The Mosaic system was only external, 'sanctifying unto the cleanness of the flesh'; partial, for it provided no expiation for the graver moral transgressions; temporary, for the sacrifices had to be repeated 'day by day'; provisional, for 'if there was perfection through the Levitical priesthood ... what further need was there that another priest should arise after the order of Melchizedek?' In spite, however, of these obvious defects and limitations in the Mosaic system, there was a constant tendency among the Jews to rest content with it, to rely upon the efficacy of these external sacrifices and ceremonies for their whole religion, to believe that 'the blood of bulls and goats' could 'put away sin,' and that no inner spiritual repentance or renovation was required. And the highest minds of the nation, represented by the prophets, were keenly alive to this danger: their rebukes and remonstrances shew how strongly they felt the imperfection of the sacrificial system, how it failed to satisfy the really religious cravings of spiritual minds. Yet there it was, divinely ordained, clearly necessary as the expression of the national religious life, profoundly significant. It could not be dispensed with, yet it could not satisfy: in its incompleteness, as well as in its symbolism, it pointed forward, and foreshadowed a perfect expiation.
(3) This examination of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament is necessary in a discussion of the doctrine of the Atonement, for several reasons. The institutions of the Law were, in the first place, ordained by God, and therefore intended to reveal in some degree His purposes, His mind towards man. We thus find in them traces of the fuller revelation which came afterwards, and the two dispensations throw light on each other. Then again, it was from the Law that the Jews derived their religious language: their conceptions of sacrifice, of atonement, of the effects of sin, were moulded by the influence of the Mosaic ceremonies. For this reason the apostolic doctrine of the Atonement must be looked at in connection with the ideas inspired by the Law, although, of course, the life and work of our Lord so enlarged the religious conceptions of the Apostles as to constitute a fresh revelation. But it was a revelation on the lines, so to speak, of the old; it took up and continued the ideas implanted by the Mosaic religion, and displayed the fulfilment of the earlier promises and forecasts. It is, therefore, from the Old Testament that we have to learn the vocabulary of the apostolic writings. As the Messianic hopes and phraseology throw light upon the apostolic conception of the Kingdom of Christ, so the sacrificial ceremonies and language of the Law throw light upon the apostolic conception of the Sacrifice, the Atonement of Christ. But this is not all. The Mosaic institutions, in their general outlines, were no arbitrary and artificial symbols, but corresponded to religious feelings, needs, aspirations that may truly be called natural and universal. This conception of sin in its twofold aspect of alienation and of guilt, and this idea of sacrifice as effecting man's restoration to union with God, and also as expiating his guilt by suffering, correspond to what the human conscience, when deeply and sincerely investigated, declares to be its inmost secret. Every man who has once realized sin, can also realize the feelings of the Jew who longed to make an expiation for the guilt of the past, to suffer some loss, some penalty that would cover his sin, and who therefore brought his offering before God, made the unconscious victim his representative, the bearer of his guilt, and by slaying it strove to make atonement. We feel the same need, the same longing. This load of guilt has to be laid down somehow: this past sinfulness must meet with a punishment which will make expiation for it: before this lost union with God can be restored we must be assured of pardon, must know that the wrath of God no longer abides on us, but has been turned away, and finds no longer in us the sin which is the one obstacle to the free course of Divine love. And then we know further that bitter truth which came to the loftiest minds among the Jews, that no sacrifice of ours can have atoning value, for God demands the offering of ourselves, and we are so weakened by sin that we cannot give ourselves up to Him, so polluted by sin that we cannot be well-pleasing in His eyes. In order to atone, sacrifice must be no outward ceremony, the offering of this or that possession, the fulfilment of this or that externally-imposed ordinance, but the entire surrender of self to God, and to His law, a surrender dictated from within by the free impulse of the will. Therefore, just as the spiritually-minded Jew felt the continual discrepancy between the external ceremonies which he was bound to fulfil, and the complete submission to the will of God which they could not effect, and without which they were wholly inadequate, so every awakened conscience must feel the fruitlessness of any outward expression of devotion and obedience so long as there is no complete sacrifice of self.
These, then, seem to be the conditions which must be satisfied before an atonement can meet the needs of the human heart and conscience, whether these are inferred from an examination of the Hebrew religious institutions or are gathered from our own knowledge of ourselves and of others. There is, first of all, the consciousness of guilt, of an offended God, of a law transgressed, of punishment impending, to expiate which some sacrifice is necessary, but no sacrifice adequate to which can be offered by us as we are. Propitiation is the first demand of the law, and we cannot, of ourselves, propitiate Him whose anger we have righteously incurred. Secondly, we long for an abiding union with Him, and for the full bestowal of the Divine life which results from that union alone. Propitiation is not enough by itself, though propitiation is the necessary first step in the process of reconciliation. Aliens, by our own sinful acts, and by the sin of our forefathers, from the life of God, we yet long to return and to live once more in Him. But this is equally impossible for us to accomplish of ourselves. By sin we have exiled ourselves, but we cannot return by mere force of will. Both as propitiation, therefore, and as reunion, the Atonement must come from without and cannot be accomplished by those who themselves have need of it. But there is a third condition, apparently irreconcileable with the other two. This same consciousness of guilt which demands an expiation demands that it shall be personal, the satisfaction of the sense of personal responsibility, and of the unconquerable conviction of our own freedom. The propitiatory sacrifice which is to effect our reunion must, for we are powerless to offer it, come from without: but at the same time we cannot but feel that it must come into contact with the will, it must be the inward sacrifice, the freewill offering of the whole nature that has sinned.
II. If the redemptive work of Christ satisfies these conditions it is evident that it is not a simple, but a very complex fact. The fault of many of the theories of the Atonement has been that, though none of them failed to be partially true, they were limited to one or other of the various aspects which that mysterious fact presents. It is certain, again, that of this complex fact no adequate explanation can be given. At every stage in the process which is generally summed up in the one word Atonement we are in presence of forces which issue from infinity and pass out of our sight even while we are contemplating their effects. And even if the Atonement could be altogether reduced, so to speak, to terms of human experience, it will be shewn that man's forgiveness, the nearest analogy of which we have any knowledge, is an experience of which no logical explanation can be given, which seems to share, indeed, something of the mystery of its Divine antitype. But though it is almost blasphemous to pretend to fathom the depth of the Atonement, to lay out the whole truth so as to satisfy the formulae of human reason, it is necessary so to understand it as to discern its response to the imperative demands of the sense of sin and the desire for forgiveness. Whatever the ultimate mysteries of the death of Christ may be, it is certain that it has had power to convince men of forgiveness and to give them a new life. It must therefore in some way satisfy the conditions which, as we have seen, are laid down by human consciousness and experience. It is under the threefold aspect required by those conditions that the doctrine of the Atonement will be here presented.
1. The death of Christ is, in the first place, to be regarded as propitiatory. On the one hand there is man's desire, natural and almost instinctive, to make expiation for his guilt: on the other there is the tremendous fact of the wrath of God against sin. The death of Christ is the expiation for those past sins which have laid the burden of guilt upon the human soul, and it is also the propitiation of the wrath of God. As we have seen, over against the sense of sin and of liability to the Divine wrath there has always existed the idea of sacrifice by which that wrath might be averted. Man could not offer an acceptable sacrifice: it has been offered for him by Christ. That is the simplest, and it would seem the most scriptural way of stating the central truth, which is also the deepest mystery, of the Atonement, and it seems to sum up and include the various other metaphors and descriptions of the redemptive work of Christ. But its mere statement at once suggests questions, the consideration of which will lead to a fuller understanding of the doctrine. Thus we have to ask. What is it which is propitiated by Christ's death? In other words, What is meant by the wrath of God against sin?
(a) It should be remembered that though there is great danger in anthropomorphism, and though most of the superstition which has ever been the shadow cast by religion on the world has arisen from an exaggerated conception of the likeness of God to ourselves, yet there is, after all, no other way of knowing God than by representing Him under conceptions formed by our own consciousness and experience, and this method is pre-eminently incumbent upon us who believe that man is made 'in the image of God.' We are certain, for instance, that love, pity, justice, are affections which, however imperfectly they may be found in us, do make for goodness, and if we may not ascribe these same affections, infinitely raised and purified, to God, we have no means of conceiving His character, of knowing 'with whom we have to deal.'
Our knowledge, even of ourselves, is after all fragmentary[220], and thus truths of whose certainty we are convinced may seem irreconcileably opposed to each other. Our conception of love, for example, is a fragment, and we cannot trace it up to the meeting-point at which it is reconciled with justice, so that in our moral judgments we are continually oscillating, as it were, between the two. But this fact should not hinder us from ascribing to God in their fullest degree both love and justice, confident that in Him they are harmonized because we are confident from the verdict of our own consciences that both are good, and because even in such imperfect reflections of His image as, for instance, parental love, we see at least a partial harmony of them. When then a doubt arises as to the literal explanation of the phrase 'the wrath of God,' the difficulty must not be met by the simple assertion that we cannot reconcile the idea of wrath with that of the love of God: we must ask whether wrath, as it exists in us, is a good and righteous affection, or whether it is always and entirely evil. To this question there can be but one answer. We are conscious of a righteous anger, of an affection of displeasure that a good man ought to feel against sin and evil, and this is amply justified by the scriptural references to righteous anger, and by the accounts of our Lord's displays of indignation against evil. But though we are thus compelled to find room, so to speak, for anger in our conception of God's character, it is not therefore necessary to ascribe to Him that disturbance of the spiritual nature, or that change in the direction of the will, which are almost invariable accompaniments of human anger. These are the defects of the human affection, from which arises the sinful tendency in our anger, and which cannot be thought of in connection with the all-holy and all-wise God. On the other hand, it is not possible to limit the conception of the 'wrath of God' to the acts whereby sin is or will be punished, which was the explanation of some of the Fathers, or to think of it as in the future only, to come into existence only on the day of judgment, as has been attempted by some modern theologians. The scriptural expressions, including as we must the passages which speak of our Lord's anger, cannot be so weakened. 'The wrath of God' seems to denote no changeful impulse or passing feeling, but the fixed and necessary hostility of the Divine Nature to sin; and the idea must further include the manifestation of that hostility, whenever sin comes before God, in external acts of vengeance, punishment and destruction. God's anger is not only the displeasure of an offended Person: it is possible that this is altogether a wrong conception of it: it must be further the expression of justice, which not only hates but punishes. The relation of the Divine Nature to sin is thus twofold: it is the personal hostility, if we may call it so, of holiness to sin, and it is also the righteousness which punishes sin because it is lawless. The two ideas are intimately connected, and not unfrequently, when we should have expected to find in the Bible the wrath of God spoken of, the language of judgment and righteousness is substituted for it. Sin is necessarily hateful to the holiness of God, but also, because sin is lawlessness, it is judged, condemned, and punished by Him in accordance with the immutable law of righteousness, which is the law of His own Nature. Therefore, to turn from God's wrath against sin to the mode in which that wrath may be averted, it results that the sacrifice offered for sin must be both a propitiation and a satisfaction. Anger, so we think, is but a feeling, and may be ousted by another feeling; love can strive against wrath and overcome it; the Divine hatred of sin need raise no obstacle to the free forgiveness of the sinner. So we might think; but a true ethical insight shews us that this affection of anger, of hatred, is in reality the expression of justice, and derives from the law of righteousness, which is not above God, nor is it dependent on His Will, for it is Himself. 'He cannot deny Himself'; He cannot put away His wrath, until the demands of Law have been satisfied, until the sacrifice has been offered to expiate, to cover, to atone for the sins of the world. The reconciliation to be effected is not merely the reconciliation of man to God by the change wrought in man's rebellious nature, but it is also the propitiation of God Himself, whose wrath unappeased and whose justice unsatisfied are the barriers thrown across the sinner's path to restoration.
(b) But how, we ask further, was this propitiation made by the Sacrifice on the Cross? Or, to put the question rather differently, what was it that gave to the death of Christ its propitiatory value? In attempting to suggest an answer to this question it is necessary to bear in mind the distinction between the actual event, or series of events, which constituted the Propitiatory Sacrifice, and that inner element which was thereby manifested, and which gave to the actual event its worth. S. Bernard expressed the distinction in the well-known words 'Not His death, but His willing acceptance of death, was pleasing to God,' and there can be no doubt that throughout the New Testament special stress is laid upon the perfect obedience manifested in the life and death of Christ, upon the accomplishment of His Father's will which He ever kept in view, and upon the contrast thus marked between the Mosaic sacrifices and the one atoning offering. 'Sacrifices and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein ... then hath He said, Lo, I am come to do Thy will.'
That the perfect obedience displayed in the passion and death of our Lord was the element which gave to the sacrifice its propitiatory value will be more readily understood when it is remembered that the essence of man's sin was from the first disobedience, the rebellion of the human will against the commands of God. The perfect sacrifice was offered by One Who, being man with all man's liability to temptation, that is with all the instruments of sin at His disposal[221], and exposed to every suggestion to set up His will against that of the Father, yet throughout His life continued unswervingly bent on doing 'not His own will, but the will of the Father Who sent Him,' and Who thus displayed the original perfection of human nature, the unbroken union with the life of God. On the cross the final struggle, the supreme temptation took place. The obedience shewn throughout His life was there manifested in death. 'He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.' At any moment of the passion a single acquiescence in evil, a single submission to the law of unrighteousness, a single swerving of His will from its choice of absolute obedience, would, we may believe, have ended all the shame and torture. And therefore there was needed at every moment a real effort of His human will to keep itself in union with the will of God[222]; it was not a mere submission at the outset once for all, but a continuous series of voluntary acts of resignation and obedience. Here then is the spirit of sacrifice which God demands, and which could not be found in the sacrifices of the Mosaic law, or in any offering of sinful man. The essence of the Atonement was the mind of Christ therein displayed, the obedience gradually learnt and therein perfected, the will of Christ therein proved to be one with the Father's will.
But we may discern a further element of propitiation in the death of our Lord. The law of righteousness, the justice of God, demands not only obedience in the present, but retribution for the past. 'The sins done aforetime' had been 'passed over in the forbearance of God' for His own purposes, which are not revealed to us: this 'passing over' had obscured the true nature of sin and of the Divine justice. Men had come to have easy thoughts of sin and its consequences; the heathen felt but vaguely the burden of guilt, the Jew trusted in the mere external works of the law. In the death of Christ a manifestation was made of the righteousness of God, of His wrath, the absolute hostility of His nature to sin. 'God set Him forth to be a propitiation, through faith, by His blood, to shew His righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.' But this manifestation of Divine justice might have been made by mere punishment: it became a propitiation, in that He, the self-chosen victim, by His acceptance of it, recognised the righteousness of the law which was vindicated on the cross. Men had refused to acknowledge God's justice in the consequences of sin; nothing but the willing acceptance of suffering, as the due portion of the human nature in which the sin was wrought, could have so declared the justice of God's law as to be a propitiation of Divine wrath. The cross was, on the one hand, the proclamation of God's ordinance against sin, on the other it was the response of man at length acknowledging the righteousness of the condemnation[223].