THE ATONEMENT.
IT is a bold and hazardous task to say anything on this subject and I must tread with bare, hushed feet, for it is a holy realm which we are essaying to enter. It must be understood from the first that I am not going to thresh over a heap of theological straw. I am not going into that realm of abstract metaphysics where one can always prove any thesis one may happen to assume at the start. I shall keep close to human experience. The pillars of our faith must be planted, not on some artificial construction of logic, but deep down in the actual experience of Life. There are external principles of the spiritual Life which are as irresistible and compelling as the laws of physics or the propositions of Euclid. The task of the religious teacher is to discover and proclaim these elemental truths, but we always find it so much easier to fall back on dogma and theories which have been spun out of men’s heads! In the Gospels and in Paul’s letters the laboratory method prevails—the writers ground their assertions on experienced facts, they tell what they have found and verified, and they always ask their readers to put their truths to the test of a personal experience like their own. Our modern method must be a return to this inward laboratory method.
No one can carefully study the theories of the atonement which have prevailed at the various epochs of Christian history without discovering that there has been in them a very large mixture of paganism. They have been deeply colored by mythology and by the crude ideas of primitive sacrifice. They start, not with the idea of God which Christ has revealed, but with a capricious sovereign, angry at sorely tempted, sinning man, and forgiving only after a sacrifice has satisfied Him. They treat sin not as a fact of experience, but as the result of an ancestral fall, which piled up an infinite debt against the race. They all move in the realm of law rather than in the domain of personality. They are all, more or less, vitiated by abstract and mathematical reasoning, while sin and salvation are always affairs of the inward life, and are of all things personal and concrete. The first step to a coercive conception of the atonement is to get out of the realm of legal phrases into the region of personality.
Sin is no abstract dogma. It is not a debt which somebody can pay and so wash off the slate. Sin is a fact within our lives. It is a condition of heart and will. There is no sin apart from a sinner. Wherever sin exists there is a conscious deviation from a standard—a sag of the nature, and it produces an effect upon the entire personality. The person who sins disobeys a sense of right. He falls below his vision of the good. He sees a path, but he does not walk in it. He hears a voice, but he says “no” instead of “yes.” He is aware of a higher self which makes its appeal, but he lets the lower have the reins. There is no description of sin anywhere to compare with the powerful narrative out of the actual life of the Apostle Paul, found in Romans VII: 9-25. The thing which moves us as we read it is the picture here drawn of our own state. A lower nature dominates us and spoils our life. “What I would I do not; what I would not that I do.”
The most solemn fact of sin is its accumulation of consequences in the life of the person. Each sin tends to produce a set of the nature. It weaves a mesh of habit. It makes toward a dominion, or as Paul calls it, a law of sin in the man—“Wretched Man,” who sees a shining possible life, but stays below, chained to a body of sin. Sin, real sin, and not the fictitious abstraction which figures in theories, is a condition of personal will and action much more than a debt to be paid or forgiven. The problem is far deeper. The only possible remedy here is to get a new man, a transformation of personality. Relief from penalty will not stead. Forgiveness is not enough. Relief from penalty, forgiveness alone, might spoil us, and make us think too lightly of our own sin. No, it is not a judicial relief which our panting, sin-defeated hearts cry out for. We want more than the knowledge that the past is covered and will not count on the books against us. We want blackness replaced by whiteness, we want weakness replaced by power, we want to experience a new set of our innermost nature which will make us more than conquerors. We seek deliverance not from penalty and debt—but deliverance from the life of sin into a life of holy will.
There is still another aspect to sin which must be considered before we can fully appreciate the way of salvation which the Gospel reveals. Sin not only spoils the sinner’s life and drags him into slavery. It separates him from God. It opens a chasm between him and his heavenly Father, or to vary the figure it casts a shadow on God’s face. God seems far away and stern. The sense of warmth and tenderness vanishes. The sinner can see God only through the veil of his sins. This is a universal experience. The same thing happens in our relations with men. As soon as we have injured a person, treated him unfairly, played him false, a chasm opens between our life and his. We transfer our changed attitude to him. We dislike to meet him. We have no comfort in his presence. We interpret all his actions through the shadow which our deed has created. Our sense of wrong-doing makes us afraid of the person wronged.
The conduct of little children offers a good illustration of this subjective effect of sin, because in them one catches the attitude at its primitive stage before reflection colors it. Some little child has disobeyed his father and discovers, perhaps for the first time, that he has “something inside which he cannot do what he wants to with,” as a little boy said. When he begins to think of meeting his father he grows uncomfortable. It is not punishment he is afraid of, he has no anticipation of that. He is conscious of wrong doing and it has made a chasm between himself and his father. He reads his father’s attitude now in the shadow of his deed. He has no joy or confidence in meeting him. Something strange has come between them.
What does the little fellow do? He instinctively feels the need of some sacrifice. He must soften his father by giving him something. He breaks open his bank and brings his father his pennies, or he brings in his hand the most precious plaything he owns, and acts out his troubled inward condition. He wants the gap closed and he feels that it will cost something to get it closed.[7] That is human nature. That feeling is deep-rooted in man wherever he is found. He is conscious that sin separates and he feels that something costly and precious is required to close the chasm. Sacrifice is one of the deepest and most permanent facts of the budding spiritual life. Its origin is far back in history. The tattered papyrus, the fragment of baked clay, the pictorial inscription of the most primitive sort, all bear witness to this immemorial custom. It is as old as smiling or weeping, as hard to trace to a beginning as loving or hating. It is bound up with man’s sense of guilt, and was born when conscience was born. Dark and fantastic are many of the chapters of the long story of man’s efforts to square the account. Priests have seized upon this instinctive tendency and have twisted it into abnormal shapes, but they did not create it—it is elemental. The idea of an angry God who must be appeased and satisfied was born with this consciousness of guilt, it is a natural product of the shadow of human sin.[8] The historic theories of the atonement, inherited from the Roman church, were all formulated under the sway of this idea.