Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)

by Augustus Hopkins Strong

If Christ had been born into the world by ordinary generation, he too would have had depravity, guilt, penalty. But he was not so born. In the womb of the Virgin, the human nature which he took was purged from its depravity. But this purging away of depravity did not take away guilt, or penalty. There was still left the just exposure to the penalty of violated law. Although Christ's nature was purified, his obligation to suffer yet remained. He might have declined to join himself to humanity, and then he need not have suffered. He might have sundered his connection with the race, and then he need not have suffered. But once born of the Virgin, once possessed of the human nature that was under the curse, he was bound to suffer. The whole mass and weight of God's displeasure against the race fell on him, when once he became a member of the race.

Because Christ is essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the race, he is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us can say of him: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, he must bear in his own person all the burdens of humanity, and must be “the Lamb of God, that” taketh, and so “taketh away, the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Simms Reeves, the great English tenor, said that the passion-music was too much for him; he was found completely overcome after singing the prophet's words in Lam. 1:12—“Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is brought upon me, Wherewith Jehovah hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.”

Father Damien gave his life in ministry to the lepers' colony of the Hawaiian Islands. Though free from the disease when he entered, he was at last himself stricken with the leprosy, and then wrote: “I must now stay with my own people.” Once a leper, there was no release. When Christ once joined himself to humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Through himself personally without sin, he was made sin for us. Christ inherited guilt and penalty. Heb. 2:14, 15—“Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their life-time subject to bondage.”

Only God can forgive sin, because only God can feel it in its true heinousness and rate it at its true worth. Christ could forgive sin because he added to the divine feeling with regard to sin the anguish of a pure humanity on account of it. Shelley, Julian and Maddolo: “Me, whose heart a stranger's tear might wear, As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone; Me, who am as a nerve o'er which do creep The Else unfelt oppressions of the earth.” S. W. Culver: “We cannot be saved, as we are taught geometry, by lecture and diagram. No person ever yet saved another from drowning by standing coolly by and telling him the importance of rising to the surface and the necessity of respiration. No, he must plunge into the destructive element, and take upon himself the very condition of the drowning man, and by the exertion of his own strength, by the vigor of his own life, save him from the impending death. When your child is encompassed by the flames that consume your dwelling, you will not save him by calling to him from without. You must make your way through the devouring flame, till you come personally into the very conditions of his peril and danger, and, thence returning, bear him forth to freedom and safety.”

Notice, however, that this guilt which Christ took upon himself by his union with humanity was: (1) not the guilt of personal sin—such guilt as belongs to every adult member of the race; (2) not even the guilt of inherited depravity—such guilt as belongs to infants, and to those who have not come to moral consciousness; but (3) solely the guilt of Adam's sin, which belongs, prior to personal transgression, and apart from inherited depravity, to every member of the race who has derived his life from Adam. This original sin and inherited guilt, but without the depravity that ordinarily [pg 758] accompanies them, Christ takes, and so takes away. He can justly bear penalty, because he inherits guilt. And since this guilt is not his personal guilt, but the guilt of that one sin in which “all sinned”—the guilt of the common transgression of the race in Adam, the guilt of the root-sin from which all other sins have sprung—he who is personally pure can vicariously bear the penalty due to the sin of all.

Christ was conscious of innocence in his personal relations, but not in his race relations. He gathered into himself all the penalties of humanity, as Winkelried gathered into his own bosom at Sempach the pikes of the Austrians and so made a way for the victorious Swiss. Christ took to himself the shame of humanity, as the mother takes upon her the daughter's shame, repenting of it and suffering on account of it. But this could not be in the case of Christ unless there had been a tie uniting him to men far more vital, organic, and profound than that which unites mother and daughter. Christ is naturally the life of all men, before he becomes spiritually the life of true believers. Matheson, Spir. Devel. of St. Paul, 197-215, 244, speaks of Christ's secular priesthood, of an outer as well as an inner membership in the body of Christ. He is sacrificial head of the world as well as sacrificial head of the church. In Paul's latest letters, he declares of Christ that he is “the Savior of all men, specially of them that believe” (1 Tim. 4:10). There is a grace that “hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men” (Tit. 2:11). He “gave gifts unto men” (Eph. 4:8), “Yea, among the rebellious also, that Jehovah God might dwell with them” (Ps. 68:18). “Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected” (1 Tim. 4:4).

Royce, World and Individual, 2:408—“Our sorrows are identically God's own sorrows.... I sorrow, but the sorrow is not only mine. This same sorrow, just as it is for me, is God's sorrow.... The divine fulfilment can be won only through the sorrows of time.... Unless God knows sorrow, he knows not the highest good, which consists in the overcoming of sorrow.” Godet, in The Atonement, 331-351—“Jesus condemned sin as God condemned it. When he felt forsaken on the Cross, he performed that act by which the offender himself condemns his sin, and by that condemnation, so far as it depends on himself, makes it to disappear. There is but one conscience in all moral beings. This echo in Christ of God's judgment against sin was to re-echo in all other human consciences. This has transformed God's love of compassion into a love of satisfaction. Holiness joins suffering to sin. But the element of reparation in the Cross was not in the suffering but in the submission. The child who revolts against its punishment has made no reparation at all. We appropriate Christ's work when we by faith ourselves condemn sin and accept him.”

If it be asked whether this is not simply a suffering for his own sin, or rather for his own share of the sin of the race, we reply that his own share in the sin of the race is not the sole reason why he suffers; it furnishes only the subjective reason and ground for the proper laying upon him of the sin of all. Christ's union with the race in his incarnation is only the outward and visible expression of a prior union with the race which began when he created the race. As “in him were all things created,” and as “in him all things consist,” or hold together (Col. 1:16, 17), it follows that he who is the life of humanity must, though personally pure, be involved in responsibility for all human sin, and “it was necessary that the Christ should suffer” (Acts 17:3). This suffering was an enduring of the reaction of the divine holiness against sin and so was a bearing of penalty (Is. 53:6; Gal. 3:13), but it was also the voluntary execution of a plan that antedated creation (Phil. 2:6, 7), and Christ's sacrifice in time showed what had been in the heart of God from eternity (Heb. 9:14; Rev. 13:8).

Our treatment is intended to meet the chief modern objection to the atonement. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:222, speaks of “the strangely inconsistent doctrine that God is so just that he could not let sin go unpunished, yet so unjust that he could punish it in the person of the innocent.... It is for orthodox dialectics to explain how the divine justice can be impugned by pardoning the guilty, and yet vindicated by punishing [pg 759]the innocent” (quoted in Lias, Atonement, 16). In order to meet this difficulty, the following accounts of Christ's identification with humanity have been given:

1. That of Isaac Watts (see Bib. Sac., 1875:421). This holds that the humanity of Christ, both in body and soul, preëxisted before the incarnation, and was manifested to the patriarchs. We reply that Christ's human nature is declared to be derived from the Virgin.