St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. II

by Charles Gore

NOTE D. See vol. i. pp. 143 ff.

DIFFICULTIES ABOUT THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT.

I have endeavoured above to sketch the positive conception of the Atonement, as St. Paul seems to put it before us. Christ inaugurates the church of the new covenant, the new life of union with God. He lays its basis in a great act of reparation to the righteousness of God, which 'the old Adam' had continually outraged. This act of reparation lies in a moral sacrifice of obedience, carried to the extreme point by the shedding of His blood. This is the great propitiation in virtue of which God is enabled, without moral misunderstanding, to forgive freely the sins of any one who comes in faith to unite himself to Christ, and set him free to begin the new life.

The subject is a divine 'mystery,' and we shall never adequately probe it. Nay more, one man's thought will rightly seem inadequate to another, who has gained, or thinks he has gained, some special avenue of insight into the divine depths. But when we pass from special points of view, which are necessarily more or less individual, and can never become certainties for men in general—when we pass on to the ground of what should be the common church belief, the statement of the original revelation, it is not, it seems to me, liable to any of the familiar moral objections, or indeed a subject of any special difficulty. The difficulties experienced by the moral consciousness of our age have been due to gross and unnecessary misunderstandings, of which the following are, perhaps, the most considerable.

(1) The propitiation has become separated from the new life, for which it merely prepares the way. It has been elevated, with disastrous moral results, from a means to an end. Christ's work for us has been treated apart from His work in us, in which alone it is realized. He alone can act for all men, because He only can be their new life within. But on this see vol. i. pp. 141 f, and Ephes. pp. 54 ff.

(2) The idea of injustice has been introduced into the 'transaction' of the Atonement, and has been the most fruitful source of difficulty;—but quite unnecessarily. There is a story that when Edward VI was a child, and deserved punishment, another boy was taken and whipped in his place. This monstrously unjust transaction has been taken by Christian teachers as an illustration of the Atonement; and it is truly an illustration of the Atonement as they misconceived it. But the misconception is gratuitous: there is no real resemblance in the two cases. For first, what is represented to us in the New Testament is not that Jesus Christ, an innocent person, was punished, without reference to His own will, by a God who thus showed Himself indifferent as to whom He punished so long as some one suffered. But He, being Himself very God, the Son of the Father, the administrator of the moral law and judge of the world, of His own will became man, and suffered what the sin of the world laid upon Him, in order that He might lift the world out of sin. Voluntary self-sacrifice for others is at least not to be described as injustice. At least we rejoice to recognize that God accepts such self-sacrifice. It is to vicarious self-sacrifice like our Lord's that the human race owes the greater part of whatever moral progress it has hitherto made.

Secondly, God is not represented as imposing any specially devised punishment on His only Son in our nature. As the matter is stated in the New Testament, He required of Him obedience, the obedience proper to man; and, if we regard sympathy with our fellow men as a part of our duty to God, we may say obedience only. Thus, 'Lo, I come to do thy will, O God' is the one cry of the Christ. In His simple acceptance of the whole of human duty lies the moral essence and value of His sacrifice. All the physical and mental sufferings of Christ came out of His fulfilment of the human ideal, Godward and manward, and were involved in it. He died because obedience to the terms of His mission—'the word of truth, and meekness, and righteousness'—in a world of sin such as this is, involved dying. 'He was obedient' without reserve—'unto death, even the death of the cross[[1]].' The value of the bloodshedding lies in this, so far as Scripture enables us to judge—that it represents utter obedience under conditions which human sin, the sin of Jews and Gentiles, laid upon Him: and it was in this sense, which does not leave out of consideration the mental torment caused to His sinless spirit by contact with sin[[2]], that He 'bare our sins in his body on the tree,' and that 'the Lord made to light on him the iniquity of us all.' What is ascribed to the Father is that He 'spared not' His only Son by miraculously exempting Him from the consequences of His mission; and that He foresaw, overruled, and used for His own wise and loving purposes the sin of men[[3]].

Thirdly and lastly, the Christ (as represented in the New Testament) did not suffer in order that we might be let off the punishment for our own sins, but in order to bring us to God. 'By his stripes we are'—not excused punishment, but—'healed.' In fact, there are two distinguishable punishments for sin. There is the spiritual punishment, which is involved in being morally alienated from God, which may become irreversible and eternal, but which is gone when the moral alienation is gone. From this Christ delivers us in making us at one again with the Father, but He Himself did not endure it. God forbid that we should imagine such a thing! Besides this there is the temporal penalty which our sins bring as inevitable consequences upon ourselves and upon the race. All these consequences of human sin the sinless Christ bore for us, but not that we might be let off bearing them. We must bear them too—both the death of the body and the chastisement of particular sins. Christ bore the punishment of sins that were not His own, in order that in our case the punishments of sins which are our own might, through His bringing us back to God, be converted into healing chastisements and gracious penances. The record of God's dealings with His saints is still, as in Ps. xcix. 8, that they are heard, forgiven and punished.

How gratuitously then the idea of injustice has been introduced into the doctrine of Christ's sacrifice for us becomes evident when once it is brought within the scriptural limits. Christ suffered voluntarily. He suffered simply what was involved in becoming man in a world of sin. He suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us back to God, that so we might have grace to bear our own sufferings and share His.

This alone, it seems to me, is what the New Testament certainly teaches. And the matter of most importance is that, ridding our minds of distracting and often needless difficulties, we should drink in, with heart and intelligence alike, the full force of what is certainly part of the Gospel—the doctrine of the one, full, perfect, and sufficient atonement with the Father, won for us by the self-sacrifice of the Christ.

[[1]] Phil. ii. 8; Hebr. x. 5-9.

[[2]] The perfect Man perfectly realized the misery and horror of the sins on behalf of which He suffered. How much is involved in this in the way of detailed realization of each individual sin of each individual sinner, is a matter on which we have no clear grounds for exact statement.

[[3]] I believe that nothing more than this is really suggested by Scripture. The phrase, 'made sin for us' (2 Cor. v. 21), means, I believe, according to the clear use of the word in the LXX, 'made a sin-offering for us.' The same words in the Hebrew stand for sin and sin-offering, and the use of the Greek follows: see especially (in LXX) Lev. iv. 31, 'It is the sin (= sin-offering) of the assembly;' 24, 'It (the goat) is a sin;' 29, 'He shall lay his hand upon the head of the sin;' vi. 25, 'This is the law of the sin'; viii. 14, 'The bullock of the sin.' Cf. Hos. iv. 8, &c.