sinners to secure God's forgiveness on their behalf.' In combina
tion with the argument in the text, this seems to me to make the
essential meaning of our Lord's baptism indubitable. To ascribe
Matt. iii. 14 f. to the productive activity of the Church, stimulated
by dogmatic motives, is perfectly gratuitous. A dogmatic motive
would have produced something more obviously and unequivocally
dogmatic than a phrase ('to fulfil all righteousness') which has
baffled most readers by its excessive vagueness.

22 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
is impossible to have this in mind, and to re
member the career which the fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah sets before the Servant of the Lord,
without feeling that from the moment He entered
on His ministry our Lord's thoughts of the future
must have been more in keeping with the reality
than those which are sometimes ascribed to Him
as alone consistent with a truly human career.
His career was truly His own as well as truly
human, and the shadow of the world's sin lay on
it from the first.1
Starting from this point, we may now go on
to examine the facts as they are put before us in
the gospels.
It is only, indeed, after the great day of
Caesarea Philippi, on which Jesus accepts from
the lips of His disciples the confession of
Messiahship, that He begins expressly to teach
the necessity of His death. But there are in
dications earlier than this that it was not alien
to his thoughts, as indeed there was much to
prompt the thought of it. There was the ex
perience of ancient prophets, to which he refers
from the sermon on the mount, at the opening of
his ministry (Matt. v. 10-12), to the great denun
ciation of the Pharisees at its close (Matt, xxiii.
37). There was the fate of John the Baptist, which,
1 Compare Kahler, Zur Lehre von der Versbhnung, 179 : 'Die
Taufe im Jordan nimmt jene Taufe voraus, der er mit Bangen
entgegenblickt, die letzte, schwerste Versuchung. '

THE BRIDEGROOM TAKEN AWAY 23
though the precise date of it is uncertain, was felt
by Jesus to be parallel to His own (Mark ix. 12,
13). There was the sense underlying all His
early success, to speak of it in such language, of
an irreconcilable antipathy in His adversaries, of
a temper which would incur the guilt of eternal
sin rather than acknowledge His claims (Mark
iii. 20-30) ; there was the consciousness, going
back, if we can trust the evangelic narrative at
all, to very early days, that the most opposite
parties were combining to destroy Him (Mark iii.
6). And there is one pathetic word in which the
sense of the contrast between the present and the
future comes out with moving power. ' Can the
children of the bride-chamber fast while the
bridegroom is with them? As long as they
have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.
But days will come when the bridegroom shall
be taken away from them, and then shall they
fast in that day ' (Mark ii. 19 f.). The force of
this exquisite word has been evaded in two ways.
(1.) Hollmann1 has argued that v. 20, in which
the taking away of the bridegroom is spoken of,
is not really a word of Jesus, but due to the pro
ductive activity of the Church. It is irrelevant in
the circumstances, and it is only made possible
by the parable of Jesus being treated as an
allegory. All that is apposite to the occasion is
the first clause : Can the children of the bride-
1 Die Bedeutung des Todes Jesu, p. 16 ff.

24 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them ?
If this proves anything, it is only that Hollmann
would not have said, Days will come when the
bridegroom shall be taken away from them ; and
that is not only irrelevant, but needs no proof.
(2.) It has been argued that the words do not
necessarily refer to a violent or premature or
unnatural death, but merely to the parting which
is inevitable in the case of all human relations,
however joyful they may be, and which perhaps
suggests itself the more readily the more joyful
they are.1 But there is nothing elsewhere in the
words of Jesus so sentimental and otiose as this.
He does not aim at cheap pathetic effects, like
the modern romance writers, who studiously paint
the brightness and gaiety of life against the
omnipresent black background of death. The
taking away of the bridegroom from the bridal
party is not the universal experience of man,
applied to an individual case ; it is something
startling, tragic, like sudden storm in a summer
sky ; and it is as such that it is present to the
mind of Jesus as a figure of His own death. Even
in the Galilean springtime, when His fortune
seems to rise like the rising tide, there is this sad
presentiment at His heart, and once at least He
suffers it to break through.
It is not possible, for critical reasons, to insist
1 Cf. Haupt, Die eschatol. Aussagen Jesu, p. 108 ; Holtzmann,
Neut. Theologie, i. p. 287.

THE SIGN OF JONAH 25
in the same way on the saying about being three
days and three nights in the heart of the earth,
as Jonah was three days and three nights in the
whale's belly (Matthew xii. 40) ; though, if this
saying is merely a misinterpretation of the sign
of Jonah by the evangelist or the Church — a mis
interpretation of comparatively late date — it does
seem strange that such explicit emphasis should
be laid on the three days and three nights, a
period quite inconsistent with the actual occur
rences when Jesus died and rose again. It seems
possible, to say the least, that (as Barth argues 1)
Jesus actually spoke the words, using the three
days and three nights merely to indicate a brief
time (cf. Hos. vi. 2, Luke xiii. 32), and laying
stress, not on the chronology, but on the great
reversal of affairs in which one who had appar
ently perished appears anew, and only then begins
to work with effect. But eveh if Jesus did make
an allusion of this sort to the issue of His life, it
does not carry us any way into the understanding
of His death. It only suggests that it is not a
final defeat, but has the true victory of His cause
beyond it. What He came to do will be effectively
done, not before He dies, but after He has come
again through death. And this is the only sign
which His enemies can have.2
1 Die Hauptprobleme des Lebens Jesu, p. 183.
a Cf. Rev. C. F. Burney in Contentio Veritatis, p. 202. ' If,
as is probable, Jonah represents the nation of Israel emerging as
though by a miracle from the Exile in order to carry out its mis-

26 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
But leaving these allusive references to His
death, let us proceed to those in which it is the
express subject of our Lord's teaching.
All the synoptics introduce it, in this sense, at
the same point (Mark viii. 31, Matthew xvi. 21,
Luke ix. 22). Matthew lays a peculiar emphasis
on the date, using it to mark the division of his
gospel into two great parts. ' From that time
Jesus began,' he says in iv. 17, 'to preach and to
say : Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at
hand.' 'From that time,' he says in xvi. 21,
'Jesus began to show to His disciples that
He must go up to Jerusalem and be killed.'
A comparison of the evangelists justifies us in
saying broadly that a new epoch in our Lord's
ministry had now begun. His audience is not
so much the multitudes as the twelve ; His
method is not so much preaching as teaching;
His subject is not so much the Kingdom as
Himself, and in particular His death. All the
evangelists mention three occasions on which
He made deliberate and earnest efforts to initiate
the disciples into His thoughts (Mark viii. 31,
ix. 31, x. 32, with parallels in Matthew and Luke).
Mark, especially, whose narrative is fundamental,
sion to the world at large, it may be noticed that the idea of the
restoration from the exile as a resurrection is elsewhere current in
the prophetic writings (Hos. vi., Ezek. xxxvii.) and that it is thus
highly fitting that the allegory of the death and resurrection of
the nation should be also the allegory of the death and resurrec
tion ofthe nation's true Representative.'

THE THREE GREAT LESSONS 27
lays stress on the continued and repeated attempts
He made to familiarise them with what was draw
ing near (notice the imperfects iSlSao-icev, eXeyev
in ix. 31). There is no reason whatever to doubt
this general representation. It is mere wanton
ness to eliminate from the narrative one or two of
the three passages on the ground that they are
but duplicates or triplicates of the same thing.
In Mark, especially, they are distinctly charac
terised by the varying attitude of the disciples.
Further, in the first we have the presumptuous
protest of Peter, which guarantees the historicity
of the whole, if anything could. In the second
the disciples are silent. They could not make
him out (r/yvoovv to pfjfia), and with the re
membrance of the overwhelming rebuke which
Peter had drawn down on himself, they were
afraid to put any question to Him (ix. 32). The
third is attached to that never-to-be-forgotten
incident in which, as they were on the way to
Jerusalem, Jesus took the lead in some startling
manner, so that they followed in amazement and
fear. If anything in the gospels has the stamp of
real and live recollection upon it, it is this. It is
necessary to insist on this repeated instruction of
the disciples by Jesus as a fact, quite apart from
what He was able to teach or they to learn. It is
often said that the death of Christ has a place in
the epistles out of all proportion to that which it
has in the gospels. This is hardly the fact, even

28 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
if the space were to be estimated merely by the
number of words devoted to it in the gospels and
epistles respectively ; but it is still less the fact
when we remember that that which, according
to the gospels themselves, characterised the last
months of our Lord's life was a deliberate and
thrice-repeated attempt to teach His disciples
something about His death.
The critical questions which have been raised
as to the contents of these passages need not here
detain us. It has been suggested that they must
have become more detailed in the telling — that
unconsciously and involuntarily the Church put
into the lips of the Lord words which were only
supplied to its own mind by its knowledge of
what actually took place — that the references to
mocking, scourging, spitting, in particular, could
not have been so explicit — above all, that the
resurrection on the third day must, if spoken of
at all, have been veiled in some figurative form
which baffled the disciples at the moment. It
has been suggested, on the other hand, that it
may have been the idea of a resurrection on the
third day, and not on the familiar great day at
the end of all things, which put them out. It
may not be possible, and it is certainly not neces
sary, to say beforehand that there is nothing in
any of these suggestions. But one may hold
sincerely, and with good grounds, that there is
very little in them, and that even that little is

INEVITABLE OR INDISPENSABLE? 29
persuasive rather for dogmatic than for historical
reasons. Surely we cannot imagine Jesus iterating
and reiterating (as we know He did), with the
most earnest desire to impress and instruct His
followers, such vague, elusive, impalpable hints
of what lay before Him as some critics would
put in the place of what they regard, for extra-
historical reasons, as impossibly definite predic
tions. Jesus nrtist have had something entirely
definite and sayable to say, when He tried so
persistently to get it apprehended. He did not
live in cloudland ; what He spoke of was the
sternest of realities ; and for whatever reason
His disciples failed to undertand Him, it cannot
have been that He talked to them incessantly
and importunately in shadowy riddles : the thing
could not be done. As far, however, as our
present purpose is concerned, it is not affected
by any reasonable opinion we may come to on
the critical questions here in view. The one
point in which all the narratives agree is that
Jesus taught that He must go up to Jerusalem
and die ; and the one question it is of importance
to answer is, What is meant by this must (Set) ?
There are obviously two meanings which it
might have. It might signify that His death
was inevitable ; the must being one of outward
constraint. No doubt, in this sense it was true
that He must die. The hostile forces which
were arrayed against Him were irreconcilable,

30 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
and were only waiting their time. Sooner or
later it would come, and they would crush Him
without remorse. But it might also signify that
His death was indispensable, the must being one
of inward constraint. It might signify that death
was something He was bound to accept and con
template if the work He came to do was to be
done, if the vocation with which he was called
was to be fulfilled. These two senses, of course,
are not incompatible; but there may be a
question as to their relation to each other.
Most frequently the second is made to depend
upon the first. Jesus, we are told, came to see
that His death was inevitable, such were the
forces arrayed against Him ; but being unable,
as the well-beloved Son of the Father, merely
to submit to the inevitable, merely to encounter
death as a blind fate, He reconciled Himself to
it by interpreting it as indispensable, as some
thing which properly entered into His work
and contributed to its success. It became not
a thing to endure, but a thing to do. The
passion was converted into the sublimest of
actions. We do not need to say that this
reasoning has nothing in it ; but it is too
abstract, and the relation in which the two
necessities are put to one another does not
answer to the presentation of the facts in the
gospels. The inward necessity which Jesus
recognised for His death was not simply the

THE SUFFERING MESSIAH 31
moral solution which He had discovered for
the fatal situation in which He found Himself.
An inward necessity is identical with the will
of God, and the will of God for Jesus is ex
pressed, not primarily in outward conditions,
but in that Scripture which is for Him the
word of God. We have seen already that from
the very beginning our Lord's sense of His own
vocation and destiny was essentially related to
that of the servant of the Lord in the Book of
Isaiah, and it is there that the ultimate source
of the Bet is to be found. The divine necessity
for a career of suffering and death is primary;
it belongs, in however vague and undefined a
form, to our Lord's consciousness of what He is
and what He is called to do ; it is not deduced
from the malignant necessities by which He is
encompassed ; it rises up within Him, in divine
power, to encounter these outward necessities
and subdue them.
This connection of ideas is confirmed when
we notice that what Jesus began to teach His
disciples is the doctrine of a suffering Messiah.
As soon as they have confessed Him to be the
Christ, He begins to give them this lesson. The
necessity of His death, in other words, is not a
dreary, incomprehensible somewhat that He is
compelled to reckon with by untoward circum
stances ; for Him it is given, so to speak, with
the very conception of His person and His work.

32 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
When He unfolds Messiahship it contains death.
This was the first and last thing He taught about
it, the first and last thing He wished His disciples
to learn. In Matthew xvi. 21, Westcott and
Hort read, ' From that time began Jesus Christ
to show to His disciples that He must go to
Jerusalem and suffer many things,' while Mark
and Luke, in the corresponding passage, speak of
the Son of Man. The official expressions, or, to
use a less objectionable term, the names which
denote the vocation of Jesus, 'the Christ' and
' the Son of Man,' show that in this lesson He is
speaking out of the sense of His vocation, and
not merely out of a view of His historical circum
stances. The necessity to suffer and die, which
was involved in His vocation, and the dim sense
of which belonged to His very being, so that
without it He would not have been what He was,
was now beginning to take definite shape in His
mind. As events made plain the forces with
which He had to deal, He could see more clearly
how the necessity would work itself out. He
could go beyond that early word about the taking
away of the bridegroom, and speak of Jerusalem,
of the elders and chief priests and scribes, of
rejection, of crucifixion. And this consideration
justifies us in believing that these details in
the evangelic narrative are historical. But the
manner in which the necessity did work itself
out, and the greater or less detail with which,

THE SERVANT OF THE LORD 33
from a greater or less distance, Jesus could
anticipate its course, do not affect in the least
the character of that necessity itself. It is the
necessity involved in the divine vocation of one
in whom the Old Testament prophecy of the
Servant of the Lord is to be fulfilled.
It must be admitted that in none of the three
summary references which the evangelists make
to our Lord's teaching on His death do they say
anything of explicitly theological import. They
tell us (1) that it was necessary — in the sense, we
now assume, which has just been explained ; (2)
that it should be attended by such and such
circumstances of pain and ignominy ; and (3)
that it should be speedily followed by His resur
rection. The repeated assurances that His dis
ciples could not understand Him must surely
refer to the meaning and necessity which He
wished them to see in His death. They cannot
but have understood His words about dying and
rising, unless, as has been suggested already, the
date of the rising puzzled them. All that re
mains is to suppose that the incomprehensible
element in the new teaching of Jesus was the
truths He wished to convey to them about the
necessity, the meaning, the purpose, the power,
of His death. But if we observe the unanimity
with which every part of the early Church taught
that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures — if, as will be shown below, we see
C

34 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
how in Acts, in Peter, in Hebrews, in John,
in Paul, passages referring to the Servant of
the Lord, and especially to His bearing sin,
and being numbered with the transgressors,
are applied to Christ — it becomes very difficult
to believe that this consent, in what might
seem by no means obvious, can have any other
source than the teaching of Jesus Himself.
Hollmann, indeed, makes a remarkable attempt
to prove that Jesus never applied the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah to Himself except in Luke
xxii. 37, and that there, when He says (with
singular emphasis), ' that which is written must
be fulfilled in Me, — the word : and He was num
bered with transgressors,' He is not thinking of
His death at all as having expiatory value in
relation to sin : He is only thinking of the dreary
fact that His countrymen are going to treat Him
as a criminal instead of as the Holy One of God.1
But there is surely no reason why the most
superficial sense of profound words, a sense, too,
which evacuates them of all their original asso
ciations, should be the only one allowed to Jesus.
1 Die Bedeutung des Todes Jesu, 69 ff.
Ritschl {Rechtf. u. Versbhnung, ii. 67) had already described
as ' an unproved conjecture ' the idea that Isaiah liii. had any
decisive influence upon the mind of Jesus. He points out that
the two express words of our Lord about His death (Matt. xx. 28,
xxvi. 28) have no connection with that chapter, and he discredits
Luke xxii. 37 (which Hollmann accepts) as part of a passage
(Luke xxii. 24-3S) which he regards as ' eine Anschwemmung von
unsicheren Erinneiungen. '

THE SERVANT OF THE LORD 35
If there is any truth at all in the connection we
have asserted between His own consciousness of
what He was and the Old Testament conception
of the Servant of the Lord, it is surely im
probable that He applied to Himself the most
wonderful expression in Isaiah liii. in a shallow
verbal fashion, and put from Him the great
meanings of which the chapter is full, and which
the New Testament writers embrace with one
accord. On the strength of that quotation, and
of the consent of the New Testament as a whole,
which has no basis but in Jesus, we are entitled
to argue from the Set of the evangelists — in other
words, from the divine necessity Jesus saw in
His death — that what he sought in those repeated
lessons to induce His disciples to do was to re
cognise in the Messiah the person who should
fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah liii. The ideal in
their minds was something far other than this,
and there is no dead lift so heavy as that which
is required to change an ideal. We do not
wonder that at the moment it was too much for
Him and for them. We do not wonder that at
the moment they could not turn, one is tempted
to say bodily round, so as to see and understand
what He was talking about. And just as little
do we wonder that when the meaning of His
words broke on them later, it was with that over
whelming power which made the thing that had
once baffled them the sum and substance of their

36 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
gospel. The centre of gravity in their world
changed, and their whole being swung round
into equilibrium in a new position. Their in
spiration came from what had once alarmed,
grieved, discomfited them. The word they
preached was the very thing which had once
made them afraid to speak.
But we are not limited, in investigating our
Lord's teaching on His death, to inferences more
or less secure. There are at least two great
words in the gospels which expressly refer to it
— the one contained in His answer to James and
John when they asked the places at His right
hand and His left in His kingdom, the other
spoken at the Supper. We now proceed to
consider these.
Part of the difficulty we always have in inter
preting Scripture is the want of context ; we do
not know what were the ideas in the minds of
the original speakers or hearers to which the
words that have been preserved for us were im
mediately related. This difficulty has perhaps
been needlessly aggravated, especially in the
first of the passages with which we are con
cerned. Yet the context here, even as we have
it, is particularly suggestive. Jesus and His
disciples are on the way to Jerusalem, when
Jesus takes the start of them, apparently under
some overpowering impulse, and they follow in
amazement and fear (Mark x. 32). He takes

THE BAPTISM AND THE CUP 37
them aside once more, and makes the third of
those deliberate attempts to which reference has
already been made, to familiarise them with His
death. ' Behold, we go up to Jerusalem ; and the
Son of Man shall be delivered to the chief
priests and the scribes ; and they shall condemn
Him to death, and shall deliver Him unto the
Gentiles: and they shall mock Him, and shall
spit upon Him and scourge Him, and shall
kill Him ; and after three days He shall rise
again ' (Mark x. 33 f.). It was while Jesus was
in the grip of such thoughts — setting His face
steadfastly, with a rapt and solemn passion,
to go to Jerusalem — that James and John came
to Him with their ambitious request. How was
He to speak to them so that they might under
stand Him? As Bengel finely says, He was
dwelling in His passion ; He was to have others
on His right hand and on His left before that ;
and their minds were in another world. How
was He to bridge the gulf between their thoughts
and His own ? ' Are ye able,' He asks, ' to drink
the cup which I drink, or to be baptized with the
baptism with which I am baptized ? ' The cup
and the baptism are poetic terms in which the
destiny which awaits Him is veiled and trans
figured. They are religious terms, in which that
destiny is represented, in all its awfulness, as
something involved in the will of God, and
involving in itself a consecration. The cup is

38 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
put into His hand by the Father, and if the
baptism is a flood of suffering in which He is over
whelmed, it has through the very name which
He uses to describe it the character of a religious
act assigned to it ; He goes to be baptized with
it, as He takes the cup which the Father gives
Him to drink. That the reference in both figures
is to His death, and to His death in that tragic
aspect which has just been described in the im
mediately preceding verses, is not open to doubt.
And just as little is it open to doubt that in the
next scene in the gospel — that in which Jesus
speaks to the disciples who were indignant with
James and John for trying to steal a march upon
them — a reference to His death is so natural
as to be inevitable. True greatness, he tells
them, does not mean dominance, but service.
That is the law for all, even for the highest. It
is by supremacy in service that the King in the
Kingdom of God wins his place. ' Even the Son
of Man came not to be ministered unto but to
minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.'
It is not inept to insist on the sequence and
connection of ideas throughout this passage,
because when it is really understood it puts the
last words — ' to give His life a ransom for many'
— beyond assault. It is often asserted that these
words are an indication of Pauline influence in the
second evangelist. Let us hope that one may be
forgiven if he says frankly that this is an asser-

A RANSOM FOR MANY 39
tion which he cannot understand. The words
are perfectly in place. They are in line with
everything that precedes. They are words in
the only key, of the only fulness, which answers
to our Lord's absorption at the time in the
thought of His death. A theological aversion to
them may be conceived, but otherwise there is
no reason whatever to call them in question.
There is no critical evidence against them, and
their psychological truth is indubitable. So far
from saying that Jesus could not have uttered
anything so definitely theological, we should
rather deny that the words are theological, in the
technical question-begging sense of the term, yet
maintain that in an hour of intense preoccupa
tion with His death no other words would have
been adequate to express the whole heart and
mind of our Lord.
From this point of view, we must notice a
common evasion of their import even by some
who do not question that Jesus spoke them. It
is pointed out, for instance, that the death is
here set in line with the life of our Lord. He
came not to be ministered unto but to minister,
and (in particular, and at last, as his crowning
service) to give His life a ransom for many. His
death is the consummation of His life, and the
consummation of His ministry; but it has no
other end than His life, and we must not
seek another interpretation for it. An extreme

40 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
example of this is seen in Hollmann,1 whose
exegesis of the passage brings out the following
result. Jesus came into the world to serve men,
and especially to serve them by awakening them
to that repentance which is the condition of
entering the Kingdom of God and inheriting its
blessings. So far, His ministry has not been
without success ; some have already repented, and
entered into the Kingdom. But even where He
has not proved successful, it is not yet necessary
to despair: many will be won to repentance by
His death who resisted all the appeal of His life.
It is scarcely necessary to point out that the
connection of ideas here is not in the least that
which belongs to the words of Jesus. Hollmann
actually speaks of a Glaubensurtheil, a conviction
which Jesus held by faith, that even His death
(tragic and disconcerting as we must suppose it
to be) will, by the grace of the Father, neverthe
less contribute to the success of His work, and
win many whom He has yet failed to reach.
But this completely leaves out the one thing to
which the words of Jesus give prominence — the
fact, namely, that the Son of Man came ex
pressly to do a service which involved the
giving of His life a ransom for many. Holl-
mann's interpretation means that Jesus could
by faith in the Father reconcile Himself to His
death as something which would, though it is
1 Die Bedeutung des Todesjesu, 99 ff.

A RANSOM FOR MANY 41
not clear how, contribute to the carrying out of
His vocation — something which, in spite of ap
pearances, would not prove inconsistent with it ;
but what the words in the gospel mean is that
the death of Jesus, or the giving of His life a
ransom for many, is itself the very soul of His
vocation. He does not say that He can bear to
die, because His death will win many to repent
ance who are yet impenitent, but that the object
of His coming was to give His life a ransom for
many. The same consideration discredits an inter
pretation like Wendt's,1 which finds the key to
the passage in Matthew xi. 29 f. Wendt lays
all the stress on the effect to be produced on
human character by realising what the death of
Jesus is. If men would only put on the yoke
of Jesus and learn of Him — if they would drink
of His cup and be baptized with His baptism —
if, as St. Paul says, they would be conformed
to His death, their souls would be liberated from
the restless passions of pride and ambition by
which James and John, and the other ten not
less than they, were tormented, and death itself
would cease to be a terror to them. However
true this may be, one cannot look at the text
without being impressed by its irrelevance as
an interpretation. There is nothing in it to
explain the introduction of Christ's death at all,
1 Lehre Jesu, ii. 509 ff.

42 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
as the very end contemplated in His coming.
There is nothing in it to explain either Xvrpov,
or avTi, or troXXav, or Xvrpov avrl vroXXcbv. In
spite of the attention it has attracted, it is an
ingenious vagary which has surely merited
oblivion. In what direction, then, are we to seek the
meaning? The only clue is that which is
furnished by the passages in which our Lord
Himself speaks of the soul and of the possibility
of losing or ransoming it. Thus in Mark viii.
34 f, immediately after the first announcement of
His death, He calls the multitude to Him with
His disciples, and says : ' If any man will come
after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross and follow Me. For whoso will save his
life (^fvxw) shall lose it : but whoso shall lose
his life fyvxfiv)' for my sake and the gospel's,
shall find it. For what does it profit a man
to gain the whole world and forfeit his life
(•uVu%?ji/) ? For what can a man give in ex
change for his life (avraXXayixa T-r)? yjrvxfjs
avTov) ? ' It is clear from a passage like this
that Jesus was familiar with the idea that
the y^vxv or life of man, in the higher or lower
sense of the term, might be lost, and that when
it was lost there could be no compensation for
it, as there was no means of buying it back.
It is in the circle of such ideas that the words
about giving His life a ransom for many must

A RANSOM FOR MANY 43
find their point of attachment, and it is not
only^far the simplest and most obvious inter
pretation, but^far the most profound and the
most consonant with the New Testament as a
whole, that Jesus in this passage conceives the
lives of the many as being somehow under
forfeit, and teaches that the very object with
which He came into the world was to lay down
His own life as a ransom price that those to
whom these forfeited lives belonged might
obtain them again. This was the supreme
service the Son of Man was to render to man
kind ; it demanded the supreme sacrifice, and
was the path to supreme greatness. Anything
short of this is in the circumstances an anti
climax ; it falls far beneath the passion with
which our Lord condenses into a single phrase
the last meaning of His life and death.
Nothing has been gained for the understand
ing of this passage by the elaborate investiga
tion of the Hebrew or Aramaic equivalents of
Xvrpov. In truth it does not matter whether
"iB3 or fi'HQ, whether rtaw or "Vno or purkana is
most akin to it in the language which Jesus
spoke ; if Sovvai rr)v «ty-vyr\v avrov Xvrpov avn
iroXXwv does not convey His idea, it will certainly
not be conveyed by any of the precarious equiva
lents for this Greek expression which are offered
for our acceptance. The best fruit of these
attempts to get behind the Greek has been

44 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Ritschl's reference to Psalm xlix. 7 f., Job
xxxiii. 23 f., as passages furnishing a real clue
to the mind of Christ. In both of these the
Hebrew word "isb occurs, which Ritschl regards
as the equivalent of Xvrpov, and in both also
the verb ma is used, with which, rather than
T T ' '
with "tab, Hollmann would connect the word of
Jesus. But the ideas which the words express
are inseparable : the "iab is in both passages that
by means of which, or at the cost of which,
the action of the verb rna (to deliver) is
accomplished.1 The Psalm makes it particu
larly plain. What no man can do for his brother
— namely, give to God a ransom for him (iiss)
so that he may still live always and not see
corruption ; what no man can do for his brother,
because the redemption (Ji^B) of their soul is
precious, and must be let alone for ever, this
the Son of Man claims to do for many, and
to do by giving His life a ransom for them. It
seems hardly open to doubt that the world in
which our Lord's mind moved as he spoke was
that of the writer of the Psalm, and if this be
so, it is possible to find in it confirmation for
the meaning just assigned to His words. Dr.
Driver 2 defines 1B3 as ' properly a covering (viz.
of an offence), hence a propitiatory gift, but re-
1 Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Versohnung, ii. 69 ff. Hollmann, Dit
Bedeutung des Todes Jesu,<y) ff.
a In Hastings' Bible Dictionary, s.v. Propitiation (vol. iv. 128).

A RANSOM FOR MANY 45
stricted by usage to a gift offered to propitiate
or satisfy the avenger-of-blood, and so the satis
faction offered for a life, i.e. a ransom' Without
going into meaningless questions as to how the
ransom was fixed, or to whom it was paid, it
is important to recognise the fact that our Lord
speaks of the surrender of His life in this way.
A ransom is not wanted at all except where
life has been forfeited, and the meaning of the
sentence unambiguously is that the forfeited
lives of many are liberated by the surrender of
Christ's life, and that to surrender His life to do
them this incalculable service was the very soul
of his calling. If we find the same thought in
St. Paul, we shall not say that the evangelist
has Paulinised, but that St. Paul has sat at the
feet of Jesus. And if we feel that such a
thought carries us suddenly out of our depth —
that as the words fall on our minds we seem
to hear the plunge of the lead into fathomless
waters — we shall not for that imagine that we
have lost our way. By these things men live,
and wholly therein is the life of our spirit.
We cast ourselves on them, because they outgo
us ; in their very immensity, we are assured that
God is in them.1
1 Compare Kahler, Zur Lehre von der Versohnung, 166 : ' We
put our whole faith in reconciliation into this word, and have a right
todo so.' I do not think anything whatever is gained by trying
all possible permutations and combinations of the words in the
text, and deciding whether i.vrl 7ro\\<2i» is to be construed with

46 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
One almost despairs of saying anything about
the Lord's Supper which will not seem invalid to
some upon critical or more general grounds. Our
main interest is in the words which Jesus spoke,
and in the light which these words throw on
His own conception of His death. Here we are
confronted at once by the paradoxical view of
Spitta that in what actually took place on the
occasion there was no reference to the death
of Christ at all. What Jesus did in the upper
room (so we are to suppose) was to anticipate
with His disciples the Messianic Supper of the
world to come. In that supper, according to
Rabbinical and Apocalyptic writers, the good to
be enjoyed is the Messiah Himself, and it is
to this that Jesus refers when He speaks of
the bread and wine as His own body and blood.
He is preoccupied with the completion of His
work, with the blessed prospect of the time
when God shall have brought His kingdom to
\6rpov or with Sovvai, or with the two in combination, or in some
other ingenious or perverse way. It is a sentence which leaves
meaning on the mind, not the bits into which it can be broken.
Ritschl sums up his interpretation thus : ' Der Sinn des Ausdrucks
Jesu ist also : Ich bin gekommen anstatt derer, welche eine Werth-
gabe als Schutzmittel gegen das Sterben fiir sich oder fur Andere
an Gott zu leisten vergeblich erstreben wiirden, dasselbe durch die
Hingebung meines Lebens im Tode an Gott zu verwirklichen, aber
eben nur anstatt derer, welche durch Glauben und selbstverleug-
nende Nachfolge meiner Person die Bedingung erfullen, unter der
allein meine Leistung den erwarteten Schutz fiir sie vermitteln
kann.' — R. u. V. ii. 86. For a criticism of Ritschl's views on
IDb and 1B3 see the last paragraph of Driver's article on
Propitiation referred to above.

THE LORD'S SUPPER 47
victory, and when from Him, the Messiah sent
of God, the powers of knowledge and of eternal
life should flow unimpeded into the disciples as
the gift of the meal which God prepares for
those who are faithful to Him. The representa
tion of the Supper in the evangelists is quite
different, Spitta admits ; but the form it there
assumes is due to the intervening death of Jesus,
which compelled the disciples to give His words
another turn. I do not feel it necessary to con
test this construction of what took place. A
conception of the Supper which sets aside the
whole testimony of the New Testament to what
it meant, which ignores its association with the
Passover, the explicit references in every account
of it to the shedding of Jesus' blood, and above
all, the character expressly stamped upon it in
the evangelists as a meal in which Jesus knew
that He was sitting with the Twelve for the
last time and was preoccupied with the idea of
His parting from them, does not demand refuta
tion. Nor is it entitled to forbid our asking —
on the basis of the narratives in our hands —
what Jesus said and did, and what is the bear
ing of this on the interpretation of His death.1
There is at least a general consent in this, that
Jesus took bread, and when He had broken it, or
1 Spitta's views are given in his treatise on Die urchristlichen
Traditionen iiber Crsprung und Sinn des Abendmahls (zur
Geschichte u. Llteratur des Urchristenthums).

48 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
as He broke it, said, This is My body ; that He
took a cup with wine in it, or a cup into which
He poured wine, saying as He did so, This is
My blood, which is poured out for many. This
is all that is admitted, e.g. by Hollmann, and it
enables him to give the same interpretation to
the supper as he gives to the word about the
Xvrpov} Christ's death is in question, certainly,
but it has no reference to those who are sitting
at the table, and who are members of the King
dom of God. The many in whose interest it
takes place — the many who are to have benefit
by it — are the same as the many for whom the
ransom is to be given ; they are the numbers, as
yet impenitent, who will be won to penitence by
the death of Jesus. According to this interpreta
tion, the idea of a supper is a complete mistake.
The persons at the table had really no interest
in the death of Christ ; they had already all that
God could give. Hollmann, therefore, expunges
from Mark as a liturgical insertion, intended to
adapt the narrative to ecclesiastical custom, the
very first word spoken by Jesus : Take (XaySere).
In propriety, the disciples should not have taken,
as His death meant nothing to them. He quotes,
with approval, a remark of Schmiedel: 'The
most significant thing is, at least in the first
instance, the breaking of the bread and the pour
ing out of the wine. The distribution of these
1 Die Bcdtutung des Todesjesu, 133 S.

THE LORD'S SUPPER 49
foods to be partaken of attaches itself to this as
a second thing. So far as the main matter is
concerned, it might have been treated as super
fluous ; but as they were sitting at table any how,
it was natural.' It is difficult to believe that this
sort of thing is written seriously : if courtesy
compels us to acknowledge that it is, we can
only draw the melancholy conclusion that it is
possible for the human mind to be serious even
when it has completely lost contact with reality.
The primary narrative of Mark begins by saying
plainly, ' He took bread, and when He had given
thanks He brake it and gave it to them and said,
Take, this is My body. Then He took a cup,
and when He had given thanks He gave it to
them, and they drank of it every one (irdvre<; last
and emphatic). And He said to them, This is
My blood of the covenant shed for many.' This
is not qualified by any other of the New Testa
ment authorities, nor by the practice of the
Church as the New Testament reveals it ; and I
submit that it is not open to any one to go behind
it, and to tell us blankly out of his own head (for
that is the only authority left) that the bearing
of what took place was really quite independent
of this giving and taking, eating and drinking ;
and that while the death of Jesus was the subject
of the symbolical actions of breaking the bread
and pouring out the wine, and was no doubt meant
to benefit some persons, it was a thing in which
D

50 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
those who were present, and who at Jesus' word
ate and drank the symbols of it, had no interest
at all. Jesus made the bread and wine symbols
of His death : this is not denied. He handed
them to His disciples, pronouncing as He did so
the very words in which He conferred on them
this symbolical character : this also is not denied.
But when He did so, it was not that the disciples
might take them in this character. On the con
trary, it was only because they were at their
supper any how, and because bread and wine are
naturally eaten and drunk. That is how bread
and wine are disposed of in this world, but it has
nothing to do with the story. If there is any
body in the world who finds this convincing,
presumably it cannot be helped.
But it is not only necessary to insist on the eat
ing and drinking of the bread and wine, which as
broken and outpoured symbolised Christ's death,
and as eaten and drunk symbolised the interest
of the disciples in that death, and their making
it somehow their own ; it is necessary to insist
on what was further said by Jesus. All the
evangelists in their narratives introduce the word
'covenant' (SiaOijKrj) in some construction or other.
Mark has, This is My blood of the covenant
(xiv. 24). Matthew, according to some authori
ties (including that combination of Latin and
Syriac versions to which critics seem inclined to
ascribe a higher value than once seemed probable)

COVENANT BLOOD 51
has, This is My blood of the new covenant (xxvi.
28). Luke has what is apparently a Pauline form,
This cup is the new covenant in My blood (xxii.
20). For long it was an admitted point among
critics that this was ah indubitable word of Jesus.
Brandt, whose criticism is sceptical enough, holds
that the only historically certain words in the
whole story are, This is My covenant blood, drink
ye all of it. But even these words have lately
been assailed in the determined effort to get
behind the gospels. Three grounds have been
assigned for questioning them.1 The first is
that the expression to alfid fiov tj)? Sta^Kiy? is
awkward in Greek ; the second, that it is impos
sible to translate it into Hebrew or Aramaic ; and
the third, that the conception of the covenant
owes its place in Christianity to St. Paul. Of
these reasons the last obviously begs the ques
tion. It does not follow that because St. Paul
makes use of an idea he originated it. There
are very great ideas, indeed, of which St. Paul
says, I delivered unto you that which also I
received (1 Corinthians xv. 3 f.) : why should not
this be one of them ? Does he not himself declare
that it is one, when he prefaces his account of
the supper — including in it the idea of the new
covenant in the blood of Jesus — with the words,
I received of the Lord that which also I delivered
unto you? (1 Corinthians xi. 23). The idea of a
1 See Preuschen's Zeitschrift, i. 69 ff.

5*

THE DEATH OF CHRIST

new covenant, and that of covenant blood, are
Old Testament ideas ; and if Jesus was conscious,
nay, if it was the very essence of His conscious
ness, that, in relation both to law and prophecy,
He came not to destroy but to fulfil, why should
not He Himself have spoken the creative word ?
As for the other two reasons, that ' My blood of
the covenant ' is awkward in Greek, and that there
are persons who cannot translate it into Hebrew,
however true or interesting they may be, they are
obviously irrelevant. It may be awkward in
Greek or in any language to combine in one
proposition the two ideas, this is My blood, and
this is covenant blood ; but however awkward
it may be, since they really are ideas which the
mind can grasp, it must be possible to do it, in
Greek or in any language. It does not, therefore,
seem open to question, on any serious ground
whatever, that Jesus at the last supper spoke of
His blood as covenant blood. Now, what does
this imply? To what set of ideas in the minds
of His hearers, to what Old Testament associa
tions does it attach itself, so as to be not merely
a word, but an element in a living mind ? We
get the clue to the answer when we notice the
form in which the words appear in Matthew,
This is My blood of the new covenant, shed for
many unto remission of sins. The added words
here may be no more than an interpretative ex
pansion of what Jesus said, but if they are no

COVENANT BLOOD 53
more than this they are also no less. They are
an interpretative expansion by a mind in a posi
tion naturally to know and understand what
Jesus meant.
The Old Testament twice speaks of 'covenant,
in the sense in which God makes a covenant with
His people. There is the covenant made with
sacrifice at Sinai, in the account of which we have
the phrase, Behold the blood of the covenant
which the Lord hath made with you upon all
these conditions (Exodus xxiv. 8). Here, it is
sometimes said, is the original ofthe words found
in our evangelists ; and as nothing is said in
Exodus about the forgiveness of sins, and as the
sacrifices mentioned there are not sin or guilt
offerings, but burnt offerings and peace offerings,
it is argued that the insertion in Matthew of the
clause 'for forgiveness of sins' is a mistake.1
The inference is hasty. Covenant blood is sacri
ficial blood, and we have every reason to believe
that sacrificial blood universally, and not only in
special cases, was associated with propitiatory
power. 'The atoning function of sacrifice,' as
Robertson Smith put it, speaking of primitive
times, 'is not confined to a particular class of
oblation, but belongs to all sacrifices.'2 Dr.
1 Holtzmann, Neut. Theologie, i. 302, says : ' The figure of
covenant blood, which alone retains its validity, points, indeed, to
a covenant sacrifice, but not necessarily also to an expiatory sacri
fice, with which last alone have been combined the later ideas of
exchange and substitution.' s Religion of the Semites, 219.

54 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Driver has expressed the same opinion with
regard to the Levitical legislation in which the
key to the language of our passage must be
found. Criticising Ritschl's explanation of sacri
fice and its effect, he says : ' It seems better
to suppose that though the burnt-, peace-, and
meat-offerings were not offered expressly, like the
sin- and guilt-offerings, for the forgiveness of sin,
they nevertheless (in so far as Kipper is predicated
of them) were regarded as ' covering,' or neutral
ising, the offerer's unworthiness to appear before
God, and so, though in a much less degree than
the sin- or guilt-offering, as effecting Kappara in
the sense ordinarily attached to the word, viz.
"propitiation."'1 Instead of saying 'in a much
less degree,' I should prefer to say 'with a less
specific reference or application,' but the point is
not material. What it concerns us to note is
tliat the New Testament, while it abstains from
interpreting Christ's death by any special pre
scriptions of the Levitical law, constantly uses
sacrificial language to describe that death, and in
doing so unequivocally recognises in it a pro
pitiatory character — in other words, a reference
to sin and its forgiveness. But there is some
thing further to be said. The passage in Exodus
is not the only one in the Old Testament to
which reference is here made. In the 31st
chapter of Jeremiah we have the sublime pro-
1 Hastings' Dictionary oj the Bible, s.v. Propitiation, p. 132.

COVENANT BLOOD 55
phecy of a new covenant — a new covenant which
is indeed but the efficacious renewal of the old,
for there is but one God, and His grace is one —
a new covenant, the very condition and founda
tion of which is the forgiveness of sins. 'They
shall all know Me from the least to the greatest,
for I will forgive their iniquities, and I will
remember their sins no more' (Jeremiah xxxi.
34). It is this which is present to the mind of
our Lord as He says of the outpoured wine, This
is My blood of the covenant. He is establishing,
at the cost of His life, the new covenant, the new
religious relation between God and man, which
has the forgiveness of sins as its fundamental
blessing. He speaks as knowing that that
blessing can only become ours through His
death, and as the condition upon which it
depends His death can be presented as a pro
pitiatory sacrifice. It is as though He had
pointed to the prophecy in Jeremiah, and said,
This day is this Scripture fulfilled before your
eyes. He had already, we might think, attached
to Himself all that is greatest in the ideals and
hopes of the Old Testament — the Messianic
sovereignty of the 2nd and of the 110th Psalm,
and the tragic and glorious calling of the Servant
of the Lord ; but there is something which
transcends both, and which gives the sublimest
expression to our Lord's consciousness of Him
self and His work, when He says, This is My blood

56 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
of the covenant. It is a word which gathers up
into it the whole promise of prophecy and the
whole testimony of the apostles ; it is the focus
of revelation, in which the Old Testament and the
New are one. The power that is in it is the
power of the passion in which the Lamb of God
bears the sin of the world. It is no misappre
hension, therefore, but a true rendering of the
mind of Christ, when Matthew calls the covenant
new, and defines the shedding of blood by refer
ence to the remission of sins.
There is really only one objection which can
be made, and it is made unceasingly, to this
interpretation of the words of Jesus. It is that
it is inconsistent with what is elsewhere His
unmistakable teaching. The very burden of His
message, we are told, is that God forgives uncon
ditionally, out of His pure fatherly love. This
love reaches of itself deeper far than sin, and
bestows pardon freely and joyfully on the peni
tent. It is nothing less than a direct contradic
tion of this gospel of the free love of God when
we make forgiveness dependent upon a sacrifi
cial, that is a propitiatory, virtue in the death of
Christ. It misrepresents God's character, and in
so doing destroys the gospel. We cannot, it
is argued, on the strength of one word, and
that a dubious word, run counter to the sense
and spirit of our Lord's teaching as a whole.
So, in substance, a large school of critics

ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY 57
and theologians. How can we answer such a
contention ?
As for the alleged dubiety of the word, we have
said enough already ; it only remains to deal with
its alleged inconsistency with the rest of our
Lord's teaching. This is usually asserted in the
most unqualified fashion, but if we look back
on what we have already seen to be our Lord's
conception of Himself and His calling from the
beginning, we may well question it. The love
of God is no doubt unconditionally free to Jesus,
but it is not an abstraction. It does not exist in
vacuo: so far as the forgiveness of sins is con
cerned — and it is with the love of God in this
relation that we have to do — it exists in and is
represented by His own presence in the world :
His presence in a definite character, and with a
definite work to do, which can only be done at a
definite cost. The freeness of God's love is not
contradicted by these facts ; on the contrary, it
is these facts which enable us to have any
adequate idea of what that love really is. To
say that it is inconsistent with God's free love
to make the forgiveness of sins dependent on the
death of Jesus, is exactly the same (in one par
ticular relation) as to say (in general) that it is
inconsistent with God's free love that entrance
into His kingdom and participation in its bless
ings should only be possible through the presence
of Jesus in the world, His work in it, and the

58 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
attitude which men assume towards Him. Those
who accept the latter should not deny the former.
If we give any place at all to the idea of media
tion, there is no reason why we should reject the
idea of propitiation : for propitiation is merely a
mode of mediation, a mode of it no doubt which
brings home to us acutely what we owe to the
Mediator, and makes us feel that though forgive
ness is free to us it does not cost nothing to Him.
Of course, if we choose to say that the Son has no
place in the gospel at all, but only the Father,
we may reject the great word about covenant-
blood, or rather we must reject it ; if He has no
place in the gospel at all, we have no obligations
to Him ; we do not owe Him anything, least of
all are we indebted to His death for the forgive
ness of sins. But there is something in such
language which when confronted with the gospels
can only strike one as utterly abstract, uncon
vincing, and unreal. It does not answer to the
relation of sinful souls to Jesus, to their devotion,
their gratitude, their sense of undying obligation.
It was not for a forgiveness with which He had in
the last resort nothing to do that they poured
their precious ointment on His head and wet
His feet with tears. No ; but in the depths of
their being they had the dim sense of His passion
in their pardon, and were conscious of an obliga
tion for it to Him which they could never repay.
The love of God, I repeat, free as it is to sinful

PROPITIATION A MODE OF MEDIATION 59
men, unconditionally free, is never conceived in
the New Testament, either by our Lord Himself
or by any of His followers, as an abstraction.
Where the forgiveness of sin is concerned, it is
not conceived as having reality or as taking effect
apart from Christ. It is a real thing to us as
it is mediated through Him, through His Pre
sence in the world, and ultimately through His
death. The love of God by which we are re
deemed from sin is a love which we do not know
except as it comes in this way and at this cost ;
consequently, whatever we owe as sinners to the
love of God, we owe to the death of Jesus.
It is no more a contradiction of God's free
love to the sinful, when we say that Christ's
death is the ground of forgiveness, than it is
a contradiction of God's fatherly goodwill to
men in general, when we admit the word of
Jesus, No man cometh unto the Father but by
Me. In both cases equally, Christ stands between
God and man ; in both cases equally it is at cost
to Him that God becomes our God. Why should
we be loth to become His debtors ? The Chris
tian faith is a specific form of dependence on
God, and to cavil at the atonement is to begin
the process of giving it away in bits. It is to
refuse to allow it to be conditioned by Christ at
the central and vital point, the point at which
the sinner is reconciled to God; and if we can
do without Christ there, we can do without

60 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Him altogether. The process which begins with
denying that we owe to Him and to His death the
forgiveness of sins, ends by denying that He has
any proper place in the gospel at all. It is not
either from His own lips, or from the lips of any
of the apostles, that we so learn Christ.

IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 61

CHAPTER II
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN PREACHING
I. THUS far we have confined ourselves to the
words of Jesus. The divine necessity of His
death, indicated in the Old Testament and form
ing the basis of all His teaching regarding it, is
the primary truth ; the nature of that necessity
begins to be revealed as the death is set in
relation to the ransoming of many, and to the
institution of a new covenant — that is, a new
religion, having as its fundamental blessing the
forgiveness of sins. I do not think this view of
our Lord's mind as to His own death can be
shaken by appealing to His experience in the
garden, as though that proved that to the last
day of His life the inevitableness of death re
mained for Him an open question.
The divine necessity to lay down His life for
men, which we have been led to regard as a
fixed point in His mind, did not preclude such
conflicts as are described in the last pages of
the gospel ; rather was it the condition of our
Lord's victory in them. At a distance, it was

62 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
possible to think of death in its heroic and ideal
aspects only, as the fulfilment of a divine calling,
an infinite service rendered in love to man ; but
as the fatal hour approached, its realistic and
repellent aspects predominated over everything;
it stood out before the mind and imagination
of Jesus — we might almost say it obtruded itself
upon His senses — as a scene and an experience
of treachery, desertion, hate, mockery, injustice,
anguish, shame. It is not hard to conceive that
in these circumstances Jesus should have prayed
as He did in the garden : O My Father, if it be
possible, let this cup pass from Me, even though
the unmoved conviction of His soul was that He
had come to give His life a ransom for many.
It is one thing to have the consciousness of so
high a calling, another to maintain and give
effect to it under conditions from which all that
is ideal and divine seems to have withdrawn. It
is one thing not to count one's life dear, or to
make much of it, in comparison with great ends
which are to be attained by laying it down ; it
is another to lay it down, encompassed not by
the gratitude and adoration of those for whom
the sacrifice is made, but by mocking and spit
ting and scorn. This was what Jesus did, and
He attained to it through the agony in the
garden. The agony does not represent a doubt
as to His calling, but the victorious assertion of
His calling against the dreadful temptation to

GETHSEMANE AND CALVARY 63
renounce it which came in the hour and with
the power of darkness. Not that I should
venture to say, as is sometimes said, that the
realisation, as they approached, of the sensible
and moral horrors of the death He was to die
was all that wrung from Jesus that last appeal
to the Father, all that made His soul exceeding
sorrowful even unto death, and put Him in
agonia — that is, in deadly fear : x this does not
answer to what we know of the courage of
martyrs.^ Though one shrinks from analysing
the cry of the heart to God in its anguish, it is
difficult to avoid the impression that both here
and in the experience of forsaking on the cross,
we are in contact with something out of pro
portion to all that men could do to Jesus, some
thing that seems to call for connection, if we
would understand it, with realities more mys
terious and profound. Language like Calvin's,2
who says plainly that Jesus endured in His soul
the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost
man, may well be repellent to us ; there is some
thing unrealisable and even impious in such
words. But it does not follow that there was
nothing true, nothing in contact with reality,
in the state of mind which inspired them.3 Not
1 See Field, Notes on the New Testament, p. 77> where decisive
proof of this is given; and Armitage Robinson, Gospel according to
Peter, pp. 84, 87 (iyundw). a Tnstitutio, II. xvi. io.
3 Calvin has, in point of fact, many more adequate utterances
on this subject : ' Invisibile illud et incomprehensibile judicium

64 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
with any logical hardness, not as carrying out
aggressively to its issue any theological theory,
but sensible of the thick darkness in which,
nevertheless (we are sure), God is, may we not
urge that these experiences of deadly fear and
of desertion are of one piece with the fact that
in His death and in the agony in the garden
through which He accepted that death as the cup
which the Father gave Him to drink, Jesus was
taking upon Him the burden of the world's sin,
consenting to be, and actually being, numbered
with the transgressors? They cannot but have
some meaning, and it must be part of the great
meaning which makes the Cross of Christ the
gospel for sinful men. No doubt there are
those who reject this meaning altogether ; it is
dogmatico-religious, not historico-religious, and
no more is needed to condemn it. But a dog
matico-religious interpretation of Christ's death
— that is, an interpretation which finds in it an
eternal and divine meaning, laden with gospel —
is so far from being self-evidently wrong, that it
is imperatively required by the influence which
that death has had in the history of the Chris
tian religion. Such an interpretation carries out,
through the experiences of His death, thoughts
as to its significance which we owe to Jesus
quod coram Deo sustinuit ' ; ' neque tamen innuimus Deum fuisse
unquam illi vel adversarium vel iratum ' ; ' illic personam nostram
gerebat ' ; and especially the following : ' Atqui haec nostra
sapientia est probe sentire quanti constiterit Dei filio nostra salus.'

GETHSEMANE AND CALVARY 65
Himself, and connects these thoughts and ex
periences with the subsequent testimony of the
apostles. In other words, to read the accounts
of Gethsemane and Calvary in this sense is to
read them in line at once with the words of
Jesus and with the words of those who were first
taught by His spirit ; it is to secure at once the
unity of the gospels with themselves, and their
unity, in the main truth which it teaches, with
the rest of the New Testament. To call such
an interpretation dogmatico-religious as opposed
to historico-religious either has no meaning, or
has a meaning which would deny to the Person
and Work of Jesus any essential place in the
Christian religion. But if the death of Jesus has
eternal significance — if it has a meaning which
has salvation in it for all men and for all times ;
a meaning which we discover in Scripture as we
look back from it and look forward ; a meaning
which is the key to all that goes before and to
all that comes after (and such a meaning I take
it to have, indisputably) — then Gethsemane and
Calvary cannot be invoked to refute, but only to
illustrate, the ' dogmatic ' interpretation. They
are too great to be satisfied by anything else.1
It does not follow, of course, that they were
understood at once, even in the light of our
1 Compare Kahler, Zur Lehre von der Versohnung, pp. 181, 401.
On the other side Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion,
p. 425 ff. E

66 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Lord's words, by those whom he left as His
witnesses. The mind can easily retain words
the meaning of which it only imperfectly appre
hends. It can retain words by which it is in
the first instance moved and impressed, rather
than enlightened. It can retain words which
are sure, when reflection awakens, to raise many
questions, to ask for definition in a great variety
of relations ; and it can retain them without at
first having any consciousness of these questions
whatever. It is in the highest degree probable
that it was so with the disciples of Jesus. We
can easily believe that they had right impressions
from our Lord's words, before they had clear
ideas about them. We can understand even that
it might be natural enough for them to ascribe
to Jesus directly what was only indirectly due
to Him, because in the absence of philosophical
reflection they were not conscious of the differ
ence. Not that one would include under this
head the creative words of Jesus already referred
to about the ransom and the covenant blood ;
these bear the stamp of originality, not of re
flection, upon them ; it is their greatness to explain
all things and to be explained by none. But
before proceeding to examine the ideas of the
primitive Christian Church on this subject, it is
necessary to give an explicit utterance on the
Resurrection, and the gospel presentation of it.
The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is

THE RESURRECTION 67
here assumed to have taken place, and, more
over, to have had the character which is ascribed
to it in the New Testament. It is not sufficient
to say that there were appearances of the Jesus
who had died to certain persons — appearances
the significance of which is exhausted when we
say that they left on the minds of those who
were favoured with them the conviction that
Jesus had somehow broken the bands of death.
It is quite true that St. Paul, in setting before
the Corinthians the historical evidence for the
Resurrection, enumerates various occasions on
which the Risen Lord was seen, and says nothing
about Him except that on these occasions He ap
peared to Peter, to James, to the Twelve, to more
than five hundred at once, and so on : this was
quite^sufficient for his purpose. But there is no
such thing in the New Testament as an appearance
of the Risen Saviour in which He merely appears.
He is always represented as entering into relation
to those who see Him in other ways than by
a flash upon the inner or the outer eye : He
establishes other communications between Him
self and His own than that which can be charac
terised in this way. It may be that a tendency
to materialise the supernatural has affected the
evangelical narrative here or there — that Luke,
for instance, who makes the Holy Spirit descend
upon Jesus in bodily form as a dove went in
voluntarily beyond the apostolic tradition in

68 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
making the Risen One speak of His flesh and
bones, and eat a bit of roast fish before the
disciples, to convince them that He was no mere
ghost ; it may be so, though the mode of Christ's
being, in the days before His final withdrawal, is
so entirely beyond our comprehension, that it is
rash to be too peremptory about it ; but even if
it were so, it would not affect the representation
as a whole which the gospels give of the Re
surrection, and of the relation of the Risen One
to His disciples. It would not affect the fact,
that He not only appeared to them, but spoke
to them. It would not affect the fact, that He
not only appeared to them, but taught them, and
in particular gave them a commission in which
the meaning of His own life and work, and
their calling as connected with it, are finally
declared. Without going in detail into the critical ques
tions here involved, yet claiming to speak with
adequate knowledge of them, I feel it quite
impossible to believe that this representation of
the gospels has nothing in it. How much the
form of it may owe to the conditions of trans
mission, repetition, condensation, and even inter
pretation, we may not be able precisely to say,
since these conditions must have varied in
definitely and in ways we cannot calculate ; but
the fact of a great charge, the general import of
which was thoroughly understood, seems indis-

THE GREAT COMMISSION 69
putable. All the gospels give it in one form
or another ; and even if we concede that the
language in which it is expressed owes something
to the Church's consciousness of what it had come
to possess through its risen Lord, this does not
affect in the least the fact that every known form
of the evangelic tradition puts such a charge,
or instruction, or commission, into the lips of
Jesus after His Resurrection. The historicity
of this representation I cannot question ; it seems
to me quite gratuitous (on the ground, merely,
that the apostles did not at once proceed to
organise a universal mission, or to. baptize in the
Triune name) to argue that in everything said of
Jesus, except that He appeared to His disciples,
the Church is simply putting back upon Him
and His authority the convictions to which she
had come under the guidance of His Spirit.
Granting that the Resurrection was more than
Keim's telegram from the unseen, convincing the
disciples that Jesus outlived death — granting that
it was, what our only authorities represent it to
be, the manifestation of Jesus in another mode of
being in which it was possible for Him, at least
for a time, and when He would, to have com
munication with His own — granting this, there
is no reason why He should not have said such
things to them as the gospels tell us He did say.
We cannot refute their representation by turning
from the last page of Matthew to the first page

70 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
of Acts, and finding that there is no mission to
all nations there, and no baptism in the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Such a refutation has only the show of success,
because it treats human nature as if it were sub
ject to no laws but those of logic. Even where
nothing but logic is necessary, it must be admitted
that man has sometimes been found wanting ;
and where action is in question, there is much
besides to be considered. Nor is it any explana
tion of the fact that the final charge of Jesus
appears in all the gospels where it does appear
to say that it represents the Church's conscious
ness of what the gospel really meant — a con
sciousness only acquired by degrees under
the teaching of the Spirit — thrown back upon
the authority of Christ Himself. There is
nothing in such an explanation to explain why
in all the gospels the Church's consciousness of
what the gospel means, of its contents and its
destination, is ascribed to the Risen Christ.
There is no reason why it should be put as it
is except that the fact was actually so.
What, then, is the content of the teaching or
commission of the Risen Saviour, which all the
evangelists give in one form or another ? Luke
has some peculiar matter in which he tells how
Jesus opened the minds of His disciples to under
stand the Scriptures, recalling the words He had
spoken while He was yet with them, how that all

THE GREAT COMMISSION 71
things must be fulfilled which were written in the
law of Moses and in the Prophets and in the
Psalms concerning Him. If Jesus spoke to His
disciples at all about what had befallen Him, all
that we have already seen as to His teaching
prepares us to believe that it was on this line.
Alike for Him and for the disciples the divine
necessity for His death could only be made out
by connecting it with intimations in the Word of
God. But apart from this instruction, which is
referred to by Luke alone, there is the common
testimony with which we are mainly concerned.
In Matthew it runs thus : 'Jesus came and spoke
to them saying, All power has been given to Me
in heaven and on earth. Go and make disciples
of all the nations, baptizing them into the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I
have commanded you. And lo, I am with you
all the days until the end of the world ' (Matt.
xxviii. 18 ff). Here we notice as the essential
things in our Lord's words (1) the universal
mission ; (2) baptism ; (3) the promise of a
spiritual presence. In Mark, as is well known,
the original ending has been lost. The last
chapter, however, was in all probability the
model on which the last in Matthew was shaped,
and what we have at present instead of it repro
duces the same ideas. ' Go into all the world
and preach the gospel to every creature. He

72 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;
but he that disbelieveth shall be condemned'
(Mark xvi. 15 f). What follows, as to the signs
which should attend on those who believe these
things — ' in My name they shall cast out demons,
they shall speak with new tongues, they shall
take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly
thing it shall not hurt them, they shall lay
hands on the sick, and they shall recover' —
shows how easy it was to expand the words of
Jesus on the basis of experience, just as a modern
preacher sometimes introduces Jesus speaking in
His own person, and promising what the preacher
knows by experience He can and will do ; but it
does not follow from this that the commission to
preach and its connection with baptism are un-
historical. In Luke the commission is connected
with the teaching above referred to. ' He said
to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should
suffer, and should rise from the dead on the third
day, and that repentance for remission of sins
should be preached in His name to all the nations,
beginning from Jerusalem' (Luke xxiv. 46 f.).
Here again we have (1) the universal commission ;
(2) repentance and remission of sins. In John
what corresponds to this runs as follows : ' Jesus
therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you.
As the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.
And when He had said this, He breathed on
them and saith to them, Receive ye the Holy
Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive they are

BAPTISM, FORGIVENESS, AND DEATH 73
forgiven unto them : whose soever sins ye retain
they are retained' (John xx. 21 f.). Here once
more we have (1) a mission, though its range is
not defined ; (2) a message, the sum and sub
stance of which has to do with forgiveness of
sins ; and (3) a gift of the Holy Ghost. ' But
what,' it may be asked, ' has all this to do with
the death of Jesus? The death of Jesus is not
expressly referred to here, except in what Luke
tells about His opening the minds of the disciples
to understand the Scriptures, and that simply
repeats what we have already had before us.'
The answer is apparent if we consider the
context in which the ideas found in this com
mission are elsewhere found in the New Testa
ment. In all its forms the commission has to do
either with baptism (so in Matthew and Mark)
or with the remission of sins (so in Luke and
John). These are but two forms of the same
thing, for in the world of New Testament ideas
baptism and the remission of sins are inseparably
associated. But the remission of sins has already
been connected with the death of Jesus by the
words spoken at the supper, or if not by the very
words spoken, at least by the significance
ascribed to his blood as covenant-blood ; and if
the Risen Saviour, in giving His disciples their
final commission, makes the forgiveness of sins
the burden of the gospel they are to preach,
which seems to me indubitable, He at the same
time puts at the very heart of the gospel His

74 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
own covenant-founding, sin-annulling death.
This inference from the evangelic passages which
record the intercourse of the Risen Lord with
His disciples may strike some, at the first glance,
as artificial ; but the air of artificiality will pass
away, provided we admit the reality of that
intercourse, and its relation both to the past
teaching of Jesus and to the future work of the
apostles. There is a link wanted to unite what
we have seen in the gospels with what we
find when we pass from them to the other books
of the New Testament, and that link is exactly
supplied by a charge of Jesus to His disciples
to make the forgiveness of sins the centre
of their gospel, and to attach it to the rite by
which men were admitted to the Christian
society. In an age when baptism and remission
of sins were inseparable ideas — when, so to
speak, they interpenetrated each other — it is no
wonder that the sense of our Lord's charge is
given in some of the gospels in one form, in
some in the other: that here He bids them
baptize, and there preach the forgiveness of sins.
It is not the form on which we can lay stress,
but only the import. The import, however, is
secure. Its historicity can only be questioned
by those who reduce the resurrection to mere
appearances of Jesus to the disciples — appear
ances which, as containing nothing but them
selves, and as unchecked by any other relation

THE BOOK OF ACTS 75
to reality, are essentially visionary. And its
significance is this : it is the very thing which is
wanted to evince the unity^ of the New Testa
ment, and the unity and consistency of the
Christian religion, as they have been presented
to us in the historical tradition of the Church.
Here, where the final revelation is made by our
Lord of all that His presence in the world means
and involves, we find Him dealing with ideas —
baptism and forgiveness — which alike in His own
earlier teaching, and in the subsequent teaching
of the apostles, can only be defined by relation
to His death.
When we pass from the gospels to the earliest
period of the Church's life we are again im
mersed in critical difficulties. It is not easy to
use the book of Acts in a way which will com
mand universal agreement. Renan's remark that
the closing chapters are the most purely historical
of anything in the New Testament, while the
opening ones are the least historical, is at least
plausible enough to make one cautious. But
while this is so, there is a general consent that in
the early chapters there is a very primitive type
of doctrine. The Christian imagination may
have transfigured the day of Pentecost, and
turned the ecstatic praise of the first disciples
into a speaking in foreign languages,1 but some
1 For the best examination of this see Chase's Hulsean Lectures
and Vernon Bartlet's Acts (Century Bible).

76 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
source or sources of the highest value underlie
the speeches of Peter. They do not represent
the nascent Catholicism of the beginning of the
second century, but the very earliest type of
preaching Jesus by men who had kept company
with Him. It would be out of place here to
dwell on the primitive character of the Christ-
ology, but it is necessary to refer to it as a
guarantee for the historical character of the
speeches in which it occurs. Consider, then,
passages like these : ' Jesus of Nazareth, a man
approved of God unto you by mighty works and
wonders and signs which God did by Him in the
midst of you, even as ye yourselves know'
(ii. 22) ; ' God hath made Him both Lord and
Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified ' (ii. 36) ;
'Jesus of Nazareth, how that God anointed Him
with the Holy Ghost and with power ; who went
about doing good, and healing all that were
oppressed of the devil, for God was with Him'
(x. 38). It is impossible to deny that in words
like these we have a true echo of the earliest
Christian preaching. And it is equally im
possible to deny that the soteriology which
accompanies this Christology is as truly primi
tive. What then is it, and what, in particular,
is the place taken in it by the death of Jesus?
It is sometimes asserted broadly that the real
subject of these early speeches in Acts is not the
death of Jesus but the resurrection ; the death, it

THE RESURRECTION IN BOOK OF ACTS 77
is said, has no significance assigned to it ; it is
only a difficulty to be got over. But there is a
great deal of confusion in this. No doubt the
apostles were witnesses of the resurrection, and
the discourses in these chapters are specimens of
their testimony. The resurrection is emphasised
in them with various motives. Sometimes the
motive may be called apologetic : the idea is that
in spite of the death it is still possible to believe
in Jesus as the Messiah ; God by raising Him
from the dead has exalted Him to this dignity.
Sometimes it may be called evangelistic. You
killed Him, the preacher says again and again
(ii. 23 f, iii. 14 f., v. 30 f), and God exalted Him
to His right hand: In these two appreciations of
Jesus lies the motive for a great spiritual change
in sinful men. Sometimes, again, the resurrec
tion is referred to in connection with the gift of
the Spirit ; the new life in the Church, with its
wonderful manifestations, attests the exaltation
of Jesus (ii. 33). Sometimes, once more, it is
connected with His return, either to bring times
of refreshing from the presence of the Lord
(iii. 20 f), or as Judge of the quick and the dead
(x. 42). But this preoccupation with the resur
rection in various aspects and relations does not
mean that for the first preachers of the gospel
the (ieath of Jesus had no significance, or no
fundamental significance. Still less does it mean
that the death of Jesus was nothing to them but

78 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
a difficulty in the way of retaining their faith in
His Messiahship, a difficulty which the resurrec
tion enabled them to surmount — its sinister
significance being discounted, so to speak, by
the splendour of this supreme miracle. This last
idea, that the cross in itself is nothing but a
scandal, and that all the New Testament inter
pretations of it are but ways of getting over the
scandal, cannot be too emphatically rejected. It
ignores, in the first place, all that has been
already established as to our Lord's own teach
ing about the necessity and the meaning of His
death — which has nothing to do with its being a
o-iedvSaXov. And it ignores, in the second place,
the spiritual power of Christ's death in those who
believe in Him, alike as the New Testament
exhibits it, and as it is seen in all subsequent
ages of the Church. The gospel would never
have been known as 'the word of the cross' if
the interpretation of the cross had merely been
an apologetic device for surmounting the theo
retical difficulties involved in the conception of a
crucified Messiah. Yet nothing is commoner
than to represent the matter thus. The apostles,
it is argued, had to find some way of getting over
the difficulty of the crucified Messiah theoreti
cally, as well as practically; the resurrection
enabled them to get over it practically, for it
annulled the death ; and the various theories of
a saving significance ascribed to the death

SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRIST'S DEATH 79
enabled them to get over it theoretically — that is
all. Nothing, I venture to say, could be more
hopelessly out of touch alike with New Testament
teaching and with all Christian experience than
such a reading of the facts. A doctrine of the
death of Jesus, which was merely the solution of an
abstract difficulty — the answer to a conundrum —
could never have become what the doctrine of
the death of Jesus is in the New Testament — the
centre of gravity in the Christian world. It
could never have had stored up in it the redeem
ing virtue of the gospel. It could never have been
the hiding-place of God's power, the inspiration
of all Christian praise. Whatever the doctrine of
Jesus' death may be, it is the feeblest of all mis
conceptions to trace it to the necessity of saying
something about the death which should as far as
possible remove the scandal of it. ' I delivered
unto you first of all,' says St. Paul to the Corin
thians, ' that which I also received, that Christ
died for our sins, according to the Scriptures '
(I Cor. xv. 3). St. Paul must have received this
doctrine from members of the primitive Church.
He must have received it in the place which he
gave it in his own preaching — that is, as the first
and fundamental thing in the gospel. He must
have received it within seven years — if we follow
some recent chronologies, within a very much
shorter period — of the death of Jesus. Even if the
book of Acts were so preoccupied with the resurrec-

80 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
tion that it paid no attention to the independent
significance of the death, it would be perfectly
fair, on the ground of this explicit reference of
St. Paul, to supplement its outline of primitive
Christian doctrine with some definite teaching on
atonement ; but when we look closely at the
speeches in Acts, we find that our situation is
much more favourable. They contain a great
deal which enables us to see how the primi
tive Church was taught to think and feel on this
important subject.
Here we have to consider such points as these.
(i)The death of Christ is repeatedly presented,
as in our Lord's own teaching, in the light
of a divine necessity. It took place 'by the
determined counsel and foreknowledge of God'
(ii. 23). That His Christ should suffer, was what
God foretold by the mouth of all His prophets
(iii. 18). In His death, Jesus was the stone
which the builders rejected, but which God made
the head of the corner (iv. 1). All the enemies
of Jesus, both Jew and Gentile, could only do
to Him what God's hand and counsel had deter
mined before should be done (iv. 28). A divine
necessity, we must remember, is not a blind but
a seeing one. To find the necessity for the
death of Jesus in the word of God means to find
that His death is not only inevitable but in
dispensable, an essential part of the work He

THE SERVANT OF THE LORD 81
had to do. Not blank but intelligible and moral
necessity is meant here.
Hence (2) we notice further the frequent identi
fication, in these early discourses, of the suffering
Messiah with the Servant of the Lord in the
Book of Isaiah. ' The God of our Fathers hath
glorified His Servant Jesus ' (iii. 13). ' Of a truth,
in this city, both Herod and Pontius Pilate were
gathered together against Thy holy Servant
Jesus' (iv. 27). The same identification is in
volved in the account of Philip and the Ethiopian
eunuch. The place of the Scripture which the
eunuch read was the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah,
and beginning from that Scripture Philip preached
to him Jesus (viii. 35). We cannot forget that
the impulse to this connection was given by our
Lord Himself, and that it runs through His whole
ministry, from His baptism, in which the heavenly
voice spoke to Him words applied to the Servant
of the Lord in Isaiah xiii. 1, to the last night of
His life when he applied to Himself the mysterious
saying, He was numbered with transgressors
(Luke xxii. 37). The divine necessity to suffer
is here elevated into a specific divine necessity,
namely, to fulfil through suffering the vocation of
one who bore the sins of many, and made interces
sion for the transgressors.
This connection of ideas in the primitive
Church is made clearer still, when we notice
F

82 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
(3) that the great blessing of the gospel, offered
in the name of Jesus, is the forgiveness of sins.
This is the refrain of every apostolic sermon.
Thus in ii. 38 : ' Repent and be baptized every
one of you in the name of Jesus Christ unto
remission of your sins.' In iii. 19, immediately
after the words, the things that God declared
before through the mouth of all the prophets,
that His Christ should suffer, He thus fulfilled —
we read : ' Repent therefore and turn, that your
sins may be blotted out.' In v. 31 Jesus is
exalted a Prince and a Saviour to give repent
ance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. In x. 43,
after rehearsing in outline the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus, Peter concludes his sermon
in the house of Cornelius : ' To him bear all the
prophets witness, that every one who believes in
Him shall receive forgiveness of sins through
His name.' This prominence given to the re
mission of sins is not accidental, and must not
be separated from the context essential to it in
Christianity. It is part of a whole system of
ideas, and other parts which belong to the same
whole with it in the New Testament are baptism
and the death of Christ. The book of Acts, like
all the other books in the New Testament, was
written inside of the Christian society, and for
those who were at home inside; it was not
written for those who had no more power of
interpreting what stood on the page than the

THE SACRAMENTS IN ACTS 8

j

letter itself supplied. It does not seem to me
in the least illegitimate, but on the contrary
both natural and necessary, to take all these
references to the forgiveness of sins and to
baptism as references at the same time to the sav
ing significance (in relation to sin) of the death of
Jesus. This is what is suggested when Jesus is
identified with the Servant of the Lord. This is
what we are prepared for by the teaching of
Jesus, and by the great commission ; and we
are confirmed in it by what we find in the rest
of the New Testament. It is not a sufficient
answer to this to say that the connection of ideas
asserted here between the forgiveness of sins or
baptism, on the one hand, and the death of Jesus
on the other, is not explicit ; it is self-evident to
any one who believes that there is such a thing
as Christianity as a whole, and that it is coherent
and consistent with itself, and who reads with a
Christian mind. The assumption of such a con
nection at once articulates all the ideas of the
book into a system, and shows it to be at one
with the gospels and epistles ; and suchan as sump
tion, for that very reason, vindicates itself.
Besides the references to baptism and the for
giveness of sins, we ought to notice also (4) the
reference in ii. 42 to the Lord's Supper. ' They
continued stedfastly ... in the breaking of
the bread.' It may seem to some excessively
venturous to base anything on the Sacraments

84 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
when everything connected with them is being
brought into dispute, and their very connection
with Jesus is denied. But without going into
the infinite and mostly irrelevant discussions
which have been raised on the subject, I venture
to say that the New Testament nowhere gives
us the idea of an unbaptized Christian — by one
Spirit we were all baptized into one body (i Cor.
xii. 13) — and that Paul, in regulating the observ
ance of the Supper at Corinth, regulates it as
part of the Christian tradition which goes back
for its authority, through the primitive Church,
to Christ Himself. ' I received of the Lord that
which also I delivered unto you' (1 Cor. xi. 23).
In other words, there was no such thing known
to Paul as a Christian society without baptism
as its rite of initiation, and the supper as its rite
of communion. And if there was no such thing
known to Paul, there was no such thing in the
world. There is nothing in Christianity more
primitive than the Sacraments, and the Sacra
ments, wherever they exist, are witnesses to
the connection between the death of Christ and
the forgiveness of sins. It is explicitly so in
the case of the Supper, and the expression of
St. Paul about being baptized into Christ's death
(Rom. vi. 3) shows that it is so in the case of
the other Sacrament too. The apostle was not
saying anything of startling originality, when he
wrote the beginning of Rom. vi. : ' Know ye not

THE SACRAMENTS IN ACTS 85
that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into His death?' Every Christian
knew that in baptism what his mind was directed
to, in connection with the blessing of forgiveness,
was the death of Christ. Both Sacraments, there
fore, are memorials of the death, and it is not
due to any sacramentarian tendency in Luke,
but only brings out the place which the death of
Christ had at the basis of the Christian religion,
as the condition of the forgiveness of sins, when
he gives the sacramental side of Christianity the
prominence it has in the early chapters of Acts.
From the New Testament point of view, the
Sacraments contain the gospel in brief; they
contain it in inseparable connection with the
death of Jesus ; and as long as they hold their
place in the Church the saving significance of
that death has a witness which it will not be
easy to dispute.
It is customary to connect with the Petrine
discourses in Acts an examination of the First
Epistle of Peter. It is not, indeed, open to dis
pute that the First Epistle of Peter shows traces
of dependence upon one or perhaps more than
one epistle of Paul. There are different ways
in which this may be explained. Peter and Paul
were not at variance about the essentials of
Christianity, as even the second chapter of the
Epistle to the Galatians proves ; if they had any
intimate relations at all, it is a priori probable

86 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
that the creative mind of Paul would leave its
mark on the more receptive intelligence of Peter ;
something also may be due to an amanuensis,
Silvanus (i Pet. v. 12) or another, who had seen
(as was possible enough in Peter's lifetime) letters
of Paul like those to the Romans or Ephesians.
But we must take care not to exaggerate either
the originality of Paul, or the secondary character
of Peter. Paul's originality is sometimes an affair
rather of dialectic than invention : he is original
rather in his demonstration of Christianity than
in his statement of it. The thing about which
he thinks and speaks with such independent and
creative power is not his own discovery ; it is the
common tradition of the Christian faith ; that
which he delivers to others, and on which he
expends the resources of his original and irre
pressible mind, he has himself in the first instance
received (1 Cor. xv. 3). And Peter may often be
explained, where explanation is necessary, not
by reference to Paul, but by reference to the
memory of Jesus in the first instance, and to the
suggestions of the Old Testament in the next.
His antecedents, properly speaking, are not
Pauline, but prophetic and evangelic. And if
there are formal characteristics of his epistle
which have to be explained by reference to his
great colleague, the substance of it, so far as our
subject is concerned, points not so much to Paul
as to Jesus and the ancient Scriptures. What

THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 87
ideas, then, we may ask, does the First Epistle
of Peter connect with the death of Jesus?
To begin with, the death of Jesus has the
central place in the writer's mind which it every
where has in the New Testament. He describes
himself as a ' witness of the sufferings of the
Christ' (v. 1). Mdprv; is to be taken here in its
full compass ; it means not only a spectator of,
but one who bears testimony to. The writer's
testimony to the sufferings of the Christ is one
in which their significance is brought out in
various aspects ; but though this sense of 'witness'
is emphasised, it by no means excludes the other ;
rather does it presuppose it. Peter seems to
prefer 'sufferings' to 'death' in speaking of the
Christ, perhaps because he had been an eye
witness, and because 'sufferings' served better
than 'death' to recall all that his Lord had
endured. Death might be regarded merely as
the end of life, not so much a moral reality, as
a limit or termination to reality ; but sufferings
are a part of life, with moral content and mean
ing, which may make an inspiring or pathetic
appeal to men. In point of fact it is the moral
quality of the sufferings of the Christ, and their
exemplary character, which first appeal to the
apostle. As he recalls what he had seen as he
stood by the great sufferer, what impresses him
most is His innocence and patience. He had
done no sin, neither was guile found in His

88 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
mouth. When he was reviled, he reviled not
again ; when he suffered he did not threaten,
but committed himself to Him who judges
righteously (ii. 22 f). In this character of the
patient and innocent sufferer Peter commends
Jesus to Christians, especially slaves, who were
having .their first experience of persecution, and
finding how hard it was not only to suffer with
out cause, but actually to suffer for doing well,
for loving fidelity to God and righteousness. It
is not necessary to press the parallel unduly, or
to argue (as Seeberg has done J) that the suffering
Christians in imitation of the Christ will have in
all respects the same kind of result, or the same
kind of influence, as His.- Yet Peter identifies
the two to some extent when he says, in iv. 13,
Ye are partakers in the sufferings of the Christ.
This is a genuinely evangelical point of view.
Jesus calls on all His followers to take up their
cross, and walk in His steps. The whole mass
of suffering for righteousness' sake, which has
been since the world began and will be to its
close, is ' the sufferings of the Christ ' ; all who
have any part in it are partners with Him in the
pain, and will be partners also in the glory which
is to be revealed. So far, it may be said, there
is no theological reflection in the epistle ; it
occupies the standpoint of our Lord's first lesson
on the Cross : I must suffer for righteousness'
1 Seeberg, Der Tod Christi, p. 292.

SPRINKLING OF THE BLOOD OF JESUS 89
sake, and so must all who follow me (Matt. xvi.
21-24) — with the admonition annexed, Let it be
in the same spirit and temper, not with amaze
ment, irritation, or bitterness.
But the epistle has other suggestions which it
is necessary to examine. The first is found in
the salutation. This is addressed to the elect
who are sojourners of the Dispersion in Pontus,
Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, accord
ing to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in
sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and
sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ (i. 1 f). In
this comprehensive address, a whole world of
theological ideas is involved. Christians are
what they are as elect according to the fore
knowledge of God. Their position does not rest
on assumptions of their own, or on any movable
basis, but on the eternal goodwill of God which
has taken hold of them. This goodwill, which
they know to be eternal — that is, to be the last
reality in the world — has come out in their
consecration by the Spirit. The Spirit, standing
as it does here between God the Father and Christ,
must be the Holy Spirit, not the spirit of the
Christian ; the consecration is wrought not upon
it but by it. The readers of the epistle would no
doubt connect the words, and be intended by the
writer to connect them, with their baptism ; it
was in baptism that the Spirit was received, and
that the eternal goodwill of God became a thing

go THE DEATH OF CHRIST
which the individual (of course through faith)
grasped in time. But what is in view in this eternal
goodwill and its manifestation in time ? It has
in view 'obedience and the sprinkling of the
blood of Jesus Christ.' We cannot miss the
reference here to the institution of the covenant
in Exodus xxiv. There we find the same ideas in
the same relation to each other. ' Moses took the
book of the covenant, and read in the audience
of the people ; and they said, All that the Lord
hath spoken will we do, and be obedient. And
Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the
people and said, Behold the blood ofthe covenant
which the Lord hath made with you upon all
these conditions.' Such a sprinkling with cove
nant blood, after a vow of obedience, is evidently
in Peter's mind here. We have already seen, in
connection with the institution of the Lord's
supper, what covenant blood means. As sacri
ficial, it is sin-covering ; it is that which annuls
sin as the obstacle to union with God. Within
the covenant, God and man have, so to speak, a
common life. God is not excluded from human
life ; He enters into it and achieves His ends in
the world through it. Man is not excluded from
the divine life ; God admits him to His friendship
and shows him what he is doing ; He becomes a
partaker in the divine nature, and a fellow-worker
with God. But the covenant is made by sacri
fice; its basis and being are in the blood. In

SPRINKLING OF THE BLOOD OF JESUS 91
this passage, therefore, election and consecration
have in view a life of obedience, in union and
communion with God ; and such a life, it is
assumed, is only possible for those who are
sprinkled with the blood of Jesus Christ. In
other words, it is this only which has abiding
power in it to annul sin as that which comes
between God and man. It is sometimes said
that the position of the blood in this passage —
after obedience — points to its sanctifying virtue,
its power to cleanse the Christian progressively,
or ever afresh, from all sin ; but if we use
technical language at all, we should rather say
that its character as covenant-blood obviously
suggests that on its virtue the Christian is per
petually dependent for his justification before
God. With this blood on us we have peace with
Him, and the calling to live in that peace.
The second express reference to the saving
significance of our Lord's death occurs in ch. i.
18 ff. Peter is exhorting those to whom he
writes to a life of holiness, and he uses various
arguments in support of his plea for sanctifica
tion.1 First, it answers to the essential relations
between man and God. ' As He who called you
is holy show yourselves also holy in all your
behaviour' (i. 15). Second, it is required in
view of the account they must render. ' If ye
invoke as Father Him who without respect of
1 Compare Kahler, Zur Lehre von der Versbhnung, p. 239.

92 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
persons judges according to every man's work,
pass the time of your sojourning here in fear'
(i. 17). And, third, they have been put in a posi
tion to live a holy life by the death of Christ.
' Knowing that you were ransomed, not with
corruptible things, silver and gold, from your
vain manner of life, handed down from your
fathers ; but with precious blood, as of a lamb
without blemish and without spot, even the
blood of Christ' (i. 18 f.). A lamb without
blemish and without spot is a sacrificial lamb,
and the virtue here ascribed to the blood of
Christ is some sort of sacrificial virtue. The
preciousness of the blood cannot be otherwise
explained than by saying that it was Christ's
blood. But what is the virtue here ascribed to
it ? By it Christians were ransomed from a vain
manner of life handed down from their fathers.
The iXvrpd>dr)T6 of this passage is no doubt an
echo of the Xvrpov dvrl troXXuv in Mark x. 45.
The effect of Christ's death was that for
Christians a peculiar kind of servitude ended;
when it told on them their life was no longer in
bondage to vanity and to custom. The expres
sion €K tj)s fiaraia<: ifimv dvao-rpo<j)rj<; trarpo-
trapaSorov is a very striking one. Life before the
death of Christ has touched it is fiaraia: i.e. it
is futile, it is a groping or fumbling after some
thing it can never find ; it gets into no effective
contact with reality ; it has no abiding fruit

REDEMPTION FROM VANITY 93
From this subjection to vanity it is redeemed by
the blood of Christ. When the power of Christ's
Passion enters into any life it is not futile any
more : there is no more the need or the inclina
tion to cry fiaraiorr]? /Maraiorrjrcov, all is vanity.
Nothing can be more real or satisfying than the
life to which we are introduced by the death of
Christ ; it is a life in which we can have fruit,
much fruit, and fruit that abides ; hence the
introduction to it, as iXvrpw&rjre suggests, is a
kind of emancipation. Similarly, life before the
death of Christ has touched it is trarporrapaBoro^ ;
it is a kind of tradition or custom, destitute of
moral originality or initiative. A man may
think he is himself, and that he is acting
freely and spontaneously, when he is only in
dulging self-will, or yielding to impulses of
nature in him through which a genuine moral
personality has neyer been able to emerge ; but
it is the power of Christ's passion descending
into the heart which really begets the new
creature, to whom moral responsibility — his own
— is an original thing, a kind of genius, in virtue
of which he does what nobody in the world ever
did before, and feels both free and bound to
do so. The moral originality of the New Testa
ment life is a miracle that never grows old ; and
whatever in the form of this epistle may be due
to a mind more creative than that of the writer,
at this point, at any rate, we catch the note of an

94 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
independent experience. Now this new life of
the Christian, with its satisfying reality, and its
wonderful freedom, was bought with the blood
of Christ.
It is possible to argue that the new life is called
forth immediately by the death of Christ — that is,
that the impression produced by the spectacle of
the cross, if we may so speak, quite apart from its
interpretation, emancipates the soul. But there is
something unreal in all such arguments. The
death of Christ was never presented to the world
merely as a spectacle. It was never presented
by any apostle or evangelist apart from an inter
pretation. It was the death of Christ so in
terpreted as to appeal irresistibly to the heart, the
conscience, the imagination, perhaps we should
sometimes include the very senses of men, which
exercised the emancipating power. And the only
hint which is here given of the line of interpreta
tion is that which is involved in the reference to
the sacrificial lamb. It was the death of Christ
not uninterpreted (which is really equivalent to
non-significant) but interpreted in some way as
a death for our sins which exercised this bene
ficent power to liberate and to recreate the soul.
A clearer light is cast on the nature of the con
nection between Christ's death and the moral
emancipation of believers by the third passage in
which the apostle makes a detailed reference to
the subject. It is that in which the example of

CHRIST'S SUFFERINGS EXEMPLARY 95
Christ in his sufferings is set before Christian
slaves who are called to suffer unjustly. Peter
pleads with them to be patient. 'What glory is
it if when you do wrong and are beaten, you take
it patiently ? But if when you do good and suffer
for it you take it patiently this is acceptable with
God. For this is what you were called for : for
Christ also suffered for you (virep vji&v erradev),
leaving you an example that ye should follow
in His steps.' So ii. 20 f. It is the exemplary
character of the sufferings of Christ that is in
view when the writer goes on : ' Who did no sin,
neither was guile found in His mouth : who when
He was reviled reviled not again, under suffering
did not threaten, but committed His cause to Him
who judges righteously.' In all this (ii. 22 f.)
the appeal of the example is clear. It is equally
clear that in what follows the exemplary char
acter of Christ's sufferings is left behind, or
transcended, and that they are put in another
aspect. It is as though the apostle could not
turn his eyes to the Cross for a moment without
being fascinated and held by it ; he saw far more
in it habitually, and he saw far more in it now,
than was needed to point his exhortation to the
wronged slaves ; it is not their interest in it, as
the supreme example of suffering innocence and
patience, but the interest of all sinners in it as
the only source of redemption, by which he is
ultimately inspired : 'Who His own self bare our

96 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
sins in His body upon the tree, that we having
died unto (the) sins might live unto righteous
ness : by whose stripes ye were healed.' The
enlargement of view is shown by the change to
the first person (He bore our sins, that we might
live, etc.), the writer including himself and all
Christians with those whom he addresses in
the benefits of Christ's death ; it is only in the
last clause — ' by whose wound you were healed '
— that he returns to his immediate subject, the
slaves who were buffeted for doing well. What,
then, precisely is it which is here affirmed of
Christ in His death?
Literally, it is that He Himself bore our sins
in His body on to the tree. The expression
dvatpepetv d/iapriav is not common : it occurs
only in Is. liii. 12 and Num. xiv. 33, the more
usual expression being Xafx^dveiv. But it seems
absurd for this reason, and for the reason that
dvacfyepetv Tt iirl rb Ovaiaarripiov is a common
expression, to argue that here the tree or cross
is regarded as an altar, to which sin was literally
carried up to be slain.1 That which is slain at
the altar is always regarded as a gift acceptable
to God : the slaying is only the method in which
it is irrevocably made His ; and nothing is more
perverse than the attempt to present sin in this
light. The words of the apostle must be inter-
1 See, for instance, Alford's note on the passage, and the qualified
support given to it in Bigg's Commentary.

THE BEARING OF SIN 97
preted as the simple sense of Christians always
has interpreted them : that Christ bore our sins in
His body as He ascended the Cross, or ascended
to it. There is something in the words eV tw
ard>/j,a,Tb and eVt to gvXov which leaves a singular
and even poignant impression of reality on the
mind. To us the Passion is idealised and trans
figured ; ' the tree' is a poetic name for the Cross,
under which the hard truth is hidden. But o-£>fia
means flesh and blood, and %vXov means timber.
We may have wondered that an apostle and eye
witness should describe the sinlessness and the
suffering of Jesus, as the writer of this epistle
does, almost entirely in words quoted from the
Old Testament ; but even as we wonder, and are
perhaps visited with misgivings, we are startled
by these words in which the Passion is set before
us as a spectacle of human pain which the writer
had watched with his own eyes as it moved to its
goal at the Cross. But this reminiscent pictorial
turn which he has given to his expression does
not alter the meaning of the principal words —
' Who His own self bore our sins.' This is the
interpretation of the Passion : it was a bearing of
sin. Now, to bear sin is not an expression for
which we have to invent or excogitate a meaning :
it is a familiar expression, of which the meaning
is fixed. Thus, to take the instance referred to
above (Num. xiv. 34): 'After the number of the
days in which ye spied out the land, even forty days,
G

9 8 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
for every day a year, shall ye bear your iniquities':
the meaning clearly is, bear the consequences of
them, take to yourselves the punishment which
they involve. Or again, in Lev. v. 17 : ' If any
one sin, and do any of the things which the Lord
hath commanded not to be done, though he knew
it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity':
the meaning is as clearly, he shall underlie the
consequences attached by the law to his act. Or
again, in Ex. xxviii. 43, where the sons of Aaron
are to observe punctually the laws about their
official dress, 'that they bear not iniquity and
die ' : to die and to bear iniquity are the same
thing, death being the penalty here denounced
against impiety. Expressions like these indicate
the line on which we are to fill out the meaning
of the words, ' Who His own self bare our sins.'
They are meant to suggest that Christ took on
Him the consequences of our sins — that He made
our responsibilities, as sin had fixed them, His
own. He did so when He went to the Cross —
i.e. in His death. His death, and His bearing of
our sins, are not two things, but one. It may be
true enough that He bore them on His spirit, that
He saw and felt their exceeding sinfulness, that
He mourned over them before God ; but however
true and moving such considerations may be, they
are not what the apostle means in the passage
before us. He means that all the responsibilities
in which sin has involved us — responsibilities

THE BEARING OF SIN 99
which are summed up in that death which is the
wages of sin — have been taken by Christ upon
Himself. His interpretation of the Passion is
that it is a bearing of sin — more precisely, that
it is the bearing of others' sin by one who is
Himself sinless. (Num. xxx. 15, Heb. 16.) The
apostle does not raise the question whether it is
possible for one to assume the responsibilities of
others in this way ; he assumes (and the assump
tion, as we shall see, is common to all the New
Testament writers) that the responsibilities of
sinful men have been taken on Himself by the
sinless Lamb of God. This is not a theorem he
is prepared to defend ; it is the gospel he has to
preach. It is not a precarious or a felicitous
solution of an embarrassing difficulty — the death
of the Messiah ; it is the foundation of the
Christian religion, the one hope of sinful men.
It may involve a conception of what Christ
is, which would show the irrelevance of the
objection just referred to, that one man cannot
take on him the responsibilities of others ; but
leaving that apart for the moment, the idea of
such an assumption is unquestionably that of
this passage. It is emphasised by the very
order of the words — -o? rd<; dfiapriai r/ficbv avrd?
dvrjvey/cev ; it was not His own but our sins that
were borne at Calvary.
To that which was so done Peter annexes the
aim of it. He bore our sins, that having died

ioo THE DEATH OF CHRIST
to the sins, we might live to righteousness. It is
not possible to argue from diroyevofievoi that our
death was involved in His — that we actually or
ideally died when He did, and so have no more
relation to sins. It is quite fair to render, 'that
we might die to our sins and live to righteous
ness.' A new life involves death to old relations,
and such a new life, involving such death, is
the aim of Christ's bearing of our sins. How
this effect is mediated the apostle does not
say. Once we understand what Christ's death
means — once we receive the apostolic testi
mony that in that death He was taking all
our responsibilities upon Him — no explanation
may be needed. The love which is the motive
of it acts immediately upon the sinful ; gratitude
exerts an irresistible constraint ; His responsi
bility means our emancipation ; His death our
life ; His bleeding wound our healing. Whoever
says ' He bore our sins ' says substitution ; and
to say substitution is to say something which
involves an immeasurable obligation to Christ,
and has therefore in it an incalculable motive
power. This is the answer to some of the
objections which are commonly made to the
idea of substitution on moral grounds. They
fail to take account of the sinner's sense of
debt to Christ for what He has done, a sense
of debt which it is not too much to designate
as the most intimate, intense, and uniform

RIGHTEOUS FOR UNRIGHTEOUS 101
characteristic of New Testament life. It is
this which bars out all ideas of being saved
from the consequences of sin, while living on in
sin itself. It is so profound that the whole
being of the Christian is changed by it; it is
so strong as to extinguish and to create at once ;
under the impression of it, to use the apostle's
words here, the aim of Christ's bearing of our
sins is fulfilled in us — we die to the sins and live
to righteousness.
This interpretation of the passage in the second
chapter is confirmed when we proceed to the one
in the third. The subject is still the same, the
suffering of Christians for righteousness' sake. ' It
is better,' says the apostle in iii. 17, ' if the will of
God should have it so, to suffer doing well than
doing ill. For Christ also died once for sins, the
righteous for the unrighteous, that He might
conduct us to God.' Here, as in the previous
passage, an exemplary significance in Christ's
sufferings is assumed, and to it apparently the
writer reverts in iv. I ('as Christ therefore suf
fered in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with
the same mind'), but it is not this exemplary
significance on which he enlarges. On the
contrary, it is a connection which the death
of Christ, or His Passion, has with sins.
Christ, he says, died in connection with sins
once for all (crn-af); His death has a unique
significance in this relation. What the special

102 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
connection was is indicated in the words St'/eato?
itrep dSUcov. It is the obvious implication of
these words that the death on which such stress
is laid was something to which the unrighteous
were liable because of their sins, and that in their
interest the Righteous One took it on Himself.
When He died for them, it was their death which
He died. His death has to be defined by relation
to sin, but it is the sin of others, not His own.
The writer no more asks here than he asked in
the previous case, How can such things be?
He does not limit the will of love — he does not,
in a world made and ruled by God, limit before
hand the power of love — to take on it to any
extent the responsibility of others. This is his
gospel, that a Righteous One has once for all
faced and taken up and in death exhausted the
responsibilities of the unrighteous, so that they
no more stand between them and God ; his
business is not to prove this, but to preach it
The only difference is that whereas in the second
chapter, if we can draw such a distinction in the
New Testament, the aim is a moral one (that we
may die to sin and live to righteousness), in the
present case it is religious (that He might conduct
us to God). The word irpoo-dyeiv has always a
touch of formality in it ; it is a great occasion
when the Son who has assumed our respon
sibilities for us takes us by the hand to bring
us to the Father. We find the same idea of the

ACCESS TO GOD 103
Trpoo-aycoyrj as the great Christian privilege in
Rom. v. 2, Eph. ii. 18. Sin, it is implied,
keeps man at a distance from God ; but Christ
has so dealt with sin on man's behalf that its
separative force is annulled ; for those who com
mit themselves to Christ, and to the work which
He has done for them in His Passion, it is
possible to draw near to God and to live in
His peace. This is the end contemplated in
His dying for sins once, the righteous for the
unrighteous. We can only repeat here what
has just been said in connection with the pre
vious passage. If Christ died the death in which
sin had involved us — if in His death He took the
responsibility of our sins upon Himself — no word
is equal to this which falls short of what is meant
by calling Him our substitute. Here also, as in
the second chapter, the substitution of Christ in
His death is not an end in itself: it has an ulterior
end in view. And this end is not attained except
for those who, trusting in what Christ has done, find
access to God through Him. Such access, we
must understand, is not a thing which can be
taken for granted. It is not for the sinful to
presume on acceptance with God whenever they
want it. Access to God is to the Apostle the
most sublime of privileges, purchased with an
unspeakable price ; for such as we are it is only
possible because for our sins Christ died. And
just as in the ancient tabernacle every object

104 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
used in worship had to be sprinkled with atoning
blood, so all the parts of Christian worship, all
our approaches to God, should consciously rest
on the atonement. They should be felt to be
a privilege beyond price ; they should be pene
trated with the sense of Christ's Passion, and of
the love with which He loved us when He suffered
for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, that
He might conduct us to God.
There is no other passage in the First Epistle
of Peter which speaks with equal explicitness of
the saving significance of Christ's death. But
the passages which have just been reviewed are
all the more impressive from the apparently
incidental manner in which they present them
selves to us. The apostle is not avowedly
discussing the theology of the Passion. There
is nothing in his epistle like that deliberate
grappling with the problem of the justification
of the ungodly which we find, for example, in
the third and fourth chapters of the Epistle to
the Romans. His general purpose, indeed, is
quite different. It is to exhort to patience and
constancy Christians who are suffering for the
first time severe persecution, and who are dis
posed to count it a strange thing that has
befallen them ; the suffering Christ is held up
to them as an example. He is the first of
martyrs, and all who suffer for righteousness'
sake, as they share the suffering which He

EXAMPLE AND ATONEMENT 105
endured, should confront it in the same spirit
which He displayed. But the imitation of Jesus
is not an independent thing for the apostle ; at
least he never speaks of it by itself. It is the
sense of obligation to Christ which enables us to
lift our eyes to so high an example ; and Peter
glides insensibly, on every occasion, from Christ
the pattern of innocence and patience in suffer
ing to Christ the sacrificial lamb, Christ the
bearer of sin, Christ who died, righteous for
unrighteous men. It is here -the inspiration is
found for every genuine imitatio Christi, and the
unforced, inevitable way in which the apostle
falls regularly back on the profounder interpreta
tion of the death of Christ, shows how central and
essential it was in his mind. He does not dwell
anywhere of set purpose on the attitude of the
soul to this death, so as to make clear the
conditions on which it becomes effective for
the Christian's emancipation from a vain and
custom-ridden life, for his death to sin, or for
his introduction to God. As has been already
remarked, the sense of obligation to Christ, the
sense of the love involved in what He has done
for men, may produce all these effects immedi
ately. But there are two particulars in which
the first epistle of Peter makes a near approach
to other New Testament books, especially to
Pauline ones, in their conception of the con
ditions on which the blessings of the gospel are

io6 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
enjoyed, and it may not be out of place to refer
to them here. The first is the emphasis it lays
on faith. The testing of the Christian life is
spoken of as ' the trying of your faith ' (i. 7) ; the
salvation of the soul is ' the end of your faith '
(i. 9) ; Christians are those * who through Him '
— that is, through Christ — 'have faith in God'
(i. 21). The other is the formula 'in Christ,'
which has sometimes been treated almost as if
it were the signature of St. Paul. It occurs in
the last verse of the epistle : ' Peace be to you all
that are in Christ' Probably it is not too bold
to suggest that in these two ideas — that of 'faith'
and that of being 'in Christ' — we have here, as
elsewhere in the New Testament, a clue to the
terms on which all the Christian facts, and most
signally the death of Christ, as the apostle inter
prets it, have their place and efficacy in the life
of men.
It is not possible to base anything on the
Second Epistle ascribed to Peter. The one
expression to be found in it, bearing on our
subject, is the description of certain false
teachers in ch. ii. 1, as 'denying the Master
who bought them ' (rbv dyopdo-avra avrov?
Becnrorrjv dpvovfievoi). The idea of dyopd£eiv
is akin to that of Xvrpovv, and the New Testa
ment in other places emphasises the fact that
we are bought with a price (1 Cor. vi. 20,
vii. 23), and that the price is the blood of

THE SECOND EPISTLE OF PETER 107
Christ (Rev. v. 9.) ; but though these ideas
no doubt underlie the words just quoted, there
is no expansion or application of them in the
context. The passage takes for granted the
common faith of Christians in this connection,
but does not directly contribute to its elucidation.

108 THE DEATH OF CHRIST

CHAPTER III
THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL
WHEN we pass from primitive Christian preach
ing to the epistles of St. Paul, we are embarrassed
not by the scantiness but by the abundance of
our materials. It is not possible to argue that
the death of Christ has less than a central, or
rather than the central and fundamental place, in
the apostle's gospel. But before proceeding to
investigate more closely the significance he
assigns to it, there are some preliminary con
siderations to which it is necessary to attend.
Attempts have often been made, while admitting
that St. Paul teaches what he does teach, to evade
it — either because it is a purely individual inter
pretation of the death of Jesus, which has no
authority for others ; or because it is a theo-
logoumenon, and not a part of the apostolic testi
mony ; or because it is not a fixed thing, but a
stage in the development of apostolic thought,
which St. Paul was on the way to transcend, and
would eventually have transcended, and which
we (by his help) can quite well leave behind us;
or because it is really inconsistent with itself, a
bit of patchwork, pieced out here and there with

TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 109
incongruous elements, to meet the exigencies
of controversy ; or because it unites, in a way
inevitable for one born a Pharisee, but simply
false for those who have been born Christian,
conceptions belonging to the imperfect as well
as to the perfect religion — conceptions which it
is our duty to allow to lapse. I do not propose
to consider such criticisms of St. Paul's teaching
on the death of Christ directly. For one thing,
abstract discussion of such statements, apart
from their application to given cases, never
leads to any conclusive results ; for another,
when we do come to the actual matters in
question, it often happens that the distinctions
just suggested disappear ; the apostolic words
have a virtue in them which enables them to
combine in a kind of higher unity what might
otherwise be distinguished as testimony and
theology. But while this is so it is relevant, and
one may think important, to point out certain
characteristics of St. Paul's presentation of his
teaching which constitute a formidable difficulty
in the way of those who would evade it.
The first is, the assurance with which he ex
presses himself. The doctrine of the death of
Christ and its significance was not St. Paul's
theology, it was his gospel. It was all he had to
preach. It is with it in his mind — immediately
after the mention of our Lord Jesus Christ, who
gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us

no THE DEATH OF CHRIST
from this present world with all its evils — that he
says to the Galatians : ' Though we or an angel
from heaven preach a gospel to you contra
vening the gospel which we preached, let him be
anathema. As we have said before, so say I now
again, if any man is preaching a gospel to you
contravening what you received, let him be
anathema' (Gal. i. 4, 8 f). I cannot agree with
those who disparage this, or affect to forgive it, as
the unhappy beginning of religious intolerance.
Neither the Old Testament nor the New Testa
ment has any conception of a religion without this
intolerance. The first commandment is, ' Thou
shalt have none other gods beside Me,' and that
is the foundation of the true religion. As there is
only one God, so there can be only one gospel.
If God has really done something in Christ on
which the salvation of the world depends, and if
he has made it known, then it is a Christian duty
to be intolerant of everything which ignores,
denies, or explains it away. The man who per
verts it is the worst enemy of God and men ; and
it is not bad temper or narrowmindedness in St.
Paul which explains this vehement language, it
is the jealousy of God which has kindled in a
soul redeemed by the death of Christ a corre
sponding jealousy for the Saviour. It is in
tolerant only as Peter is intolerant when he
says, 'Neither is there salvation in any other'
(Acts iv. 12), or John, when he says, 'He that

ST. PAUL'S INTOLERANCE in
hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not
the Son of God hath not the life' (i John v.
12); or Jesus Himself when He says, 'No man
knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him '
(Matt. xi. 27). Intolerance like this is an
essential element in the true religion ; it is the
instinct of self-preservation in it ; the unforced
and uncompromising defence of that on which
the glory of God and the salvation of the world
depends. If the evangelist has not something to
preach of which he can say, If any man makes it
his business to subvert this, let him be anathema,
he has no gospel at all. Intolerance in this sense
has its counterpart in comprehension ; it is when
we have the only gospel, and not till then, that
we have the gospel for all. It is a great argument,
therefore, for the essential as opposed to the casual
or accidental character of St. Paul's teaching on
Christ's death — for it is with this that the epistle
to the Galatians is concerned — that he displays
his intolerance in connection with it. To touch
his teaching here is not to do something which
leaves his gospel unaffected ; as he understands
it, it is to wound his gospel mortally.
Another consideration of importance in this
connection is St. Paul's relation to the common
Christian tradition. No doubt this apostle was
an original thinker, and in the Epistle to the
Galatians he is concerned to vindicate his

112 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
originality, or at least his independence ; but
his originality is sometimes exaggerated. He
did not invent Christianity ; there were apostles
and preachers and men in Christ before him.
And he tells us expressly that in the funda
mentals of Christianity he not only agreed with
them, but was indebted to them. ' I delivered
unto you first of all that which I also received,
that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He
hath been raised the third day, according to the
Scriptures' (i Cor. xv. 3). It is impossible to
leave out of the tradition which St. Paul had him
self received, and which he transmitted to the
Corinthians, the reference to the meaning of
Christ's death — 'He died for our sins according
to the Scriptures ' — and to limit it to the fact :
the fact needed no such authentication. It is
the fact in its meaning for sinners which con
stitutes a gospel, and this, he wishes to assert,
is the only gospel known. ' Whether it be I or
they — whether it be I or the twelve apostles at
Jerusalem — this is the way we preach, and it was
thus that you became believers' (1 Cor. xv. n).
And the doctrinal tradition of Christianity, if we
may call it so, was supplemented and guaranteed
by the ritual one. In the same epistle to the
Corinthians St. Paul says again, speaking of the
Supper, ' I received of the Lord that which also
I delivered unto you' (1 Cor. xi. 23). An im-

ST. PAUL AND TRADITION 113
mediate supernatural revelation of what took
place on the last night of our Lord's life has no
affinity to anything we know of revelations : we
must understand St. Paul to say that what he had
handed on to the Corinthians had before been
handed on to him, and went back originally to
the Lord Himself. The Lord was the point
from which it started. But Paul could not re
ceive this ritual tradition, and we know he did
not, without receiving at the same time the great
interpretative words about the new covenant in
Christ's blood, which put the death of Christ,
once for all, at the foundation of the Gospel.1
It is not Paulinism which does this, it is the
Christianity of Christ. The point at issue be
tween the apostle and his Jewish Christian
adversaries was not whether Christ had died
for sins ; every Christian believed that. It was
rather how far this death of Christ reached in the
way of producing or explaining the Christian
life. To St. Paul it reached the whole way ; it
explained everything ; it supplanted everything
1 Cf. Soltau, Unsere Evangelien, S. 85 : ' The apostles and
evangelists who went about two by two from church to church
preaching everywhere the Word of God, must have had a fixed
basis for the instruction they gave. And when Paul (1 Cor.
xi. 23) declares of his account of the Supper, " I have received
it from the Lord," he points in doing so to a. formulation of
Christian teaching once for all fixed and definite.' In a note he
adds that St. Paul's words, 'the Lord Jesus on the night on
which He was betrayed,' even show an affinity to the synopdc
narrative. H

ii4 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
he could call a righteousness of his own ; it in
spired everything he could call righteousness
at all. To his opponents, it did not so much
supplant as supplement: but for the atoning
death, indeed, the sinner is hopeless ; but even
when he has believed in it, he has much to do on
his own account, much which is not generated in
him by the sense of obligation to Christ, but
must be explained on other principles — e.g. that
of the authority of the Jewish law. It is not
necessary to enter into this controversy here,
but what may fairly be insisted upon is the fact,
which is evident in all the epistles, that under
neath the controversy St. Paul and his opponents
agreed in the common Christian interpretation
of Christ's death as a death in which sin had
been so dealt with that it no longer barred
fellowship between God and those who believed
in Jesus. This, again, should make us slow to
reject anything on this subject in St. Paul as
being merely Pauline — an idiosyncrasy of the
individual. We must remember that his great
argument against Judaising Christians is that they
are acting inconsistently : they are unwittingly
doing something which contravenes, not Paulin-
ism but the gospel they have already received of
redemption through the death of Christ
Again, the perception of St. Paul's place in Chris
tian tradition, and of his debt to it, should make
us slow to lay stress on the development which

DEVELOPMENT IN ST. PAUL 115
has been discovered in his writings. Leaving
out the Pastorals, Paul wrote his other epistles
within the space of ten years. But he had been
preaching the gospel, in which the death of
Christ had from the beginning the place and
significance which we have just seen, at least
fifteen years before any of the extant epistles
were written. Is it credible that he had no
intellectual life at all for those fifteen years, and
that then, all of a sudden, his brain began to
work at high pressure, and continued to work so
till the end of his life? It is true that in- the
epistles of the imprisonment, as they may
be conveniently called — Colossians, Ephesians,
Philippians — we see the whole gospel in other
relations than those in which it is exhibited in
the epistles of the great missionary period —
Thessalonians, Corinthians, Galatians, Romans.
But this is something quite different from a
development in the gospel itself; and in point
of fact we cannot discover in St. Paul's interpre
tation of Christ's death anything which essen
tially distinguishes his earliest epistles from his
latest. To suppose that a great expansion of
his thoughts took place between the letters to
the Thessalonians and those to the Corinthians
is to ignore at once the chronology, the nature of
letters, and the nature of the human mind. St.
Paul tells us himself that he came to Corinth de
termined to know nothing among the Corinthians

u6 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. But he
came in that mood straight from Thessalonica,
and in that mood he wrote from Corinth the
letters to Thessalonica, in which, nevertheless,
there is, as we shall see, only a passing allusion
to Christ's death. Nothing could demonstrate
more clearly how entirely a matter of accident
it is — that is, how entirely it depends upon con
ditions which we may or may not have the
means of discovering — whether any particular
part of the apostle's whole conception of Chris
tianity shall appear in any given epistle. If
development might be asserted anywhere, on
general grounds, it would be in this case and on
this subject ; there is far more about Christ's
death, and far more that is explicit, in the First
Epistle to the Corinthians than in the first to the
Thessalonians. Yet precisely at this point our
knowledge of St. Paul's mind when he reached
Corinth (i Cor. ii. i f), and of the brief interval
which lay between this and his visit to Thessa
lonica, put the idea of development utterly out of
the question. As far as the evidence goes — the
evidence including St. Paul's epistles on the one
hand, and St. Paul's admitted relation to the
doctrinal and ritual tradition of Christianity on the
other — the apostle had one message on Christ's
death from first to last of his Christian career. His
gospel, and it was the only gospel he knew, was
always ' the Word of the Cross ' (i Cor. i. 18), or

EXPERIENCE AND CONTROVERSY 117
'the Word of reconciliation ' (2 Cor. v. 19). The
applications might be infinitely varied, for, as
has been already pointed out, everything was
involved in it, and the whole of Christianity was
deduced from it ; but this is not to say that it
was in process of evolution itself.
There are two other sets of questions which
might be raised here, either independently or
in relation to each other — the questions involved
in the experimental, and in the controversial or
apologetic, aspects of St. Paul's theology. How
much of what he tells us of the death of Christ
is the interpretation of experience, and has
value as such ? How much is mere fencing with
opponents, or squaring of accounts with his own
old ways of thinking about God and the soul,
but has no value now, because the conditions to
which it is relative no longer exist? These
questions, as has been already remarked, are
not to be discussed abstractly, because taken
abstractly the antitheses they present are in
evitably tainted with falsehood. They assume
an opposition which does not exist, and they
ignore the capacity of the truth to serve a
variety of intellectual and spiritual purposes.
St. Paul could use his gospel, no doubt, in contro
versy and in apology, but it was not devised for
controversial or apologetic ends. The truth
always has it in itself to be its own vindication
and defence. It can define itself in all relations,

118 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
against all adversaries ; but it is not constituted
truth, it is only exhibited as truth, when it does
so. The fact that Christ died for our sins — that
His death is an atoning death — is a magnificent
apology for the Cross, turning its shame into
glory ; but it is not philosophy or criticism, it is
mere unintelligence, to maintain that it was in
vented or believed just in order to remove the
offence of the Cross. In St. Paul it is not an
apologetic or a controversial truth, or a truth
relative to the exigencies of Jewish prejudice ;
it is an independent, eternal, divine truth, the
profoundest truth of revelation, which for that
very reason contains in it the answer to all
religious questions whether of ancient or of
modern times. It is so far from being a truth
which only a mind of peculiar antecedents or
training could apprehend, that it is of all truths
the most universal. It was the sense of it, in its
truth, that made St. Paul a missionary to all men.
When he thought of what it meant, it made him
exclaim, Is God a God of Jews only ? (Rom. iii. 29).
Is the God who is revealed in the death of Christ
for sin a God who speaks a language that only one
race can understand ? Incredible. The atoning
death of Christ, as a revelation of God, is a thing
in itself so intelligible, so correspondent to a
universal need, so direct and universal in its
appeal, that it must be the basis of a universal
religion. It is so far from being a truth (if we

FACT AND THEORY IN ST. PAUL 119
can speak of truth on such terms) relative only
to one race, or one upbringing, or one age, or
one set of prejudices, that it is the one truth
which for all races and in all ages can never
admit of any qualification. In itself true, it can
be used as a weapon, but it was no necessity of
conflict which fashioned it. It is the very heart
of revelation itself.
The same attitude of mind to the Pauline
teaching which would discount some of it as
controversial or apologetic, as opposed to experi
mental or absolute, is seen in the disposition to
distinguish in that teaching, as the expression is,
fact from theory. In all probability this also is
a distinction which it will not repay us to discuss
in vacuo : everything depends on the kind of fact
which we are supposed to be theorising. The
higher we rise in the scale of reality the more
evanescent becomes the distinction between the
thing ' itself and the theory of it. A fact like
the one with which we are here concerned, a
fact in which the character of God is revealed,
and in which an appeal is to be made to the
reason, the conscience, the heart, the whole moral
being of man, is a fact which must be, and must
be seen to be, full of rational, ethical, and emo
tional content. If instead of 'theory' we use
an equivalent word, say ' meaning,' we discover
that the absolute distinction disappears; The
fact is not known to us at all unless it is known

120 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
in its meaning, in "that which constitutes it a
revelation of God and an appeal to man ; and to
say that we know it in its meaning is to say that
we know it theoretically, or in or through a
theory of it. A fact of which there is no theory
is a fact in which we can see no meaning ; and
though we can apply this distinction so far
when we are speaking of physical facts, and
argue that it is fire which burns and not the
theory of heat, we cannot apply it at all when
we are speaking of a fact which has to tell on us
in other than physical ways : through conscience,
through the heart, through the intelligence, and
therefore in a manner to which the mind can
really respond. St. Paul's own words in Romans
v. n enable us to illustrate this. We have re
ceived, he says, or taken, the reconciliation. If
we could take it physically, as we take a doctor's
prescription, which would tell on us all the same
whatever our spiritual attitude to it might be,
then we might distinguish clearly between the
fact and the theory of it, and argue that as long
as we accepted the fact, the theory was neither
here nor there ; but if the fact with which we are
dealing cannot be physically accepted at all —
if it addresses itself to a nature which is higher
than physical, a nature of which reason, imagina
tion, emotion, conscience, are the elements, then
the fact itself must be seen to be one in which
there is that which appeals to all these elements ;

THE RESURRECTION IN ST. PAUL 121
that is, to repeat the truth, it must be an inter
preted fact, something in which fact and theory
are indissolubly one. The Cross must be ex
hibited in o Xoyos rov aravpov, the Reconciliation
in o Xdyo? rf/9 KaraXXayrj'i ; and Xoyos is always a
rational, a theoretical word. It is much easier to
say there is a distinction of fact and theory, a
distinction between the testimony and the theo
logy of St. Paul, than to prove it ; it is much
easier to imagine that one can preach the gospel
without any theory of the death of Christ than,
knowing what these words mean, to do so. The
simplest preacher, and the most effective, is
always the most absolutely theoretical. It is a
theory, a tremendous theory, that Christ's death
is a death/or sin. But unless a preacher can put
some interpretation on the death — unless he can
find a meaning in it which is full of appeal — why
should he speak of it at all ? Is it the want of a
theory that deprives it of its place in preaching ?
There is one other subject to which also it is
necessary to refer before going into detail on St.
Paul's teaching — the connection between Christ's
death and His resurrection. The tradition of
Protestant theology undoubtedly tends to isolate
the death, and to think of it as a thing by itself,
apart from the resurrection; sometimes, one is
tempted to say, apart even from any distinct
conception of Him who died. But we know that
St. Paul himself puts an extraordinary emphasis

122 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
on the resurrection. Sometimes it is co-ordinated
with the death. ' If we believe that Jesus died
and rose again,' he writes to the Thessalonians,
including in this the whole of the Christian faith
(i Thess. iv. 14). ' He was delivered for our
offences, and raised again for our justification,'
he says to the Romans, making the resurrection
as essential as the death (Rom. iv. 25). It is
the same with the summary of fundamental
truths, which constituted the gospel as he
preached it at Corinth, and which has been re
peatedly referred to already : ' first of all that
Christ died for our sins according to the Scrip
tures, and that He was buried, and that He rose
again the third day according to the Scriptures'
(1 Cor. xv. 3 f). But there are passages in which
he gives a more exclusive emphasis to the resur
rection. Thus in Rom. x. 9 he writes : ' If thou
shalt confess with thy mouth that Jesus is Lord,
and believe in thy heart that God raised Him
from the dead, thou shalt be saved'; and in
1 Cor. xv. 17 : 'If Christ is not risen, your faith
is vain ; ye are yet in your sins.' It is possible,
however, to do full justice to all such expressions
without qualifying in the slightest the promi
nence given in St. Paul to Jesus Christ as cruci
fied. It was the appearance of the Risen One
to St. Paul which made him a Christian. What
was revealed to him on the way to Damascus was
that the Crucified One was Son of God, and the

LOVE OF GOD IN CHRIST'S DEATH 123
gospel that He preached afterwards was that of
the Son of God crucified. There can be no sal
vation from sin unless there is a living Saviour :
this explains the emphasis laid by the apostle on
the resurrection. But the Living One can only
be a Saviour because He has died : this explains
the emphasis laid on the Cross. The Christian
believes in a living Lord, or he could not believe
at all ; but he believes in a living Lord who died
an atoning death, for no other can hold the faith
of a soul under the doom of sin.
The importance of St. Paul's teaching, and the
fact that dissent from any specifically New Testa
ment interpretation of Christ's death usually
begins with it, may justify these preliminary
observations ; we now go on to notice more pre
cisely what the apostle does teach. What then, let
us ask, are the relations in which St. Paul defines
the death of Christ? What are the realities
with which he connects it, so that in these con
nections it becomes an intelligible thing — not a
brute fact, like the facts of physics, while their
laws are as yet unknown, but a significant,
rational, ethical, appealing fact, which has a
meaning, and can act not as a cause but as a
motive? In other words, what is the doctrinal
construction of this fact in virtue of which St. Paul
can preach it to man as a gospel ?
(1) To begin with, he defines it by relation to

124 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the love of God. The death of Christ is an illus
tration or rather a demonstration of that love.
It is a demonstration of it which can never
be surpassed. There are great, though rare
examples of love among men, but nothing which
could give any suggestion of this. ' Scarcely for
a righteous man will one die ; for the good man
possibly one might dare even death : but God
commends His love to us in that while we were
yet sinners Christ died for us ' (Rom. v. 7 f). We
shall return to this, and to St. Paul's inferences
from it, when the passage in Romans comes before
us ; but meanwhile we should notice that the inter
pretation of Christ's death through the love of
God is fundamental in St. Paul. In whatever
other relations he may define it, we must assume,
unless the contrary can be proved, that they are
consistent with this. It is the commonest of all
objections to the propitiatory doctrine of the
death of Christ that it is inconsistent with the
love of God ; and not only amateur, but profes
sional theologians of all grades have rejected St.
Paul's doctrine of propitiation as inconsistent
with Jesus' teaching on the love of the Father ;
but if a mind like St. Paul teaches both things
— if he makes the death of Christ in its pro
pitiatory character the supreme demonstration
of the Father's love — is there not an immense
probability that there is misunderstanding some
where? It may be a modern, it is certainly not

LOVE OF CHRIST IN HIS DEATH 125
a Pauline idea, that a death for sins, with a view
to their forgiveness, is inconsistent with God's
love. Whatever the process, St. Paul related that
death to God's love as the supreme proof of it.
(2) Further, the apostle defines Christ's death
by relation to the love of Christ. ' The Son of
God loved me,' he says, ' and gave Himself for
me ' (Gal. ii. 20). ' The love of Christ constraineth
us, because we thus judge, that one died for all'
(1 Cor. v. 14). ' Walk in love, as Christ also loved
us, and gave Himself for us an offering and a
sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour'
(Eph. v. 2). ' Christ loved the church, and gave
Himself for it, that He might sanctify it to Him
self (Eph. v. 25). Christ is not an instrument,
but the agent, of the Father in all that He does.
The motive in which God acts is the motive in
which He acts : the Father and the Son are at
one in the work of man's salvation. It is this
which is expressed when the work of Christ is
described, as it is in Phil. ii. 8 and Rom. v. 19,
as obedience — obedience unto death, and that
the death of the Cross. The obedience is con
ceived as obedience to the loving will of the
Father to save men — that is, it is obedience in
the vocation of Redeemer, which involves death
for sin. It is not obedience merely in the sense
of doing the will of God as other men are called
to do it, keeping God's commandments ; it is
obedience, in this unique and incommunicable

126 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
yet moral calling, to be at the cost of life the
Saviour of the world from sin. Hence it is in
the obedience of Christ to the Father that the
great demonstration of His love to men is given
— ' He loved me,' as the apostle says, ' and gave
Himself for me.' In His obedience, in which He
makes His great sacrifice, Christ is fulfilling the
will of God ; and the response which He evokes
by His death is a response toward God. It is
at this point, in the last resort, that we become
convinced of the deity of Christ. It is a work
of God which He is working, and the soul that
is won for it is won for God in Him.
(3) The relation of Christ's death to the love
of God and of Christ is its fundamental relation
on one side ; on the other side, St. Paul relates
it essentially to sin. It is a death for sin, what
ever else may be said of it. ' First of all, Christ
died for our sins.' It was sin which made death,
and not something else, necessary as a demon
stration of God's love and Christ's. Why was
this so? The answer of the apostle is that it
was so because sin had involved us in death,
and there was no possibility of Christ's deal
ing with sin effectually except by taking our
responsibility in it on himself — that is, except by
dying for it. Of course it is assumed in this that
there is an ethical connection of some kind
between death and sin, and that such a con
nection of words as, ' The wages of sin is death,'

CONNECTION OF DEATH AND SIN 127
(Rom. vi. 23) really has meaning. No doubt
this has been denied. Death, it is argued, is
the debt of nature, not the wages of sin ; it
has no moral character at all. The idea of
moral liability to death, when you look at the
universality of death quite apart from moral
considerations, is a piece of pure mythology. In
spite of the assurance with which this argument
is put forward it is not difficult to dissent from it.
What it really does is to treat man abstractly,
as if he were no more than a physical being ;
whereas, if we are to have either religion or
morality preserved in the world, it is essential
to maintain that he is more. The argument
is one of the numberless class which proves
nothing, because it proves too much. It is
part of a vaster argument which would deny
at the same time the spiritual nature and the
immortality of man. But while it is right to
say that death comes physically, that through
disease, or accident, or violence, or mere physical
exhaustion, it subdues to itself everything that
lives, this does not touch the profounder truth
with which St. Paul is dealing, that death
comes from God, and that it comes in man to
a being who is under law to Him. Man is not
like a plant or an animal, nor is death to him
what it is at the lower levels of life. Man has
a moral nature in which there is a reflection
of the holy law of God, and everything that

128 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
befalls him, including death itself, must be in
terpreted in relation to that nature. Conscience,
quickened by the law of God, has to look at death,
and to become alive, not to its physical ante
cedents, but to its divine meaning. What is Gods
voice in death to a spiritual being? It is what the
apostle represents it — death is the wages of "sin.1
It is that in which the divine judgment on sin
comes home to the conscience. The connection
between the two things is real, though it is not
physical ; and because it is what it is — because
death by God's ordinance has in the conscience
of sinful men the tremendous significance which
it does have — because it is a power by which
they are all their lifetime held in bondage — be
cause it is the expression of God's implacable and
final opposition to evil — He who came to bear
our sin must also die our death. Death is the
word which sums up the whole liability of man
in relation to sin, and therefore when Christ
came to give Himself for our sins He did it by
dying. It does not occur to St. Paul to ask how
Christ could die the death which is the wages of
sin, any more than it occurred to St. Peter (see
p. 99) to ask how He could bear the sins of others.
If any one had argued that the death which
Jesus died, since it had not the shadow of a bad
1 Compare Kahler, p. 399. In Empfindung, Mythus, Bild,
Religion und Betrachtung ist der Tod, wie wir Sunder ihn
sterben, der Prediger der Verantwortlichkeit geblieben.

CONNECTION OF DEATH AND SIN 129
conscience cast upon it, was not the death which
is the wages of sin, can we not conceive him ask
ing, 'What death, then, was it? Is there any
other? The death He died was the only death
we know ; it was death in all that tragic reality
that we see at Calvary ; and the sinlessness of
Jesus — when we take His love along with it —
may have been so far from making it impossible
for Him to know and feel it as all that it was,
that it actually enabled him to realise its awful
character as no sinful soul had ever done or
could do. Instead of saying, He could not die
the death which is the wages of sin, it may be
far truer to say, None but He could.' 1
It may not be amiss here to point out that
analysis of the term ' death ' as it is used by St.
Paul almost invariably misleads. According to
M. Men£goz,2 the apostle's doctrine of the ex
piation of sin by death is fatally vitiated by the
ambiguity of the term. Paul confounds in it
two distinct things : (1) death as l' an/an tissement
complet et definitif; (2) death as la peine de mort,
le de'ces. If we take the word in the first sense,
Christ did not die, for He was raised again, and
therefore there is no expiation. If we take it in
the second sense, there was no need that He
should die, for we can all expiate our own sins
by dying ourselves. This kind of penetration
1 Compare Kahler, Zur Lehre von der Versohnung, 397 ff.
¦ Le Pichi et la Redemption, p. 258 f.
I

1 30 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
is hardly to be taken seriously. When Paul
spoke of Christ's death as a death for sin, he
had not a definition in his mind, whether
I ' anc'antissement complet et de'finitif, or la peine de
mort ; he had the awful fact of the crucifixion,
with everything, physical and spiritual, which
made it real ; that was the bearing of sin and
expiation of it, whether it answered to any
one's abstract definition or not. The apostle
would not have abandoned his gospel because
some one demonstrated a priori, by means of
definitions, that expiation of sin by death was
either (i) impossible, or (2) unnecessary. He
lived in another region. With these general
remarks on the different relations in which St.
Paul defines the death of Christ, we may now
proceed to consider the teaching of the epistles
in detail, keeping as far as possible to chrono
logical order.
(I.) The Epistles to the Thessalonians do not
yield us much. The only indisputable passage
is 1. v. 10 : ' God did not appoint us to wrath,
but to the obtaining of salvation through our
Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether
we wake or sleep we should live together with
Him.' If the question is raised, What did
Christ do for us with a view to our salvation,
St. Paul has only one answer : He died for us.
There is nothing in the epistles like the
language of the hymn : —

FIRST EPISTLE TO THESSALONIANS 131
' For us despised, for us He bore
His weary thirst and hungered sore ;
For us, temptations sharp He knew,
For us the Tempter overthrew.'
The only thing He is said to have done for
us is to die, and this He did, because it was
determined for Him by sin. The relation of sin
and death in the nature of things made it bind
ing on Him to die if He was to annul sin. The
purpose here assigned to Christ's death, that
whether we wake or sleep we should live to
gether with Him, suggests that His power to
redeem is dependent on His making all our
experiences His own. If we are to be His in
death and life, then He must take our death
and life to Himself. If what is His is to be
come ours, it is only on the condition that what
is ours He first makes His. There is the same
suggestion in Romans xiv. 9 : ' To this end
Christ died and lived, that He might be Lord
both of dead and living.' Not as though death
made Him Lord of the dead, and rising again, of
the living; but as One to whom no human
experience is alien, He is qualified to be Lord
of men through all. The particular character
elsewhere assigned to death as the doom of sin
is not here mentioned, but it does not follow
that it was not felt. On the contrary, we should
rather hold that St. Paul could never allude to
the death of Christ without becoming conscious

i32 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
of its propitiatory character and of what gave it
that character. The word would fill of its own
accord with the meaning which it bears when he
says, First of all, Christ died for our sins.
(II.) When we pass to the First Epistle to the
Corinthians, we have much fuller references to the
subject. For one thing, its supreme importance
is insisted on when we find the gospel described
as ' the word of the cross ' (i. 1 8), and the apostle's
endeavours directed to this, 'that the cross of
Christ may not be made void ' (i. 17). It is
in the same spirit that he contrasts the true
gospel with the miracles claimed by the Jews,
and the wisdom sought by the Greeks : ' We
preach Christ crucified, the power of God and
the wisdom of God.' So again in the second
chapter he reminds the Corinthians how he
came to Achaia determined to know nothing
among them but Jesus Christ and Him crucified :
his whole gospel, the testimony of God, as he
calls it, was in that (ii. 1 f). In other passages
he refers to the death of Christ in general terms
which suggest the cost at which man's redemp
tion was achieved. Twice over, in chapters vi.
20, and vii. 23, he writes, Ye were bought with
a price ; making it in the first instance the basis
of an exhortation to glorify God in the nature
He had made His own at so dear a rate ; and in
the other, of an exhortation to assume all the
responsibilities of that freedom for which they

BOUGHT WITH A PRICE 133
had been so dearly ransomed, and not to be
come servants of men, i.e. not to let the con
ventions, or judgments, or consciences of others
invade a responsibility which had obligations to
the Redeemer alone. It may not be possible to
work out the figure of a price, which is found
in these passages, in detail ; we may not be
able to say what it answered to, who got it,
how it was fixed, and so on. But what we
may legitimately insist upon is the idea that
the work of man's salvation was a costly work,
and that the cost, however we are to construe it,
is represented by the death of Christ. Ye were
bought with a price, means, Ye were not bought
for nothing. Salvation is not a thing which can .
be assumed, or taken for granted ; it is not an
easy thing, about which no difficulty can possibly
be raised by any one who has any idea of the
goodness of God. The point of view of the
New Testament is the very opposite. Salvation
is a difficult thing, an incredible thing, an im
possible thing ; it is the miracle of miracles that
such a thing should be ; the wonder of it never
ceases, and it nowhere finds a more thrilling ex
pression than in St. Paul's words, Ye were bought
with a price. St. Paul will show us in other ways
why cost was necessary, and the cost of Christ's
death in particular ; but it is a great step in initia
tion into the gospel he preached to see that cost,
as Bushnell puts it in his book on Forgiveness and

134 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Law, had to be made, and actually was made,
that men might be redeemed for God.
There is another passage in the First Epistle
to the Corinthians on which I should lay greater
stress than is usually done in connection with
the apostle's teaching on Christ's death : it is
that in the tenth and eleventh chapters in
which St. Paul speaks of the Sacraments.
He is concerned about the recrudescence of
immorality among the saints, about the pre
sumptuous carelessness with which they go into
temptation, relying apparently on their sacra
mental privileges to ensure them against peril.
He points out that God's ancient people had had
similar privileges, indeed identical ones, yet had
fallen in the wilderness owing to their sins. You
are baptized into Christ ? Yes, and all our fathers
were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the
sea ; they formed one body with him, and were
as sure of God's favour. You have supernatural
meat and supernatural drink in the Holy Supper,
meat and drink which have the assurance of a
divine and immortal life in them ? So had they
in the manna and the water from the rock. They
all ate the same supernatural meat as you do,
they all drank the same supernatural drink ; they
drank of a supernatural rock which followed
them, and the rock was Christ1 It is obvious
1 IJhave rendered TrvevpaTiicbv here ' supernatural ' rather than
'spiritual,' because it suggests better the element of mystery, or

ST. PAUL ON THE SACRAMENTS 135
from this passage (1 Corinthians x. 1-4) as well
as from the references to baptism in i. 13 f, xii.
13, and from the full explanation of the Supper
in xi. 23 ff, that the Sacraments had a large place
in the church at Corinth, and not only a large
place, but one of a significance which can hardly
be exaggerated. And, as has been pointed out
already, there is no interpretation of the Sacra
ments except by reference to the death of Christ.
Baptism has always in view, as part at least of
its significance, the forgiveness of sins ; and as
the rite which marks the believer's initiation into
the new covenant, it is essentially related to the
act on which the covenant is based, namely, that
which Paul delivered first of all to this Church,
that Christ died for our sins. When, in another
epistle, Paul argues that baptism into Christ
means baptism into His death, he is not striking
out a new thought, of a somewhat venturesome
originality, to ward off a shrewd blow suddenly
aimed at his gospel ; he is only bringing out what
rather of divineness, which all through this passage is connected
with the Sacraments. Baptism is not a common washing, nor is
the Supper common meat and drink ; it is a divine cleansing, a
divine nourishment, with which we have to do in these rites ; there
is a mysterious power of God in them, which the Corinthians were
inclined to conceive as operating like a charm for their protection
in situations of moral ambiguity or peril. This is so far suggested
to the Greek reader by irvev/iaTtKov, for irvei'ixa and its derivatives
always involve a reference to God ; but as it is not necessarily
suggested to the English reader by ' spiritual,' I have ventured on
the other rendering. The indefiniteness of ' supernatural ' is rather
an advantage in the context than a drawback.

136 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
was all along to him the essential meaning of
this ordinance. The Supper, again, of which he
speaks at length in I Corinthians x. and xi.,
bears as unmistakable reference to Christ's
death. The cup is specially defined as the new
covenant in His blood, and the apostle sums up
the meaning of the Sacrament in the words, As
often as ye eat this bread and drink the cup, ye
publish the Lord's death till He come (i Cor. xi.
26). In all probability KarayyiXXere (publish)
implies that the Sacrament was accompanied
by words in which its significance was expressed ;
it was not only a picture in which the death of
Christ was represented and its worth to the
Church declared ; there was an articulate con
fession of what it was, and of what the Church
owed to it. If we compare the sixth chapter of
Romans with the tenth and eleventh of ist Cor
inthians, it seems obvious that modern Christians
try to draw a broader line of distinction between
the Sacraments than really exists. Partly, no
doubt, this is owing to the fact that in our times
baptism is usually that of infants, while the
Supper is partaken of only by adults, whereas,
in New Testament times, the significance of
both was defined in relation to conscious faith.
But it would not be easy to show, from St.
Paul's epistles, that in contents and meaning,
in the blessings which they represented and
which were conveyed through them, there is any

ST. PAUL ON THE SACRAMENTS 137
very great distinction. The truth seems rather
to be that both the Sacraments are forms into
which we may put as much of the gospel
as they will carry ; and St. Paul, for his part,
practically puts the whole of his gospel into
each. If Baptism is relative to the forgive
ness of sins, so is the Supper. If Baptism is
relative to the unity of the Church, so is the
Supper. We are not only baptized into one
body ( 1 Cor. xii. 13), but because there is one
bread, we, many as we are who partake of it, are
one body (1 Cor. x. 17). If Baptism is relative
to a new life in Christ (Rom. vi. 4 f), in the
Supper Christ Himself is the meat and drink by
which the new life is sustained (1 Cor. x. 3 f.).
And in both the Sacraments, the Christ to whom
we enter into relation is Christ who died ; we are
baptized into His death in the one, we proclaim
His death till the end of time in the other. I
repeat, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the
significance of these facts, though it is possible
enough to ignore them altogether. The super
stition that has gathered round the Sacraments,
and that has tempted even good Christians to
speak of abolishing them, probably showed itself
at a very early date ; there are unmistakable
traces of it in the First Epistle to the Corinthians
itself, especially in the tenth chapter ; but instead
of lessening, it increases our assurance of the
place which these ordinances had in Christianity

138 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
from the beginning. And although the rationale
of the connection between the death of Christ
and the blessings of the gospel is not elucidated
by them, it is presupposed in them. In ordi
nances with which every Christian was familiar,
and without which a place in the Christian com
munity could neither be acquired nor retained,
the death of Christ was perpetually kept before
all as a death essentially related in some way to
the forgiveness of sins.
Not much light falls on our subject from the
one sacrificial allusion to Christ's death in I Cor
inthians v. 7 : ' For our passover also has been
sacrificed — Christ.' No doubt rb •trdo-'^a here, as
in Mark xiv. 12, means the paschal lamb, and
the apostle is thinking of Christ as the Lamb of
God, by whose sacrifice the Church is called and
bound to a life of holiness. It is because of this
sacrifice that he says, ' Let us therefore keep
festival, not in old leaven, nor in leaven of malice
and wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of
sincerity and truth.' It is implied here certainly
that there is an entire incongruity between a life
of sin, and a life determined by a relation to the
sacrificial death of Christ ; but we could not, from
this passage alone, make out what, according to
St. Paul, was the ground of this incongruity. It
would be wrong, in a passage with this simply
allusive reference to the passover, to urge the
significance of the lamb in the twelfth and

SECOND EPISTLE TO CORINTHIANS 139
thirteenth chapters of Exodus, and to apply
this to interpret the death of Christ. There is
no indication that the apostle himself carried out
his thought on these lines.
We now come to the Second Epistle to the
Corinthians, which is here of supreme import
ance. In one point of view, it is a defence of
St. Paul's apostleship, and of his work in the
apostolic office. The defence rests mainly on
two pillars ; first, his comprehension of the
gospel ; and second, his success in preaching
it. There are one or two references in the earlier
chapters to the sufferings and even the death of
Jesus in an aspect with which we are not here
specially concerned. Thus in i. 5, Paul says :
' The sufferings of Christ abound toward us ' ;
meaning by this that in his apostolic work he
suffered abundantly just as Christ had suffered ;
the weariness and peril from which Jesus could
not escape haunted him too ; the Lord's experi
ence was continued in him. Similarly, in iv. IO,
when he speaks of always bearing about in the
body tt/v vetcpaxriv rov 'Irjcrov — the dying of Jesus
— he means that his work and its attendant
sufferings are killing him as they killed his
Master; every day he feels his strength lessen,
and the outer man perish. But it is not in these
passages that the great revelation is made of
what Christ's death is in relation to sin. It is in
chapter v., in which he is defending his conduct

140 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
in the apostolic office against the assaults of his
enemies. Extravagant or controlled, the motive
of his conduct was always the same. ' The love
of Christ constrains us,' he writes, ' because we
thus judge, that one died for all (so then all died),
and died for all that they who live should no
longer live for themselves, but for Him who died
for them, and rose again.' The importance of
this passage is that it connects the two relations
in which St. Paul is in the habit of defining
Christ's death — its relation to the love in which
it originated, and to the sin with which it dealt ;
and it shows us how to construe these two things
in relation to each other. Christ's death, we are
enabled to see, was a loving death, so far as men
are concerned, only because in that death He
took the responsibilities of men upon Himself:
deny that, and it will be impossible to show any
ground on which the death can be construed as
a loving death at all. It is necessary to examine
the passage in detail.
The love of Christ, the apostle argues, con
strains us, because we thus judge — i.e., because
we put a certain interpretation on His death.
Apart from this interpretation, the death of
Christ has no constraining power. Here we find
in St. Paul himself a confirmation of what has
been said above about the distinction of fact and
theory. It is in virtue of a ceitain theory of
Christ's death that the fact has its power to

ONE DIED FOR ALL 141
constrain the apostle. If it were not susceptible
of such an interpretation, if this theory were
inapplicable to it, it would not constrain any
more. What, then, is the theory? It is that one
died for all ; irrep iravrav means that the interest
of all was aimed at and involved in the death ofthe
one. How it was involved in it these words alone
do not enable us to say. They do not by them
selves show the connection between Christ's death
and the world's good. But St. Paul draws an im
mediate inference from them : 'so then all died.'
In one sense, it is irrelevant and interrupts his
argument He puts it into a hurried parenthesis,
and then eagerly resumes what it had suspended.
' One died for all (so then all died), and died for
all that they who live should no longer live to
themselves, but to Him who died for them and
rose again.' Yet it is in this immediate inference
— that the death of Christ for all involved the
death of all — that the missing link is found. It
is because Christ's death has this inclusive char
acter — because, as Athanasius puts it, ' the death
of all was fulfilled in the Lord's body ' — that His
death has in it a power which puts constraint on
men to live for Him-1 I cannot agree With Mr.
Lidgett when he says that the words can only be
understood in connection with the apostle's de
claration elsewhere, that he has been 'crucified
1 De Incarnatione, c xx. §. 5.

i42 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
with Christ' x That declaration is a declaration
of Christian experience, the fruit of faith ; but
what the apostle is dealing with here is something
antecedent to Christian experience, something by
which all such experience is to be generated, and
which, therefore, is in no sense identical with it.
The problem before us is to discover what it is
in the death of Christ which gives it its power to
generate such experience, to exercise on human
hearts the constraining influence of which the
apostle speaks ; and this is precisely what we
discover in the inferential clause : ' so then all
died.' This clause puts as plainly as it can be
put the idea that His death was equivalent to the
death of all ; in other words, it was the death of
all men which was died by Him. Were this not
so, His death would be nothing to them. It
is beside the mark to say, as Mr. Lidgett does,
that His death is died by them rather than theirs
by Him ; the very point of the apostle's argument
may be said to be that in order that they may
die His death He must first die theirs. Our
dying His death is not, in the New Testament, a
thing which we achieve on our own initiative, or
out of our own resources ; it is the fruit of His
dying ours. If it is our death that Christ died on
the Cross, there is in the Cross the constraint of
an infinite love ; but if it is not our death at all
1 J. S. Lidgett, The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement,
P-39-

MEANING OF RECONCILIATION 143
— if it is not our burden and doom that He has
taken to Himself there — then what is it to us?
His death can put the constraint of love upon all
men, only when it is thus judged — that the death
of all was died by Him. When the apostle pro
ceeds to state the purpose of Christ's death for
all — ' that they which live should not henceforth
live to themselves, but to Him who died for them
and rose again ' — he does it at the psychological
and moral level suggested by the words : The
love of Christ constrains us. He who has done so
tremendous a thing as to take our death to Him
self has established a claim upon our life. We
are not in the sphere of mystical union, of dying
with Christ and living with Him ; but in that of
love transcendently shown, and of gratitude pro
foundly felt1 But it will not be easy for any one
to be grateful for Christ's death, especially with a
gratitude which will acknowledge that his very
life is Christ's, unless he reads the Cross in the
sense that Christ there made the death of all men
His own.
It is in this same passage that St. Paul gives
the fullest explanation of what he means by
reconciliation (/caraXXayr}), and an examination
of this idea will also illustrate his teaching on the
death of Christ. Where reconciliation is spoken
of in St. Paul, the subject is always God, and the
1 The way in which theologians in love with the ' mystical union '
depreciate gratitude must be very astonishing to psychologists.

144 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
object is always man. The work of reconciling
is one in which the initiative is taken by God,
and the cost borne by Him ; men are reconciled
in the passive, or allow themselves to be recon
ciled, or receive the reconciliation. We never
read that God has been reconciled. God does
the work of reconciliation in or through Christ,
and especially through His death. He was
engaged, in Christ, in reconciling the world —
or rather, nothing less than a world — to Himself
(2 Cor. v. 19). He reconciled us to Himself
through Christ (v. 20). When we were enemies,
we were reconciled to God by the death of His
Son (Rom. v. 10). Men who once were alienated,
and enemies in mind through wicked works, yet
now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh
through death (Col. i. 21 f). It is very unfor
tunate that the English word reconcile (and also
the German vers'ohnen, which is usually taken as
its equivalent) diverge seriously, though in a way
of which it is easy to be unconscious, from the
Greek KaraXXdao-eiv. We cannot say in English,
God reconciled us to Himself, without conceiving
the persons referred to as being actually at peace
with God, as having laid aside all fear, distrust,
and love of evil, and entered, in point of fact,
into relations of peace and friendship with God.
But KaraXXdcra-eiv, as describing the work of God,
or tcaraXXaryr}, as describing its immediate result,
do not necessarily carry us so far. The work of

MEANING OF RECONCILIATION 145
reconciliation, in the sense of the New Testament,
is a work which is finished, and which we must
conceive to be finished, before the gospel is
preached. It is the good tidings of the Gospel,
with which the evangelists go forth, that God has
wrought in Christ a work of reconciliation which
avails for no less than the world, and of which
the whole world may have the benefit. The
summons of the evangelist is — 'Receive the recon
ciliation ; consent that it become effective in your
case.' The work of reconciliation is not a work
wrought upon the souls of men, though it is a
work wrought in their interests, and bearing so
directly upon them that we can say God has
reconciled the world to Himself; it is a work —
as Cromwell said of the covenant — outside of us,
in which God so deals in Christ with the sin of
the world, that it shall no longer be a barrier
between Himself and men.
From this point of view we can understand
how many modern theologians, in their use of
the word reconciliation, come to argue as it were
at cross purposes with the apostle. Writers
like Kaftan,1 for example, who do not think of
1 Kaftan holds that nothing is to be called Erlosung or Ver-
sohnung (redemption or reconciliation) unless as men are actually
liberated and reconciled ; Erlosung and Versbhnung are to be
understood, as the Reformers rightly saw (?), as Wirkungen Gottes
in und an den Glanbigen. But he overlooks the fact that what
ever is to liberate or reconcile men must have qualities or virtues
in it which, in view of their normal effect, whether that effect be
in any given case achieved or not, can be called reconciling or
K

146 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the work of Christ as anything else than the
work which Christ is perpetually doing in winning
the souls of men for God, and who describe this
as the work of reconciliation, though they may
seem to the practical modern intelligence to be
keeping close to reality, are doing all that can
be done to make the Pauline, or rather the New
Testament point of view, bewildering to a modern
reader. Reconciliation is not something which
is doing ; it is something which is done. No
doubt there is a work of Christ which is in
process, but it has as its basis a finished work
of Christ ; it is in virtue of something already
consummated on His cross that Christ is able
to make the appeal to us which He does, and to
win the response in which we receive the recon
ciliation. A finished work of Christ and an
objective atonement — a xaraXXay^ in the New
Testament sense — are synonymous terms ; the
one means exactly the same as the other; and
it seems to me self-evident, as I think it didto
St. Paul, that unless we can preach a finished
work of Christ in relation to sin, a KaraXXayr} or
reconciliation or peace which has been achieved
independently of us, at an infinite cost, and to
which we are called in a word or ministry of
reconciliation, we have no real gospel for sinful
liberative ; and that the determination of these qualities or virtues
— that is, as he calls it, an 'objective ffcifslehre' — is not only
legitimate but essential in the interpretation of the work of Christ.
See his Dogmatik, §§ 52 ff.

CHRIST MADE SIN FOR US 147
men at all. It is not in something Christ would
fain do that we see His love, it is in something
He has already done ; nay, it is only through
what He has already done that we can form any
idea, or come to any conviction, of what He
would fain do. He has died for us all, and by
that death — not His own, properly speaking, but
the death of the sinful race taken to Himself —
He has so demonstrated the reality and infinity
of the love of God to the sinful, as to make it
possible for apostles and evangelists to preach
peace to all men through Him.
In the passage with which we are dealing, St.
Paul appends to the apostolic message, abruptly
and without any conjunction, the statement of
the great truth of Christ's finished work which
underlies it. ' On Christ's behalf, then, we are
ambassadors, as though God were entreating you
through us : we beg of you on Christ's behalf,
Be reconciled to God. Him that knew no sin
He made to be sin for us, that we might become
God's righteousness in Him' (2 Cor. v. 20 f).
The want of a conjunction here does not destroy
the connection ; it only makes the appeal of the
writer more solemn and thrilling. There need
not be any misunderstanding as to what is meant
by the words, Him that knew no sin He made to
be sin for us. To every one who has noticed that
St. Paul constantly defines Christ's death, and
nothing but His death, by relation to sin, and

148 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
who can recall similar passages in the Epistle
to the Galatians or to the Romans, to which we
shall presently come, it is obvious that these
tremendous words cover precisely the same mean
ing as ' He died for our sins.' When the sinless
one, in obedience to the will of the Father, died
on the Cross the death of all, the death in which
sin had involved all, then, and in that sense, God
made Him to be sin for all. But what is meant
by saying, ' in that sense ' ? It means, ' in the
sense of His death.' And what that means is
not to be answered a priori, or on dogmatic
grounds. It is to be answered out of the Gospel
history, out of the experience of our Lord in the
Garden and on the Cross. It is there we see
what death meant for Him ; what it meant for
Him to make our sin, and the death in which
God's judgment comes upon sin, His own ; and
it is the love which, in obedience to the Father,
did not shrink from that for us which gives
power and urgency to the appeal of the Gospel.
We ought to feel that moralising objections here
are beside the mark, and that it is not for sinful
men, who do not know what love is, to tell
beforehand whether, or how far, the love of
God can take upon itself the burden and re
sponsibility of the world's sin ; or if it does so,
in what way its reality shall be made good.
The premiss of the Gospel is that we cannot
bear that responsibility ourselves ; if we are left

CHRIST MADE SIN FOR US 149
alone with it, it will crush us to perdition. The
message of the gospel, as it is here presented, is
that Christ has borne it for us ; if we deny that
He can do so, is it not tantamount to denying the
very possibility of a gospel? Mysterious and
awful as the thought is, it is the key to the whole
of the New Testament, that Christ bore our sins.
Of this, God made Him to be sin for us is
merely another equivalent ; it means neither more
nor less. The end contemplated — that we might
become the righteousness of God in Him — is
here stated religiously or theologically. Christ
takes our place in death, and in so doing is
identified with the world's sin ; the end in view
in this is that we should take His place in life,
and in so doing stand justified in God's sight.
By what psychological process this change in
our position is mediated St. Paul does not here
tell. What he does is to give a religious equi
valent for the ethical and psychological repre
sentation of ver. 14: 'He died for all, that they
which live should not live unto themselves, but
to Him who died for them and rose again.' It
took no less than His death for them to bring
into their life a motive of such creative snd
recreative power; and it takes no less than His
being made sin for them to open for thtm ihe
possibility of becoming God'.-, righteousness in
Him. To say so is not to bring different
things into an artificial correspondence. The

150 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
two statements are but the ethical and the
theological representation of one and the same
reality ; and it confirms our interpretation of
the passage, and our conviction of the coherence
of the apostolic gospel, that under various and
independent aspects we are continually coming
on the same facts in the same relation to each
other. (III.) The closing verses of the fifth chapter
of 2nd Corinthians may fairly be called the locus
classicus on the death of Christ in St. Paul's
writings. Yet in proceeding to the Epistle to
the Galatians we are introduced to a document
which, more exclusively than any other in the
New Testament, deals with this subject, and its
significance. Even in the salutation, in which
the apostle wishes his readers grace and peace
from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,
he expands the Saviour's name by adding, in a
way unexampled in such a connection elsewhere,
'who gave Himself for our sins that He might
redeem us from the present world with all its ills,
according to the will of our God and Father'
(i. 4). Reference has already been made to the
vehement words in which he anathematises man
or angel who shall preach a different gospel.1
At the end of the second chapter he puts again,
in the strongest possible form, his conviction
that Christianity, the new and true religion, is
1 See above, p. no.

CHRISTIANITY ALL IN THE CROSS 151
a thing complete in itself, exclusive of every
thing else, incapable of compromise or of supple
ment, and that it owes this completeness, and if
we choose to call it so, this intolerance, to the
supreme significance and power which belong in
it to the death of Christ. ' I have been crucified
with Christ ; my life is no longer mine, it is
Christ who lives in me ; the life I now live in
flesh I live in faith, faith in the Son of God who
loved me and gave Himself up for me' (ii. 20).
The whole of the Christian religion lies in that.
The whole of Christian life is a response to the
love exhibited in the death of the Son of God
for men. We cannot point to anything and say,
' See, that is Christian, that is good in God's
sight,' without saying at the same time, 'That
has been generated in the life of man by the
tremendous appeal of the cross.' To say that
there is such a thing as righteousness which has
another source is, according to St. Paul, to frus
trate the grace of God ; it is to compromise the
Christian religion in its very principle ; and to
such a sin St. Paul will be no party. If righteous
ness is by law, as he sums it up in one of his
passionate and decisive words, then Christ died
for nothing (ii. 21). St. Paul knew by experience
and by revelation — he knew by every way in
which knowledge can find, and win, and hold the
mind — that Christ did not die for nothing, nor
for something merely, but for everything. He

152 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
knew that all he was, or could ever become as
a Christian, came out of the Cross. This is why
he could say to the Corinthians, ' I determined
to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ
and Him crucified' (i Cor. ii. 2); and why he
repeats it in other words to the Galatians, ' God
forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of
our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world
is crucified to me and I to the world' (Gal.
vi. 14).
Put positively, then, we may say that the aim
of the Epistle to the Galatians is to show that
all Christianity is contained in the Cross ; the
Cross is the generative principle of everything
Christian in the life of man. Put negatively,
we may say its aim is to show that law, and
especially, as it happened, the ritual side of the
Jewish law, contributes nothing to that life.
Now St. Paul, it might be argued, had come to
know this experimentally, and independently of
any theory. When it had dawned on his mind
what the Cross of Christ was, when he saw what
it signified as a revelation of God and His love,
everything else in the universe faded from his
view. Newman speaks, in a familiar passage of
the Apologia, of resting in ' the thought of two,
and two only, absolute and luminously self-
evident beings, myself and my Creator'; in the
relations and interaction of these two his religion
consisted. A religion so generated, though it

CHRISTIANITY ALL IN THE CROSS 153
may be very real and powerful, is, of course,
something far poorer than Christianity ; yet in
a somewhat similar way we might say of St.
Paul that for him the universe of religion con
sisted of the soul and the Son of God giving
Himself up for it ; all that God meant for him,
all that he could describe as revelation, all that
begot within him what was at once religion,
life, and salvation, was included in this act of
Christ. No law, however venerable ; no customs,
however dear to a patriotic heart ; no traditions
of men, however respectable in effect or intention,
could enter into competition with this. It was
dishonouring to Christ, it was an annulling of
the grace of God, to mention them alongside
of it. To do so was to betray a radical mis
apprehension of Christ's death, such as made it
for those who so misapprehended it entirely
ineffective. ' Ye are severed from Christ,' St.
Paul cries, ' ye who would be justified by law ;
ye are banished from grace ' (v. 4).
But though St. Paul had learned this by ex
perience, he does not, in point of fact, treat this
subject of law empirically. He does not content
himself with saying, ' I tried the law till I was
worn out, and it did nothing for me ; I made an
exhaustive series of experiments with it, result-
less experiments, and so I am done with it ;
through the law I have died to the law (ii. 19);
it has itself taught me, by experience under it,

154 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
that it is not the way to life, and so it is to me
now as though it were not.' He does not content
himself with giving this as his experience of the
law; nor does he, on the other hand, content
himself with giving us simply and empirically his
experience of Christ. He does not say, ' Christ
has done everything for me and in me. The
constraint of His love is the whole explanation
of my whole being as a Christian. By the grace
of God, and by nothing else, I am what I am,
and therefore the law is nothing to me : I am so
far from finding myself obliged to acknowledge
its claims still, that it is my deepest conviction
that to acknowledge its claims at all is to
frustrate the grace of God, to make void the
Cross of Christ' Probably if he had written
thus — and no doubt he might have written thus
— it would have seemed attractive and convincing
to many who have misgivings about what he
actually has written. But St. Paul could not,
and did not remain at this empirical standpoint.
He has a theory again — or let us say an under
standing — of the relations of Christ and law,
which enables him to justify and comprehend
his experience. But for the truths of which this
theory is the vehicle, the death of Christ would
not be what it is, or exercise over the soul the
power which it does. It is some dim sense of
these truths, truths which the theory does not
import but only unfolds, which in every case

CHRIST UNDER THE LAW 155
gives the death of Christ its constraining influ
ence upon sinful men. What, then, is the theory?
Briefly, it is summed up in the words, Christ
under the law. This is the expression used in
Galatians iv. 4, and its indefiniteness, in this form,
makes it seem unobjectionable enough. It signi
fies that when He came into the world Christ came
under the same conditions as other men : all that
a Jew meant when he said ' Law ' had significance
for him ; the divine institutions of Israel had a
divine authority which existed for him as well as
for others. To say that the Son of God was made
under the law would thus mean that He had the
same moral problem in His life as other men ; that
He identified Himself with them in the spiritual
conditions under which they lived ; that the
incarnation was a moral reality and not a mere
show. But it is certain that this is not all that
St. Paul meant; and to the writer, at least, it is not
certain that St. Paul ever had this as a distinct and
separate object of thought present to his mind at
all. What he really means by ' Christ under the
law' comes out in its full meaning in chapter iii.
1 3 : Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law
by becoming curse for us. ' Under the law,' in
short, is an ambiguous expression, and it is
necessary to be clear as to which of the possible
interpretations it bears in this case. In relation
to man in general, the law expresses the will of
God. It tells him what he must do to please

156 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
God. It is imperative, and nothing more. We
may say, of course, that Christ was under the
law in this sense ; it is self-evident But as has
just been hinted, it is doubtful whether St. Paul
ever thought of this by itself. To be under the
law in this sense did not to him at least yield the
explanation of Christ's redeeming power. In
the mere fact that Christ came to keep the law
which was binding on all, there was no such
demonstration of love to sinners as was sufficient,
of itself, to make them new creatures. But this
is not the only sense which can be assigned to
the words, 'under the law.' The law has not
only a relation to man as such, in which it ex
presses the will of God ; it has a relation to men
as sinners, in which it expresses the condemna
tion of God. Now Christ is our Redeemer,
according to the apostle, because He was made
under the law in this sense. He not only be
came man, bound to obedience — it is not easy
to say where the omnipotent loving constraint
is to be discovered in this ; but He became curse
for us. He made our doom His own. He took
on Him not only the calling of a man, but our
responsibility as sinful men ; it is in this that
His work as Redeemer lies, for it is in this that
the measure, or rather the immensity, of His
love is seen. To say, ' He became a curse for
us,' is exactly the same as to say, ' He was made
sin for us,' or ' He died for us ' ; but it is infinitely

THE OBEDIENCE OF A REDEEMER 157
more than to say, ' He was made man for us ' —
or even man bound to obedience to the law — a
proposition to which there is nothing analogous
in the New Testament. The conception of
obedience, as applicable to the work of Christ,
will recur in other connections ; here it is enough
to say that if we wish to put the whole work of
Christ under that heading, we must remember
that what we have to do with is not the ordinary
obedience of men, but the obedience of a Re
deemer. Christ had an ethical vocation, as St
Paul reminds us in the very first reference to His
death in this epistle : ' He gave Himself for our
sins, to deliver us from the present evil world,
according to the will of our God and Father' ; but
his vocation, in carrying out that redeeming will,
was a unique one; and, according to St. Paul, its
uniqueness consisted in this, that one who knew
no sin had, in obedience to the Father, to take
on Him the responsibility, the doom, the curse,
the death of the sinful. And if any one says
that this was morally impossible, may we not
ask again, What is the alternative ? Is it not
that the sinful should be left alone with their
responsibility, doom, curse, and death ? And is
not that to say that redemption is impossible?
The obedience of the Redeemer transcends
morality, if we will ; it is something to which
morality is unequal ; from the point of view c f
ordinary ethics, it is a miracle. But it is the

158 * THE DEATH OF CHRIST
very function of the Redeemer to do the thing
which it is impossible for sinful men to do for
themselves or for each other ; and St. Paul's
justification of the miracle is that it creates all
the genuine and victorious morality — all the
keeping of God's commandments in love — which
the world can show.
There have been many attempts, if not to
evade this line of argument, and this connection
of ideas, then to find something quite different
in Galatians, which shall dispense with the
necessity of considering it. Thus it is argued
that St. Paul in the whole epistle is dealing with
Jews, or with people who wanted to be Jews,
and with their relation to the ceremonial law — a
situation which no longer has reality for us. But
this is hardly the case. St. Paul nowhere draws
any distinction in the law between ceremonial
and moral ; the law for him is one, and it is the
law of God. It is owing to accidental circum
stances that the ceremonial aspect of it is more
prominent in this epistle, as the ethical aspect is
in Romans. But we shall find the same line of
argument repeated in Romans, where it is the
moral law which is at stake ; and when the
apostle tells us that through the law he has died
to the law (Gal. ii. 16), or that we have died to
the law through the body of Christ (Rom. vii. 4),
or that we are not under law but under grace
(Rom. vi. 14), he has not the moral law any less

LAW UNIVERSALISED IN ST. PAUL 159
in view than the ceremonial. He means that
nothing in the Christian life is explained by
anything statutory, and that everything in it is
explained by the inspiring power of that death
in which Christ made all our responsibilities to
the law His own. There is a sense, of course, in
which the law is Jewish, but St. Paul had general
ised it in order to be able to preach the Gospel
to the Gentiles ; x he had found analogues of it in
every society and in every conscience; in his
evangelistic preaching he defined all sin by re
lation to it; in the utmost extent of meaning
that could be given to the term, ' law ' had
significance for all men ; and it was a gospel for
all men that St. Paul preached when he- declared
that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the
law by becoming curse for us. No doubt when
he wrote the words, 'Christ redeemed us from
the curse of the law by becoming curse for us,'
he was thinking, as his antecedents and circum
stances compelled him to think, of himself and
his fellow-countrymen, who had known so well
the yoke of bondage ; that is, it is an exegetical
result that 97/ici? means us Jews; but that does
not alter the fact that the universal gospel
underlies the expression, and is conveyed by it ;
it only means that here a definite application is
made of that gospel in a relevant case.
The same considerations dispose of the
1 See Expositor, March 1901, p. 176 ff.

160 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
attempts that are made to evacuate the ' curse '
of meaning by identifying it with the ' Cross.'
No doubt Paul appeals in support of his idea
that Christ became a curse for us to the text in
Deuteronomy xxi. 23, which he quotes in the
form ' Cursed is every one who hangs upon a
tree.' No doubt he avoids applying to Christ
the precise words of the text, Accursed of God
(/ceKarrjpa/iivos vtrb rov 0eov (LXX.) DwK~rp?p).
So do we, because the words would be false and
misleading. Christ hung on the tree in obedience
to the Father's will, fulfilling the purpose of the
Father's love, doing a work with which the Father
was well pleased, and on account of which the
Father highly exalted Him ; hence to describe
Him as accursed of God would be absurd.
It is not because St. Paul shrinks from his
own logic that he says He became a curse for
us, instead of saying He became a curse of God,
or accursed of God, for us ; it is because he is
speaking in truth and soberness. Death is the
curse of the law. It- is the experience in which
the final repulsion of evil by God is decisively
expressed ; and Christ died. In His death
everything was made His that sin had made
ours — everything in sin except its sinfulness.
There is no essential significance in the cruci
fixion, as if it would have been impossible to say
that Christ became a curse for us, if He had died
in any other way. The curse, in truth, is only

CHRIST MADE A CURSE FOR US 161
one of St. Paul's synonyms for the death of Christ
— one which is relative, no doubt, to the concep
tion of Christ as ' under the law,' but which for its
meaning is entirely independent of the passage
in Deuteronomy. The New Testament has
many analogies to this use of the Old. Christ
rode into Jerusalem on an ass, and declared
Himself a King in doing so, but no one supposes
that His sovereignty is constituted or exhausted
in this ; it is entirely independent of it, though
in connection with a certain prophecy (Zech. ix. 9)
it can be identified with it. So again He was
crucified between two thieves, and an evangelist
says that there the Scripture was fulfilled — He
was numbered with transgressors ; but we know
that the Scripture was fulfilled in another and
profounder sense, and would have been fulfilled
all the same though Jesus had been crucified
alone (Mark xv. 28 Rec, Luke xxii. 37). And so
also with the Deuteronomic quotation in Gala
tians iii. 13. The Old Testament here gave Paul
an expression — an argumentum, if we will ; it did
not give him his gospel. He had said already,
e.g. in 2 Corinthians v. 21, and will say again in
other forms, all he has to say here : that in His
death Christ was made under the law, not merely
as that which laid its imperative, but as that
which laid its sentence, upon man ; that He took
to Himself in His death our responsibility, our
doom, our curse, as sinful men, and not merely
L

1 62 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
our obligation to be good men. And though it
is Christian, it is not illogical, to avoid such an
expression as accursed of God. For in so making
the doom of men His own in death Christ was
doing God's will.
The other passages in Galatians which deal
with our subject bring to view the ethical rather
than the theological import of the death of
Christ. One occurs at chapter v. 24 : ' They
that are of Christ Jesus crucified the flesh with
its passions and lusts.' Ideally, we must under
stand, this crucifixion of the flesh is involved in
Christ's crucifixion ; really, it is effected by it
Whoever sees into the secret of Calvary — who
ever is initiated into the mystery of that great
death — is conscious that the doom of sin is in it ;
to take it as real, and to stand in any real rela
tion to it, is death to the flesh with its passions
and desires. So with the last passage in the
epistle at which the subject recurs (vi. 14) :
' Never be it mine to boast but in the cross
of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the
world has been crucified to me, and I to the
world.' Here the apostle reiterates with new
emphasis at the end of his letter what he has
enforced from the beginning, that the Cross is
the explanation of everything Christian. Of
course it is the Cross interpreted as he has in
terpreted it; apart from this interpretation, which
shows it to be full of a meaning that appeals

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 163
irresistibly to man, it can have no rational or
moral influence at all. But with this interpreta
tion it is the annihilative and the creative power
in Christianity ; the first commandment of the
new religion is that we shall have no God but
Him who is fully and finally revealed there.
(IV.) The Epistle to the Romans is not so
directly controversial as that to the Galatians ;
there are no personal references in it, and no
temper. But the Gospel is defined in it in
relation to law, in very much the same sense as
in Galatians ; the completeness of the Christian
religion, its self-containedness, its self-sufficiency,
the impossibility of combining it with or supple
menting it from anything else, are assumed or
proved in much the same way. The question of
religion for St. Paul is, How shall a man, a sinful
man, be righteous with God ? The Gospel
brings the answer to that question. It is be
cause it does so that it is a Gospel. It tells
sinful men of a righteousness which is exactly
what they need. It preaches something on the
ground of which, sinners as they are, God the
Judge of all can receive them — a righteousness of
God, St. Paul calls it, naming it after Him who is
its source, and at the same time characterising it
as divinely perfect and adequate — a righteous
ness of God which is somehow identified with
Jesus Christ (iii. 22 ; cf. 1 Cor. i. 30). In particular
it is identified somehow with Jesus Christ in His

164 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
death (iii. 25), and therefore in Romans as in
Galatians this death of Christ is the source of all
that is Christian. All Christian inferences about
God are deduced from it. Once we are sure of
it and of its meaning, we can afford a great deal
of ignorance in detail. We know that it covers
everything and guarantees everything in which
we are vitally interested ; that it disposes of the
past, creates the future, is a security for immortal
life and glory (v. 9 ff, viii. 3 1 ff). What, then, does
St. Paul say of the righteousness of God, and of
the death of Christ in relation to it ?
The critical passage is that in ch. iii. 21 ff. To
give a detailed exegesis of it would be to do what
has been perhaps too often done already, and
would raise questions to distract as well as to aid
intelligence. As is well known, there are two
principal difficulties in the passage. The one is
the meaning of iXaar^piov (propitiation) in v. 25.
The other is that which is raised by the question
whether the righteousness of God has the same
meaning throughout, or whether it may not have
in one place — say in v. 22 — the half-technical
sense which belongs to it as a summary of St.
Paul's gospel ; and in another — say in v. 26 —
the larger and more general sense which might
belong to it elsewhere in Scripture as a synonym
for God's character, or at least for one of His
essential attributes. Not that these two principal
difficulties are unrelated to each other: on the

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PROPITIATION 165
contrary, they are inextricably intertwined, and
cannot be discussed apart. It is an argument
for distinguishing two senses of Bi/caioawrj deov
(the righteousness of God) that when we do so
we are enabled to see more clearly the meaning
of lXao-rrjpio<!. It is the very function of Jesus
Christ, set forth by God as a propitiation in His
blood, to exhibit these two senses (which are
equally indispensable, if there is to be a religion
for sinful men), in their unity and consistency
with each other. And, on the other hand, the
term iXao-rr)p(,o<s, to say the least, is relative to
some problem created by sin for a God who
would justify sinners ; and the distinction of two
senses in which 8iicaio<rvvr) 8eov is used enables
us to state this problem in a definite form.
Assuming, then, that both difficulties will come
up for consideration, there is a certain convenience
in starting with the second — that which is involved
in the use of the expression ' the righteousness of
God.' It is used in vv. 21, 22, 25, and 26 ; and
one use of it is implied in v. 24 : 'being justified
freely by His grace.' It seems to me a strong
argument for the double sense of this expression
that when the apostle brings his argument to a
climax the two senses have sifted themselves out,
so to speak, and stand distinctly side by side : the
end of all God's action in His redeeming revelation
of Himself to men is 'that He may be just Him
self, and justify him who believes in Jesus ' (et? to

166 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
elvai airov SUaiov Kai hiKaiovvra rov bk 7rto-Te&>?
'Ir)o-ov, v. 26). The first part of this end — God's
being righteous Himself — might quite fairly be
spoken of as BtKaioo-vvrj deov (God's righteous
ness) ; it is, indeed, what under ordinary circum
stances is meant by the words. Compare, for
example, the use of them in ch. iii? 5. But God's
appearance in the character of 6 ZiK.at.wv (he who
justifies) is also the manifestation of a righteous
ness of God, and indeed of the righteousness of
God in the sense in which it constitutes St. Paul's
gospel — a righteousness of God which stands or
turns to the good of the believing sinner. Both
things are there : a righteousness which comes
from God and is the hope of the sinful, and God's
own righteousness, or His character in its self-con
sistency and inviolability. In virtue of the first,
God is 6 SiKaicov, the Justifier ; in virtue of the
second, He is BUaio<;, Just. What St. Paul is con
cerned to bring out, and what by means of the
conception of Christ in His blood as iXao-rijpios
(endued with propitiatory power) he does bring
out, is precisely the fact that both things are
there, and there in harmony with each other.
There can be no gospel unless there is such a
thing as a righteousness of God for the ungodly.
But just as little can there be any gospel unless
the integrity of God's character be maintained.
The problem of the sinful world, the problem of
all religion, the problem of God in dealing with
a sinful race, is how to unite these two things

JUST AND THE JUSTIFIER 167
The Christian answer to the problem is given by
St. Paul in the words : 'Jesus Christ whom God
set forth a propitiation (or, in propitiatory power)
in His blood.' In Jesus Christ so set forth there
is the manifestation of God's righteousness in the
two senses, or, if we prefer it, in the complex
sense, just referred to. Something is done which
enables God to justify the ungodly who believe
in Jesus, and at the same time to appear signally
and conspicuously a righteous God. What this
something is we have still to consider ; but mean
while it should be noted that this interpretation
of the passage agrees with what we have already
seen — that justification of the ungodly, or forgive
ness of sins, or redemption, or whatever we are
to call it, is a real problem for St. Paul. Gospel
is the last thing in the world to be taken for
granted : before there can be any such thing
a problem of tremendous difficulty has to be
solved, and according to the apostle of the
Gentiles it has received at God's hands a tre
mendous solution.
Before entering into this, it is only fair to refer
to the interpretations of the passage which aim
at giving the righteousness of God precisely the
same force all through. In this case, of course, it
is the technical, specifically Pauline sense which
is preferred ; the Bixaioo-vvr] 0eov is to be read
always as that by which sinful man is justified.
This is done by different interpreters with very
various degrees of insight.

168 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
(i) There are those who seem unconscious that
there is any problem, any moral problem, in the
situation at all. The righteousness of God, they
argue, is essentially self-imparting ; it 'goes out'
and energises in the world; it takes hold of
human lives and fills them with itself; it acts
on the analogy of a physical force, like light
or heat, diffusing itself and radiating in every
direction, indiscriminately and without limit
Legal religion, no doubt, conceives of it other
wise ; to legalism, God's righteousness is a
negative attribute, something in which God, as
it were, stands on the defensive, maintaining His
integrity against the sin of the world ; but
that is only a mistake. God's righteousness is
affluent, overflowing, the source of all the good
ness in the world ; and we see in Jesus Christ
that this is so. The truth in all this is as obvious
as the irrelevance. Of course all goodness is
of God ; no man would less have wished to
question this than St. Paul. But St. Paul felt that
the sin of the world made a difference to God ;
it was a sin against His righteousness, and His
righteousness had to be vindicated against it ;
it could not ignore it, and go on simpliciter
'justifying' men as if nothing had happened.
Such an interpretation of the passage ignores
altogether the problem which the sin of the
world (as St. Paul looked at it) presented to
God. It makes no attempt whatever to define

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD 169
the relation, on which everything in the passage
turns, between the divine righteousness and the
death of Christ as a iXaarr/piov ; and in missing
altogether the problem, it misses as completely
the solution — that is, it misses the Gospel. We
cannot keep Christianity, or any specifically
Christian truth, if we deny its premises.
(2) There are those who assimilate the
righteousness of God in this passage to the
SiKaioavvi] 0eov in the Psalms and later Isaiah,
those familiar passages in which it is so often
found as a parallel to o-asrripta (salvation). It
is in these, they argue, that the real antecedents
are found both of St. Paul's thoughts and of his
language. What, for instance, could be closer to
his mind than Ps. xcvi. 2: 'The Lord hath made
known His salvation ; His righteousness hath
He openly shewed in the sight of the heathen ' ?
In the Gospel we have the manifestation of the
righteousness of God in this sense, a righteous
ness which is indistinguishable from His grace,
and in which He shows Himself righteous by
acting in accordance with His covenant obliga
tions — receiving His people graciously, and loving
them freely.1 There is something attractive in
1 This is the view of Ritschl, who decides that everywhere in
Paul the righteousness of God means the mode of procedure
which is consistent with God's having the salvation of believers
as His end P.ca'itf. u. Vers. ii1. 117). In the same sense he argues
that the coir dative idea to the righteousness of God is always that
of the righteousness of His people {ibid. 108, no). He seems to
forget here that the God of the Gospel is defined by St. Paul in

170 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
this, and something true ; but it is as completely
irrelevant to St. Paul's thought in the passage
before us as the more superficial view already
referred to. For one thing, St. Paul never refers
to any of these passages in connecting his gospel
with the Old Testament. He must have been
perfectly aware that they were written on another
plane than that on which he stood as a sinful
man and a preacher to sinners. They were
written for God's covenant people, to assure
them that God would be true to the obligations
of the covenant, and would demonstrate His
righteousness in doing so ; God's righteous
ness, in all these passages, is that attribute to
which His people appeal when they are wronged.
The situation which St Paul has before him,
however, is not that of God's people, wronged
by their enemies, and entitled to appeal to His
righteousness to plead their cause and put them
in the right ; it is that of people who have no
cause, who are all in the wrong with God, whose
sins impeach them without ceasing, to whom
God as Righteous Judge is not, as to a wronged
terms which expressly contradict this view, as ' He who justifies
the ungodly' (Rom. iv. 5) ; and that a reference to sin rather than
to righteousness in the people is the true correlative of the Pauline
diKaioo-ivi) 8eov. Ritschl's treatment of the passage in Rom. iii. 3 ff.,
where God's righteousness is spoken of in connection with the
judgment ofthe world, and with the infliction of the final wrath
upon it, and where it evidently includes something other than
the gracious consistency to which Ritschl would limit it, is an
amusing combination of sophistry and paradox.

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD 171
covenant people, a tower of hope, but a name
which sums up all their fears. The people for
whom Isaiah and the Psalms were written were
people who, being put in the wrong by their
adversaries on earth, had a supreme appeal to
God, before whom they were confident they
should be in the right ; the people to whom St.
Paul preaches are people who before God have
no case, so that the assurances of the prophet and
the psalmists are nothing to them. Of course
there is such a thing as a New Covenant, and it
is possible for those who are within it to appro
priate these Old Testament texts ; there is, for
example, a clear instance of such appropriation in
the First Epistle of John 1.9: 'If we confess our sins,
He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins,
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.' In
other words, He is true to the obligations of His
covenant with us in Christ. These glorious Old
Testament Scriptures, therefore, are not without
their meaning for the New, or their influence in it;
but it is a complete mistake, and it has been the
source of the most far-reaching and disastrous
confusion, to try to deduce from them the Pauline
conception of the righteousness of God. And
it must be repeated that in such interpretations,
as in those already referred to, there is again
wanting any sense of a problem such as St. Paul
is undoubtedly grappling with, and any attempt
to define explicitly and intelligibly the relation

172 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
between the righteousness of God, conceived as it
is here conceived, and the propitiation in the
blood of Christ. Indeed, it is not too much to
say that for St. Paul there is no such thing as a
BiKaioo-vvrj deov except through the propitiation ;
whereas here the BiKaioavvi] 0eov is fully explained,
with no reference to the propitiation whatever.
(3) It is worth while to refer to one particular
construction of the passage, in which an attempt
is made to keep the same sense of BiKaioo-vvr/
0eov throughout, and at the same time to do
justice to the problem which is obviously in
volved. It is that which is given by Dr. Seeberg
of Dorpat in his book, Der Tod Christi. Seeberg
as a writer is not distinguished either by lucidity
or conciseness, but, put briefly, his interpreta
tion is as follows. Righteousness means acting
according to one's proper norm, doing what one
ought to do. God's proper norm, the true rule
of action for Him, is that He should institute
and maintain fellowship with men. He would
not be righteous if He did not do so; He would
fail of acting in His proper character. Now, in
setting forth Christ as a propitiation, God does
what the circumstances require if fellowship is to
be instituted and maintained between Himself
and sinful men ; and it is in this sense that
the propitiation manifests or demonstrates His
righteousness. It shows God not unrighteous,
not false to Himself and to the true norm of His

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD 173
action, as He would have been if in the face of
sin He had simply let the idea of fellowship with
man go ; but manifesting Himself as a righteous
God, who is true to Himself and to His norm
most signally and conspicuously in this, that
over sin and in spite of it He takes means to
secure that fellowship between Himself and men
shall not finally lapse. This is ingenious and
attractive, though whether the conception of the
righteousness of God from which it starts would
have been recognised by St. Paul or by any
Scripture writer is another matter; but apart
from this, it obviously leaves a question un
answered, on the answer to which a great deal
depends. That question is, What is the means
which God takes to secure fellowship with sinful
men, i.e. to act toward them in a way which does
justice to Himself? It is implied in Seeberg's
whole argument that sin does create a problem
for God ; something has to be done, where sinful
men are concerned, before fellowship with God
can be taken for granted ; and that something
God actually does when He sets forth Christ a
propitiation, through faith, in His blood. The
question, therefore, is — if we are going to think
seriously at all — What is the propitiation, or
more precisely, How is the propitiation to be
defined in relation to the sin of the world, in
view of which God provided it, that He might
be able still to maintain fellowship with man ?

174 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
This is a question which, so far as I am able
to follow him, Seeberg never distinctly answers.
He says that God set forth Christ in His blood
as ' ein solches . . . welches durch den Glauben
ein siihnhaft wirkendes ist ' (a thing or power of
such a sort that through faith it comes to have
an atoning efficacy).1 He refuses to explain the
propitiatory character of Christ's death by re
garding it as sacrificial ; he refuses to explain it
as in any sense vicarious ; neither of these ideas,
according to him, is supported by St. Paul. What
St. Paul taught was rather this. Christ compre
hended in Himself the whole human race, as
Adam did (this idea St. Paul borrowed from the
Jewish doctrine of original sin); and through the
death of Christ humanity has suffered that which
the holy God in grace claimed from it as the
condition of its entering again into fellowship
with Him. As the Holy One, He has made this
re-entrance dependent upon death, and as the
Gracious One He has consented to be satis
fied with that suffering of death which He has
made possible for humanity in Christ.2 It is not
easy to regard this as real thinking ; it is rather
an abnegation of thought It does not set the
death of Christ in any real relation to the
problem with which the apostle is dealing. The
suffering of death is that which God in His grace
is pleased to claim from the sinful race as the
1 Der Tod Christi, p. 187. » Ibid. p. 286.

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD 175
condition of restored fellowship, and He has been
further pleased to accept as satisfying this con
dition that particular suffering of death which
Christ endured, and which can be reproduced
in individuals through faith ; but everything is
of mere good pleasure, there is no rational
necessity at any point. One can only repeat
it : this is a medium in which thinking is im
possible, and it is not the medium in which
St. Paul's mind moved. It was not an arbitrary
appointment of God that made the death of
Christ iXaarrjpiov ; it was the essential relation,
in all human experience, of death and sin.
Christ died for our sins, because it is in death
that the divine judgment on sin is finally ex
pressed. Once we put law and necessity out of
the relations between Christ's death and our
sin, we dismiss the very possibility of thinking
on the subject ; we may use words about it, but
they are words without meaning. It is a sig
nificant feature of all such explanations, to call
them so, of Christ's death, that they do not
bring it into any real relation to the Christian's
freedom from the law, or to the controversies
which raged round this in the Pauline churches ;
and this is only one of the ways in which it
appears that though using certain Pauline
words they have gone off the rails of Pauline
thought. The passage in Romans becomes
simple as soon as we read it in the light of those

176 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
we have already examined in 2 Corinthians
and in Galatians. It is Christ set forth in
His blood who is a propitiation ; that is, it is
Christ who died. In dying, as St. Paul con
ceived it, He made our sin His own ; He took it
on Himself as the reality which it is in God's
sight and to God's law : He became sin, became
a curse for us. It is this which gives His death
a propitiatory character and power; in other
words, which makes it possible for God to be
at once righteous and a God who accepts as
righteous those who believe in Jesus. He is
righteous, for in the death of Christ His Law is
honoured by the Son who takes the sin of the
world to Himself as all that it is to God ; and
He can accept as righteous those who believe in
Jesus, for in so believing sin becomes to them
what it is to Him. I do not know any word
which conveys the truth of this if ' vicarious ' or
' substitutionary ' does not, nor do I know any
interpretation of Christ's death which enables
us to regard it as a demonstration of love to
sinners, if this vicarious or substitutionary char
acter is denied.
There is much preaching about Christ's death
which fails to be a preaching of Christ's death,
and therefore to be in the full sense of the term
gospel preaching, because it ignores this. The
simplest hearer feels that there is something
irrational in saying that the death of Christ is a

LOVE MUST BE INTELLIGIBLE 177
great proof of love to the sinful, unless there is
shown at the same time a rational connection
between that death and the responsibilities
which sin involves, and from which that death
delivers. Perhaps one should beg pardon for
using so simple an illustration, but the point is a
vital one, and it is necessary to be clear. If I
were sitting on the end of the pier, on a summer
day, enjoying the sunshine and the air, and some
one came along and jumped into the water and
got drowned ' to prove his love for me,' I should
find it quite unintelligible. I might be much in
need of love, but an act in no rational relation
to any of my necessities could not prove it. But
if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning,
and some one sprang into the water, and at the
cost of making my peril, or what but for him
would be my fate, his own, saved me from death,
then I should say, 'Greater love hath no man
than this.' I should say it intelligibly, because
there would be an intelligible relation between
the sacrifice which love made and the necessity
from which it redeemed. Is it making any rash
assumption to say that there must be such an
intelligible relation between the death of Christ
— the great act in which His love to sinners is
demonstrated — and the sin of the world for
which in His blood He is the propitiation? I
do not think so. Nor have I yet seen any
intelligible relation established between them,
M

178 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
except that which is the key to the whole of New
Testament teaching, and which bids us say, as
we look at the Cross, He bore our sins, He died
our death. It is so His love constrains us.
Accepting this interpretation, we see that the
whole secret of Christianity is contained in Christ's
death, and in the believing abandonment of the
soul to that death in faith. It is from Christ's
death, and the love which it demonstrates, that
all Christian inferences are drawn. Once this is
accepted, everything else is easy and is secure.
'When we were yet sinners, Christ died for us;
much more then being justified now in His blood
shall we be saved through Him from the wrath.
For if when we were enemies we were reconciled
to God through the death of His Son, much more,
being reconciled, we shall be saved in His life'
(Rom. v. 8 ff). The much more implies that in
comparison with this primary, this incredibly
great proof of God's love, everything else may be
taken for granted. It is the same argument which
is employed again in chap. viii. 32 : ' He that
spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up
for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely
give us all things ? ' And as it includes every
thing else on the part of God, so does it also
on the part of man. The propitiatory death of
Christ, as an all-transcending demonstration of
love, evokes in sinful souls a response which is
the whole of Christianity. The love of Christ
constraineth us : whoever can say that can

JURIDICAL AND ETHICO-MYSTICAL 179
say all that is to be said about the Christian
life. This is not the way in which St. Paul's gospel is
usually represented now. Since Pfleiderer's first
book on Paulinism was translated, between twenty
and thirty years ago, it has become almost an
axiom with many writers on this subject, that the
apostle has two doctrines of reconciliation — a juri
dical and an ethico-mystical one. There is, on
the one hand, the doctrine that Christ died for us,
in a sense like that which has just been explained ;
and on the other, the doctrine that in a mystical
union with Christ effected by faith we ethically
die with Him and live with Him — this dying with
Christ and living with Him, or in Him, being the
thing we call salvation. What the relation of the
two doctrines is to each other is variously repre
sented. Sometimes they are added together, as
by Weiss, as though in spite of their independ
ence justice had to be done to both in the work
of man's salvation : a doctrine of justification by
faith alone in Christ who died for us finding
its indispensable supplement in a doctrine of
spiritual regeneration through baptism, in which
we are vitally united to Christ in His death and
resurrection. Weiss holds that it is not Pauline
to say that the fellowship of life with Christ is
established by faith ; it is only established,
according to his view, by baptism.1 But Paul,
1 Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments, § 84 b. (English
Translation, i. p. 456 ff. ).

180 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
it is safe to say, was incapable of divorcing his
thoughts so completely from reality as to repre
sent the matter thus. He was not pedantically
interpreting a text, he was expounding an experi
ence ; and there is nothing in any Christian
experience answering to this dead or inert justi
fication by faith, which has no relation to the
new life, nor again is there anything in
Christian experience like this new life which
is added by baptism to the experience of justi
fication by faith, but does not spring out of it.
It is a moral wrong to any serious-minded person
to construe his words in this way. Ritschl does
not add the two sides of the Pauline gospel
together as Weiss does. For him they stand
side by side in the apostle, and though salvation
is made equally dependent on the one and the
other they are never combined. Romans sixth has
nothing to do with Romans third. The concep
tion of the new life, derived from union to Christ
in His death and resurrection, is just as indif
ferent to justification by faith, as the representa
tion of Christ's death in the sixth chapter of
Romans is to the sacrificial representation of the
same thing in the third. The new life or active
righteousness of the sixth chapter bears the same
name as the divine righteousness of the third,
but materially they have nothing in common, and
the diversity of their contents stands in no
relation to the origination of the one from the

JURIDICAL AND ETHICO-MYSTICAL 181
other.1 Ritschl says it is for dogmatic, not biblical,
theology to define the problem created by these
two ways of salvation and the apparent contra
diction between them — and to attempt its solu
tion ; and Holtzmann is disposed to censure Weiss
for overlooking this, and attempting an adjust
ment in his Biblical Theology of the New Testa
ment} But this is manifestly unfair to St. Paul.
The apostle knew nothing about the distinctions
which Theological Encyclopaedia draws between
biblical and dogmatic; he was a man of intellectual
force and originality engaged in thinking out a
redeeming and regenerative experience, and the
presumption surely is that his thought will repre
sent somehow the consistency and unity of his
experience. If it does so, it is for his interpre
ters to make the fact clear without troubling
themselves whether the result is to be labelled
biblical or dogmatic. There are too many
people who refuse to take biblical theology
seriously, because it is incoherent, and who
refuse to take dogmatic seriously, because its
consistency is artificially produced by suppres
sing the exuberant variety of the New Testa
ment. Perhaps if New Testament experience
had justice done to it, the incoherence of New
Testament thinking would not be so obvious.
Holtzmann himself attempts to find points of
contact, or lines of connection, or to borrow
1 Rechtf. u. Versbhnung, ii. pp. 338 f. 2 Neut. Theologie, ii. p. 141.

182 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
from another field an expression of Dr. Fair-
bairn's, 'developmental coincidences' between the
two gospels, though in a haphazard way ; ideas
like 7rto-Tt?, trvevfia, and aTroXvrpa><ri<;, it is pointed
out, find a place in the unfolding of both.1
In spite of such high authorities, I venture to
put in a plea for the coherence of St. Paul. If
we found the one theory, as it is called, at one
period of his life, and the other at another, there
might be a prima facie case for inconsistency;
but when both are set out in full detail, in a
definite sequence, in the same letter, and that
the most systematic of all the apostle's writings,
and one which aims unambiguously at exhibiting
his gospel as a whole, the presumption is all
the other way. There are cases in which it is
fallacious to say post hoc, ergo propter hoc, but
this is not one. There could not be a greater
mistake than to assume that in the sixth chapter
of Romans St. Paul makes a new beginning, .
forgetting all that he has said, and meeting
objections to that gospel which we have been
expounding by introducing ideas which have no
relation to it, and which may indeed be described
as a correction of it, or a supplement to it, or
a substitute for it, but which are in no sense
whatever a defence of it. A defence of it is
clearly what St. Paul means to give, and we are
bound to assume that he saw what he was doing.
1 Neut. Theologie, ii. p. 137 ff.

JURIDICAL AND ETHICO-MYSTICAL 183
He had preached that sinful men are justified
freely through faith in Jesus set forth by God
as a propitiation in His blood, and his adversaries
had brought against this gospel the accusation that
it tempted to and even justified continuance in sin.
What is his answer? To begin with, it is an ex
pression of moral horror at the suggestion, firj
yevoiro ! But, in the next place, it is a demonstra
tion of the inconsistency of such a line of action
with what is involved in justification. ' Men who
like us died to sin, how shall we still live in it?'
(Rom. vi. 2.) Why should it be taken for granted
that ' dying to sin ' is a new idea here, on a new
plane, an idea which startles one who has been
following only that interpretation of justification
which we find in Rom. chs. iii.-v. ? It may be a
new idea to a man who takes the point of view
of St. Paul's opponents, and who does not know
what it is to be justified through faith in the
propitiation which is in Christ's death ; but it
is not a new idea to the apostle, nor to any one
who has received the reconciliation he preaches ;
nor would he be offering any logical defence of
his gospel if it were a new idea. But it is no
new idea at all ; it is Christ dying for sin —
St. Paul reminds the objectors to his doctrine —
it is Christ dying our death on the tree; who
evokes the faith by which we become right with
God ; and the faith which He evokes answers to
what He is and to what He does: it is faith

1 84 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
which has a death to sin in it. Of course, if
Christ's death were not what it has been described
to be, it would be nothing to us ; it would evoke
no faith at all ; but being what it has been
described to be, the faith which is the response
to it is a faith which inevitably takes moral
contents and quality from it. The very sane
experience in which a man becomes right with
God — that is, the experience of faith in Christ
who died for sins — is an experience in which he
becomes a dead man, so far as sin is concerned, a
living man (though this is but the same thing in
other words), so far as God is concerned. This,
I repeat, is what is given in experience to the
man who believes in Christ as St. Paul preaches
him in Rom. iii. 25 f, and this is the ethical
justification of his gospel. What is fundamental
here is Christ in the character of propitiation,
Christ bearing our sin in His death ; it is this
Christ and no other who draws us in faith to
Himself, so that in and through faith His death
and life become ours. The forensic theory of
atonement, as it is called, is not unrelated to the
ethico-mystical ; it is not parallel to it ; it is not
a mistaken ad hominem or rather ad Pharisaeum
mode of thought which ought to be displaced by
the other ; it has the essential eternal truth in
it by which and by which alone the experiences
are generated in which the strength of the other
is supposed to lie. I do not much care for the

JURIDICAL AND ETHICO-MYSTICAL 185
expression 'mystical union' with Christ, for it
has been much abused, and in St. Paul especially
has led to much hasty misconstruction of the
New Testament ; but if we are to use it at all, we
must say that it is something which is not a
substitute for, but the fruit of, the vicarious
death of Christ. It owes its very being to that
atonement outside of us, that finished work of
Christ, which some would use it to discredit.
And it is because this is so, that St. Paul can use
it, so far as he does so, not to replace, or to
supplement, or to correct, but to vindicate and
show the moral adequacy of his doctrine of
justification. Of course, in the last resort, the
objection brought against St. Paul's gospel can
only be practically refuted. It must be lived
down, not argued down; hence the hortatory tone
of Romans vi. But the new life is involved in the
faith evoked by the sin-bearing death of Christ,
and in nothing else ; it is involved in this, and
this is pictorially presented in baptism. Hence
the use which St. Paul makes of this sacrament
in the same chapter. He is able to use it in his
argument in the way he does because baptism
and faith are but the outside and the inside of
the same thing. If baptism, then, is symbolically
inconsistent with continuance in sin, as is
apparent to every one, faith is really inconsistent
with it. But faith is relative to the BiKaioo-vvi)
0eov, the divine justification which is St. Paul's

1 86 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
gospel, and therefore that gospel in turn is
beyond moral reproach.1
It is possible to go more into detail here on
lines suggested by St. Paul himself. Christ died
our death on the cross, and the faith which that
death evokes has a death in it also. But how are
we to interpret this ? By relation to what are
we to define the death which is involved in faith ?
We may define it by relation to anything by
relation to which Christ's death has been defined.
Thus, following the apostle, we can say that the
death involved in faith is (i) a death to sin.
Christ's death on the cross was a death to sin,
the apostle tells us, in the sense that it intro
duced him to a condition in which he had no
longer any responsibility in relation to it (Rom.
vi. 10). He had assumed the responsibility of it
in love, but He had also discharged it, and sin
had no claim on Him further. For us, dying to
sin may seem to have a different meaning ; it is
not a discharge from its responsibilities that is
wanted, but a deliverance from its power. But
this can only come on the foundation of the
other; it is the discharge from the responsi
bilities of sin involved in Christ's death and
appropriated in faith, which is the motive power
in the daily ethical dying to sin. It really is such
a motive power, and the only one in the world,
1 For a fuller treatment of this point, see article in Expositor,
October 1901, ' The Righteousness of God and the New Life.'

DYING TO SIN 187
when we realise what it is. But just as death to
the law — to anticipate for a moment another
experience involved in faith in the death of
Christ — needs to be realised by ceaseless vigil
ance against all that would enslave the conscience,
and against everything in our nature that makes
us seek external supports, and authorities to
relieve ns of the responsibility of becoming a law
to ourselves under the constraint of the cross, so
must death to sin also be realised by moral effort.
It is involved in faith, so far as the principle and
the motive power are concerned ; the man who
plants his whole hope in the revelation of God
made in Christ the propitiation is a man who in
the act and for the time is taking sin, death, the
law, and the judgment of God, as all that they
are to Christ ; that is, he is owning sin, and dis
owning it utterly ; acknowledging it as unre
servedly in all its responsibility, and separating
himself as entirely from it, as Christ did when
He died. Such faith, involving such a relation
to sin as can be called a death to it, covers the
whole life, and is a moral guarantee for it ; yet
the death to sin which is lodged in it has to be
carried out in a daily mortification of evil, the
initial crucifixion with Christ in a daily cruci
fixion ofthe passions and lusts.
(2) It may even be said more specifically that
the death involved in faith is a death to the flesh.
This is the point of the difficult passage in

1 88 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Romans viii. 3 f. St. Paul is there describing the
way of salvation from sin, and says that the law
was impotent in the matter owing to the flesh.
The flesh virtually means sin in its constitutional
and instinctive character — sin as the nature or
the second nature of man, it does not here
matter which. What the law could not do God
took another way of doing. He sent His Son in
the likeness of flesh of sin, and as a sin-offering,
and in so doing condemned sin in the flesh.
6fiolco/j,a here no doubt emphasises Christ's like
ness to us : it is not meant to suggest difference
or unreality in His nature. He was all that we
are, short of sin. Yet He came in connection
with sin, or as a sin-offering, and it is through
this that we must interpret the expression ' con
demned sin in the flesh.' It does not mean that
Christ showed sin to be inexcusable, by Himself
leading a sinless life ; there is no salvation, no
emancipation from sin in that. The condemna
tion is the act of God, and in sending His own
Son in connection with sin — which must mean
in the one connection with it which St. Paul ever
refers to, i.e. as a propitiation for it — God con
demned it in the flesh. His judgment came on
it in the death which Christ died in our nature,
and with that judgment its right and its power
in our nature came to an end. I say its right
and its power, for the things are related. Until
the responsibilities involved in sin have been

DYING TO THE FLESH 189
fully acknowledged and met, as they are acknow
ledged and met in the death of Christ, its power
remains ; to express the truth psychologically,
until sin is expiated, the sinner has a bad con
science, and as long as a man has a bad conscience,
he cannot begin to be a good man. It is because
Christ's death deals effectually with the responsi
bility of sin, and puts right with God the man
who believes in Him, that it can do for our nature
what law could never do — break sin's power.
Weiss and others have argued that it is a mistake
to find here the idea of expiation : the context is
interested only in the moral deliverance from
evil. But from the point of view of St. Paul, this
is not a reasonable objection : it is setting the
end against the means. He knew by experience
that sin could only have its power broken by
being expiated, and that is precisely what he
teaches here. Only, he gives it a peculiar turn.
The fact that expiation has been made through
Christ's death for sin in the very nature which
we wear, is used to bring out the idea that in that
nature, at all events, sin can have no indefeasible
right and no impregnable seat. The death involved
in faith in Christ is a death not only to sin gener
ally, but to sin in the constitutional and virulent
character suggested by the flesh. But like the
other ' deaths,' this one too needs to be morally
realised. ' Mortify therefore your members which
are upon the earth.'

i9o THE DEATH OF CHRIST
(3) Further, the death involved in faith is re
peatedly defined by St. Paul as a death to the law,
or to law in general (Gal. ii. 19 ; Rom. vi. 14, vii. 4).
There is undoubtedly something paradoxical
in this, and it is the point at which St. Paul's
gospel, from the beginning, was most misunder
stood and most assailed. On the one hand, when
Christ died, justice was done to the law of God,
both as an imperative and as a condemning law,
as it had never been done before. The will of
God had been honoured by a life of perfect obedi
ence, and the awful experience of death in which
God's inexorable judgment on sin comes home
to the conscience had been borne in the same
obedience and love by His sinless Son. On the
other hand, when this death evokes the faith for
which it appeals, the righteous requirement of
the law is fulfilled in the believer ; the law gets
its due in his life also, or, as the apostle puts it,
it is established by faith. How is it, then, that
faith involves a death to the law? It is through
the assurance, given to faith at the cross, that so
far as doing the will of God is concerned, a new
and living way has been found. It is not the law
in its old legal form — the law of statutory injunc
tions and prohibitions — which is to generate
goodness in sinful man ; it is the law glorified in
the atonement. The whole inspiration of the
Christian life lies here, and it is an inspiration,
not a statutory requirement. Nothing is to count

DYING TO THE LAW 191
in the life of a Christian which does not come with
perfect freedom from this source. This explains
the extraordinary emphasis which St. Paul
everywhere lays on liberty. Liberty is the cor
relative of responsibility ; man must be perfectly
free that the whole weight of his responsibilities
may come upon him. But this weight of respon
sibility cannot be faced, and would not sanctify-
even if it could be faced, in vacuo ; it can be faced
only when we know God in Christ crucified ; and
it does sanctify, when the constraint of the atone
ment, with its awful homage to the holiness of
God, descends upon the heart. But this is all
that is required, for this is too great to be com
promised by alliance with anything else. Perfect
freedom, with entire responsibility to the Re
deemer — the obligation to be a law to one
self, with the power of Christ's passion resting
upon the spirit — that is the death to law which
St. Paul contemplates. No statutes, no tradi
tions of men, no dogmata, intellectual or moral,
no scruples in the consciences of others, are to
have legal obligations for us any longer. Not
even the letters written by the finger of God on
the tables of stone constitute a legal obligation
for the Christian. All that he is to be must
come freely out of the atoning death of Christ.
He is dead to the law — in the widest sense of the
word, he is dead to law — through the body of
Christ. From this freedom we are always being

192 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
tempted to relapse. We are always establishing
for ourselves, or letting others impose upon us,
customs — whether intellectual, as creeds; or
ethical, as the conventional ways of being charit
able or of worshipping God — which though good
in themselves, tend to corrupt the world just
because they are customs : in other words, we
are always tacitly denying that the death of
Christ does full justice to law in every sense of
the term, and that for those who believe in it law
exists henceforth only in the divine glory of the
atonement, and in the life which it inspires.
It may seem astonishing that in all this no
reference has been made to the Spirit, but the
omission, I think, can be justified.1 For one
thing, St. Paul himself discusses the whole sub
ject of the Christian's death with Christ, as
involved in Christ's death and the Christian's
faith in it, without reference to the Spirit. The
Spirit is not mentioned in the sixth chapter of
Romans. I do not say it is not implied — for in
stance, in the allusions to baptism; but it is
implied in all that the apostle says ; it is not
implied as something to be added to it. Theo
logically, the Spirit is the divine correlative of
faith, and of the dying with Christ and living
with Christ, of which we have been speaking ; it
is the power of God which is manifested in every
1 For a fuller treatment of the Spirit and the New Life, see
article in Expositor, December 1 901.

THE SPIRIT IN ST. PAUL 193
Christian experience whatever. It is not some
thing specifically divine which comes in through
baptism and has no relation to faith and justi
fication ; it is related in the same way to all ; it
is the divine factor in all that restores man to,
and maintains him in, the life of God. But the
Spirit does not work in vacuo. He glorifies
Christ. He works through the propitiation, in
terpreting, revealing, applying it ; and when we
talk of the Spirit as an abstractly supernatural
power, a power of God not working through the
gospel and its appeal to the reason, conscience,
and will of man, we are not on Christian ground.
Without the Spirit — that is, without God — all
that has been said about the meaning of Christ's
death could not win upon men ; but just because
the action of the Spirit is implied as the corre
lative of faith at every point, it is illegitimate
to call it in to explain one Christian experience
more than another — for instance, to derive re
generation from it, or the new life, but not justi
fication. Either Spirit or Faith may truly be
said to be co-extensive with Christianity, and
therefore they are co-extensive with each other.
But if we are speaking of the new moral life of
the Christian, and ask what we mean by the
Spirit psychologically — that is, what form it
takes as an experience — I should say it is in
distinguishable from that infinite assurance of
God's love, given in Christ's death, through which
N

194 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the Christian is made more than conqueror in
all the difficulties of life, inward or external. It
is with this assurance the Spirit is connected
when St. Paul opens his discussion of the subject
in Romans v. 5 : ' The love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit
given to us.' It is with this same assurance he
concludes his discussion, ch. viii. 35 : ' Who
shall separate us from the love of God?' The
triumphant certainty of this love, a certainty
always recurring to and resting on that miracle
of miracles, the sin-bearing death of Christ, is
the same thing as joy in the Holy Spirit, and
it is this joy which is the Christian's strength.
From the Spirit, then, or from the love of God
as an assured possession, the Christian life may
equally be explained. And it is not another,
but the same explanation, when we say that it
is begotten and sustained from beginning to end
by the virtue which dwells in the propitiatory
death of Jesus.
(V.) When we come to the epistles of the
Imprisonment a new range seems to be given
to Christ's death, and to the work of reconcilia
tion which is accomplished in it. This holds,
at least, of the Epistles to the Colossians and
Ephesians ; so far as Philippians is concerned,
we find ourselves in the same circle of ideas as
in Galatians and Romans. The close parallel,
indeed, of Phil. iii. 9 f. with the exposition

THE EPISTLES OF THE IMPRISONMENT 195
of the apostolic gospel in these earlier letters
is a striking proof of the tenacity and con
sistency of St. Paul's thought. But in Colossians
we are confronted with a new situation. 'The
world ' which is the object of reconciliation is no
longer as in 2 Cor. v. 19, or Rom. iii. 19, the
world of sinful men ; it is a world on a grander
scale. ' God has been pleased through Him to
reconcile all things to Himself, having made
peace through the blood of His cross, through
Him, whether they be things on earth or things
in heaven ' (Col. i. 20). The reconciliation of
sinful men is represented as though it were only
a part of this vaster work. ' And you,' it is
added, 'who were once estranged, and enemies
in mind by wicked works, He has now reconciled
in the body of His flesh through death ' (v. 21 f.).
The same ideas are found in the Epistle to the
Ephesians (i. 7 ff). Here we start with the
historical Christ, ' in whom we have our redemp
tion through His blood, even the forgiveness
of our trespasses ' ; but when the mystery of
Christ's work is revealed to the Christian in
telligence, it is seen to have as its end 'the
gathering together in one of all things in Him,
both things in (or above) the heavens and
things on the earth' (v. 10). This enlargement
of the scope of Christ's death, or, if we prefer
to call it so, this extension of its virtue into
regions where we cannot speak of it from

196 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
experience, has sometimes had a disconcerting
effect, and the bearings of it are not quite clear.
It is argued by some, who naturally wish to be
as precise as possible in interpreting their author,
that ' the things in heaven and the things on
earth,' which are referred to in the passages
just quoted, must be spiritual beings ; only such
can be the objects of reconciliation, for only
such can have estranged themselves from God
by sin. But where do we find the idea of any
such estrangement in Scripture, except in the
case of disobedient angels to whom the idea of
reconciliation is never applied? For answer
we are pointed to various passages in the Old
and the New Testament, not to mention Jewish
literature outside, in which there is the con
ception of spiritual beings whose fortunes are
somehow bound up with those of men. Thus
in Isaiah xxiv. 21, a late passage in which
apocalypse begins to displace prophecy, we read :
' It shall come to pass in that day that the Lord
shall punish the host of the high ones on high,
and the kings of the earth upon the earth.' The
two sets of persons here referred to somehow
correspond to each other ; there is a counter
part in the unseen world of the characters and
fortunes visible on earth. Again, in the book
of Daniel we hear of ' the prince of the king-
. dom of Persia (ch. x. 13), 'the prince of Grecia'
(x. 20), and 'your prince' (x. 21), meaning the

THE WORLD BEYOND MAN 197
prince of the children of Israel : the princes, as
the name Michael in x. 21 shows, being in all
cases angelic beings, who in some way or other
were identified with the nations, representing
them in the unseen world, pleading their cause,
fighting their battles, and mysteriously involved
in their fortunes. It is something quite analogous
to this that we find in the early chapters of
Revelation, where the epistles of the risen
Lord are addressed to the angels of the
churches. The angel is not a bishop; he is,
so to speak, the personification of the church
in the world unseen ; the spiritual counterpart
of it, conceived as a person on whom its
character and responsibilities will be visited
somehow. It is the same idea, with an in
dividual application, that we find in our Lord's
Word about the angels of the little ones, who
in heaven do always behold the face of His
heavenly Father (Matt, xviii. 10), and again
in the book of Acts (xii. 15), where the people
who would not believe that Peter had been re
leased from prison said, ' It is his angel.' On
such a background of Jewish belief the inter
pretation of these passages has been essayed.
It is not man only, we are asked to believe,
who has been involved in sin, and in the aliena
tion from God which is its consequence ; the sin
of man has consequences which reach far beyond
man himself. It stretches downward through

198 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
nature, which has been made subject to vanity
because of it, and it stretches upward into a
spiritual world which we may not be able to
realise, but which, like nature, is compromised
somehow by our sin, and entangled in our
responsibility to God. For these higher beings,
then, as well as for man, Christ has done His
reconciling work, and when it is finished they
as well as we will be gathered together in one
in Him.
It would perhaps be going too far to say
that there is nothing in this, and that no such
ideas ever floated vaguely before the apostle's
imagination. The people to whom he wrote
believed in 'thrones and dominions and princi
palities and powers ' ; and although there is a
touch of indifference, not to say scorn, in some
of his own allusions to the high-sounding names
— for instance, in Ephesians i. 22 f. — they had
some sort of reality for him too. But if he had
definitely held such a view as has just been
expounded, the probabilities are that it would
have told more decidedly on his thinking, and
found less ambiguous expression in his writings.
At best it could belong only to the quasi-
poetical representation of his faith, not to the
gospel which he preached on the basis of ex
perience, nor to the theology or philosophy
which was its intellectual expression. And
when we look at the epistles of the Captivity

ABSOLUTENESS OF CHRISTIANITY 199
generally, our minds are rather drawn in another
direction. The enlarged scope of the work of
reconciliation is part of that expansion, so to
speak, of Christ's person from a historical to
a cosmical significance which is characteristic
of these epistles as a whole. Christ is no
longer a second Adam, the head of a new
humanity, as in the earlier letters (Rom. v. 12 ff,
1 Cor. xv. 45 ff.) ; He is the centre of the uni
verse. He is a Person so great that St. Paul is
obliged to reconstruct His whole world around
Him. He is the primary source of all creation,
its principle of unity, its goal (Col. i. 15 ff).
In consistency with this, the meaning and
efficacy of what He has done extends through it
all. His Person and work have absolute signi
ficance ; wherever we have to speak of revela
tion or of reconciliation, in whatever world, in
whatever relations, it is of Him we have to
speak. Whether St. Paul would have presented
this genuinely Christian truth to his imagination
in the somewhat fantastic fashion just explained
may be more or less doubtful ; in any case it
is of little consequence. What is of consequence
is his conviction that in Jesus Christ dwelt all
the fulness of the Godhead— all that makes God
in the full sense of the term God — bodily, that
is, in organic unity and completeness ; and that
the same completeness and finality belong to
His reconciling work. 'The blood of His

200 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
cross': it is in this we find the resolution of
all discords, not only in the life of man, but
in the universe at large. It is in this we see
a divine love which does not shrink from taking
on itself to the uttermost the moral responsi
bility for the world it has made, and for all the
orders of being in it, and all their failures and
fortunes. The eternal truth of this different
ages and circumstances will picture to them
selves in different ways ; all we "need to care
for is that ways of picturing it which are un
congenial to our imaginations do not deprive us
of the truth itself.
It is a smaller but not a less attractive applica
tion ofthe idea of reconciliation, as accomplished
in Christ's death, when we find it in the second
chapter of Ephesians as the reconciliation of Jew
and Gentile in the one body of Christ (vv. 1 1-22).
The application may to us seem casual, but this
is one of the great thoughts of St. Paul. ' Is
God a God of Jews only ? ' he asks in Rom. iii. 29
as he contemplates Christ set forth as a propitia
tion in His blood. Is the great appeal of the
Cross one which is intelligible only to men of a
single race, or to which only those who have had
a particular training can respond ? On the con
trary, there is nothing in the world so universally
intelligible as the Cross ; and hence it is the
meeting-place not only of God and man, but of
all races and conditions of men with each other.

THE PASTORAL EPISTLES 201
There is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female,
bond nor free, there. The Cross is the basis of
a universal religion, and has in it the hope of
a universal peace. But of all Christian truths
which are confessed in words, this is that which
is most outrageously denied in deed. There is
not a Christian church nor a Christian nation in
the world which believes heartily in the Atone
ment as the extinction of privilege, and the
levelling up of all men to the same possibility
of life in Christ, to the same calling to be saints.
The spirit of privilege, in spite of the Cross,
is obstinately rooted everywhere even among
Christian men.
An examination of the pastoral epistles, quite
apart from the critical questions that have been
raised as to their authorship, does not introduce
us to any new ideas on our subject. It is at
all events genuinely Pauline when we read in
1 Tim. ii. 5, 'There is one God, one Mediator
also between God and man, Himself man, Christ
Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all
(avTiXvrpov vtrep irdvrav).' It is the ransoming
death in virtue of which Jesus does mediate
between God and sinners ; but for it, He would
not be a mediator in any sense relevant to man's
situation. This, as Holtzmann has noticed, is
in harmony with the use of ' mediator ' in the
Epistle to the Hebrews. There also Jesus is
Mediator, but it is of a covenant which is

202 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
characterised as KpeCrrcov, Kaivr/, and via ; He is
the means through which, at the cost of His
death, sinners enter into the perfect religious
relation to God. But though this idea is found
in Hebrews, it does not follow that it is unpauline
in itself, nor even (though avriXvrpov is found
here only in the New Testament) that it is
unpauline in expression. The dying with Christ,
referred to in 2 Tim. ii. 6, is akin rather to what
we have found in 2 Cor. chs. i. and iv. than to
Romans vi. : it is a share in martyr sufferings
which is meant, not formally the mortification of
the old man. In Titus there are two passages
which require to be mentioned. The first is in
ch. ii. 14, where we read of ' our Saviour Jesus
Christ, who gave Himself for us that He might
redeem us from all unrighteousness (dvofiia<s) and
purify for Himself a people of His own, zealous
of good works.' It is somewhat peddling to
suggest, as Holtzmann does,1 that Paul would
rather have said we were redeemed from i>o/ao?
than from dvopia, and that even in touching on
a Pauline thought an unpauline expression is
used rXvrpcoar]rat for ' redeem '). The whole
expression, Xvrpovo-0ai as well as dvofiia, comes
from Ps. cxxx. 8, and St. Paul might have liberty
to quote the Old Testament as well as anybody
else. Nevertheless, the general impression one
gets from the pastoral epistles is, that as a
1 Neut. Theologie, ii. 265 f.

THE PASTORAL EPISTLES 203
doctrine Christianity was now complete and
could be taken for granted ; it is not in process
of being hammered out, as in the Epistle to the
Galatians ; there is nothing creative in the state
ment of it ; and it is the combination of fulness
and of something not unlike formalism that
raises doubts as to the authorship. St. Paul
was inspired, but the writer of these epistles is
sometimes only orthodox. One feels this with
reference to the second passage in Titus (iii. 4 ff):
'When the kindness of God our Saviour, and His
love toward man, appeared, not by works done
in righteousness which we did ourselves, but
according to His mercy He saved us, through
the washing of regeneration and renewing of the
Holy Ghost, which He poured out upon us richly
through Jesus Christ our Saviour : that, being
justified by His grace, we might be made heirs
according to the hope of eternal life.' St. Paul
could no doubt have said all this, but probably
he would have said it otherwise, and not all at
a time. In any case, it adds nothing to the New
Testament teaching on the death of Christ as we
have already examined it

204 THE DEATH OF CHRIST

CHAPTER IV
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
THE Epistle to the Hebrews is in many ways
one of the most perplexing books of the
New Testament. It stands quite alone and is
peculiarly independent, yet it has affinities with
almost every strain of thought to be found else
where in primitive Christianity, and points of
historical attachment for it have been sought
all round the compass.1 Thus there are those
who think its true line of descent is to be traced
to James, Cephas, and John — the three apostles
who seemed to be pillars in the mother church
of Jerusalem. It is the last and finest product
of that type of Christian mind which we see at
work in the fifteenth chapter of Acts. Perhaps
this was the feeling of the person to whom
the address — 7r/3os 'E^patou? — is due. When
we examine the epistle closely, however, we
discover that there is very little to be found in
this direction to explain its peculiarities. Others,
1 For a full discussion on this point, see Holtzmann, Neut.
Theologie, ii. 28 1 ff.

THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 205
again, would trace it to the school of St. Paul.
This, no doubt, has a greater plausibility. Dis
counting altogether the alleged Pauline author
ship, the epistle has many points of contact with
St. Paul in language, and some in thought. But
we cannot fail to be struck with the fact that
where the language coincides with St. Paul's, the
thought does not ; and that where the minds of
the authors meet, their language is independent.
Thus both St. Paul and the writer to the Hebrews
speak of the law, of what the law cannot do
(Rom. viii. 3 ; Heb. x. 1), of the superseding of
the law (Rom. x. 4; Heb. vii. 12), of faith
(Rom. iv. ; Heb. xi.), of a righteousness accord
ing to faith (Rom. i. 17 ; Heb. xi. 7), and so
on ; but when they use the same words they
do not mean the same thing. The law to St. Paul
is mainly the moral law, embodying God's re
quirements from man ; in this epistle, it is the
religious constitution under which Israel lived,
and which gave it a certain though an imperfect
access to God. In St. Paul and in this epistle alike
the law is superseded in the Christian religion,
but the relation between them is differently
defined in the two cases. St. Paul defines law and
gospel mainly by contrast ; in Hebrews they
are set in a more positive relation to one another.
It used to be life under external statutory
authority, now it is life under inspiration, and
the two are mutually exclusive — such is St. Paul's

206 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
conception : see Romans vi. and 2 Cor. iii. It
used to be life under the shadowy, the unreal,
that which could bring nothing to perfection;
now it is life under the real, the eternal, that
which makes perfect for ever ; the shadow is
abandoned, because the coming good which cast
it is here : see Hebrews vii.-x. No doubt such
contrasts as this (between St. Paul and the Epistle
to the Hebrews) require qualification, but broadly
they are true, and they could be illustrated at
many other points. At the present moment the
favourite tendency among critics is to explain
the peculiarities of the epistle by attaching it
neither to the primitive Christianity of Jerusalem,
nor in the first instance to the characteristic
thoughts of St. Paul (though both of course are
implied), but to the quasi-philosophical mind of
Alexandrian Judaism. It is there we find the
contrast of seen and unseen, of sensible and
intelligible, of this world and the world to come,
of the transitory and the abiding, of earth and
heaven, of which this epistle makes so much;
and there also the Xoyos, which mediates between
God and the world, is presented in many of the
aspects (e.g. as Intercessor, as Mediator, as High
Priest) in which Jesus figures here. But here
again the differences outweigh the resemblances.
The Son of God does exercise in this epistle
many of the functions which in Philo are assigned
to the Logos ; but in order to exercise them He

HEBREWS INTENSELY THEOLOGICAL 207
must assume human nature and pass through
all human experience — conceptions which are a
direct contradiction of all that Logos in Philo
means. Evidently the author of this epistle,
whatever his intellectual affinities, combined with
an extraordinary sensitiveness to all that was
being thought and said in the world in which
he lived an extraordinary power of holding fast
his own thoughts, of living in his own mind,
and letting it work along its own lines.
Of all New Testament writers he is the most
theological — that is, he is most exclusively
occupied with presenting Christianity as the
final and absolute religion ; not a religion, in
the sense in which it might concede a legitimate
place to others, but religion simpliciter, because
it does perfectly what all religion aims to do.
This is what is expressed in his favourite word
ati»i'to?(eternal). St. John in his gospel and epistles
uses this word twenty-three times, but invariably
to qualify life, and with him it is rather the
combination than the adjective which is charac
teristic. But in Hebrews alcbvios is used far
more significantly, though less frequently. Jesus
is author of 'eternal' salvation (v. 9), i.e. of final
salvation, which has no peril beyond ; all that
salvation can mean is secured by Him. The
elements of Christianity include preaching on
'eternal' judgment (vi. 2), i.e. a judgment which
has the character of finality, from which there

208 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
is no appeal, beyond which there is no fear or
no hope. Christ has obtained 'eternal' redemp
tion for us (ix. 12): not a redemption like that
which was annually achieved for Israel, and
which had to be annually repeated, as though
its virtue faded away, but a redemption the
validity of which abides for ever. Christ has
offered Himself through ' eternal ' spirit (ix. 14),
i.e. in Christ's sacrifice we see the final revela
tion of what God is, that behind which there is
nothing in God ; so that the religion which rests
on that sacrifice rests on the ultimate truth ofthe
divine nature, and can never be shaken. Those
who are called receive the promise of the
'eternal' inheritance (ix. 15): not an earthly
Canaan, in which they are strangers and pilgrims,
and from which they may be exiled, but the
city which has the foundations, from which God's
people go no more out. And finally, the blood
of Christ is the blood of an ' eternal ' covenant
(xiii. 20), i.e. in the death of Christ a religious
relation is constituted between God and men
which has the character of finality. God, if it
may be so expressed, has spoken His last word;
He has nothing in reserve ; the foundation has
been laid of the kingdom which can never be
removed. It is this conception of absoluteness
or finality in everything Christian which domi
nates the book. The conception, of course, is
involved in all Christian experience, but to make

WESTCOTT ON HEBREWS 209
it as explicit as it is in this epistle does not
come naturally to every one. There are minds
to which a less reflective religion seems warmer
and more congenial : they miss in a writing like
this the intimacy and glow which pervade the
epistles of St. Paul. Those in whom theological
interest preponderates over religious may call
the Epistle to the Hebrews the high water-mark
of inspiration ; those whose religion makes them
averse to theology can call it the high water
mark of uninspired writing.
Speaking generally, the epistle may be said to
give a description of the Person and Work of
Christ as constituting the perfect religion for
men, and to define this religion in relation to the
ancient religion of the Jews as embodied in
the Tabernacle or Temple service. Curiously
enough, the Person and Work of Christ thus
interpreted have been looked at, so to speak,
from both ends. Some theologians, of whom
Westcott may be taken as a type, begin at the
beginning, or rather at chap. i. 3. They start
with the pre-existent, the eternal Son of God.
They point to what He essentially is — the bright
ness of the Father's glory and the express image
of His substance. They point to His providential
action — He bears or guides all things by the
word of His power. They point to the work He
did as incarnate — He made purgation of sins.
They point to the exaltation which followed —
O

210 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
He sat down on the right hand of the Majesty
in the Heavens. And then they draw the
general conclusion that what Christ did, accord
ing to the epistle, was to fulfil man's destiny
under the conditions of the fall. That destiny,
it is assumed, He would have fulfilled in any case.
The incarnation is part of the original plan of
the world ; only, in the peculiar circumstances of
the case in hand — that is, under the conditions
of the fall — the incarnation had to be modified
into an atonement This is one way of con
struing the writer's ideas. Another is repre
sented by writers like Seeberg, who begins, if one
may say so, at the end. The Christ of the
author is essentially Christ the High Priest, in
the heavenly sanctuary, mediating between God
and men, securing for sinful men access to God
and fellowship with Him. Christ exercises His
High Priestly function in heaven, but it rests
upon the death which He died on earth.
Though Seeberg does not include Christ's death
in His priestly ministry, he frankly admits that
His priestly ministry is based on His death, and
that but for His death He could not be a priest
at all. Hence his argument runs in exactly the
opposite direction from Westcott's. Christ is
essentially a priest, the work of bringing sinners
into fellowship with God is essentially the work
He has to do, and the work He does. It is in
that work alone that we know Him. But to do it

SEEBERG ON HEBREWS in
He had to die, and in order to die He had to have
a body prepared for Him, i.e. He had to become
incarnate (ch. x. 5). It is not the incarnation
which is taken for granted, and the atonement
which in the peculiar circumstances of man's case
is wrought into it or wrought out of it to meet an
emergency ; it is the actual fact of an atonement
and a reconciling priestly ministry which is made
the foundation of everything ; the incarnation is
defined solely by relation to it. The atonement,
and the priestly or reconciling ministry of Christ,
are the end, to which the incarnation is relative
as the means. That this last is the view of the
epistle and of the New Testament in general I
do not doubt : it is the only view which has an
experimental, as opposed to a speculative, basis;
and I venture to say that the other shifts the
centre of gravity in the New Testament so dis
astrously as to make great parts of it, and these
most vital parts, unintelligible. One could not
go to the New Testament with a more mislead
ing schematism in his mind than that which is
provided by the conception of the incarnation,
and its relation to the atonement, to which West
cott's influence has given currency in many
circles. But leaving this larger question on one
side, we may start with the fact that both schools
of interpreters meet in the middle, and find the
real content of the epistle, religious and theo
logical, in what it has to say of the historical

212 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Christ. And that, beyond a doubt, is concen
trated in what it has to say of His death. It
was with 'the suffering of death' in view that
He became incarnate ; it is because of 'the
suffering of death ' that He is crowned with that
glory and honour in which He appears in the
presence of God on our behalf. Here then we
come to our proper subject again, and may ask,
as in the case of St. Paul, in what relations the
death of Christ is defined by the writer so as to
bring out its meaning.
In the first place, it is defined by relation to
God, and especially, as in St. Paul, by relation
to His love. It is by the grace of God that
Jesus tastes death for every man (ii. 9). God is
not conceived in this epistle, or in any part of
the New Testament, as a malignant or hostile
being who has to-be won by gifts to show his
goodwill to man : whatever the death of Christ
is or does, it is and does in the carrying out of
His purpose. It is the grace of God to sinners
which is demonstrated in it. This is involved
also in two other ideas emphasised in the
epistle. One is the idea that no man takes the
honour of priesthood to himself of his own
motion : he must be called of God, as Aaron was
(v. 4). Christ has had this call ; we hear it in
the 110th Psalm, which He Himself applied to
Himself (Mark xii. 35 ff): 'Thou art a priest for
ever, after the order of Melchisedec' It is true

OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST 213
that the priest represents the people toward
God, but he can only do so by God's appoint
ment, and consequently it is a work of God
which he does, a gracious work, in which he is
not persuading God, as it were, against His will,
but on the contrary carrying out His will for the
good of men. The other idea used in the inter
pretation of Christ's work, and especially of His
death, which connects them in a similar way
with God, is the idea of obedience. Jesus,
though He were Son, yet learned obedience
through the things which He suffered (v. 8).
When He appeared in the body which God had
prepared for Him, it was with the words on His
lips, ' Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God ' (x. 7).
There is nothing in Christ's life and death of
irresponsibility or adventure. It is all obedience,
and therefore it is all revelation. We see God in
it because it is not His own will but the will of
the Father which it accomplished. Even when
we come to consider its relation to sin, this must
be borne in mind. Atonement is not something
contrived, as it were, behind the Father's back ;
it is the Father's way of making it possible for
the sinful to have fellowship with Him. The
author introduces one idea, not very easy to
define, in this connection. In speaking of the
actual course of Christ in life and death, he says,
'It became Him (errpeirev yap airm) for whom
are all things and through whom are all things,

214 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the
Captain of their salvation perfect through suffer
ings ' (ii. 10). What eirperrev suggests is not so
much the kind of necessity we have found in
other places in the New Testament as moral
congruity or decorum. Suffering and death are
our lot ; it is congruous with God's nature — we
can feel, so to speak, the moral propriety of it —
when He makes suffering and death the lot of
Him who is to be our Saviour. He would not
be perfect in the character or part of Saviour if
He did not have this experience. What this
suggests is the interpretation of Christ's death
by moral aesthetics rather than by moral law,
by a rule to be apprehended in feeling rather
than in conscience. It is moving and impressive,
this action in congruity with God's nature and
our state, whether we see a more inevitable
necessity for it or not. In all these ways, at all
events, the writer attaches Christ's death to the
grace, the will, and the character of God ; and in
all these ways, therefore, he warns us against
setting that death and God in any antagonism
to each other.
But besides defining it by relation to God, the
writer defines Christ's death also by relation to
sin. At the very beginning, in the sublime
sentence in which He introduces the Son, His
earthly work is summed up in the phrase : ' hav
ing made purgation of sins ' (i. 3). How this is

ONE SACRIFICE FOR SINS 215
done, he does not tell at this point, but the sequel
makes it indubitable. It was done by His
sacrificial death. So, again, he speaks of Christ
as being once offered to bear the sins of many
(ix. 28) ; as having been once manifested at the
end of the world to put away sin by the sacrifice
of Himself (ix. 26) ; as being a merciful and
faithful high priest in our relations to God to
make propitiation for the sins of the people
(ii. 17) ; as having offered one sacrifice for sins
for ever, and having perfected for ever by that
sacrifice those who are being sanctified (x. 12-14).
There is the same sacrificial conception in all the
references in the epistle to the blood of Christ.
He entered into the most holy place with (Bid)
His own blood (ix. 12). The blood of Christ shall
purge your conscience from dead works (ix. 14).
We have boldness to enter into the holiest in the
blood of Jesus (x. 19). His blood is the blood of
the covenant with which we are sanctified, and to
lapse from the Christian religion is to be guilty
of the inconceivable, the unpardonable sin, of
counting that blood a profane thing (x. 29). In
all these ways the death of Christ is defined as a
sacrificial death, or as a death having relation to
sin : the two things are one. It is quite possible
to lose ourselves here by trying to give to details
in the sacrificial language of the epistle an im
portance which they will not bear. The writer
refers to sacrifices of different kinds in his inter-

216 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
pretation of the death of Christ. Sometimes he
speaks of it in connection with the Old Testa
ment sin offerings ; at others in connection with
the covenant sacrifices at Sinai, on which the
ancient relation of God to His people was based ;
more than all, in connection with the annual
sacrifices on the great day of atonement, when
the earthly sanctuary was purged of its defile
ment, and the high priest entered into the most
holy place, representing and embodying Israel's
access to God and fellowship with Him. But no
emphasis is laid on the distinguishing features
of these various sacrifices : they are looked at
simply in the expiatory or atoning significance
which is common to them all. They represent a
divinely appointed way of dealing with sin, in
order that it may not bar fellowship with God ;
and the writer thinks of them broadly in this
light. I do not feel at liberty to belittle this, as
is sometimes done, and to say with Holtzmann
that the convincing power of the writer's argu
ments reaches precisely as far as our conviction
of the divine origin of the Mosaic cultus, of the
atoning power of sacrificial blood, and of the
typical significance of the sacrificial ritual ; the
tacit assumption being that in regard to all these
things rational conviction can reach but a very
little way. As we have seen already, the death
of Christ is defined by relation to sin in many
places in the New Testament where no use, at
least no explicit use, is made of sacrificial phrase-

PRIESTHOOD IN HEBREWS 217
ology. Such phraseology is not essential either
to reach or to express the truth held by Christian
faith as to the relation of Christ's death to sin.
Neither is it forced by the author of the epistle :
he only expresses by means of it, and that, as we
have seen, with the greatest freedom, the convic
tion of all New Testament Christians, that in
the death of Christ God has dealt effectually with
the world's sin for its removal. It is easy to dis
parage too lightly what Wellhausen has called
the pagan element in the religion of Israel ; but
it is probably truer to hold with this writer that
the sacrificial system had something in it which
trained the conscience and helped man to feel
and to express spiritual truths for which he had
no adequate articulate language.
Important, however, as his reference to sacrifice
may be, it is not so much through the idea of
sacrifice that we are initiated into the writer's
mind as through the idea of priesthood. Now
in relation to the priest the various conceptions
of sacrifice are unified ; the distinctions of sin
offerings, burnt offerings, peace offerings, and so
forth, disappear; sacrifice is reduced to this — it
is the characteristic function of the priest, the
indispensable means to the fulfilment of his
calling. A priest is the essential figure in religion
as it is conceived in the Epistle to the Hebrews ;
when the priesthood is changed there is neces
sarily also a change of law — the whole religious
constitution is altered (vii. 12); in other words.

218 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the priest determines what the religion is. Hence
if we wish to know what Christianity is, in which
Christ is priest, we must investigate the priest
hood as it is discharged by him.
yj The priest's function, speaking generally, is to
establish and to represent the fellowship of God
and man. That fellowship must exist, it must
be incorporated and made visible, in the priest's
own person ; and through his ministry it must
be put within reach of the people for whom he
acts as priest. Through his ministry they must
be put in a position to draw near to God them
selves, to worship, to have fellowship with God ;
in a word, to become God's people. If we ask
why a priest and a priestly work of mediation
are necessary, why men cannot immediately and
in their own right, as it were, draw near to God,
the answer is self-evident. It is because their
sin stands in the way, and cannot be ignored.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews, as everywhere in
the New Testament, sin is a problem, and the
burden of the book is that God has dealt with
the problem in a way answering to its magnitude.
He has instituted a priesthood to deal with it.
He has appointed His Son a priest with this
very end in view, that he should make propitia
tion for the sins of the people (ii. 17). If we ask
how this priest deals with sin in order to make
propitiation for it, the answer, as has already
been observed, is given in Old Testament terms.

THE PRIEST'S FUNCTIONS 219
He deals with it by the way of sacrifice. This
is the only method of propitiation, known to the
Old Testament, which is of a piece with the
idea of priesthood. It is irrelevant to argue, as
is sometimes done by persons who are anxious
that the grace of the gospel should not be abused,
that the Old Testament only provides for the
propitiation of certain kinds of sin, and these not
the more serious ; such thoughts are not present to
the writer's mind. Propitiation must be made for
sin, if sinful men are to have fellowship with God
at all ; the only propitiation known to scripture,
as made by a priest, is that which is made through
sacrifice (apart from shedding of blood there is
no remission, ix. 22) ; and the writer has no
conception beforehand of sins with, which the
priest and the sacrifice present to his mind are
unable to deal. He does recognise the possibility
that men may contemn the gospel altogether,
and even after they have known its power, may
trample under foot the blood of the covenant
with which they were sanctified, and so commit
a sin for which in the nature of the case there
can be no further propitiation — as he puts it, for
which there is no more a sacrifice in reserve
(x. 26); but that is another matter. His position,
speaking generally, is that in Christ and His
death we have a priest and a sacrifice capable
of dealing effectively with sin as the barrier
between God and man, and actually dealing with

220 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
it in such a way that in despite of it God has
a worshipping people among sinful men.
Can we, now, get any way under the surface
here? Sacrifice is not a familiar nor a self-
interpreting idea to us, whatever it may have
been to the author and to those whom he
addressed ; can we penetrate or explain it at all,
so as to make intelligible to ourselves any relation
which the death of Christ had to sin, or to the
will of God in regard to sin ?
Sometimes the attempt is made to do this by
looking immediately at the effect of Christ's work
in the souls of men, and deducing its relation to
sin, as a secondary thing, from this. The epistle,
of course, does not ignore the effect of Christ and
His sacrifice upon men : it has, indeed, a variety
of words to describe it. Sometimes the word
employed is dyid%uv (to sanctify). The priestly
Christ and His people are He who sanctifies,
and they who are sanctified (ii. 1 1). Christians
have been sanctified through the offering of
the body of Jesus Christ once for all (x. io).
By one offering He has perfected for ever
those who are being sanctified (x. 14). It was
Christ's object in dying to sanctify the people
through His own blood (xiii. 12). There has been
much discussion as to what sanctification in such
passages means, and especially as to whether
the word is to be taken in a religious or an
ethical sense. Probably the distinction would

SANCTIFICATION IN HEBREWS 221
not have been clear to the writer; but one thing
is certain, it is not to be taken in the sense of
Protestant theology. The people were sanctified,
not when they were raised to moral perfection —
a conception utterly strange to the New Testa
ment as to the old — but when, through the
annulling of their sin by sacrifice, they had been
constituted into a people of God, and in the
person of their representative had access to His
presence. The word dyid^etv, in short, in the
Epistle to the Hebrews, corresponds as nearly
as possible to the Pauline Bikuiovv ; the sancti
fication of the one writer is the justification of
the other ; and the irpoo-aymyt) or access to God,
which St. Paul emphasises as the primary bless
ing of justification (Rom. v. 2; Eph. ii. 18, iii. 12),
appears everywhere in Hebrews as the primary
religious act of 'drawing near' to God through
the great High Priest (iv. 16, vii. 19-25, x. 22).
It seems fair then to argue that the immediate
effect of Christ's death upon men is religious
rather than ethical ; in technical language, it
alters their relation to God, or is conceived as
doing so, rather than their character. Their
character, too, alters eventually, but it is on
the basis of that initial and primary religious
change ; the religious change is not a result of
the moral one, nor an unreal abstraction from it.
A similar result follows if we consider another
of the words used to explain the effect of Christ's

222 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
priestly and sacrificial work upon men — the word
reXeiovv, rendered ' to make perfect' It is widely
used in the epistle in other connections. Christ
Himself was made perfect through sufferings
(ii. io) ; that is, He was made all that a high
priest, or a captain of salvation, ought to be.
It does not mean that suffering cured Him of
moral faults ; but that apart from suffering and
what He learned in it He would not have been
completely fitted for His character of represent
ing, and succouring, mortal men. So again
when we read, the law made nothing perfect
(vii. 19) ; the meaning is, that under the ancient
religion of Israel nothing reached the ideal. The
sanctuary was a worldly or material sanctuary
(ix. 1); the priests were sinful mortal men, ever
passing on their unsatisfactory functions to their
successors (vii. 23) ; the sacrifices were of irra
tional creatures — the blood of bulls and goats,
which could never make the worshipper perfect
as touching the conscience (ix. 9) ; that is, they
could never completely lift the load from within,
and give him irapprjo-ia and joy in the presence
of God ; the access to the holiest of all was
not abiding; as represented in the High Priestly
ministry of the day of atonement, the way to
God was open only for a moment, and then shut
again (ix. 7 f). There was nothing perfect there,
nothing in that religious constitution which could
be described as reXeio.' or alcoviov. But with

PERFECTION IN HEBREWS 223
Christ, all this is changed. By one offering He
has perfected for ever those who are being
sanctified (x. 14). The word cannot mean that
He has made them sinless, in the sense of having
freed them completely from all the power of
sin, from every trace of its presence; it means
obviously that He has put them into the ideal
religious relation to God. Because of His one
offering, their sin no longer comes between them
and God in the very least ; it does not exclude
them from His presence or intimidate them ; they
come with boldness to the throne of grace; they
draw near with a true heart and in full assurance
of faith ; they have an ideal, an unimpeachable
standing before God as His people (iv. 16, x. 22).
In Pauline language, there is now no condem
nation ; instead of standing afar off, in fear and
trembling, they have access to the Father ; they
joy in God through the Lord Jesus Christ, through
whom they have received the atonement (Rom.
viii. 1, v. 2-1 1).
Once more, if we examine the passage in which
the verb Ka0ap%en> is used to express the result
of Christ's work in relation to man, we shall be
led to the same conclusion. It is in ix. 14, and
occurs in the sentence contrasting the efficacy
ofthe ancient sacrifices with that of the sacrifice
of Christ. ' For if the blood of goats and
bulls and ashes of a heifer sprinkling the defiled
sanctifies to the purification of the flesh, how

224 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
much more shall the blood of Christ, who
through eternal spirit offered Himself without
spot to God, purify your conscience from dead
works to serve the living God.' The Old Testa
ment sacrifices had an outward efficacy; they
removed such defilements as excluded a man
from the communion of Israel with God in its
national worship. The New Testament sacrifice
has an inward efficacy; it really reaches to the
conscience, and it puts the man in a position to
offer religious service (Xarpeveiv) to a living God.
In some way it neutralises or annuls sin so that
religious approach to God is possible in spite of it.
The examination of these words justifies us
in, drawing one conclusion. The writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews does not conceive of a
regenerating, or, in the modern sense ofthe term,
sanctifying, effect of Christ's death upon the soul
as immediate or primary. He does not conceive
it as directly emancipating the soul from sin, as
an immoral power operative in it ; nor does he
regard this experience of emancipation as the
only reality with which we have to deal. It is '
a reality, but it is an effect, and an effect to be
traced to a cause. That cause is not simply
Christ's death ; it is Christ's death as a reality
capable of being so interpreted as to yield the
rational explanation of such an effect. It is
often argued that the idea of an antecedent
relation of Christ's death to sin — antecedent,

CHRIST'S FINISHED WORK 225
that is, to the emancipation of the soul from
sin's power — is essentially unreal, nothing more
than the caput mortuum of this great experience.
This is certainly not the view of the writer to the
Hebrews. On the contrary, he has, like St. Paul
and others to whom reference has been, and will
yet be made, the conception of a finished work of
Christ, a work finished in His death, something
done in regard to sin once for all, whether any
given soul responds to it or not. As he puts it
at the beginning of the epistle, He made purga
tion of sins — the thing was done — before He sat
down at the right hand of the Majesty in the
Heavens. As he puts it later, He has offered one
sacrifice for sins for ever, and by the one offering
He has brought for ever into the perfect relation
to God those who are being sanctified. And
though the epistle does not use the once familiar
language about the risen Saviour pleading the
merits of His sacrifice, it does undoubtedly repre
sent this sacrifice, offered through eternal spirit,
as the basis on which the eternal priesthood of
Christ is exercised, and the sinner's access to
God assured. Now, a finished work of Christ
and an objective atonement are the same thing,
and the question once more presents itself: What
is it, in Christ's death, which gives it its atoning
power? Why is it that, on the ground of this
death, God, with whom evil cannot dwell, allows
sinners unimpeded, joyful, assured access to
p

226 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Himself, and constitutes them a people of His
own? It is possible to answer this question too
vaguely. It is too vague an answer when we
look away from Christ's death, and its specific
relation to sin, and emphasise broadly Christ's
identification of Himself with us as laying the
basis for our identification of ourselves with
Him, in which acceptance with God is secured.
No doubt the epistle does give prominence to
Christ's identification of Himself with those whose
priest He is to become. He who sanctifies and
they who are being sanctified — He who consti
tutes others into a people of God, and they who
are so constituted — are all of one (ii. ii). He is
not ashamed to call them brothers. He takes
their nature on Him, becoming with them a
partaker of flesh and blood (ii. 14). He takes
their experience to Himself, being tempted in
all things like as they are (iv. 15). Even in
death He does not stand aloof from them ; He
dies because they have to die ; He dies that
through death He may destroy him who has the
power of death, and free them who through fear
of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage
(ii. 14). But all this, not excepting the death
itself in this aspect, belongs, from the point of
view of the epistle, rather to the preparation
for priesthood than to the discharge of priestly
functions. The priest must undoubtedly be
kindred to the people for whom he acts; he

THROUGH ETERNAL SPIRIT 227
must know their nature and life ; he must
be taught by experience like theirs to have
compassion on the ignorant and erring; nay,
he must have sounded the tragic depths of
mortal fear if he is to bring weak, sinful,
dying men to God. All this Christ has done.
He has qualified Himself by the immeasurable
condescension of the Incarnation and the life in
the flesh to be all that a priest should be. But
when we come to the supreme act of His priest
hood, the offering of Himself to God in death, the
entering into the holiest of all through His own
blood, the question recurs : What is it which
gives this in particular its efficacy in regard to
sin? The one hint of an answer to this question
offered by the epistle itself is that which we
find in the words of ix. 14: 'Christ who through
eternal spirit offered Himself without spot to
God.' The sinlessness of Jesus entered into the
Atonement : only one who knew no sin could
take any responsibility in regard to it which
would create a new situation for sinners. But
more important even than this is the suggestion
contained in the words 'through eternal spirit'
This is not the same as through 'indissoluble
life' (vii. 16), as though the idea were that the
life offered to God on the Cross was one which
death could not hold, but was rather by death
'liberated' and 'made available' for others.
Neither is it the same as 'through His divine

228 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
nature,' as though the idea were that the divine
nature or the divine personality through which
Christ surrendered His human life to God gave
the sacrifice an immeasurable value. These are
forms of words rather than forms of thought, and
it is difficult to attach to them any intelligible
or realisable meaning. If we follow the line of
thought suggested by the use of ald>vio<; (eternal)
in other passages of the epistle, we shall rather
say that what is meant here is that Christ's
offering of Himself without spot to God had an
absolute or ideal character; it was something
beyond which nothing could be, or could be
conceived to be, as a response to God's mind
and requirements in relation to sin. It was
the final response, a spiritual response, to the
divine necessities of the situation. Something
of what is included in this may be suggested
by the contrast which is here drawn in the
epistle between Christ's offering of Himself
through eternal spirit and the sacrifices of the
Old Testament. As opposed to these, His
sacrifice was rational and voluntary, an intel
ligent and loving response to the holy and
gracious will of God, and to the terrible situa
tion of man. But what we wish to understand
is why the holy and gracious will of God, and
the terrible situation of man, demanded and
were satisfied by this particular response of
Christ's death, and not by anything else.

SIN AND DEATH AGAIN 229
So far as I can see, there is no explanation
of this whatever, unless we can assume that
the author shared the view of St. Paul and of
primitive Christianity generally, that sin and
death were so related to one another — were in
some sense, indeed, so completely one — that
no one could undertake the responsibility of
sin who did not at the same time submit to
death. As has been already said, it is not
necessary to suppose that this relation of sin
and death was established arbitrarily ; if it
existed for the human conscience, as part of
the actual order of the world, the situation
would be before us which required Christ to
die in order to take really upon Him our
responsibility in this relation. That it does
thus exist, the New Testament elsewhere, and
something in human experience as well, com
bine to prove ; and that the writer to the
Hebrews was conscious of this is shown by
the fact that he, like other New Testament
writers, makes the death of Christ the very
thing by which sin is annulled as a power
barring man's approach to God. His idea is
not that Christ by His death, or in virtue of
it, acts immediately upon the sinful soul, turn
ing it into a righteous one, and in that sense
annulling sin ; it is rather that sin is annulled
and, in its character as that which shuts man
out from God's presence and makes worship

230 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
impossible, ceases to be, through the once for
all accomplished sacrifice of Christ. And
though his dominant thought may be said to
be that Christ by His death removes sin, as
an obstacle standing in our path — bears it
away, so that it blocks our road to God no
longer — still He does not do this except by
dying; in other words, He bears sin away
because He bears it ; He removes the respon
sibility of it from us because He takes it upon
Himself. The connection of ideas which is here sug
gested is often controverted by appeal to the
passage at the beginning of the tenth chapter.
There the writer is contrasting the sacrifices of
the old covenant with that of the new. 'The
law,' he says, 'having a shadow of the good
things to come, not the very image of the things,
could never with the same sacrifices which they
offer year by year continually make perfect those
who draw near. Otherwise would they not have
ceased to be offered, owing to the worshippers,
having been once purged, having no longer
conscience of sins ? So far from this being the
case, sins are brought to mind in them year by
year. It is impossible for blood of bulls and
goats to remove them. Accordingly, at His
entrance into the world, He says, " Sacrifice and
offering Thou didst not desire, but a body didst
Thou prepare for me. In whole burnt offerings

REDEMPTIVE OBEDIENCE 231
and offerings for sin Thou hadst no pleasure."
Then I said, "Behold I come; in the volume of
the Book it is written concerning Me ; to do
Thy will, O God." Above, in saying " sacrifices
and offerings, and whole burnt offerings, and
offerings for sin Thou didst not desire nor take
pleasure in " — that is, God had no delight in
such sacrifices as are offered according to the
law — then His Word stands, " Lo, I come to do
Thy will." He removes the first to establish
the second.' This passage is often read as if it
signified that sacrifice was abolished in favour
of obedience, and the inference is drawn that
no use can be made of the conception of sacrifice
in the interpretation of Christ's death, or as it
is sometimes put, that no significance can be
assigned to His death which does not belong
equally to every part of His life. His obedience
is what atones, and His obedience is the same
from first to last. But to argue thus is to ignore
the very words with which the writer proceeds :
'in which will — that is, the will of God which
Christ came to do — we have been sanctified, i.e.
constituted a worshipping people of God, through
the offering ofthe body of Jesus Christ once for all.'
We cannot here, any more than in other passages
of the New Testament, make the original sense
of Old Testament words a key to their meaning
when they are quoted in the New. What is
contrasted in this passage is not sacrifice and

232 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
obedience, but sacrifice of dumb creatures, of
bulls and goats and such like, with sacrifice into
which obedience enters, the sacrifice of a rational
and spiritual being, which is not passive in death,
but in dying makes the will of God its own.
The will of God, with which we are here con
cerned, is not satisfied by an obedience which
comes short of death. For it is not merely the
preceptive will of God, His will that men should
do right and live according to His holy law,
which Christ came to fulfil; it is His gracious
will, a will which has it in view that sinful men
should be constituted into a people to Himself,
a will which has resolved that their sin should
be so dealt with as no longer to keep them at a
distance from Him ; a will, in short, that sinners
should find a standing in His sight. And in
that will we are sanctified, not merely by Christ's
fulfilment of the law of God as it is binding on
man in general, but by His fulfilment of the law
as it is binding on sinful men, by His obedient
suffering of death as that in which God's mind
in relation to sin finds its final expression: to
use the words of the writer himself, ' through the
offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.'
There is an ambiguity in saying that obedience
is the principle of the atonement, or its spiritual
principle, or that which gives the work of Christ
its value.1 It is no doubt true to say so, but
1 Cf. Non mors sed voluntas placuit sponte morientis (Bernard).

REDEMPTIVE OBEDIENCE 233
after we have said so the essential question
remains — that question the answer to which must
show whether, when we say ' obedience,' we have
seen any way into the secret of the Atonement :
viz. obedience to what? It is not enough to
say, Obedience -to the will of God ; for the will
of God is one thing when we think of man
abstractly, another when we think of man under
the definite conditions produced by sin. It is
one thing when we conceive of it as an impera
tive will, having relation only to man as God's
creature ; it is another when we conceive it as
a redeeming, restorative, gracious will, of which
the human race is in reality the object, not the
subject, the subject by whom the will is carried
out being Christ. In both cases, of course,
obedience, the free fulfilment of the divine will,
is that which has moral value. But just because,
in both cases, the attitude of the human will is
formally the same — just because we can say
'obedience,' whether we are thinking of God's
will generally, or thinking of it as a will specially
directed to the redemption of the sinful — just
for this reason it is inadequate, ambiguous, and
misleading to speak of obedience as the prin
ciple of the Atonement. Christ's obedience is
not merely that which is required of all men, it
is that which is required of a Redeemer ; and it
is its peculiar content, not the mere fact that
it is obedience, which constitutes it an atonement.

234 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
He had a moral vocation, of course ; but it was
not this — and this is all that obedience means —
which made Him a Redeemer: it was something
unique in 1 1 is vocation, something that pertained
to Him alone. Christ did not come into the
world to be a good man : it was not for this that
a body was prepared for Him. He came to be
a great High Priest, and the body was prepared
for Him that by the offering of it He might put
sinful men for ever into the perfect religious
relation to God.
In determining the meaning of obedience, and
of the will of God, in this passage, we touch the
quick of the great question about the relations of
Incarnation and Atonement. If we have read it
correctly, it confirms what has been already said
about the ideal priority of the latter. It is the
Atonement which explains the Incarnation : the
Incarnation takes place in order that the sin of
the world may be put away by the offering of
the body of Jesus Christ. The obedience of the
Incarnate One, like all obedience, has moral
value — that is, it has a value for Himself; but
its redemptive value, i.e. its value for us, belongs
to it not simply as obedience, but as obedience
to a will of God which requires the Redeemer
to take upon Himself in death the responsibility
of the sin of the world. That this is done
obediently implies that in dying the Son of God
acknowledges the justice of God in connecting

CHRIST AND HIS PEOPLE 235
death and sin, as they are connected for the
human conscience ; He does right, as it has been
put, by the divine law which is expressed in that
connection. And in doing so He does perfectly,
and therefore finally and once for all, something
through which sinful men can enter into fellow
ship with God. He lays the basis of the new
covenant ; He does what sinners can look to as
a finished work ; He makes an objective atone
ment for sin — exactly what St. Paul describes
as KaraXXayf] or reconciliation. There is peace
now between God and man ; we can draw near
to the Holy One.
The Epistle to the Hebrews does not make as
clear to us as the Pauline epistles how it is that
Christ's death becomes effective for men. The
author was not an evangelist so much as a
pastor, and it is not the initiation of Christianity
but its conservation with which he deals through
out. But the answer to the question is involved
in the conception of Christ as Priest. The priest
is a person who acts as the representative of a
people: he does something which it properly
falls to them to do, but which they cannot do
for themselves ; by God's grace he does it, and
on the strength of it they draw near to God.
The epistle lays great stress on the fact that
Christ has identified Himself with man ; in sub
stance, therefore, it may be said, His work must
be appropriated by men's identifying themselves

236 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
with Him. The writer never uses the Pauline
expression ' in Christ ' to express this identifica
tion or its result ; he has the vaguer conception of
being ' partakers of Christ,' fiiro^oi rov Xpicrrov,
which so far answers to it (iii. 14, cf. iii. 1, vi. 4,
xii. 8). Christ is not represented, as He is by
St. Paul, as the object of faith ; He is rather the
great exemplar of faith. Yet He is the object of
the Christian confession, both as apostle and
High Priest (iii. 1) ; it is to those who obey Him
that He is the author of eternal salvation (v. 9) ;
and He is the centre to which the eyes and
hearts of Christians are steadily directed. It
does not, therefore, exhaust the meaning of the
writer to say that He is our representative, and
that He does nothing for us which it is not for
us to do over again. It is true that He is our
representative ; but He not only acts in our
name, and in our interest ; in His action He
does something for us which we could never have
done for ourselves, and which does not need to
be done over again ; He achieves something
which we can look to as a finished work, and in
which we can find the basis of a sure confidence
toward God. He achieves, in short, ' purgation
of sins' (i. 3). This is the evangelical truth
which is covered by the word ' substitute,' and
which is not covered by the word ' representative';
and it is the consciousness of this truth that
makes the Evangelical Church sensitive and even

IDENTIFICATION WITH CHRIST 237
jealous of a too free and easy use of the ideas
that Christ becomes one with us in all things,
and we in all things one with Him. There is an
immense qualification to be made in this oneness
on both sides — Christ does not commit sin, and
we do not make atonement. The working in us
of the mind of Christ toward sin, which presum
ably is what is meant by our identification with
Him in His death, is not the making of atone
ment, nor the basis of our reconciliation to God ;
it is the fruit of the Atonement, which is Christ's
finished work. Seeberg's elaborate essay on the
death of Christ in Hebrews is an admirable illus
tration of the confusion which results from the
hazy use of words like 'identification,' Zusammen-
schluss, etc., or the idea (to call it an idea) that
Christ and the Christian are one person, and that
this is what makes access to God and forgive
ness of sins possible. It leads to expressions
like this : ' Forgiveness of sins therefore presup
poses that the life of him who has experience of
it comes to have the standing of a life which has
passed sinless through death.'1 The forgiveness
of sins may come to this in the end ; it may
beget a life which shares in Christ's victory over
sin and death ; but it is surely a subversion of
the very idea of forgiveness to say that it pre
supposes it. A life .that has passed sinless
through death, whatever else it may know, knows
1 Der Tod Christi, p. 92 f.

238 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
nothing of forgiveness ; and therefore forgive
ness, whatever it may be, is not a participation
in any part of such a life's experience, whether
by the method of ' identification ' or by any
other. Or again, from another side, the hazy
use of such language leads to utterances like
this : ' The thing Christ has done (die Leistung
Christi), though it has not been done by the
sinner, is yet a thing which he might or would
fain have done, and is therefore in principle his
doing.'1 This is not wrestling with mysteries, or
sounding great deeps ; it is trifling with words,
or trying to say Yes and No in the same breath.
Let the Passion of Christ draw us to the utmost
to share in His. mind toward God and toward sin,
and the fact remains that its power to do so is
dependent on the clear recognition of the truth
that Christ did something for us in His death
which we could not do for ourselves, and which
we do not need to do after Him. By His one
offering He put us for ever in the perfect relation
to God. This is the vital point in Christianity,
and to deny the debt to Christ at this point is
eventually to deny it altogether. The process
which starts with rejecting the objective Atone
ment — in other words, the finished work of
Christ and the eternal dependence on Him and
obligation to Him which this involves — has its
inevitable and natural issue in the denial that
1 Der Tod Christi, p. 99.

FAITH IN HEBREWS 239
Christ has any essential place in the Gospel.
We can only assent to such a view by renouncing
the New Testament as a whole.
Although faith is not defined in the epistle
directly by relation to Christ, it is nevertheless
faith which saves (x. 22, 38 f., xiii. 7), and the well-
known description or definition in the eleventh
chapter can easily be applied in the Christian
religion. Faith is there said to be the assurance
of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen
(xi. 1). It is to the invisible world what sight
is to the visible ; it is the means of realising it,
so that its powers and motives enter into the life
of men, and enable them after patient endurance
and fulfilment of God's will to inherit the pro
mises. What, then, Is the unseen world which is
realised by Christian faith? It is a world in
which Christ holds the central place, and in
which, in the virtue of that death in which He
made purgation of sins, He appears perpetually
in the presence of God on our behalf. It is a
world in which everything is dominated by the
figure of the great High Priest, at the right hand
of the Majesty in the Heavens, clothed in our
nature, compassionate to our infirmities, able to
save to the uttermost, sending timely succour to
those who are in peril, pleading our cause. It is
this which faith sees, this to which it clings as
the divine reality behind and beyond all that
passes, all that tries, daunts, or discourages the

240 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
soul ; it is this in which it finds the ens realis-
simum, the very truth of things, all that is meant
by God. It is holding fast to the eternal
realities revealed in Christ, and not some in
definable ' identification ' with Him, on which all
that is Christian depends. And it is this, more
than anything, which, in spite of differences of
form, makes the writer akin to St. Paul. For he
too builds everything on Jesus Christ, crucified
and exalted.

THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 241

CHAPTER V
THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS
By the Johannine writings are meant the Apoca
lypse and the fourth gospel, as well as the three
catholic epistles to which the name of John is
traditionally attached. It is not possible to
enter here into a review of the critical questions
connected with them, and especially into the
question of their authorship. The most recent
criticism, while it seems to bring the traditional
authorship into greater uncertainty, approaches
more nearly than was once common to the posi
tion of tradition in another respect : it ascribes
all these writings to the same locality, to pretty
much the same period, and to the same circle of
ideas and sympathies. This is a nearer approach
than would once have been thought probable to
ascribing them all to the same hand. When a
writer like Weizsacker concludes that the Apo
calypse and the fourth gospel have so many
points of contact that they must have come from
one school, while they are nevertheless so dis
tinct that they must have come from different
Q

242 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
hands,1 it is probably quite legitimate to treat
the two in connection, if not to regard them as
one. Thirty years ago it would have been un
critical to speak of them except as the extremest
opposites to each other. As for the connection
between the gospel and the epistles, or at least
the first epistle, with which alone we shall be
concerned, that seems to me indubitable. No
doubt there are differences between them, and a
difference touching closely on our subject — the
epistle, like all epistles in contrast with all
gospels, having more of what may be called
reflection upon Christ's death, or interpretation
of it, than the kindred gospel. But that does
not prove, as J. Reville argues,2 that they were
due to different hands ; it only proves that the
gospel, however much it may be subdued in
form to the style of the writer's own thoughts, is
true to its character as a gospel, and the epistle
to its character as an epistle. If these two books
cannot be ascribed to the same pen, literary
criticism is bankrupt. The whole of the Johan-
nine writings, it may be safely assumed, belongs
to the region of Asia Minor, to a school, let us
say, which had its headquarters in Ephesus, and
to the last quarter, or perhaps the last decade, of
the first century of our era.
The opening words of the Apocalypse carry
1 Das apostolischf ZeitaHer, p. 484.
a Le quatrieme Evangile, p. 51 ff.

THE APOCALYPSE 243
us at once to the heart of our subject. John
interweaves with the address of his book to the
seven churches a sudden doxology : ' To Him
that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins in His
blood, and He made us a kingdom, priests to His
God and Father, to Him be the glory and the
dominion for ever and ever ' (i. 5 f). What is
before his mind as he speaks is Christ in His
exaltation — the faithful witness, the firstborn
of the dead, the prince of the kings of the earth ;
but he cannot contemplate Him, nor think of
the grace and peace which he invokes on the
churches from Him, without recurring to the
great deed of Christ on which they ultimately
depend. Christ's love is permanent and un
changing, and John thinks of it as such (tco
dyarrwvri 17/ia?, to Him that loveth us) ; but the
great demonstration of it belongs to the past
(Kai Xvcravri T/ficis e« rcov dfiapricov r\p.a>v iv no
ai/jiari avrov). He does not say, ' who liberates
us from our sins,' as though a progressive purifi
cation were in view ; but ' who liberated us,'
pointing to a finished work. It seems to me
far the most probable interpretation of iv tg>
ai/j-ari to make iv represent the Hebrew 3 of
price : Christ's blood was the cost of our libera
tion, the ransom price which He paid. This
agrees with the word of our Lord Himself in the
Gospel about giving His life a ransom for many
(Matt. xx. 28), and with other passages in the

244 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Apocalypse in which the notion of ' buying ' a
people for God finds expression (v. 9, xiv. 3 f).
Sin, or rather sins, held men in bondage ; and
from this degrading servitude Christ purchased
their freedom at no less a cost than that of His
own life. It is not any undefined goodwill, it is
the love revealed in this dear-bought emancipa
tion of the sinful, which inspires the doxology,
'to Him that loveth us.' Redemption, it may be
said, springs from love, yet love is only a word
of which we do not know the meaning till it is
interpreted for us by redemption.1
The result of the liberty, bought by Christ's
blood, is that those who were once held by sin
are made a kingdom, even priests, to His God
and Father. These words are borrowed from the
fundamental promise of the Old Covenant in
Exodus xix. 6. ' He made us a kingdom ' does
not mean ' He made us kings' (so some MSS. and
A.V.). It means, ' He constituted us a people
over whom God reigns ' : the dignity conferred
on us is not that of sovereignty, but of citizen-
1 \o6aa.vTL (washed) is the reading familiar to us from the
Received Text and the Vulgate. It also, as well as \botum, has
analogies in the book : cf. vii. 14 and the Text. Rec. at xxii. 14;
and Bousset calls attention to the frequent mention of white robes
without any particular reference to the blood of Christ. The
sacrament of baptism made the figure of washing an obvious one
to Christians, quite apart from such suggestions as are given ty
Ps. 1. 4, Isa. i. 16, 18, and its influence is apparent in I Cor.
vi. II, Tit. ii. 14. On the whole, Xiaavri is much the better-
supported reading : for the meaning which would go with
\atmavTi Iv see below on vii. 14, p. 247.

THE LAMB SLAIN 245
ship. ' He made us priests ' means that in virtue
of His action we are constituted a worshipping
people of God ; on the ground of it we have
access to the Father. Both words together imply
that it is the action of Christ, who died for our
redemption, to which we owe our standing in
God's sight, and our whole relation to Him so far
as it is anything in which we can rejoice. All
dignity and all privilege rest on the fact that He
set us free from our sins at the cost of His blood.
A doxology is not the place at which to seek for
the rationale of anything, and we do not find the
rationale of these things here. It is the fact only
which is brought into view. The vision of Christ
calls out the whole contents of the Christian con
sciousness ; the Christian heart is sensible of all
it owes to Him, and sensible that it owes it all in
some way to His death.
Next in significance to this striking passage
come the frequent references in the Apocalypse
to the Lamb, and especially to the Lamb as it
had been slain. In all, this name occurs twenty-
nine times. The most important passages are
the following: (1) ch. v. 6-14. Here the Lamb
is represented as sovereign — the object of all
praise ; as a Lamb which had been sacrificed —
ia-cpaypivov means ' with the throat cut ' ; as living
and victorious — eart)Ko<; (standing). It has the
character which sacrifice confers, but it is alive ;
it is not dead, but it has the virtue of its death in

246 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
it. It is on the ground of this death, and of the
redemption (or purchase of men for God) effected
by it, that all praise is ascribed to the Lamb, and
the knowledge and .control of all providence put
into His Jiands. ' Worthy art Thou to take the
book and to open the seals of it, for Thou wast
slain and didst purchase to God by Thy blood' (eV
rio ai/ictTi o~ov) ' out of every tribe and tongue and
people and nation, and didst make them to our
God a kingdom and priests, and they shall reign
upon the earth.' Here we have the ideas of
i. 5 repeated, with the further thought that love
like that displayed in Christ's death for man's
redemption is worthy not only of all praise, but
of having all the future committed to its care.
It is really a pictorial way of sayingjihat redeem
ing love is the last reality in the universe, which
all praise must exalt, and to which everything
else must be subordinate. (2) The next passage
is that in vii. 14, about the martyrs in the Neronic
(or Domitianic ?) persecution. ' One of the elders
answered me, saying, These that are clothed in
the white robes, who are they, and whence did
they come ? and I said to Him, My Lord, Thou
knowest. And He said to me, These are they
that come out of the great tribulation, and they
washed their robes and made them white eV rm
a'ijjiari rov dpviov (in the blood of the Lamb).'
Here what is referred to is evidently the power
of Christ's death to sanctify men, though how it

THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB 247
is exercised we are not told. The people seen in
this vision, the endless procession coming out of
the great tribulation, were martyrs and confessors.
They had taken up their cross and followed Jesus
to the end. They had drunk of His cup, and
been baptized with His baptism. They had
resisted unto blood, striving against sins, and
now they were pure even as He was pure. But
the inspiration to all this, and the strength for it,
was not their own : they owed it to Him. They
washed their robes and made them white in the
blood of the Lamb ; it was the power of His
Passion, descending into their hearts, which
enabled them to do what they did. Once more,
the rationale is wanting. Some may feel that
none is needed — that the Cross acts immediately
in this way on those who are of the truth : none,
at all events, is given. We can only feel that the
Cross must have some divine meaning in it when
it exercises so overwhelming a constraint. (3)
The third passage has also a relation to martyr
dom, or at least to fidelity in a time of terrible
persecution. 'And they overcame him because
ofthe blood of the Lamb, and because of the word
of their testimony, and they loved not their life
unto death ' (xii. 11). It is implied in this that
but for the blood of the Lamb they would not
have been able to overcome ; the pressure put on
them would have been too great, and they would
inevitably have succumbed to it. But with a

248 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
motive behind them like the blood of the Lamb
they were invincible. Now nothing can be a
motive unless it has a meaning ; nothing can be a
motive in the line and in the sense implied here
unless it has a gracious meaning. To say that
they overcame, because of the blood of the Lamb,
is the same as to say that the love of Christ con
strained them. They dared not, with the Cross on
which He died for them before their eyes, betray
His cause by cowardice, and love their own
lives more than He had loved His. They must
be His, as He had been theirs. It is taken for
granted here that in the blood of the Lamb there
had been a great demonstration of love to them ;
in other words, that the death of Christ was
capable of being defined in such a way, in relation
to their necessities, as to bear this interpretation.
It is because it is an incomparable demonstration
of love that it is an irresistible motive. And
though the relation is not thought out nor defined
here — where it would have been utterly out of
place — it is not forcing the language in the least
to assume that it must have existed in fact for
the author.
There are two other passages which might be
brought into connection with our subject — xiii. 8,
and xxi. 27 — in which reference is made to 'the
Lamb's book of life.' In this book the names are
written of those who are to inherit life everlast
ing : those whose names are not found there die

THE LAMB'S BOOK OF LIFE 249
the second death. Nothing could express more
strongly the writer's conviction that there is no
salvation in any other than the Lamb : that in
Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the whole hope
of a sinful world. It is very common to take the
first of the two passages just quoted as though it
spoke of 'the Lamb slain from the foundation of
the world,' and to argue from it that atonement
is no afterthought, that redemption belongs to
the very being of God and the nature of things ;
but though these are expressions upon which
a Christian meaning can be put, they find no
support in this passage. The words 'from the
foundation of the world ' are not to be construed
with ' slain,' but with ' written,' as the parallel
passage proves ; it is the names of the redeemed
that stand from eternity in the Lamb's book of
life, not the death or sacrifice of the Lamb which
is carried back from Calvary and invested with
an eternal, as distinct from its historical, reality.
An apostle would probably have felt that the
historical reality was compromised by such a
conception, or that something was taken away
from its absolute significance. But even dis
counting this, it has no exegetic support1
1 The use of this text which is here rejected is found e.g. in
Contentio Veritatis, p. 298, where Mr. Inge writes : 'These [the
death and resurrection of Cnrist] are eternal acts, even as the
generation of the Son of God is an eternal act. They belong to
the unchangeable and ever-operating counsels of God. So it is
possible for the New Testament writers to say that the Lamb was
slain for us from the foundation of the world, and that the rock

250 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
If we try to put together the various lights
which the Apocalypse casts on the death of Jesus,
we may say: (i) That death is regarded as a
great demonstration of love (i. 5). (2) It is a
death which once for all has achieved something
— the aorists Xvaavri (i. 5)1 io-<pdyr]<; Kai rjyopa-
era? iv rco a'i/iari (v. 9), prove this. There is a
finished work in it (3) It is a death which
has an abiding power — dpviov eo? iacparyfiivov
(v. 6), not o-cpayev.1 (4) This abiding power is
exercised in this, that it enables men to be faith
ful to Christ under persecution, to suffer with
Him rather than sin, finally, rather to die than
sin (xii. 11). Christ Himself was a martyr, and
the typical Christian is a martyr too. To be
a martyr is to furnish the decisive proof that the
abiding power of Christ's blood is being exercised
over one's life. (5) Hence the blood of Christ
both does something once for all — in breaking
which followed the Israelites through the wilderness was Christ
The passion of Christ was itself (as the Greek Fathers called it) a
sacrament or mystery of an eternal truth ; it was the supreme
sacrament of human history ; the outward and visible sign of a
great supra-temporal fact' This point of view, whatever its
legitimacy or illegitimacy, is certainly much more characteristic
of the Greek Fathers than of the New Testament writers. To the
latter Christ is the equivalent of absolute spiritual reality. They
never raise the abstract question of the relation of time to eternity ;
and though the eternal import of the historical, in the life and
death of Jesus, is the foundation of all their thinking, they never
describe the Passion as the sacrament or symbol of any reality
beyond itself.
r Compare St. Paul's use of the perfect participle iaravpapAvaw,
I Cor. i. 23, 2 Cor. ii. 2, Gal. iii. 1.

THE FOURTH GOSPEL 251
the bond which sin holds us by, and bringing us
into such a relation to God that we are a people
of priests — and does something progressively, in
assuring our gradual assimilation to Jesus Christ
the faithful witness. In both respects the Chris
tian life is absolutely indebted to it ; without it,
it could neither begin nor go on. There is the
same experience, it may be said, of Christ's death,
the same practical appreciation of it, and the
same exultant and devout utterances of that
appreciation in the language of worship, which
we find in St. Paul ; but, as we might expect,
when the nature of the composition is taken into
account, we do not find any such dialectic treat
ment of this Christian experience, and of the
ideas it involves, as in the writings of the apostle
of the Gentiles.
We may now proceed to the examination of
the gospel. The general conception of the fourth
gospel is that what we owe to Christ is life,
eternal life ; and this life, it may further be said,
we owe to the Person rather than to anything
He does. This is true without any qualification
of the prologue (ch. i. 1-18), and it is true of the
gospel so far as the influence of the prologue can
be traced through it. If we use the word re
demption at all — and it occurs naturally to us as
we come from the Apocalypse — we must say that
redemption is conceived in the gospel as taking
place through revelation. Jesus redeems men, or

252 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
gives them life, by revealing to them the truth
about God. The revelation is made in His own
Person — by His words and deeds, no doubt, but
supremely by what He is. ' This is life eternal,
that they should know Thee, the only true God,
and Him whom Thou didst send, Jesus Christ'
(xvii. 3). The work of redemption, to borrow the
dogmatic category, is interpreted through the
prophetic office of Christ almost exclusively. It
is on this basis that the ordinary contrasts are
drawn between the theology of St. Paul and that
of the fourth gospel, and if we do not look too
closely they can be drawn in very broad lines ; to
change the figure, they can be put in epigram
matic and striking forms. Thus it may be said
that in St. John the great and fundamental idea is
revelation; God makes Himself known to men,
and in making Himself known He redeems them;
to see Him in His true nature is to be withdrawn
from the world of sin. In St. Paul, on the other
hand, revelation is through redemption. It is
because God in Jesus Christ takes the responsi
bilities of the sinful world upon Himself, so
reconciling the world to Himself, that we know
what He is : the relation of revelation and redemp
tion is reversed. It agrees with this, again, that as
Schultz has put it,1 in St. John the death of Jesus
1 Die Gottheit Christi, 447. * Also nicht als ein Einzelereigniss,
nicht in Beziehung auf das Gesetz, nicht als Opfer in gewbhnlichem
Sinne hat der Tod Christi seine Bedeutung (sc. in John). Nicht
urn des Todes willen ist das Fleisch Chtisti nothig gewesen, sondern
der Tod ist nothig gewesen um des Fleisches willen.

ST. JOHN AND ST. PAUL 253
only comes, though it comes inevitably, because
of the flesh ; the Word was made flesh, and
therefore must share the fate of all flesh, fulfil
the destiny of man by a perfect death as by
a perfect life. In St. Paul, on the contrary, it is
the death which is the primary thing; except
for the purpose of dying for man's redemp
tion Christ would never have been here in the
flesh at all. It agrees with this further, so it is
said, that whereas in St. Paul (as in the synoptic
gospels) the people in whom Jesus is most in
terested, and who are most interested in Him,
are the sinners who need redemption and whom
He died to redeem, in St. John the sinners have
practically disappeared, and the persons who
have an interest in Jesus are the relatively good
people who are prepared to appreciate the revela
tion He has brought. ' He that doeth the truth
cometh to the light ' (iii. 21). ' Every one that is
of the truth heareth My voice ' (xviii. 37). A
sentence like x. 26, 'Ye do not believe, because
ye are not of My sheep,' would, according to
Holtzmann, have been exactly reversed in the
synoptics ; it would have been, ' You are not
of My sheep, because you do not believe.' 1
The trick of such contrasts is easily learned,
but does not strike one as very valuable. It
depends for its plausibility on those genera
lities in which there is always some delusion
hidden. It depends in this case, for example,
1 Neut. Theologie, ii. p. 492.

254 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
on taking the somewhat abstract and speculative
standpoint of the prologue, and allowing that to
dominate the historical parts of the gospel. But
if we turn from the prologue to the gospel itself,
in which Jesus actually figures, and in which
His words and deeds are before us, we receive
a different impression. There is a great deal
which resists the speculative solvent supposed to
be contained in the Logos theory. There is, in
particular, a great deal bearing upon the death of
Christ and its significance, which goes to dis
credit those abstract contrasts which bave just
been illustrated. When we do take such a closer
look at the gospel, what do we find ?
We find that the death of Christ in a great
variety of ways comes to the front, as something
which is of peculiar significance for the evan
gelist (i) The first allusion to it is that which
is put into the lips of John the Baptist in i. 29 :
' Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the
sin of the world.' If these are not the words of
the Baptist, they are all the more the words of
the evangelist, and define his standpoint from
the outset. That they refer to the death of Jesus
does not seem to me open to question. Granting
that 6 aipcov rrjv dfiapriav rov Koo-fiov is rightly
rendered qui tollit or qui aufert peccatum mundi —
who takes away, not who takes on him, the sin
of the world — we have to take the subject of the
sentence into consideration, the Lamb. When

DESTROY THIS TEMPLE 255
sin is taken away by a lamb, it is taken away
sacrificially; it is borne off by being in some sense
— in the case of an unintelligent sacrifice, only
a figurative sense — borne. It is not too much to
say that the conception of Christ's death as a
sacrifice for sin, put thus, at the very beginning
of the gospel, into the lips of the great witness
to Jesus, is meant to convey decisively the evan
gelist's own conception of Jesus and His work. He
is here to put away sin — that sums up His voca
tion ; and He does not put it away by the method
of denunciation, like the Baptist, but by the sacri
ficial method, in which it has to be borne.1
(2) There is a further allusion to the death of
Jesus in ii. 19 : ' Destroy this temple, and in
three days I will build it up.' This, according to
the evangelist, He spoke concerning the temple
of His body. The evangelist's interpretation
has been treated with very little respect by
critics of all schools. It is not necessary to
defend it ; but I repeat, that if this is not what
Jesus meant, all the more must we recognise the
preoccupation of the evangelist himself with the
idea. He drags it in, we must believe, where it
is out of place, only because it is the centre of all
his thoughts about Jesus ; it is in it he instinc
tively seeks the key to anything mysterious in
the Master's words.
(3) The third reference is indisputable, though
1 On this passage, see Garvie in Expositor, May 1902, p. 375 f.

256 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the terms in which it is expressed may not be
free from ambiguity. It is that in ch. iii. 14 in
which Jesus is represented as comparing Himself
to the brazen serpent : ' Even so must the Son
of Man be lifted up.' The expression 'lifted up'
occurs in one or two other places, and the same
happy or unhappy ambiguity attaches to it in
all. Thus in ch. viii. 28 Jesus says to the Jews :
'When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then
shall ye know that I am He,' etc. In xii. 32 we
have: 'And I, if I be lifted up from the earth,
will draw all men to Myself.' Here the evan
gelist again has a note which has excited the
contempt of critics. 'This He said, indicating
by what kind of death He was to die' (xii. 33).
All that the Jews seem to have taken out of the
word was the idea of ' removal '; for they contrast
the inevitable ' uplifting ' of the Son of Man with
the ' abiding of the Christ for ever.' Here it is by
no means necessary to join in the common cen
sure of the evangelist. Where the 'uplifting' is
spoken of indefinitely, it may be conceived, pro
perly enough, to include the exaltation ; but
where it is spoken of as the act of the Jews
(viii. 28), and compared to the elevation of the
brazen serpent on a pole (iii. 14 f.), the allusion to
the Cross is unmistakable. There is, indeed, an
exact parallel to it in Ezra vi. 1 1 (R.V.), though
the word vifrovv is not used: 'Also I have made
a decree that whosoever shall alter this word,

THE SON OF MAN LIFTED UP 257
let timber be pulled down from his house, and
let him be lifted up and fastened thereon.' That
was the death which Jesus died, and to such a
death the evangelist understood Him to refer
when he used the word which he represents by
irty-ovv. The word had the advantage — for no
doubt it was counted an advantage — of carrying
a double meaning, of raising the mind at once
to the cross and to the heavenly throne. But
nothing is more characteristic of the writer, or of
Jesus as He is set before us in this gospel, than
the unification of these two things. They are
inseparable parts of the same whole. Hence the
peculiar use of the term ' glorify ' (e.g. ' Now is
the Son of Man glorified,' xiii. 31) to express
what happens to Christ in His death. There is
no conception of a humiliation in death followed
and rewarded by an exaltation ; on the contrary,
Christ is lifted up and ascends through His death :
His glory is revealed in that whole experience
which death initiates, and into which it enters,
more than in all His miracles. The mere fact
that words like v^(o0r)vai and 8o£ao-0f)vai are
the evangelist's chosen words to describe Christ's
death shows how thought had been preoccupied
with it, and how, the prologue notwithstanding,
the Christian soul felt itself here at the heart of
the revelation and of the redeeming power of
God. (4) The death of Christ is again alluded to, in
R

258 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
all probability, in chap, vi., and that in close con
nection with the life which is His supreme gift to
men ; He speaks there of His flesh, which He
will give for the life of the world, and of eating
the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of
Man (vi. 51-53). If it were possible, as I do not
think it is, to deny that there is any reference in
this chapter to the sacrament of the Lord's
Supper, it might be possible also to deny that
it contained any reference to Christ's death.
Verses like those just quoted would merely be
an enigmatic and defiant manner (such as we
frequently find at the close of a discussion in
the fourth gospel) of putting the general truth of
v. 57 : ' He that eateth Me, he it is who shall
live because of Me.' ' My flesh ' and ' My blood '
would in this case only be a more concrete and
pictorial ' Me'; there would not of necessity be
any reference to the death. But when we re
member the period at which the gospel came into
use, the sacramental allusion (see below, p. 276 ff),
both here and in the third chapter, seems to me
quite indisputable ; and this carries with it the
allusion to Christ's death as in some way or
other the life of the world.
(5) In the tenth chapter we again come upon
passages in which there is nothing equivocal. ' I
am the Good Shepherd : the Good Shepherd
layeth down His life for the sheep' (x. 11).
This, it might be said, is only an ideal way of

THE GOOD SHEPHERD 259
putting it ; it is what the Good Shepherd would
do if the situation emerged which required it.
But it is not put so by the evangelist. The
need has emerged, and the laying down of His
life with a view to its resumption is made the
sum and substance of the vocation of Jesus.
'Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I
lay down My life that I may take it again. No
one taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of My
self. I have authority to lay it down, and I have
authority to take it again. This commandment
have I received from My Father' (x. 17 f.).
Christ's death is not an incident of His life, it
is the aim of it. The laying down of His life
is not an accident in His career, it is His
vocation ; it is that in which the divine pur
pose of His life is revealed.
(6) A peculiar solemnity attaches in the gospel
to a sixth allusion to Christ's death, that which
is made in the unconscious prophecy of Caiaphas
A prophecy is that which a man speaks undcr
the impulse of the Holy Spirit, and the evangeli.-t
means us to understand that a divine authority
attaches for once to the words of this bad man.
' Being high priest that fateful year, he pro
phesied that Jesus was to die for the nation,
and not for the nation only, but also to gather
together in one the children of God who were
scattered abroad.' Some interest of the nation,
and this great interest of the family of God,

260 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
were conditioned by the death of Jesus, how
ever that death may be related to the ends it
was to achieve.
(7) In the twelfth chapter there are several
significant allusions. There is the corn of wheat
which, unless it fall into the ground and die,
abides alone, but if it die, bears much fruit
(xii. 24) — a similitude in which the influence of
Jesus is made to depend directly on His death ;
and in close connection with this there is the
anticipation of the near and awful future, the
shadow of which struck dark and cold upon the
Saviour's soul. ' Now is My soul troubled, and
what shall I say ? Father, save Me from this hour.
But for this cause came I unto this hour ' (xii. 27).
'This hour' is the great crisis in the life of Jesus,
the hour which no one could anticipate (vii. 30,
viii. 20), but from which, now that it has come,
He will not shrink. It has come, in the sense
already explained, as the hour in which the Son
of Man is to be glorified : the hour in which He
is to drink the cup which the Father gives Him
to drink, and to crown the work the Father has
given Him to do. The way in which He is
moved by it, shrinks from it, accepts it, reveals
the place it holds in His mind, and in that of the
evangelist also.
(8) Just as the Lamb of God at the beginning
of the gospel (i. 29) connected it with Isa. liii.,
so does the quotation in chap. xii. 38 give us the

THE GREATEST LOVE 261
same key to its interpretation at the end.
'Though He had done so many signs before
them, they did not believe on Him, that the
word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled
which he said : Lord, who hath believed our
report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord
revealed?' Taken alone, this passage could not
be made to bear any special reference to the
death of Christ or to its interpretation ; but
occurring as it does after the triple and unmis
takable references of the corn of wheat, the
dreaded hour, and the lifting up from the earth
(vv. 24, 27, 32), it seems to me rather probable
than otherwise that it is meant to bring before
the reader's mind, by a sufficient hint, the fifty-
third chapter of Isaiah, as the Old Testament,
and therefore the divine, solution of the mys
teriously disappointing career of Jesus.
(9) If this instance is reckoned doubtful, there
can be no doubt about the one in the fifteenth
chapter : ' Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends'
(xv. 13). It is characteristic of St. John, we are
told, as opposed to St. Paul, that in St. John Jesus
died for His friends ; St. Paul thinks of Him as
dying for His enemies (Rom. v. 10). It is an inept
remark. Jesus at the moment is speaking to His
friends, and about the supreme pledge of love He
is going to give them. In other places, St. John,
like St. Paul, represents Him as giving His flesh

262 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
'for the life of the world' (vi. 51), and lays stress
on the fact that it is God's love for the world,
in its all-inclusive yet individualising intensity,
which explains His ' lifting up ' (iii. 14). This is
the great thing on which they agree : the highest
revelation of love is made in the death of Jesus.
(10) A singular and striking allusion to His
death has been found in our Lord's intercessory
prayer : ' For their sakes I sanctify Myself that
they also may be sanctified in truth ' (xvii. 19).
The meaning of this will be considered presently.
And finally (11) there is the story of the
Passion itself. A peculiar significance attaching
to the death of Jesus is implied (a) by the fulness
with which the story is told ; (b) by the references
in it to the fulfilment of prophecy, which mean
that a divine purpose was being carried out by
it (xix. 24= Ps. xxii. 19 ; xix. 28 f. = Ps. lxix. 22 ;
xix. 36f. = Ex. xii. 46, Zech. xii. 10); and (c) by
the peculiarly emphatic attestation given to some
mysterious circumstances attendant on it, the
sense of which might have remained hidden from
us but for the interpretation of them provided
in the first epistle. ' One of the soldiers with
a spear pierced His side, and there came out
immediately blood and water. And he that hath
seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true,
and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye also
may believe. For these things took place that
the Scripture might be fulfilled : A bone of

ITS PLACE IN ST. JOHN 263
Him shall not be broken. And again, another
Scripture says : They shall look on Him whom
they pierced ' (xix. 36 f., cf. ist epistle, v. 6).
This series of passages has not been cited at
random, but to dissipate the impression which
many people have, and which some writers on
New Testament theology propagate, that the
death of Christ has no place in the fourth gospel
corresponding to that which it has elsewhere in
the New Testament. I think they are sufficient
to dissipate such an impression. No doubt there
is much in the fourth gospel which makes it
plausible to say, St. Paul deals with the work of
Christ, St. John with His person ; for St. Paul,
Christ only lives to die ; for St. John, He dies be
cause death is the only issue from life ; but such
contrasts do as much to mislead as to illumine.
As soon as we are past the prologue, into
the scenery of what Jesus actually said, did,
thought, feared, and suffered, we see that His
death really fills the place it does everywhere
in the New Testament, and has the same
decisive importance. Indeed, the constant com
plaint of commentators is that the evangelist
drags it in at inappropriate places, a complaint
which, so far as it is justified, only shows how
completely his mind was absorbed and domin
ated by the Cross.
But does this prominence of the death of Jesus
in the gospel throw any light upon its meaning?

264 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
Is it defined by St. John (or by Jesus) in any such
relations as by St. Paul ? Allowing for the fact
that the writer's mind is not of a dialectical turn
like that of St. Paul, but given rather to intuition
than to reflection — in other words, to the con
templation of results rather than of processes,
of ends rather than of means or conditions — we
must answer these questions in the affirmative.
In St. John, as in St Paul, Christ's death is set
in relation to the love and saving will of God.
' God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish, but have eternal life' (iii. 16).
Again, in St. John as in St. Paul, Christ's death is
related to His own love : ' Greater love hath no
man than this, that a man lay down his life for
his friends' (xv. ij). This is the favourite text
of Abaelard, quoted again and again as having
the whole secret of the atonement in it : every
thing, according to Abaelard, lies in this, that
there is love in Christ's death, with power in
it to evoke love, the response of love being the
whole experience of salvation. The more fully
Christ's love wins from us the answer of love, the
more fully are we justified and saved; that is
all.1 Without raising the question whether the
1 See Abaelard in Migne, vol. 178, p. 836 : ' Justior quoque, id
est amplius Dominum diligens, quisque fit post passionem Christi
quam ante, quia amplius in amorem accendit completum bene-
ficium quam speratum. Redemptio itaque nostra est ilia summa
in nobis per passionem Christi dilectio quae non solum a ser-

LOVE AND OBEDIENCE 265
act of Christ in laying down His life must not be
related in some real way to our real necessities
before it can either be or be conceived to be
an act of love at all, we may notice that its
character as connected with His love is again
emphasised in the allegory of the Good Shep
herd. The perfect freedom with which Christ
acts the shepherd's part, on to the final sacrifice
which it demands, is apparently the characteristic
of His work to which He attaches the greatest
importance. And it is so because it is through
the freeness with which the surrender of life
is made that the love which is its motive is
revealed. ' I lay down My life of Myself. No
one taketh it from Me. I have authority to lay
it down, and I have authority to take it again '
(x. 17 f.) This spontaneity on the part of Jesus,
when it is put in relation to the love of the Father
in giving the Son, appears as obedience. The
authority or liberty Fie has to lay down His life
and to take it again is a commandment He has
received from the Father. Equally with St. Paul
or with the writer to the Hebrews, St. John could
use the term * obedience ' to describe the whole
work of Christ ; but just as with them, with him
too it is loving obedience to a will of love, an
vitute peccati liberat, sed veram nobis libertatem filiorum Dei
acquirit, ut amore ejus potius quam timore cuncta impleamus, qui
nobis tantam exhibuit gratiam qua major inveniri ipso attestante
non potest.' He then refers to John xv. 13, Luke xii. 49,
Rom. v. 5.

266 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
attitude at once to God's purpose and to man's
need which makes the Passion the sublimest of
actions, and justifies the paradox of the gospel
that the Cross is a 'lifting up' or a glorifying
of Jesus.
It is possible, however, to go further in defining
the death of Christ in the fourth gospel. Pro
ceeding as it does from the love of the Father
and the Son, it is nevertheless not conceived as
arbitrary. It is free, but there is a rational
necessity for it. The Son of Man must be lifted
up if He is to save those who believe. The corn
of wheat must fall into the ground and die if it
is not to abide alone. Not much, indeed, is said
to explain this. The various ends secured by
Christ's death — the advantage of the flock for
which as the Good Shepherd He lays down His
life (x. ii), the eternal life of those who believe
in Him (iii. 14 f.), the rallying round Him as a
centre of the scattered children of God, so that
He becomes the head of a new humanity (xi. 52) :
these, no doubt, are all dependent upon it some
how ; but how, the evangelist is at no pains to
tell. But we do no violence to his thought when
we put this and that in the gospel together in
order to discern what he does not explicitly say.
Everything, we have seen, comes from the love
of God ; the death of Christ is to be construed
in harmony with this, not in any antagonism to
it. But the love of God to the world is never

ITS INTERPRETATION IN ST. JOHN 267
conceived in Scripture abstractly. It is not
manifested in some evolutionary process which
is necessarily determined d priori, as might be
hastily inferred from the prologue to the fourth
gospel ; to conceive it so would be to deny its
grace. It is conceived, practically, in relation
to definite needs of man which it meets; it is
manifested not on the analogy of natural forces,
which simply are what they are, but on the
analogy of the free actions of men, which are
determined by specific motives. To deny this is
to lose the living and gracious God of revelation,
and to take in His place a metaphysical phantom.
God so loved the world that He gave His only-
begotten Son. The giving of the Son at least
includes the giving of Him to that death which,
as we have seen, pervades the gospel from begin
ning to end ; indeed, the death is emphasised in
the immediate context (iii. 14 f). Nor are we left
without sufficiently clear hints as to the necessity
which determined the gift. In the passage just
referred to (iii. 16), we see that apart from it men
are lost; they perish, instead of having eternal
life. St. John's mind revolves round these ultimate
ideas, death and life, rather than their moral
equivalents or presuppositions, sin and righteous
ness ; but we cannot suppose that he did not
include in 'death' and 'life' all that we mean
by these latter words. That he did include all
this we see when the consequence of refusing the

268 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
gift of God is presented in the terrible word of
Jesus, ' If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall
die in your sins' (viii. 24) ; or when the evangelist
himself writes, ' He that believeth on the Son
hath eternal life ; he that disobeyeth the Son
shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on
him ' (iii. 36). The love of God, then, represented
in the gift of Christ, has in view, according to the
fourth gospel, the sin of the world, its exposure
to the Divine wrath, its perishing if left to itself;
and the gift in which that love is embodied, if it
is to be intelligently apprehended at all, must
also have a definite relation to this concrete case.
If it delivers men from perishing under the wrath
of God, and from the sin by which that wrath is
evoked, then an intelligible relation to sin and
to the divine wrath is implicit in the writer's
consciousness of it, whether he has given articu
late expression to such a relation or not. It is
quite legitimate here to emphasise such passages
as i. 29, where, as has been already shown,
a sacrificial deliverance from sin is represented
as the sum and substance of the gospel ; and
xx. 23, where the power which the Risen Lord
confers on His disciples in virtue of all that He
has achieved is a power connected with the for
giveness of sins. It may seem to some a less
obvious instance, but the striking word of Jesus
in xvii. 19 points in the same direction: 'For
their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may

CHRIST SANCTIFYING HIMSELF 269
be sanctified in truth.' What men needed was
to be sanctified, that is, to be consecrated to God.
It was not in their power — surely no reason can
be conceived for this but that which lies in their
sin — to consecrate themselves, and what they
were not able to do for themselves Christ did for
them in His own Person. He consecrated Him
self to God in His death. That the reference is
to His death does not seem open to question ;
the present tense, dyid^co, which suggests some
thing going on at the moment, and the circum
stances of the Speaker, whose mind is full of what
is at hand, put out of court the idea that the
word is intended to describe His life as a whole.
His life was past, and now, in His own Person,
through death, He is about to establish between
God and man a relation which men could never
have established for themselves, but into which
they can truly enter, and into which they will be
drawn once it is established by Him. This seems
to me the exact equivalent of the Pauline doctrine
that Christ dies our death that we may be drawn
into the fellowship of His death, and so put right
with God. He acts — 'I sanctify Myself; men
are acted on — ' that they also may be sanctified.'
He establishes the reconciliation ; they, to use
Pauline language, receive it (Rom. v. 11).
I have spoken of the gospel throughout as if
it expressed the mind of the writer rather than
that of the Subject. The necessity of such a con-

270 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
cession to the current criticism is shaken when
we pass to the epistle, for there we find the death
of Christ and its significance put in a light which
more imperatively recalls the other New Testa
ment epistles, and which differentiates this one
to a considerable extent from the gospel. The
contrast with the epistle on this very point is
one of the evidences that the gospel is truer to
its assumed historical position than many would
admit; it is not his own mind the writer wishes
to impart, but the mind of Christ ; and though
it is certainly by the same hand as the epistle,
he does not feel at liberty to say everything in
it that the epistle allows him to say.
For example, we frequently find in the epistle
explicitly stated, what we have as a rule to infer
in the gospel, the connection between the death
of Christ and sin. Thus in i. 7 : ' The blood of
Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin.1 In
ii. if.:' These things write I unto you, that ye sin
not. And if any one sin, we have an advocate with
the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He
Himself is a propitiation for our sins : and not for
ours only, but also for the whole world.' In ii. 12 :
' I write unto you, little children, because your
sins are forgiven you for His name's sake.' In
iii. 5 : ' Ye know that He was manifested to take
away sins.' In iv. 10 : ' Not that we loved God,
but that He loved us, and sent His Son a propi
tiation for our sins.' The whole Person and Work

THE CLEANSING BLOOD 271
of Christ, we see here, His whole manifestation in
the world, but in some signal way His death, are
set in relation to sin. It is characteristic of the
writer, here as in the gospel, that his interest is
in the end or result, the actual cleansing of the
soul from sin, its sanctification not in the sense of
1 Cor. vi. 1 1, or of Heb. x. 29, but in the sense of
modern Protestant theology. This sanctifica
tion is dependent on the death of Christ. If we
walk in the light as God is in the light, the blood
of Jesus His Son continuously and progressively
cleanses us from all sin : our sanctification is
gradually achieved under its influence (i. 7). It
is the removal of sin in this sense which is re
ferred to also in iii. 5 : ' He was manifested, that
He might put sins away.' It is by no means
necessary, for the understanding of the evangelist
here, that we should adopt the strange caprice
which fascinated Westcott, and distinguish with
him in the blood of Christ (1) His death, and (2)
His life ; or (1) His blood shed, and (2) His blood
offered; or (1) His life laid down, and (2) His
life liberated and made available for men.1 No
doubt these distinctions were meant to safeguard
a real religious interest : they were meant to
secure the truth that it is a living Saviour who
saves, and that He actually does save, from sin,
and that He does so in the last resort by the
1 See Westcott, The Epistles of St. John, p. 34 ff. Epistle
to the Hebrews, p. 293 ff.

272 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
communication of His own life ; but I venture to
say that a more groundless fancy never haunted
and troubled the interpretation of any part of
Scripture than that which is introduced by this
distinction into the Epistle to the Hebrews and
the First Epistle of John. The New Testament
writers, though they speak often of Christ's
death, never think of a dead Christ : their Christ
is One who became dead and is alive for evermore,
and in His immortal life the virtue of His death
is present. He did something when He died,
and that something He continues to make effec
tive for men in His Risen Life ; but there is no
meaning in saying that by His death His life —
as something other than His death — is 'liberated '
and 'made available' for men: on the contrary,
what makes His risen life significant and a sav
ing power for sinners is neither more nor less
than this, that His death is in it ; it is the life of
one who hy dying has dealt with the fatal neces
sities of man's situation, and in doing so has given
a supreme demonstration of His love.
This connection of ideas becomes apparent
when we notice that St. John uses a word akin to
St. Paul's lXao-rrjpi.ov in describing the relation of
Christ to sin. Jesus Christ the righteous, he
says, is the iXao-fioi for our sins (ii. 2); and
again, he says, God of His own accord loved
us, and sent His Son a propitiation for our
sins (iv. 10). It is impossible to suppose that

BLOOD AND PROPITIATION 273
St. John used this word in any other relations
than those in which it is found (or in which the
cognate terms are found) in Hebrews or in St.
Paul. The characteristic words of religion can
not be applied in new ways at will. Now the
idea of iXao-fib<} or propitiation is not an insulated
idea — indeed there cannot be any such thing.
It is part of a system of ideas, which we have
to reconstruct with the means at our disposal.
It is related, for one thing, to the idea of sin.
It is sin, according to the uniform teaching of
the New Testament, which creates the necessity
for it, and which is in some sense the object of it.
In other words, sin is the problem with which
iXao-fib<! deals. St. John agrees with all New
Testament writers in regarding sin as a problem.
It cannot simply be ignored or suppressed ;
something has to be done with it, and the
effective something (when its removal is in
view) has been done by Christ the iXacrfji,6<;.
Again, the idea of IXao-fib*} is related to the
ideas of sacrifice and intercession. When St.
John says that Jesus Christ the righteous is the
propitiation for our sins, this is implied. He
has spoken almost immediately before about the
blood of Jesus cleansing from all sin ; he speaks
further on with significant emphasis about His
coming in blood as well as in water (v. 6) ; and
he no doubt conceived Jesus as set forth, as
St. Paul has it (Rom. iii. 25), in His blood in
S

274 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
this propitiatory character. Further, the idea
of t'Xaoyid? by being related to sin is related
also to some divine law or order which sin has
violated, and which is acknowledged in its in
violable rights by the iXaa/j.6<;. This is what
is meant when the propitiation is described as
Jesus Christ the Righteous. All that is divine,
all the moral order of the world, all that we
mean by the Law of God, has right done by
it in the death of Christ. Sin, in that sense,
is neutralised by the propitiation, and if men
could enter into it, or if the benefit of it could
come to them, sin would no more be a barrier
to their fellowship with God. The propitiation
would draw them to God and put them right
with Him, and as it held their hearts more
closely it would more effectually and thoroughly
cleanse them from every taint of sin. The
power of sanctification is lodged in it as well
as the condition of the sinner's primary accept
ance with God. The first of these — the power
of sanctification — preponderates in the epistle;
but it would be as complete a negation of its
teaching, as of that of every New Testament
writing, to say that the second — the sinner's
acceptance with God — is dependent upon it.
The very reverse is the case. The sin of the
whole world has been atoned for, as the apostle
expressly asserts (ii. 2) ; and it is on the basis of
this work finished for all, and assumed to underlie

PROPITIATION AND LOVE 275
everything, that the progressive purification of
the Christian proceeds. It is the virtue of the
iXao-fios, in which all sin has been dealt with
for its removal, and dealt with according to the
realities of the divine law involved in the case,
which eventually effects sanctification.
Perhaps the most striking thing in the first
Epistle of St. John is the manner in which the
propitiation of Christ is related to the love of
God. The connection of the two things is, as
we have seen, universal in the New Testament.
No one could teach more emphatically than St.
Paul, for example, that it is to the love of God
we owe the presence of Jesus in the world and
His work for men. No one could contrast what
the love of God has done for us in Christ more
emphatically than St. Paul does with the utmost
which men will do from love for each other.
But St. John rises above all comparisons to an
absolute point of view at which propitiation and
love become ideas which explain each other,
and which have no adequate illustration apart
from each other. He not only defines the pro
pitiation by relation to love — God Himself loved
us and sent His Son a propitiation for our sins
(iv. 10); He defines love by relation to the
propitiation — in this have we come to know
what love is, that He laid down His life for
us (iii. 16). The emphasis in this last sentence
is on the expressly contrasted words iKelvos

276 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
vrrep rjfiatv. It is the contrast of what He is
and of what we are, of the sinless Son of God
and the sinful sons of men, in which the nerve
of the proposition lies. So far from finding
any kind of contrast between love and pro
pitiation, the apostle can convey no idea of love
to any one except by pointing to the propitia
tion — love is what is manifested there ; and he
can give no account of the propitiation but by
saying, Behold what manner of love. For him,
to say ' God is love ' is exactly the same as to
say 'God has in His Son made atonement for
the sin of the world.' If the propitiatory death
of Jesus is eliminated from the love of God, it
might be unfair to say that the love of God is
robbed of all meaning, but it is certainly robbed
of its apostolic meaning. It has no longer that
meaning which goes deeper than sin, sorrow,
and death, and which recreates life in the
adoring joy, wonder, and purity of the first
Epistle of St. John.
In speaking of the death of Christ, it would
not be just either to the gospel or to the
Epistle of St. John to ignore the place held in
both by the sacraments. That place has been
ignored by some and disputed by others ; but
if we realise the date at which both documents
were written, the place which the sacraments
had in Christian worship at the time, and the
inevitableness with which ordinary Christians

THE SACRAMENTS IN ST. JOHN 277
must have thought, and as we know did think,
of the sacraments when they read, it seems to
me indisputable. Baptism and the Lord's
Supper, it is no exaggeration to say, were full
in the writer's view at many points. He must
have thought of baptism when he wrote in the
third chapter of the gospel the words about
being born of water and spirit ; he must have
thought of the Supper as he wrote in the sixth
about eating the flesh of the Son of Man and
drinking His blood. I cannot doubt that he
thought of both when he told in xix. 34 of
the blood and water that issued from the
pierced side of Jesus, and again in the epistle
(v. 6 f.) urged that Jesus Christ came through
water and blood, adding, with unambiguous em
phasis, not in the water only, but in the water
and in the blood. The water and the blood
were always present in the church in the form
of the sacraments, and the evangelist uses the
sacraments here as witnesses to the historical
reality of the life and experiences of Jesus.
Christian baptism answers to His baptism ; the
Christian feast in which faith partakes of His
body and blood is a perpetual testimony to
His passion. It is in this last that St. John is
peculiarly interested as he writes the epistle.
There were teachers abroad, of whom Cerinthus
is a type, who preached a Christ that had
come in the water only, not in the blood. The

278 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
redeeming love and power of God, they held, had
descended on Jesus at His baptism, and been
with Him in His ministry of teaching and heal
ing: there is a divine reality in this, therefore,
on which we can depend. But they had with
drawn from Him before the Passion : there is
therefore no corresponding divine reality there.
It is against such a view that the apostle
makes the elaborate and emphatic protest of
v. 6 f. : ' not in the water only, but in the water
and in the blood.' To deny the divine reality
and saving significance of the Passion was to
rob the most sacred rite of the Christian religion
at once of its basis and its import; it was to
abolish the Lord's Supper. The apostle appeals
to the Lord's Supper against such a view. A
Christ who did not come by blood — a Christ
whose flesh was not the true meat and His
blood the true drink, as the celebration of the
Supper and the liturgical language used at it
implied — a Christ who did not by His death
bring life to men — was not the Christ known
to the faith and acknowledged in the worship
of the church. The sacraments, but especially
the sacrament of the Supper, are the strong
hold of the New Testament doctrine concerning
the death of Christ.
But there is another side to this. While the
apostle sees in the sacraments a testimony to
the historicity of the baptism and death of

THE SPIRIT IN ST. JOHN 279
Christ, and to the perpetual presence in the
church of the saving power of the Lord's
Passion, and while he insists upon their histor
icity as against those who denied that Jesus
Christ had come in flesh, and who made the
life on earth, and especially the death, phan
tasmal, so far as a revelation of God was con
cerned, he protests on the other hand against
those who would materialise the history. He
checks them at every point by introducing and
emphasising the Spirit. Thus in the gospel,
chap, iii., he speaks once of being born of
water and spirit, but from that point onward
the water is ignored : we hear of the Spirit
alone ; of its breathing where it will, of being
born of the Spirit, of every one who is so born.
So also in the sixth chapter, after using the
strongest language about eating the flesh and
drinking the blood of the Son of Man — language
in which enigmatic defiance to antipathetic
minds is carried to the furthest point — he pre
cludes all possibility of religious materialism
by the words : ' It is the Spirit which gives
life ; the flesh is of no use for this ; the words
that I have spoken to you are spirit and are
life' (vi. 63). Words and speech address man
on the spiritual side of his nature, and it is on
this side that everything included in Christ —
'he that eateth Mel He says — finds access to
us. And finally, in the epistle, after laying

280 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the stress we have seen on the water and the
blood, he concludes : ' And the Spirit is that
which beareth witness, for the Spirit is the
truth. For three are they that bear witness,
the Spirit and the water and the blood, and
the three agree in one.' In every case the
historical is asserted, but care is taken that it
shall not be materialised : a primacy is given
to the spiritual. On the other hand, there is
no such spiritualising as would leave to the
historical merely a position of vanishing or
relative importance. There is no sublimation
of Christianity into ' ethical ' or ' spiritual prin
ciples,' or into ' eternal facts,' which absolve us
from all obligation to a Saviour who came in
blood. Except through the historical, there is
no Christianity at all, but neither is there any
Christianity till the historical has been spiritually
comprehended. This is closely connected with our subject
Christianity is as real as the blood of Christ :
it is as real as the agony in the garden and the
death on the Cross. It is not less real than
this, nor more real ; it has no reality whatever
which is separable from these historical things.
Yet it is not in their mere externality, as events
in past time, that they establish Christianity or
save men from their sins. It is as their spiritual
meaning is recognised, and makes a spiritual
appeal to men, and awakes a spiritual response.

HISTORICAL AND SPIRITUAL 281
It is when that awful experience of Jesus is re
vealed as a propitiation of sins, an assumption
of our responsibilities by one who does right
by the eternal law which we have wronged,
and does it at this tremendous cost for us ; it
is then that the soul of man is reached by the
divine love, and through penitence and faith
drawn away from evil, and born again of God.
It is then that the blood of Jesus, God's Son,
cleanses from all sin. It is then that in His
death the Son of Man is glorified, and God is
glorified in Him.

282 THE DEATH OF CHRIST

CHAPTER VI
ITS IMPORTANCE IN PREACHING AND IN
THEOLOGY
If the series of studies which we have now
completed has reproduced with any adequacy
or accuracy the mind of the New Testament
writers, certain conclusions of importance may
fairly be deduced from it. One is that there
really is such a thing as the New Testament
There is, as we were disposed to assume, a real
and substantial unity of thought in the books
which we call by that name. They were not
written with a view to incorporation in a canon ;
to repeat the paradox referred to in the intro
duction, New Testament theology is the theology
of the Church at a time when as yet it had no
New Testament. But the New Testament books
have a unity, nevertheless, which is not external
or imposed, nor due to the accident of their
being approximately contemporary, but which
is inward, essential, and spiritual, and which
qualifies them to be canonical. Another con
clusion to which we are led is that the death of

THE UNITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 283
Christ is the central thing in the New Testa
ment, and in the Christian religion as the New
Testament understands it. And when we say
the death of Christ, we include, of course, the
significance which the New Testament ascribes
to it. Apart from that significance the death of
Christ has no more right to a place in religion
than the death of the penitent or the impenitent
thief. The Cross and the word of the Cross — the
Cross and the rationale of it in relation to the love
of God and the sin of Man — are for religion one
thing. This being so, it is apparent that both for
the propagation and for the scientific construction
of the Christian religion the death of Christ is of
supreme importance. Not that I should draw
too abstract a distinction. The propagation of
Christianity and its interpretation by intelli
gence — in other words, preaching and theology
— should never be divorced. At the vital point
they coincide. The simplest truth of the gospel
and the profoundest truth of theology must be
put in the same words — He bore our sins. If
our gospel does not inspire thought, and if our
theology does not inspire preaching, there is no
Christianity in either. Yet vitally related as
they are, there is a sufficiently clear distinction
between them, and in considering some conse
quences, for preaching and theology, of New
Testament teaching on Christ's death, it will be
convenient to take preaching first.

284 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
It is an immediate inference, then, from all
that we have seen in the New Testament, that
where there is no Atonement there is no gospel.
To preach the love of God out of relation to the
death of Christ — or to preach the love of God
in the death of Christ, but without being able to
relate it to sin — or to preach the forgiveness of
sins as the free gift of God's love, while the
death of Christ has no special significance as
signed to it — is not, if the New Testament is the
rule and standard of Christianity, to preach the
gospel at all. Many ministers have suffered
from the charge of not preaching the gospel,
and have resented it as an injustice. In any
given case it may quite well have been so.
There are those who are unable to separate form
from substance in thinking, and who are only
too ready to believe that if the familiar form in
which the truth has been expressed is varied,
the substance is being injured or dissipated.
But it is not saying a hard or unjust thing to
say that in some cases the charge may not be
groundless. It may be made not merely by the
unintelligent, who fail to distinguish form from
substance, but by the simple Christian spirit
which has the anointing from the Holy One, and
knows instinctively whether that by which it
lives is present in the message it hears or not
There is such a thing as preaching in which the
death of Christ has no place corresponding to

NO GOSPEL WITHOUT ATONEMENT 285
that which it has in the New Testament. There
is preaching in which the New Testament inter
pretation of Christ's death is ignored, or carped
at, or exploded. We do not need to argue that
no man can preach the gospel until he has
absorbed into his mind and heart the whole
significance of Christ's death as the New Testa
ment reveals it ; in that case, who could preach
at all? But it is not unjust to say that no man
will so preach as to leave the impression that
he has the Word of God behind him if he is
inwardly at war with the idea of atonement,
constantly engaged in minimising it, maintaining
an attitude of reserve, or even of self-defence, in
relation to it. We may take it or leave it, but
it is idle to attempt to propagate the Christian
religion on the basis and with the authority of
the New Testament, unless we have welcomed
it with our whole heart.
It is proper to remember in this connection
that very often it is the simplest expressions,
and those most open to abstract criticism, in
which the profoundest truth is most tellingly
expressed and most really apprehended ; and
that when this is the case, if we are compelled
to criticise, we should be careful that we do not
discredit the essential truth as well as the in
adequate form. It is easy, for instance, to criti
cise the insufficiency of any commercial figure,
like that of ' debt/ to exhibit the personal and

286 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
spiritual relations subsisting between man and
God ; yet Christ used this figure habitually,
and the whole impression which it makes upon
the conscience is sound. The words of the
revival hymn, 'Jesus paid it all, All to Him I
owe,' have the root of the matter in them ; and,
however inadequate they may be to the inter
pretation of Christ's work and of Christian
experience as a whole, they are infinitely truer
than the most balanced, considerate, or subtle
statement which denies them. Hence, whatever
the motive which prompts criticism of such forms,
we should be sensitive to the meaning they bear.
Even if we think they are morally inadequate,
and leave the new life unprovided for, we should
remember that in the New Testament the new
life is the immediate response to the very truth
which such forms convey. The new life springs
out of the sense of debt to Christ. The re
generating power of forgiveness depends upon
its cost : it is the knowledge that we have been
bought with a price which makes us cease to be
our own, and live for Him who so dearly bought
us. And we should remember also that it is
not always intellectual sensitiveness, nor care for
the moral interests involved, which sets the mind
to criticise statements of the Atonement. There
is such a thing as pride, the last form of which
is unwillingness to become debtor even to Christ
for forgiveness of sins ; and it is conceivable that

COMPLETENESS OF THE ATONEMENT 287
in any given case it may be this which makes
the words of the hymn stick in our throats. In
any case, I do not hesitate to say that the sense
of debt to Christ is the most profound and
pervasive of all emotions in the New Testament,
and that only a gospel which evokes this, as
the gospel of Atonement does, is true to the
primitive and normal Christian type.
Not only must Atonement by the death of
Christ be preached if we would preach the New
Testament gospel, but the characteristics of
the Atonement must be clearly reflected in the
preaching if justice is to be done to the gospel.
As the finished work of Christ the Atonement
is complete, and the perfection which belongs
to it belongs also to the new relation to God
into which we enter when the Atonement is
appropriated by faith. There is no condemna
tion to them that are in Christ Jesus. Their
relation to God is not determined now in the very
least by sin or law, it is determined by Christ
the propitiation and by faith. The position of
the believer is not that of one trembling at the
judgment seat, or of one for whom everything
remains somehow in a condition of suspense ; it
is that of one who has the assurance of a Divine
love which has gone deeper than all his sins, and
has taken on itself the responsibility of them,
and the responsibility of delivering him from
them. A relation to God in which sin has

288 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
nothing to say, but which is summed up in
Christ and His perfect Atonement for sin — in
John Wesley's words, full salvation now — is the
burden of the gospel. If it is not easy to believe
this or to preach it, it is because, as the heavens
are higher than the earth, so are God's thoughts
higher than our thoughts, and His ways than
our ways. In the New Testament itself there
is always something startling, something almost
incredible, which breaks again and again on the
soul with a sense of wonder, in the experience
of reconciliation through the death of Christ.
But it is this great gospel which is the gospel
to win souls — this message of a sin-bearing, sin-
expiating love, which pleads for acceptance, which
takes the whole responsibility of the sinner un
conditionally, with no preliminaries, if only he
abandon himself to it. Only the preaching of
full salvation now, as Wesley tells us — and who
knew better from experience than he ? — has any
promise in it of revival.
Further, preaching which would do justice
to the Atonement must hold out in the gospel
an assurance corresponding to the certainty of
Christ's death and to the sin -bearing love
demonstrated in it. Nothing is more character
istic of churches than their attitude to assurance,
and the place they give it in their preaching and
in their systems of doctrine. Speaking broadly,
we may say that in the Romish church it is

THE ATONEMENT AND ASSURANCE 289
regarded as essentially akin to presumption ; in
the Protestant churches it is a privilege or a
duty; but in the New Testament religion it is
simply a fact. This explains the joy which, side
by side with the sense of infinite obligation, is the ,
characteristic note of apostolic Christianity. The
great invincible certainty of the reconciling love
of God, which even when we were enemies made
peace for us, this underlies all things, embraces
all things, makes all things work together for
good to those who love God, makes us more
than conquerors in all things; take away the
certainty of it, and the New Testament temper
expires. Joy in this certainty is not presump
tion ; on the contrary, it is joy in the Lord, and
such joy is the Christian's strength. It is the
impulse and the hope of sanctification ; and to
deprecate it, and the assurance from which it
springs, is no true evangelical humility, but a
failure to believe in the infinite goodness of God
who in Christ removes our sins from us as far
as the east is from the west, and plants our life
in His eternal reconciling love. The New Testa
ment spirit is not meant for our despair, but for
our inspiration ; that assurance of sin-bearing
love, that sanctifying strength and gladness, are
the type of genuine Christian life.
We can understand and appreciate the motive
which, both in the Romish and in the Protestant
churches, has fostered in relation to assurance a
T

290 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
temper which is not that of the New Testament,
and which does not answer to the completeness
and certainty of Christ's finished work. The
motive is in both cases a desire to safeguard
moral interests and to put a check upon self-
deception. The Romish church safeguards moral
interests by making justification and the new
life identical : men are justified as, and only
in proportion as, they are actually and morally
renewed. The objection to this method is that
the security is too good. An absolute justifica
tion is needed to give the sinner a start. He
must have the certainty of 'no condemnation,1
of being, without reserve or drawback, right with
God through God's gracious act in Christ, before
he can begin to live the new life. As Chalmers
put it with magnificent simplicity, ' What could
I do if God did not justify the ungodly}' It is
not by denying the gospel outright, from the
very beginning, that we are to guard against the
possible abuse of it. In the Protestant churches,
on the other hand, the attempt to check pre
sumption and to safeguard moral interests was
usually made by laying stress on the proper kind
of faith. The German Pietists, in opposition to
a dead orthodoxy, in which faith had come to
mean no more than the formal recognition of
sound doctrine, spoke with emphasis of penitent
faith, living faith, true faith, obedient faith, and
so on. It is somewhat against qualifications like

THE ATONEMENT AND ASSURANCE 291
these that they are foreign to the New Testament
What they come to in practice is this : Before
the mercy of God in Christ the propitiation can
be available for you, O sinful man, you must have
a sufficient depth of penitence, a sufficiently
earnest desire for reconciliation and holiness,
a sufficient moral sincerity ; otherwise grace
would only minister to sin. But such qualifica
tions do infringe upon the graciousness of the
gospel — I mean on its absolute freeness — as
something to be explained out of the love
of God and the necessity, not the merits, of
men. Christ did not die for those who were
sufficiently penitent. He is the propitiation for
the whole world, and He bore the sins of all
that all might believe and receive through Him
repentance and remission. To try to take some
preliminary security for the sinner's future
morality before you make the gospel available
for him is not only to strike at the root of
assurance, it is to pay a very poor tribute to
the power of the gospel. The truth is, morality
is best guaranteed by Christ, and not by any
precautions we can take before Christ gets a
chance, or by any virtue that is in faith except
as it unites the soul to Him. Now the Christ
who is the object of faith is the Christ whose
death is the Atonement, and the faith which
takes hold of Christ as He is held out in the
gospel conducts, if we may use such a figure,

292 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the virtue of the Atonement into the heart. The
mercy of God which we welcome in it, and
welcome as the first and last of spiritual realities
with invincible assurance, is a mercy which has
deep in the heart of it God's judgment upon sin ;
and such a mercy, absolutely free as it is, and
able to evoke in sinful men a joy unspeakable
and full of glory, can never foster either im
morality or presumption. But when its certainty,
completeness, and freeness are so qualified or
disguised that assurance becomes suspect and
joy is quenched, the Christian religion has ceased
to be.1
There is one other characteristic of the Atone
ment which ought to be reflected in gospel
preaching as determined by it, and which may
for want of a better word be described as its
1 I venture to quote two sentences in illustration of this para
graph. Dr. Dale (Life, p. 666), who read Pusey's life 'with a
deep impression of the nobleness and massiveness of his nature,
and feeling more than ever that the power of God was with him,'
had nevertheless to add : ' The absence of joy in his religious life
was only the inevitable effect of his conception of God's method
of saving men ; in parting wiih the Lutheran truth concerning
justification (it might equally well be said with the New Testament
truth of Christ's finished work) he parted with the springs of
gladness.' It is in the same line that Dr. Fairbairn has said of
Pusey, that the sense of sin was ' more a matter for himself to
bear than for grace to remove' (Philosophy ofthe Christian
Religion, p. 333). The other sentence is from Chalmers, a great
nature who had an original experience of the New Testament
religion and often found original utterance for it : ' Regaled my
self with the solidity of the objective part of religion, and long to
enter a field of enlargement in preaching on the essential truths of
the gospel' (Life, by Hanna, vol. ii. p. 417).

FINALITY OF THE ATONEMENT 293
finality. Christ died for sins once for all, and the
man who believes in Christ and in His death has
his relation to God once for all determined not
by sin but by the Atonement. The sin for which
a Christian has daily to seek forgiveness is not
sin which annuls his acceptance with God, and
casts him back into the position of one who has
never had the assurance of the pardoning mercy
of God in Christ ; on the contrary, that assurance
ought to be the permanent element in his life.
The forgiveness of sins has to be received again
and again as sin emerges into act ; but when
the soul closes with Christ the propitiation, the
assurance of God's love is laid at the foundation
of its being once for all. It is not to isolated
acts it refers, but to the personality ; not to sins,
but to the sinner; not to the past only, in which
wrong has been done, but to time and eternity.
There will inevitably be in the Christian life
experiences of sinning and being forgiven, of
falling and being restored. But the grace which
forgives and restores is not some new thing, nor
is it conditioned in some new way. It is not
dependent upon penitence, or works, or merit
of ours; it is the same absolutely free grace
which meets us at the Cross. From first to
last, it is the blood of Jesus, God's Son, which
cleanses from sin. The daily pardon, the daily
cleansing, are but the daily virtue of that one
all-embracing act of mercy in which, while we

294 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
were yet sinners, we were reconciled to God by
the death of His Son.
To say that there is no gospel without Atone
ment, and that the characteristics of the Atone
ment must be impressed upon Christian preaching
and reflected in the completeness, assurance, and
joy of the Christian life which is the response
to it, does not mean that the preacher is always
to be expressly and formally engaged with the
death of Christ, nor does it determine in what
way that death in its redeeming significance is
to be presented to men. It is impossible to
forget the example of our Lord, though we are
bound to remember that what was natural and
inevitable before the Passion and the Resurrec
tion may not be either wise or natural now.
But looking to the gospels, we cannot but see
that our Lord allowed His disciples every oppor
tunity to become acquainted with Him, and to
grow into confidence in Him, before He began
to teach them about His death. He allowed
them to catch the impression of His Personality
before He initiated them into the mystery of His
Passion. As for outsiders, He seems not to have
spoken to them on the subject at all. Yet it
would be a mistake, as we have seen, to suppose
that the death of Jesus was not present — in His
mind and in His life — even where nothing was
said of it. The more we study the gospels, and
the more thoroughly we appreciate such incidents

OUR LORD'S METHOD 295
as the Baptism, the Temptation, and the Trans
figuration, with the heavenly voices attendant
on them— not to mention the occasions on which
His death rises even in early days to the surface
of our Lord's mind — the more we shall be
convinced that the sense and the power of it
pervade everything we know of Him. He lived
in the same spirit in which He died, and in a
true sense we are in contact with the Passion
and the Atonement whenever we are in contact
with the soul of Jesus. To preach the gospels,
therefore, it may be said, is to preach the gospel.
On the other hand we must remember, and
allow the remembrance its full weight as a direc
tory for teaching and preaching, that a time
came when Jesus set Himself deliberately, sys
tematically, and with unwearied reiteration to
bring home to His disciples the meaning of
His death. Everything conspires to make us
see how deeply it moved Him, and how deeply
He was concerned to have it apprehended by
the disciples as what it was. The very names
by which He names it — My baptism, My cup ;
the profound virtue He ascribes to it as a
ransom, and as the basis of a new covenant
between God and man ; the striking ordinances
of baptism and the supper which He associated
with it, and which in spite of intelligible yet
misconceived protests will guard its meaning
while the world stands ; all these separately, and

296 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
still more in combination, warn us that whatever
method may be prescribed in any given case'
by pedagogic considerations, it must not be one
which leaves it optional to us to give the death
of Christ a place in our gospel or not, as we
please. It is as certain as anything can be that
He meant us to be His debtors and to feel that
we are so. He meant to represent Himself as
the mediator between God and sinners, and to
evoke in sinners an infinite sense of obligation
to Himself as they realised that they had peace
with God. And it always comes to this in the
long-run, Men may come into contact with
Christ at different places ; they may approach Him
from all quarters of the compass, under various
impulses, yielding to a charm and constraint in
Him as manifold as the beatitudes or as the
gracious words and deeds of the gospel. But
if they are in dead earnest as He is, they will
come sooner or later to the strait gate ; and the
ultimate form the strait gate assumes — for it is
a gate that goes on straitening till the demand
for death is made as the price of life — is that to
which Jesus leads up His disciples in His last
lessons : are you willing to humble yourselves
so as to owe to Me, and to My death for you,
the forgiveness of sins and the life which is life
indeed? There is a straight line from every
point in the circumference of a circle to the
centre, and when we get to the quick of almost

KIERKEGAARD'S VIEW 297
anything in the relations of men to Jesus, it leads
with wonderful directness to this decisive point.
A striking passage from Kierkegaard's diary
may help to reconcile in our minds what seem
to be conflicting assertions : the one, that there
is no preaching of the gospel unless the Atone
ment is preached ; the other, which, as we have
seen, has a superficial support in the life and
practice of Jesus, that the Atonement is the last
thing in Christ to which the mind can be opened
or reconciled. In general, Kierkegaard says,1
the relation between God and man is represented
thus : Christ leads us to God ; man requires a
mediator in order to have access to the Father.
But this, he argues, is not how the New Testa
ment puts it Nor can this by any possibility
be the true way of putting it if, as he further
argues, our relation to God is to become con
tinually higher and more real ; for it can only
become such through a continual experience on
our part of being more deeply humbled in God's
presence. But there is no sense of being deeply
humbled in the first stages of our religion. We
begin, in short, with the Father, quite easily and
naturally, and without any mediator. This and
nothing else is the childlike way of beginning.
For the child nothing is too high ; he says Du
1 Aus den Tiefen der Reflexion : aus Sbren Kierkegaards
Tagebuchern 1833-1855 : aus dem Danischen Ubersetzt von
F. Venator.

298 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
to the Kaiser just as he does to his nurse, and
finds it perfectly intelligible and proper that God
should be his Father. It would have no meaning
to him if he heard a voice which said, ' No man
cometh unto the Father but by Me.' But as
soon as man has attained to a certain degree
of maturity, God's greatness or sublimity, moral
as well as metaphysical, becomes so overwhelm
ing to him that it is no longer natural or easy
to call him Father. There is something pre
sumptuous in it, or something quite unreal. Now
this sense of the relation between himself and
God, which grows upon man as his moral con
sciousness matures, is true, and there is that
which answers to it in the mind of God Himself.
Hence at this stage God points us to His Son,
the Mediator. ' It is written in the prophets,'
says Jesus (John vi. 45), ' And they shall all be
taught of God. Every one who has heard from
the Father and has learned comes to Me.' This
is the remedy for the presumption and unreality
just referred to. It is as though God said:
You must not assert or claim sonship in your
own right ; you must not take Fatherhood for
granted ; but through the Mediator I can be
your Father. This, however, is not all. The
Mediator also, like the Father at first, is apt
to be taken for granted with the assurance of
youth, if not of childhood. For the Mediator
is at first conceived as example ; it is in imita
tion of Him, in likeness to Him — to use the

KIERKEGAARD'S VIEW 299
phrase which is most popular in our own day,
and is charged to the full with this unreflecting
youthful assurance, it is in self- identification with
Him — that we must realise the Fatherhood of
God. There is an amiable youthfulness, says
Kierkegaard, the token of which is that it finds
nothing too high for it. It seems to it quite
natural and becoming that it should have such
an infinitely lofty example as Jesus, the Son of
God ; among its amiable illusions is to be
counted a pious conviction that it is within its
power to attain to this example ; it takes for
granted that the example and he who is striding
to follow it are in such a sense of one kind that
nothing can really come between them. But
once more, as the moral consciousness matures,
a change comes. The example towers to such
a height before man's eyes — the sinless Son of
God is so remote and inaccessible in His sinless
ness and sonship — that man can no longer think
of imitating it, or of trying to do so, in the
independent style of good comradeship. He
cannot take it for granted that he can make
himself what Christ is: that he can 'identify'
himself with Christ offhand, simply because he
wants to do so. And Christ, too, is of this
opinion; it is another and a more dependent
relation, with a deeper sense of obligation in it,
which He requires from His followers. The
example has another side, of which amiable
and aspiring youth is at first ignorant : He is

300 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
also the Reconciler. This it is which brings us
to the point. Partly, Kierkegaard argues, there
is a stage in life — the stage of amiable and
aspiring youth — which is without the moral cate
gories necessary for appreciating the example;
it does not see, feel, nor understand how Christ
transcends all that it is, and how He must in
some profound way be of another as well as of
the same nature ; partly, he thinks, it has an
illusory conception of its own powers, and of
what it is in it to be. But whatever the reason,
the fact remains ; experience reveals to one who
is trying to imitate Jesus, or to identify himself
with Him, that he needs reconciliation first : he
must become debtor to Jesus for this one thing
needful before he can have a sound start in
the filial life. He must owe it to Christ as
Reconciler, and owe it from the very beginning,
if he is ever to stand in the relation of a son
to the Father. He may think at first that he
can identify himself with the Son of God at
any point over the whole area of his life, but
he discovers experimentally that this is not so.
He finds out in a way surer than any logical
demonstration that Christ is in the last resort
as inaccessible to him as the God to whom he
would draw near by imitating Christ, and that
the only hope he has of getting to God in this
way depends upon Christ's making Himself one
with him in that responsibility for sin which

•FIRST OF ALL' 301
separates him from the Father. His one point
of contact with Christ, when his whole situation
is seriously taken, is Christ's character as a pro
pitiation for sin ; and sooner or later he is driven
in upon that.
The type of experience here described may
be common enough in Christian lands, but what,
it may be asked, is its relation to such a practice
as St. Paul describes in 1 Cor. xv. 3 : ' I delivered
unto you first of all that which I also received,
that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures?' Is this consistent with what has
just been said, or with what we have seen of our
Lord's method of teaching ? Is there a rule in
it for all evangelistic preaching?
St. Paul's expression, iv 7rpd>roi<;, is not quite
so pointed as 'first of all.' It is certainly to
be taken, however, in a temporal sense : among
the first things the apostle transmitted to the
Corinthians were the fundamental facts of the
Christian religion, the death and resurrection of
Jesus in the significance which belonged to them
' according to the Scriptures,' that is, in the light
of the earlier revelation. And among these first
things the death of Christ in its relation to sin
had a foremost place. It is, I think, a fair
inference from this that in preaching the gospel
the main appeal is to be made to the conscience,
and that it cannot be made too soon, too urgently,
too desperately, or too hopefully. It is because

302 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the Atonement is at once the revelation of sin
and the redemption from sin, that it must inspire
everything in preaching which is to bring home
to the conscience either conviction of sin or
the hope and assurance of deliverance from it.
'Eternity,' Halyburton said, 'is wrapt up in
every truth of religion ' ; the Atonement, it
is not too much to say, is wrapt up in every
truth of the Christian religion, and should be
sensible through every word of the Christian
preacher. In this sense at least it must be
delivered iv irparrow. We may begin as wisely
as we please with those who have a prejudice
against it, or whose conscience is asleep, or who
have much to learn both about Christ and about
themselves before they will consent to look at
such a gospel, to say nothing of abandoning
themselves to it ; but if we do not begin with
something which is essentially related to the
Atonement, presupposing it or presupposed by
it or involved in it, something which leads in
evitably, though it may be by an indirect and
unsuspected route, to the Lamb of God that
taketh away the sin of the world, we have not
begun to the gospel at all. This may seem a
hard saying to those who have listened to weari
ness to the repetition of orthodox formulae on
this subject, and have realised that even under
the New Covenant there are conditions which
compel us to say, The letter killeth. But it is

THE SENSE OF SIN 303
not because the formulae are orthodox that they
weary, it is because they are formal ; the vital
interest of the great realities which they enshrine
has slipped from an unbelieving grasp, and left
the preacher with nothing to deliver but words.
A fresh realisation of the truth which they
embody would bring new words or put new life
into the old ; and in any case the fact remains
that there is nothing which is so urgently and
immediately wanted by sinful men, nothing which
strikes so deep into the heart, which answers so
completely to its need, and binds it so irrevocably
and with such a sense of obligation to God, as
the atoning death of Jesus; Implicit or ex
plicit, it is the Alpha and Omega of Christian
preaching. Most preachers in any sympathy with this line
of thought have deplored in the present or the
last generation the decay of the sense of sin.1
Now, the Atonement is addressed to the sense of
sin. It presupposes the bad conscience. Where
there is no such thing, it is like a lever without
a fulcrum ; great as its power might be, it is
actually powerless, and often provokes resent
ment. The phenomenon is a curious one, and
though it cannot be permanent, it calls for
explanation. Possibly the explanation is partly
to be found in the circumstance that the Atone-
1 For a typical illustration, see Dale's Christian Doctrine,
pp. 251 ff.

3o4 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
ment itself was once preached too much as
though it had relation only to the past, and had
no assurance or guarantee in it for man's future.
It contained the forgiveness of sins, but not the
new life. Where this was the case we can under
stand that it ceased to be interesting to those
whose hearts were set on holiness. We can
understand how Bushnell could speak of the
forgiveness of sins as ' only a kind of formality,
or verbal discharge, that carries practically no dis
charge at all.' But it is not easy to understand how
this could be brought into any kind of relation to
the New Testament. There, as we have seen, the
forgiveness of sins, and the Atonement which is its
ground, are no formality. They are the supreme
miracle of revelation, the hardest, most incredible,
most wonderful work of the God who alone does
wondrous things ; the whole promise and potency
of the new life are to be found in them alone.
The Atonement, or God's justification of the un
godly, which takes effect with the acceptance
of the Atonement, regenerates, and there is no
regeneration besides. But while a defective
appreciation of the New Testament may have
done something to discredit the Atonement,
and to make men think of forgiveness, and of
the sense of sin which demands it, as alike
'formalities' in contrast with actual sanctifica
tion, the deadening of conscience is probably
to be traced on the whole to other causes. It

THE SENSE OF SIN 305
is due in great part to the dominance in the
mind for the last forty or fifty years of the
categories of natural science, and especially of
a naturalistic theory of evolution. All things
have been ' naturalised,' if we may so speak ;
the spiritual being no longer retains, in the
common consciousness, his irreducible individu
ality ; he has lapsed to some extent into the
vast continuity of the universe. Even to speak
of the individual is to use language which is
largely unreal, and with individuality individual
responsibility has lost credit. It is the race
which lives, and it is the qualities and defects of
the race which are exhibited in what we call the
virtues and vices of men. When we look at the
lives of others, the last thing we now think of
is the responsibility which attaches to each of
them for being what he is ; and it is apt to be the
last thing also which we think of when we look
at ourselves. Heredity and environment — these
are the dominant realities in our minds ; and so
inevitable, so importunate is their pressure, that
what was once known as freedom passes out of
view. We are afraid to speak as the Bible speaks
about personal responsibility — we are afraid to
say the tremendous things it says about sin and
sinful men — both because we would not be unjust
to others, and because we wish to be considerate
to ourselves. For the same reason we are afraid
to give that decisive importance to the atoning
u

306 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
death of Christ which it carries in the New
Testament. But of one thing we may be cer
tain : sooner or later there will be a reaction
against this mental condition. When our sense
of the unity of the race in itself, and of its
unity with the ' nature ' which is the theatre of
its history, has done its work — when the social
conscience has been quickened — when the feeling
of corporate responsibility has attained adequate
intensity, so that the duties of society to the
individual shall be no longer overlooked, the
responsibility of the individual will come back
in new strength. The naturalistic view of the
world cannot permanently suppress the moral
one. Even while it has seemed to threaten it,
it has been preparing for its revival in a more
profound and adequate form. The sense of
personal responsibility, when it does come back,
will be less confined, more far-reaching and mys
terious ; it will be more than ever such a sense
of responsibility as will make the doctrine of
a divine atonement for sin necessary, credible,
and welcome.
Meanwhile, surely, the preaching of the Atone
ment has something to do with producing the very
state of mind on which its reception depends. It
is the highest truth of revelation ; and the highest
truth is like the highest poetry — it has to generate
the intellectual and moral atmosphere in which
alone it can be appreciated and taken to the heart

THE SENSE OF SIN 307
To say that there is no sense of sin, or that the
sense of sin is defective, is only to say in other
words that there is no repentance, or no adequate
repentance ; no returning of the mind upon itself
deeply enough, humbly enough, tenderly and
hopefully enough, to have any healing or restor
ing effect. But how is this spiritual condition to
be altered ? What is the cure for it ? There are
those who cannot be convinced that any cure is
necessary. In spite of all Christian confession
to the contrary, they cling to the idea that such a
returning of the mind upon itself as would con
stitute repentance unto life and be the proper
condition of pardon and acceptance with God, is
an experience which the sinful soul can produce
out of its own resources, and clothed in which it
can come hopefully to meet God. But true repent
ance — that is, repentance which is not self-centred,
but which realises that sin is something in which
God has an interest as well as we ; repentance
which is not merely a remorseful or apathetic or
despairing regret, but a hopeful, healing, sancti
fying sorrow — such repentance is born of the
knowledge of God, and of what God has done
for us in our sins. It is not a preliminary to
the Atonement, nor a substitute for it, nor a way
in which we can be reconciled to God without
being indebted to it ; it is its fruit. It is born at
the Cross where we see sin put away, not by our
own regret, however sincere and profound, but by

308 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
the love of God in the Passion of His dear Son.
Hence we lose the only chance of seeing it, and
of seeing in its true intensity the sense of indi
vidual responsibility which is part and parcel of
it, if we give the Atonement anything less than
the central place in our preaching. No one is
really saved from sin until he has in relation to it
that mind which Christ had when He bore our
sins in His own body on the tree. And no motive
is potent enough to generate that mind in sinful
men but the love with which Christ loved us
when He so gave Himself for us. It is true to
say that the Atonement presupposes conscience
and appeals to it, but it is truer still to say that
of all powers in the world it is the supreme
power for creating and deepening conscience.
One remembers again and again the story of
the first Moravian missionaries to Greenland,
who, after twenty years of fruitless toil in
indirect approaches to the savage mind, found
it suddenly responsive to the appeal of the
Cross. Probably St. Paul made no mistake when
he delivered to the Corinthians iv wptarot? the
message of the Atonement. No one can tell how
near conscience is to the surface, or how quickly
in any man it may respond to the appeal. We
might have thought that in Corinth much pre
liminary sapping and mining would have been
requisite before the appeal could be made with
any prospect of success; but St. Paul judged

THE SENSE OF SIN 309
otherwise, and preached from the very outset the
great hope of the gospel, by which conscience is
at once evoked and redeemed. We might think
that in a Christian country conscience would
be nearer the surface, more susceptible, more
conscious of its needs, more quickly responsive
to the appeal of the atonement ; and if we do not
always find it so, it is only, as St. Paul himself
puts it, because all men have not faith. We
cannot get behind this melancholy fact, and give
the rationale of what is in itself irrational. Yet
all experience shows that the gospel wins by its
magnitude, and that the true method for the
evangelist is to put the great things in the fore
front. If this is not the way to the conscience,
this sublime demonstration of the love of God in
Christ, in which our responsibility as sinful men
is taken by Him in all its dreadful reality and
made His own, what is ? In what, if not in this,
can we find the means of appealing to all men,
and to that which is deepest in all ?
One other characteristic ought to distinguish
evangelical preaching, as preaching determined
by the Atonement: it ought to have a deep
impression of the absoluteness of the issues in
faith and unbelief, or let us say in the acceptance
or rejection of the reconciliation. In one way, it
may be said, this is always the note of religion.
It is a form of the absolute consciousness, and
deals not with a sliding scale but with the blank,

310 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
unqualified antithesis of life or death, weal or
woe, salvation or perdition, heaven or hell. This
is true, yet of no religion is it more emphatically
true than of that which is exhibited in the New
Testament. It is a life and death matter we are
concerned with when we come face to face with
Christ and with what He has done for us. It is
quite possible to preach with earnestness, and
even with persuasiveness, from another stand
point. It is quite possible to have a very sincere
admiration for goodness, and a very sincere desire
to be better men than we are and to see others
better; it is quite possible even to see the charm
and beauty of Christ's goodness, and to commend
it in the most winning way to men, and yet to
want in preaching the very note which is char
acteristic both of Christ and the apostles. Christ
knew that He was to give His life a ransom ; the
apostles knew that He had done it, and had made
peace with the blood of His Cross ; and their
preaching, though it is never overbearing or
unjust, though it never tries to intimidate men,
or (as one may sometimes have been tempted to
think in a mission service) to bully them into
faith, is as urgent and passionate as the sense of
the atoning death can make it. To receive the
reconciliation, or not to receive it — to be a
Christian, or not to be a Christian — is not a
matter of comparative indifference ; it is not the
case of being a somewhat better man, or a man,

LIFE AND DEATH ISSUES 311
perhaps, not quite so good ; it is a case of life or
death. It is difficult to speak of this as it ought
to be spoken of, and to urge it in any given
situation may easily expose the preacher to the
charge of intolerance, uncharitableness, or moral
blindness; but difficult as it may be to preach
the gospel in the spirit of the gospel, with a
sense at the same time of the infinite love which
is in it, and the infinite responsibility which it
puts upon us, it is not a difficulty which the
preacher's vocation will allow him to evade. He
may easily be represented as saying that he is
making the acceptance of his own theology the
condition of acceptance with God, and arrogating
to himself the right to judge others ; but while
he repudiates such charges as inconsistent with
his whole relation both to God and man, he will
not abandon his conviction that the apostolic
sense of the infinite consequences determined
by man's relation to the gospel is justified, and
that it is justified because it is in harmony with
all that the New Testament teaches about the
finished work of Christ. God has spoken His
last word in His Son ; He has done all that He
can do for men ; revelation and redemption are
complete, and the finality on which the Epistle
to the Hebrews lays such emphasis as character
istic of everything belonging to the new covenant
ought to have an echo in every proclamation of
it. If therefore we are conscious that this note

312 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
is wanting in our preaching — that it fails in
urgency and entreaty — that it is expository
merely, or attractive, or hortatory — that it is
interpretative or illuminative, or has the char
acter of good advice, very good advice indeed,
when we come to think of it, — it is probably time
to ask what place in it is held by the Atonement.
The proclamation of the finished work of Christ
is not good advice, it is good news : good news
that means immeasurable joy for those who
welcome it, irreparable loss for those who reject
it, infinite and urgent responsibility for all. The
man who has this to preach has a gospel about
which he ought to be in dead earnest: just
because there is nothing which concentrates in
the same way the judgment and the mercy of
God, there is nothing which has the same
power to evoke seriousness and passion in the
preacher. Leaving out of account its importance to the
sinner, the supreme interest of the doctrine of
the Atonement is, of course, its interest for the
evangelist ; without a firm grasp of it he can do
nothing whatever in his vocation. But what is
central in religion must be central also in all
reflection upon it, and the theologian no1 less
than the evangelist must give this great truth its
proper place in his mind. I have no intention of
outlining a system of theology in which the
atonement made in the death of Christ should

THE KEY TO REVELATION 313
be the determinative principle ; but short of this,
it is possible to indicate its bearing and signifi
cance in regard to some vital questions.
For example, if we have been correct in our
appreciation of its place in the New Testament,
it is not too much to say that as the focus of
revelation it is the key to all that precedes. It
may not always be historically true, but it will
always be divinely true — that is, it will answer to
God's mind as we can see it now, if not as it was
apprehended from stage to stage in the history
of revelation — if we let the light of the final
revelation of the New Testament fall all along
upon the Old. The nature of the unity which
belongs to Scripture has always been a per
plexing question — so perplexing, indeed, that the
very existence of any unity at all has been denied ;
yet there is an answer to it. Scripture converges
upon the doctrine of the Atonement ; it has the
unity of a consentient testimony to a love of God
which bears the sin of the world. How this is
done we do not see clearly till we come to Christ,
or till He comes to us ; but once we get this
insight from Him, we get it for revelation as a
whole. To Him bear all the Scriptures witness;
and it is as a testimony to Him, the Bearer of sin,
the Redeemer who gave His life a ransom for us,
that we acknowledge them. This is the burden
of the Bible, the one fundamental omnipresent
truth to which the Holy Spirit bears witness by

314 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
and with the word in our hearts. This, at bottom,
is what we mean when we say that Scripture is
inspired.
It is worth while to insist on this in view of the
widespread confusion which prevails in regard to
inspiration ; the apparent readiness, on the part of
some, to give it up as an insignificant or irrelevant
idea, if not an utterly discredited one ; and the
haphazard attempts, on the part of others, to save
it piecemeal, after abandoning it as a whole. The
truth is, the unity of the Bible and its inspiration
are correlative terms. If we can discover a real
unity in it — as I believe we can and do when we
see that it converges upon and culminates in a
divine love bearing the sin of the world — then
that unity and its inspiration are one and the
same thing. And it is not only inspired as a
whole, it is the only book in the world which
is inspired. It is the only book in the world to
which God sets His seal in our hearts when we
read in search of an answer to the question, How
shall a sinful man be righteous with God ? It is
mere irrelevance and misunderstanding to talk
in this connection of the 'inspiration' of great
minds like ^Eschylus or Plato, not to speak of
those who have been born and bred in the Chris
tian atmosphere, like Dante or Shakespeare. We
do not believe in inspiration because we find
something in Isaiah which we do not find in
^Eschylus — though we do; nor because we find

ATONEMENT AND INSPIRATION 315
something in St. Paul which we do not find in
Plato — though again, and more emphatically, we
do ; we believe in inspiration because in the whole
Bible, from Isaiah to St. Paul, and earlier and
later, there is a unity of mind and spirit and pur
pose which shines out on us at last in the atoning
work of Christ. When we approach the greatest
of human minds with the problem of religion,
How shall a sinful man be just with God? we
shall, no doubt, find sympathy, for the problem
of religion is a universal problem; we find
sympathy, for instance, of the profoundest in
writers like ^Eschylus and Sophocles. But when
we approach Scripture with this problem, we not
only find sympathy, but a solution ; and with the
solution is identified all that we mean by inspira
tion. All the suggestions of the Bible with
reference to this problem converge upon the
Cross. The Cross dominates everything. It
interprets everything. It puts all things in
their true relations to each other. Usually those
who are perplexed about the inspiration of the
Bible discuss their difficulties with no considera
tion of what the Bible means as a whole ; and yet
it is only as a whole that we can attach any
meaning to its being inspired. There is no sense
in saying that every separate sentence is inspired :
we know that every separate sentence is not.
There are utterances of bad men in the Bible,
and suggestions of the devil. Neither is there

316 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
any sense in going through the Bible with a blue
pencil, and striking out what is not inspired that
we may stand by the rest. This may have the
apologetic or educational advantage of com
pelling some people to see that after all abate
ments are made there is a great deal which
retains its authority, and imposes responsibility ;
but it is precarious and presumptuous in the
highest degree. And though it may have the
appearance of greater plausibility, it is just as
futile to attempt to graduate the inspiration of
Scripture, to mark the ebb and flow of the Divine
presence in the heart of a writer, or the gradual
rise of the tide from the remote beginnings of
revelation till it reaches its height in Christ
No doubt it is a task for the historian to trace
the gradual progress of revelation and to indicate
its stages, but the historian would be the first to
acknowledge that the questions so often raised
about the inspiration of persons or books or
sentences or arguments are mostly unreal. We
will never know what inspiration is until Scrip
ture has resolved itself for us into a unity. That
unity, I venture to say, will be its testimony to a
love in God which we do not earn, which we can
never repay, but which in our sins comes to meet
us with mercy, dealing, nevertheless, with our sins
in all earnest, and at infinite cost doing right-by
God's holy law in regard to them ; a love which
becomes incarnate in the Lamb of God bearing

ATONEMENT AND CHRIST'S PERSON 317
the sin of the world, and putting it away by the
sacrifice of Himself. It is in its testimony to this
that the unity of Scripture and its inspiration con
sists, and whoever believes in this believes in
inspiration in the only sense which can be ration
ally attached to the word.
The doctrine of the atonement, in the central
place which Scripture secures for it, has decisive
importance in another way: it is the proper
evangelical foundation for a doctrine of the
Person of Christ To put it in the shortest
possible form, Christ is the Person who can do
this work for us. This is the deepest and most
decisive thing we can know about Him, and in
answering the questions which it prompts we are
starting from a basis in experience. There is a
sense in which Christ as the Reconciler confronts
us. He is doing the will of God on our behalf,
and we can only look on. It is the judgment
and the mercy of God in relation to our sins
which we see in Him, and His Presence and
work on earth are a divine gift, a divine visita
tion. He is the gift of God to men, not the
offering of men to God, and God gives Himself
to us in and with Him. We owe to Him all
that we call divine life. On the other hand, this
divine visitation is made, and this divine life is
imparted, through a life and work which are
truly human. The presence and work of Jesus
in the world, even the work of bearing sin, does

318 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
not prompt us to define human and divine by
contrast with each other: there is no suggestion
of incongruity between them. Nevertheless,
they are both there, and the fact that they
are both there justifies us in raising the question
as to Jesus' relation to God on the one hand,
and to men on the other. We become sensible,
as we contemplate this divine visitation, this
achievement of a work so necessary to man yet
so transcending his powers, that Jesus is not in
the human race one man more to whom our
relation may be as fortuitous as to any other.
Rather does the whole phenomenon justify us
in putting such a question as Dale's : What
must Christ's relation to men be in order to
make it possible that He should die for them ? —
a question leading to an essentially evangelical
argument, that Christ must have had an original
and central relation to the human race and to
every member of it. Whether this is the best
way to express the conclusion need not here be
considered, but that this is the final way to
approach the problem is not open to doubt.
In this connection I venture to emphasise
again a point referred to at the close of the first
chapter. It is the doctrine of the Atonement
which secures for Christ His place in the gospel,
and which makes it inevitable that we should
have a Christology or a doctrine of His Person.
Reduced to the simplest religious expression,

ATONEMENT AND CHRIST'S PERSON 319
the doctrine of the Atonement signifies that we
owe to Christ and to His finished work our
whole being as Christians. We are His debtors,
and it is a real debt ; a debt infinite, never
to be forgotten, never to be discharged. The
extraordinary statement of Harnack — as extra
ordinary, perhaps, in its ambiguity as in its daring
— that in the gospel as Jesus preached it the Son
has no place but only the Father, owes whatever
plausibility it has under the most favourable
construction to the assumption that in the gospel
as Jesus preached it there is no such thing as
an atoning work of Jesus. Jesus did nothing in
particular by which men become His debtors;
He only showed in His own life what the state
of the case was between God and men, quite
apart from anything He did or had to do. He
was 'the personal realisation and the power of
the gospel, and is ever again experienced as
such.' One might be tempted to criticise this
from Kierkegaard's point of view, and to urge
that it betrays no adequate appreciation of
the gulf between Christ and sinful men, and of
the dreadful difficulty of bridging it ; but it is
sufficient to say that it departs so widely not
only from the consciousness of primitive Christi
anity as it is reflected in the epistles, but from
the mind of Christ as we have seen cause to
interpret it through the gospels, that it is im
possible to assent to it. Christ not only was

320 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
something in the world, He did something. He
did something that made an infinite difference,
and that puts us under an infinite obligation :
He bore our sins. That secures His place in
the gospel and in the adoration of the church.
That is the impulse and the justification of
all Christologies. Harnack's statement, quoted
above, is meant to give a religious justification
for lightening the ship of the church by casting
Christological controversy overboard ; but the
Atonement always says to us again, Consider
how great this Man was ! As long as it holds
its. place in the preaching of the gospel, and
asserts itself in the church, as it does in the New
Testament, as the supreme inspiration to praise,
so long will Christians find in the Person of their
Lord a subject of high and reverent thought.
It is a common idea that Socinianism (or Uni
tarianism) is specially connected with the denial
of the Incarnation. It began historically with
the denial of the Atonement It is with the
denial of the Atonement that it always begins
anew, and it cannot be too clearly pointed out
that to begin here is to end, sooner or later,
with putting Christ out of the Christian religion
altogether. It is the more necessary to insist on this point
of view because there is in some quarters a
strong tendency to put the Atonement out of its
place, and to concentrate attention on the Incar-

ATONEMENT AND INCARNATION 321
nation as something which can be appreciated in
entire independence of it. The motives for this
are various. Sometimes they may not unfairly
be described as speculative. ' The great aim of
the Christian Platonists,' says Mr. Inge, 'was to
bring the Incarnation into closest relation with
the cosmic process. It need hardly be said that
no Christian philosophy can have any value
which does not do this.' x Those, therefore, whose
interest is in the cosmic process, or in articu
lating all that is known as Christian into the
framework of the universe, devote their attention
to the Person of Christ, and seek in it the natural
consummation, so to speak, of all that has gone
before. Without that Person the universe would
be without a crown or a head. It is so con
stituted that only He gives it unity and com
pleteness. That its unity had been broken
before He came to earth, and that He completed
it by a work of reversal and not of direct evolu
tion — a work which, however truly it may be said
to have carried out the original idea of God, is
yet in the strictest sense supernatural, a redemp
tion, not a natural consummation — is practically
overlooked. With others, again, the motive may
be said to be ethical. To put the Atonement
at the foundation of Christianity seems to them
to narrow it morally in the most disastrous way.
It is as though they lost the breadth and variety
1 Contentio Veritatis, p. 74.
X

322 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
of interest and motive which appeal to the con
science from the life of Christ in the pages of the
evangelists. But there is a misconception here.
Those who make the Atonement fundamental do
not turn their backs on the gospels. They are
convinced, however, that the whole power of the
motives which appeal to us from the life of Jesus
is not felt until we see it condensed, concen
trated, and transcended in the love in which He
bore our sins in His own body on the tree.
Others displace the Atonement for what may be
called a dogmatic reason. It is a fixed point
with them that so great a thing as the Incarna
tion could not be in any proper sense contingent ;
the presence of the Son of God in the world
cannot be an ' after-thought ' or an ' accident ' ;
the whole intent of it cannot be given in such
an expression as ' remedial.' The universe must
have been constituted from the first with a view
to it, and it would have taken place all the same
even though there had been no sin and no need
for redemption. When it did take place, indeed,
it could not be exactly as had been intended ;
under the conditions of the fall, the Incarnation
entailed a career which meant Atonement; it
was Incarnation into a sinful race, and the Atone
ment was made when the Son of God accepted
the conditions which sin had determined, and
fulfilled man's destiny under them. Perhaps
the truth might be put within the four corners

ATONEMENT AND INCARNATION 323
bf such a formula, but the tendency in those who
adopt this point of view is to minimise all that
is said in the New Testament about the death of
Christ in relation to sin. The specific assertions
and definitions of the apostolic writings are
evaded. They are interpreted emotionally but
not logically, as if the men who say the strong
things on this subject in the New Testament had
said them without thinking, or would have been
afraid of their own thoughts. The most dis
tinguished representative of this tendency in our
own country was Bishop Westcott. Not that
what has just been said is applicable in its
entirety to him ; but the assumption that the
Incarnation is something which we can estimate
apart from the Atonement, something which has
a significance and a function of its own, inde
pendent of man's redemption from sin, underlies
much of his writing, and tends to keep him from
doing full justice to apostolic ideas on this sub
ject. The logic of the position becomes apparent
in a writer like Archdeacon Wilson, who frankly
merges the Atonement in the Incarnation, assures
us that in making a distinct problem of the
former we have been asking meaningless ques
tions, getting meaningless answers, and repelling
men from the gospel. ' Let us say boldly that
the Incarnation, that is the life and death of
the Christ — for the life and death were equally
necessary — is the identification of the human

324 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
and the divine life. This identification is the
atonement. There is no other.'1 One can only
regret that this short and easy method was not
discovered till the close of the nineteenth
century ; anything less like the terrible problem
sin presented to the apostles, and their intense
preoccupation with it, it would not be easy to
conceive. There are three broad grounds on which the
interpretation of the Atonement as a mere in
cident, or consequence, or modification of the
Incarnation — the Incarnation being regarded as
something in itself natural and intelligible on
grounds which have no relation to sin — ought
to be discounted by the evangelist and the theo
logian alike, (i) It shifts the centre of gravity
in the New Testament. The Incarnation may be
the thought round which everything gravitates in
the Nicene Creed, and in the theology of the
ancient Catholic Church which found in that
creed its first dogmatic expression ; but that
only shows how far the first ecclesiastical appre
hension of Christianity was from doing justice
to New Testament conceptions. Even in the
gospel and the epistles of St. John, as has been
shown above, the Incarnation cannot be said
(without serious qualification) to have the char
acter here claimed for it, and it cannot be
asserted with the faintest plausibility for the
1 The Gospel ofthe Atonement, p. 89.

ATONEMENT AND INCARNATION 325
synoptic gospels or the epistles of St. Paul.
The New Testament knows nothing of an incar
nation which can be defined apart from its
relation to atonement; it is to put away sin,
and to destroy the works of the devil, that even
in the evangelist of the Incarnation the Son of
God is made manifest. It is not in His being
here, but in His being here as a propitiation for the
sins of the world, that the love of God is revealed.
Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of
revelation, and any construction of Christianity
which ignores or denies this distorts Christianity
by putting it out of focus. (2) A second ground
for resisting the tendency to put the Incarnation
into the place which properly belongs to the
Atonement is that it is concerned under these
conditions with metaphysical, rather than with
moral problems. Now Scripture has no interest
in metaphysics except as metaphysical questions
are approached through and raised by moral
ones. The Atonement comes to us in the moral
world and deals with us there ; it is concerned
with conscience and the law of God, with sin and
grace, with alienation and peace, with death to
sin and life to holiness ; it has its being and its
efficacy in a world where we can find our footing,
and be assured that we are dealing with realities.
The Incarnation, when it is not defined by rela
tion to these realities — in other words, when it is
not conceived as the means to the Atonement,

326 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
but as part of a speculative theory of the world
quite independent of man's actual moral neces
sities — can never attain to a reality as vivid and
profound. It can never become thoroughly
credible, just because it is not essentially related
to anything in human or Christian experience
sufficiently great to justify it. It does not
answer moral questions, especially those which
bring the sinful man to despair; at best it
answers metaphysical questions about the rela
tion of the human to the divine, about the proper
way to define these words in relation to each
other, whether it be by contrast or by mutual
affinity, about the divine as being the truth of the
human and the human as being the reality of the
divine, and so forth. It does not contain a gospel
for lost souls, but a philosophy for speculative
minds. Now the New Testament is a gospel for
lost souls, or it is nothing ; and whatever philo
sophy it may lead to or justify, we cannot see that
philosophy itself in the light in which it demands
to be seen, unless we keep the gospel in its New
Testament place. If we start in the abstract
speculative way there is no getting out of it, or
getting any specifically Christian good out of it
either; it is only when the Person of Christ is
conceived as necessarily related to a work in
which we have a life and death moral interest,
that it has religious import, and can be a real sub
ject for us. There is in truth only one religious

• ATONEMENT AND INCARNATION 327
problem in the world — the existence of sin ; and
one religious solution of it — the Atonement, in
which the love of God bears the sin, taking it, in
all its terrible reality for us, upon itself. And
nothing can be central or fundamental either in
Christian preaching or in Christian thinking
which is not in direct and immediate relation to
this problem and its solution. (3) The third
ground on which we should deprecate the obtru
sion of the Incarnation at the cost of the Atone
ment is that in point of fact — whether it is an
inevitable result or not need not be inquired — it
tends to sentimentality. It is dangerous to bring
into religion anything which is not vitally re
lated to morals, and Incarnation not determined
by Atonement is open to this charge. The
Christmas celebrations in many churches supply
all the proof that is needed : they are an appeal
to anything and everything in man except that
to which the gospel is designed to appeal. The
New Testament is just as little sentimental as it
is metaphysical : it is ethical, not metaphysical ;
passionate, not sentimental. And its passionate
and ethical character are condensed and guaran
teed in that atoning work of Christ which is in
every sense of the word its vital centre.
If it is a right conception of the Atonement
which enables us to attain to a right conception
of the Person of Christ, similarly we may say it is
through a right conception of the Atonement that

328 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
we come to a right conception of the nature or
character of God. In the Atonement revelation
is complete, and we must have it fully in view
in all affirmations we make about God as the
ultimate truth and reality. The more imperfect
our conceptions of God, the more certainly they
tend to produce scepticism and unbelief; and
nothing presents greater difficulties to faith than
the idea of a God who either gives no heed to
the sin and misery of man, or saves sinners, as it
were, from a distance, without entering into the
responsibility and tragedy of their life and
making it His own. To put the same thing in
other words, nothing presents greater difficulties
to faith than a conception of God falling short of
that which the New Testament expresses in the
words, God is love. Not that this conception is
self-interpreting or self-accrediting, as is often
supposed. There is no proposition which is more
in need both of explanation and of proof. We
may say God is love, and know just as little
what love means as what God means. Love is
like every word of moral or spiritual import ; it
has no fixed meaning, like a word denoting a
physical object or attribute ; it stands, so to
speak, upon a sliding scale, and it stands higher
or lower as the experience of those who use it
enables them to place it. St. John, when he
placed it where he did, was only enabled to do
so by the experience in which Christ was re-

ATONEMENT AND DOCTRINE 329
vealed to him as the propitiation of sins. It is
with this in his mind that he says, Hereby per
ceive we love. The word love, especially in such
a proposition as God is love, has to fill with its
proper meaning before it can be said to have any
meaning at all ; it is used in a thousand senses
which in such a proposition would only be absurd
or profane. Now the person who first uttered
that sublime sentence felt his words fill with
meaning as he contemplated Christ sent by God
a propitiation for the whole world. A God who
could do that — a God who could bear the sin of
the world in order to restore to man the possi
bility of righteousness and eternal life — such a
God is love. Such love, too, is the ultimate truth
about God. But apart from this the apostle
would not have said that God is love, nor is it
quite real or specifically Christian for any one
else to say so. There is no adequate way of tell
ing what he means. Until it is demonstrated
as it is in the Atonement, love remains an
indeterminate sentimental expression, with no
clear moral value, and with infinite possibilities
of moral misunderstanding ; when it fills with
meaning through the contemplation ofthe Atone
ment, the (.'.anger of mere sentimentalism and
other moral dangers are provided against, for
love in the Atonement is inseparable from law.
The universal moral elements in the relations of
God and man are unreservedly acknowledged, and

330 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
it is in the cost at which justice is done to them
in the work of redemption that the love of God
is revealed and assured. We see then its reality
and its scale. We see what it is willing to do,
or rather what it has done. We see something
of the breadth and length and depth and height
which pass knowledge. We believe and know
the love which God has in our case, and can say
God is love. And it is from the vantage-ground
of this assurance that we look out henceforth on
all the perplexities of the world and of our own
life in it. We are certain that it is in God to
take the burden and responsibility of it upon
Himself. We are certain that it is in the divine
nature not to be indifferent to the tragedy of
human life, not to help it from afar off, not to
treat as unreal in it the very thing which makes
it real to us — the eternal difference of right and
wrong — but to bear its sin, and to establish the
law in the very act and method of justifying the
ungodly. It is a subordinate remark in this con
nection, but not for that reason an insignificant
one, that this final revelation of love in God is at
the same time the final revelation of sin : for sin,
too, needs to be revealed, and there is a theo
logical doctrine of it as well as an experience
antecedent to all doctrines. Love is that which
is willing to take the responsibility of sin upon it
for the sinner's sake, and which does so ; and sin,

ATONEMENT AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 331
in the last resort — sin as that which cuts man
finally off from God — is that which is proof
against the appeal of such love.
There is another great department of Christian
science to which the Atonement is of fundamental
importance — the department of Christian ethics,
the scientific interpretation of the new life. It
has undoubtedly been a fault in much systematic
theology, that in dealing with the work which
Christ finished in His death it has shown no
relation, or no adequate and satisfactory relation,
between that death and the Christian life which
is born of faith in it. There must be such a
relation, or there would be no such thing in the
world as Christian life or the Christian religion.
The only difficulty, indeed, in formulating it is
that the connection is so close and immediate
that it might be supposed to be impossible to
hold apart, even in imagination, the two things
which we wish to define by relation to each other.
But it may be put thus. The death of Christ,
interpreted as the New Testament interprets it,
constitutes a great appeal to sinful men. It
appeals for faith. To yield to its appeal, to
abandon oneself in faith to the love of God
which is manifested in it, is to enter into life.
It is the only way in which a sinful man can
enter into life at all. The new life is constituted
in the soul by the response of faith to the appeal

332 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
of Christ's death, or by Christ's death evoking
the response of faith. It does not matter which
way we put it. We may say that we have re
ceived the Atonement, and that the Atonement
regenerates ; or that we have been justified by
faith, and that justification regenerates ; or that
we have received an assurance of God's love
which is deeper than our sin, and extends to all
our life past, present, and to come ; and that
such an assurance, which is the gift of the Spirit
shed abroad in our hearts, regenerates : it is all
one. It is the same experience which is described,
and truly described, in every case. But both the
power and the law of the new life, the initiation
of which can be so variously expressed, are to
be found in the atoning death of Christ, by
which faith is evoked, and there only; and the
Atonement, therefore, is the presupposition of
Christian ethics as it is the inspiring and control
ling force in Christian life. Nothing can beget
in the soul that life of which we speak except
the appeal of the Cross, and what the appeal of
the Cross does beget is a life which, in its moral
quality, corresponds to the death of Christ itself.
It is a life, as it has been put already, which has
that death in it, and which only lives upon this
condition. It is a life to which sin is all that
sin was to Christ — law, and holiness, and God,
all that law and holiness and God were to Christ

ATONEMENT AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 333
as He hung upon the tree ; a life which is com
plete and self-sufficing, because it is sustained
at every moment by the inspiration of the Atone
ment. This is why St. Paul is not afraid to
trust the new life to its own resources, and why
he objects equally to supplementing it by legal
regulations afterwards, or by what are supposed
to be ethical securities beforehand. It does
not need them, and is bound to repel them as
dishonouring to Christ. To demand moral
guarantees from a sinner before you give him
the benefit of the Atonement, or to impose legal
restrictions on him after he has yielded to its
appeal, and received it through faith, is to make
the Atonement itself of no effect. St. Paul, taught
by his own experience, scorned such devices.
The Son of God, made sin for men, so held his
eyes and heart, entered into his being with such
annihilative, such creative power, that all he was
and all he meant by life were due to Him alone.
He does not look anywhere but to the Cross
for the ideals and motives of the Christian : they
are all there. And the more one dwells in the
New Testament, and tries to find the point of
view from which to reduce it to unity, the more
is he convinced that the Atonement is the key to
Christianity as a whole. ' The Son of Man came
to give His life a ransom for many.' ' Christ died
for the ungodly.' ' He bore our sins in His own

334 THE DEATH OF CHRIST
body on the tree.' ' He is the propitiation for
the whole world.' ' I beheld, and lo, a lamb
as it had been slain.' It is in words like these
that we discover the open secret of the new
creation.

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