15 Epitome Theologia Christiana Dogmatica.
16 Die Lehren von Adam's Fall, der Erbsunde, und dem Opfer Christi.
17 Studien der Evang. Geietlichkeit Wurtemburgs, viii. 1, 2. Doederlein, Morus, Knapp, Schwarze, and Reinhard affirm that the death of Christ was not the price of our pardon, but the confirming declaration of free pardon from God. Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 297, note 5.
18 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei Jahrhunderteu.
19 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei Jahrhunderten, ss. 176-180.
20 Augustine, Epist. ad Evodium 99. Op. Imp. vi. 22, 30. Epist. 164. Dante makes Adam say he had been 4302 years in Limbo when Christ, at his descent, rescued him. Paradise, canto xxvi.
through all the events and forces associated with the death of Christ, including his descent to Hades and his resurrection, men are delivered from the doom of the under world. The common theology explains it as teaching that there was an expiatory efficacy in the unmerited sufferings of Christ. The system known as Unitarianism says it denotes merely the exertion of a saving spiritual power on the hearts of men. The first interpretation charges the figure of speech with a dramatic revelation of the love of God freely rescuing men from their inherited fate. The second seems to make it a tank of gore, where Divine vengeance legally laps to appease its otherwise insatiable appetite. The third fills it with a regenerative moral influence to be distributed upon the characters of believers. The two former also include the last; but it excludes them. Now, as it seems to us, the first is the form of mistake in which the early Church, including the apostles, embodied the true significance of the mission of Christ. Owing to the circle of ideas in which they lived, this was the only possible form in which the disciples of Jesus could receive the new doctrine of a blessed immortality brought to light by Christianity.21 The second is the form of false theory in which a few scholastic brains elaborated the cruel results of their diseased metaphysical speculations. The third is the dry, meager, inadequate statement of the most essential truth in the case.
There is one more point of view in which the New Testament holds up the resurrection of Christ. It is regarded as a summons to a moral and spiritual resurrection within the breast of the believer. As the great Forerunner had ascended to a spiritual and immortal life in the heavens, so his followers should be inspired with such a realizing sense of heavenly things, with such Divine faith and fellowship, as would lift them above the world, with all its evanescent cares, and fix their hearts with God. This high communion with Christ, and intense assurance of a destined speedy inheritance with him, should render the disciple insensible to the clamorous distractions of earth, invulnerable to the open and secret assaults of sin, as if in the body he were already dead, and only alive in the spirit to the obligations of holiness, the attractions of piety, and the promises of heaven. "When we were dead in trespasses and sins, God loved us, and hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places." "If ye, then, be risen with Christ, set your affection on things above, not on earthly things; for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." This moral symbolic application of the resurrection is most beautiful and effective. Christ has risen, immaculate and immortal, into the pure and holy heaven: then live virtuously and piously, that you may be found worthy to be received unto him. "He that hath this hope purifieth himself, even as He is pure." Paul enforces this thought through the striking figure that, since "we are freed from the law through the death of Christ, we should be married to his risen spirit and bring forth fruit unto God." And again, when he speaks in these words, "Christ in you the hope of glory," we suppose he refers to the spiritual image of the risen Redeemer formed in the disciples' imagination and heart, the prefiguring and witnessing pledge of their ascension also to heaven. The same practical use is made of the doctrine through the rite and sign of baptism. "Ye are buried with Christ in
21 Bretschneider forcibly illustrates this in his Handbuch der Dogmatik der Evang. Luther. Kirche, sects. 156-158, band ii.
baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through faith in the working of God, who hath raised him from the dead." "Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ, why are ye subject to worldly ordinances? and if ye be risen with him, seek those things which are above." When the disciple sunk beneath the baptizing waters, he was typically dead and buried, as Jesus was in the tomb; when he rose from the waters into the air again, he figuratively represented Christ rising from the dead into heaven. Henceforth, therefore, he was to consider himself as dead to all worldly sins and lusts, alive to all heavenly virtues and aspirations. "Therefore," the apostle says, "we are buried with Christ by baptism unto death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we should walk in newness of life." "In that Christ died, he died unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God." "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." This was strictly true to the immediate disciples of Jesus. When he died, their hearts died within them; they shrank away in hopeless confusion and gloom. When he returned to life and ascended to heaven, in feeling and imagination they went with him. Every moral power and motive started into new life and energy.