It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the previous existence of sacrifice is intimated in Gen. 3:21—“And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.” Since the killing of animals for food was not permitted until long afterwards (Gen. 9:3—to Noah: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you”), the inference has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which secures our restoration to God's favor, as the death of the victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts of human nature are an expression of God's will, Abel's faith may have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of [pg 727]animals in sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times.... In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical teaching.” We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine ordinance as much as were marriage and government.
On Gen. 4:3, 4, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to death. All his toil could not satisfy God's holiness, or remove the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation, helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God's appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God ‘bore witness in respect of his gifts’(Heb. 11:4). To Cain it is said, ‘if thou doest well (lxx.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—if thou offerest correctly) shalt thou not be accepted?’ But Cain desired to get away from God and from God's way, and to lose himself in the world. This is ‘the way of Cain’ (Jude 11).” Per contra, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel's faith may have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God's acceptance of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve, ‘This is now bone of my bones....’ (Gen. 2:23), before any divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of primitive sacrifice.” Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first word of the original man was probably a prayer, the first action of fallen man a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1: 368-408. Bishop Butler: “By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.”
(f) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of Christ's work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God's love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal and pardon of sinners.
“The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed against it! But instead [pg 728]of this he received from John the Baptist, without rebuke, the words: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29).”
A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay, accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the whole symbolical system representing it became functum officio, and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”
For denial that Christ's death is to be interpreted by heathen or Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, 2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.” Bushnell and Young do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ's sacrifice are borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual, e. g., θυσία, προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution, is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.
With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education, may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful world?
“We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously, for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death of selfhood, death with Jesus, regeneration.
“The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself from his powerlessness and become free? This question was unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant which prevented him from finding in the historically realized common spirit of the good the real force available for the individual becoming good.”