Cf. Num. 25:13, where Phinehas, by slaying Zimri, is said to have “made atonement for the children of Israel.” Surely, the “atonement” here cannot be a reconciliation of Israel. The action terminates, not on the subject, but on the object—God. So, 1 Sam. 29:4—“wherewith should this fellow reconcile himself unto his lord? should it not be with the heads of these men?” Mat. 5:23, 24—“If therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother [i. e., remove his enmity, not thine own], and then come and offer thy gift.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:387-398.
Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl'sche Theologie, 42—“Ἐχθροὶ ὄντες (Rom. 5:10) = not the active disposition of enmity to God on our part, but our passive condition under the enmity or wrath of God.” Paul was not the author of this doctrine,—he claims that he received it from Christ himself (Gal. 1:12). Simon, Reconciliation, 167—“The idea that only man needs to be reconciled arises from a false conception of the unchangeableness of God. But God would be unjust, if his relation to man were the same after his sin as it was before.” The old hymn expressed the truth: “My God is reconciled; His pardoning voice I hear; He owns me for his child; I can no longer fear; With filial trust I now draw nigh, And ‘Father, Abba, Father’ cry.”
A sin-offering: John 1:29—“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world”—here αἴρων means to take away by taking or bearing; to take, and so take away. It is an allusion to the sin-offering of Isaiah 53:6-12—“when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin ... as a lamb that is led to the slaughter ... Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Mat. 26:28—“this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many unto remission of sins”; cf. Ps. 50:5—“made a covenant with me by sacrifice.” 1 John 1:7—“the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin”—not sanctification, but justification; 1 Cor. 5:7—“our passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ”; cf. Deut. 16:2-6—“thou shalt sacrifice the passover unto Jehovah thy God.” Eph. 5:2—“gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor of a sweet smell” (see Com. of Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament); Heb. 9:14—“the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; 22, 26—“apart from shedding of blood there is no remission.... now once in the end of the ages hath he been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself”; 1 Pet. 1:18, 19—“redeemed ... with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ.” See Expos. Gk. Test., on Eph. 1:7.
Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 35, points out that John 6:52-59—“eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood”—is Christ's reference to his death in terms of sacrifice. So, as we shall see below, it is a propitiation (1 John 2:2). We therefore strongly object to the statement of Wilson, Gospel of Atonement, 64—“Christ's death is a sacrifice, if sacrifice means the crowning instance of that suffering of the innocent for the guilty which springs from the solidarity of mankind; but there is no thought of substitution or expiation.”Wilson forgets that this necessity of suffering arises from God's righteousness; that without this suffering man cannot be saved; that Christ endures what we, on account of the insensibility of sin, cannot feel or endure; that this suffering takes the place of ours, so that we are saved thereby. Wilson holds that the Incarnation constituted the Atonement, and that all thought of expiation may be eliminated. Henry B. Smith far better summed up the gospel in the words: “Incarnation in order to Atonement.”We regard as still better the words: “Incarnation in order to reveal the Atonement.”
A propitiation: Rom. 3:25, 26—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, ... in his blood ... that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.” A full and critical exposition of this passage will be found under the Ethical Theory of the Atonement, pages 750-760. Here it is sufficient to say that it shows: (1) that Christ's death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute [pg 720]in God which demands the atonement is his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God's justifying the believer.
Compare Luke 18:13, marg.—“God, be thou merciful unto me the sinner”; lit.: “God be propitiated toward me the sinner”—by the sacrifice, whose smoke was ascending before the publican, even while he prayed. Heb. 2:17—“a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people”; 1 John 2:2—“and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world”; 4:10—“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins”; cf. Gen. 32:20, lxx.—“I will appease [ἐξιλάσομαι, “propitiate”] him with the present that goeth before me”; Prov. 16:14, lxx.—“The wrath of a king is as messengers of death; but a wise man will pacify it” [ἐξιλάσεται, “propitiate it”].
On propitiation, see Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 216—“Something was thereby done which rendered God inclined to pardon the sinner. God is made inclined to forgive sinners by the sacrifice, because his righteousness was exhibited by the infliction of the penalty of sin; but not because he needed to be inclined in heart to love the sinner or to exercise his mercy. In fact, it was he himself who ‘set forth’Jesus as ‘a propitiation’ (Rom. 3:25, 26).” Paul never merges the objective atonement in its subjective effects, although no writer of the New Testament has more fully recognized these subjective effects. With him Christ for us upon the Cross is the necessary preparation for Christ in us by his Spirit. Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 74, 75, 89, 172, unwarrantably contrasts Paul's representation of Christ as priest with what he calls the representation of Christ as prophet in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “The priest says: Man's return to God is not enough,—there must be an expiation of man's sin. This is Paul's doctrine. The prophet says: There never was a divine provision for sacrifice. Man's return to God is the thing wanted. But this return must be completed. Jesus is the perfect prophet who gives us an example of restored obedience, and who comes in to perfect man's imperfect work. This is the doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews.”This recognition of expiation in Paul's teaching, together with denial of its validity and interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews as prophetic rather than priestly, is a curiosity of modern exegesis.
Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 107-127, goes still further and affirms: “In the N. T. God is never said to be propitiated, nor is it ever said that Jesus Christ propitiates God or satisfies God's wrath.” Yet Dr. Abbott adds that in the N. T. God is represented as self-propitiated: “Christianity is distinguished from paganism by representing God as appeasing his own wrath and satisfying his own justice by the forth-putting of his own love.” This self-propitiation however must not be thought of as a bearing of penalty: “Nowhere in the O. T. is the idea of a sacrifice coupled with the idea of penalty,—it is always coupled with purification—‘with his stripes we are healed’ (Is. 53:5). And in the N. T., ‘the Lamb of God ... taketh away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29); ‘the blood of Jesus ... cleanseth’ (1 John 1:7).... What humanity needs is not the removal of the penalty, but removal of the sin.” This seems to us a distinct contradiction of both Paul and John, with whom propitiation is an essential of Christian doctrine (see Rom. 3:25; 1 John 2:2), while we grant that the propitiation is made, not by sinful man, but by God himself in the person of his Son. See George B. Gow, on The Place of Expiation in Human Redemption, Am. Jour. Theol., 1900:734-756.
A substitution: Luke 22:37—“he was reckoned with transgressors”; cf. Lev. 16:21, 22—“and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel ... he shall put them upon the head of the goat ... and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a solitary land”; Is. 53:5, 6—“he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” John 10:11—“the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep”; Rom. 5:6-8—“while we were yet weak, in due season Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: for peradventure for the good man some one would even dare to die. But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”; 1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.”
To these texts we must add all those mentioned under (b) above, in which Christ's death is described as a ransom. Besides Meyer's comment, there quoted, on Mat. 20:28—“to give his life a ransom for many,” λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν—Meyer also says: “ἀντί denotes substitution. That which is given as a ransom takes the place of, is given instead of, those who are to be set free in consideration thereof. Ἀντί can only be understood in the sense of substitution in the act of which the ransom is presented as an equivalent, to secure the deliverance of those on whose behalf the ransom is paid,—a view which is only confirmed by the fact that, in other parts of the N. T., this ransom is usually spoken of as an expiatory sacrifice. That which they [those for whom the ransom is paid] are [pg 721]redeemed from, is the eternal ἀπώλεια in which, as having the wrath of God abiding upon them, they would remain imprisoned, as in a state of hopeless bondage, unless the guilt of their sins were expiated.”