kI believe that all the writers who up to now have taken part in the symposium in The Christian World on this central question of Christianity are agreed in rejecting the notion of Expiation in the pagan sense ; the sense, that is, according to which the man who had offended a divinity must, in order to appease his resentment and recover his favour, pay the equivalent of his trespass either by a sacrifice offered or by some form of suffering undergone. This pagan idea is not that of the Bible. There, not only in the New Testament, but already in the Old, it is God, the offended God Himself, who takes the initiative in His own reconciliation with the sinful world ; who determines the conditions of it, and who provides the means for its realisation. « The Lord hath laid on Him (His servant) the iniquity of us all (Ésaïe 53). » « Blessed is he whose sin is covered and to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity » (Psaumes 32). « God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son » (Jean 3.16). « All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ » (2 Corinthiens 5). « Ye have been redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish… fore-ordained from before the foundation of the world » (1 Pierre 1). These and similar passages teach that the redemption of the world by Christ is due absolutely to the Divine love.
k – Given in a symposium for The Chritian World, 1899
But this being so, it may seem a misnomer to speak of God’s reconciliation with man, since He who decides on, and accomplishes the reconciliation can hardly be regarded as needing to be Himself reconciled. The love that loves sufficiently to take such an action towards the offender is surely in no need of being itself regained. We must then, say some, eliminate entirely from Christianity the notion of expiation and, still more, of substitution, preserving only the idea of the Heavenly Father, ever ready to pardon without any other condition than that of man’s faith in His love a faith by which the sinner finds himself really reconciled with the God whom before he had regarded as his enemy. This is, in appearance, an important simplification of the Christian doctrine, and in support of it, it is usual to cite the parable of the prodigal son.
It has, however, to be observed that the New Testament offers to us in various forms some times as verb, sometimes as substantive a term which it is difficult to reconcile with this point of view. Five times do we meet there the Greek term which signifies the placating, or rendering favourable, of God. (Luc 18.13 ; Romains 3.24 ; Hébreux 2.17 ; 1 Jean 2.2 ; 4.10.) This, while it does not exactly imply the destruction of a feeling of enmity in God, supposes nevertheless a favourable change to be produced in Him towards the sinner. Paul indeed goes so far as to speak of « indigna tion, » of « wrath, » which he attributes to God against those who « obey unrighteousness » (Romains 2.8). He further (in Éphésiens 2.3) calls all men in their natural condition, « children of wrath. » According to this there is room for the idea that the term « reconciliation » may apply not only to man, but also to God. When Paul (Romains 9.28) calls the Jews « enemies, » « as touching the Gospel » and « for your sake, » but on the other hand declares them « beloved for the fathers sake, » it is clear that the word « loved » can only relate to the love of God, and that consequently the word « enemies » in this connection means also the (momentary) enmity of God towards these same Jews. So in Romains 5.9-10, where we find the same word « enemy » used directly after the phrase « the wrath of God » it is impossible to confine the term entirely to the enmity of man towards God. The apostle is evidently thinking at the same time of God’s enmity against sinful man. The work of reconciliation, then, while, as all Scripture says, having God as its author, has nevertheless, it appears, a certain bearing upon the Divine mind, and the idea of a propitiation which occurs so often in the New Testament, and applying, as it must, to an effect produced upon God, however difficult it may be to accord the fact that God is at the same time its author, finds yet its right to a place in the Christian dogma.
To understand how that is possible it is necessary, first of all, to distinguish between the love which gives and the love which pardons. Both are indeed the same love, but their action is governed by different conditions. The former has nothing to do but to yield itself to its feeling of free benevolence, and to simply scatter its gifts ; but the latter, at the moment of action, finds two obstacles in its way. These are, on the one hand, the sentiment of displeasure in the offended party, and on the other, the disastrous and widespreading effects which would follow from a pardon pure and simple, and granting, as it would seem, the right of existence to evil. The love which pardons can, then, only be exercised on two conditions that are unknown to the love which gives. The first is the breaking down of the repulsion, the alienation of heart, the revolt which the offence produces in the offended party. And when the offended one is God, to whom the good is not, as with us, a something apart from or above Him, but who is Himself Goodness in Person, what a supreme gravity belongs, then, to the offence ! The revolt of man against God becomes nothing less than a negation of God, that is to say, of the good, and God cannot but react against what amounts to a denial of Himself. From the perfect holiness which constitutes His essence there results, therefore, an active indignation which is opposed to pardon. The second obstacle is, as we have said, the danger lest sin, unless it meet with an adequate chastisement as the opposer of good, be not in some way, as it were, legitimised. To pardon it unconditionally would be to yield it an en during place in the life of humanity.
It is to these two exigences that an expiation, in the Christian sense of the word, must respond. It is true that Paul does not apply the term « reconciliation » to God Himself. He does not say that God has reconciled Himself to the world, but that « God has reconciled the world to Himself through Christ » (2 Corinthiens 5.18-19). Did he shrink from employing the first expression, as though it might seem to suggest an imputation against the Divine Majesty ? However that may be, he himself calls Christ « the means of propitiation set forth by God » (Romains 3.25), and in 2 Corinthiens 5.20-21, he justifies the invitation to be reconciled to God which the preachers of the Gospel are to address to men by this motive : « For God has made sin for us Him who knew no sin » ; in other words : « Be ye reconciled with God, since God Himself has become reconciled to you ; since He has done in relation to His own nature what was necessary for that end. »
But does not this idea suppose a change in the Divine mind incompatible with the Divine immutability ? We may grant the change. But if we admit that God rejoices over the spectacle of a man devoted to goodness and opposing evil, that His heart goes out to such an one, and that His power cooperates with him ; and if, on the other hand, it is certain that the heart of God is grieved, alienated, out raged, at the view of a man obstinately bent on evil, how can it be otherwise than that when a change shall in either of these cases take place towards good or evil, a corresponding change shall be produced in the mind of God ? When the man changes, if the Divine sentiment did not also change in relation to him, that would be really to say that God was changeable. Love of good and hatred of evil form the invariable law of His being,, and from this it results that each instant infinite changes take place in the mind of God in accordance with the moral condition of His creatures. We must not represent to ourselves the Divine immutability as though it were like that of a stone ; it is comparable rather to that of a column of mercury, which, in constant obedience to the same physical law, rises or falls in the tube in perfect accord with each change in the atmosphere. As a friend once said to me, God is, of all beings, the most delicately and infinitely sensitive. From afar He sees and rejoices over the first movement of a heart that turns towards good ; and equally does He perceive and is grieved by, the faintest drawing of the soul towards evil.
Precisely because the Divine love is so perfectly free is it able to take on differing forms. Of these I single out two which have a special bearing on our subject. God’s love may show itself as a love of compassion or as a love of satisfaction and of complaisance in its object. The love of compassion reveals itself in God as a necessity for consoling, for saving. It is perfectly compatible with hatred of evil, and with indignation against one who commits it. One may say, indeed, that the greater God’s indignation, the more profound the compassion He feels for the evil condition of the man who causes it. For man is miserable to the extent in which he displeases God ; and that God Himself well knows. Hence His pity. It is from this love of compassion that the design proceeds of saving the sinful world. The love of satisfaction or of complacency, on the contrary, results from the joy which fills the heart of God at seeing the realisation of good in His creature, whom He can now lead into full communion with Himself, a communion which is man’s supreme good, the final object of his existence. The transition from the first of these forms of Divine love to the second can, naturally, result only from a transformation in the object of it, and that by an inner movement from an evil to a good will.
What, then, will be the condition under which the perfect love of God, the love of satisfaction and of communion, can replace the love, as yet incomplete, of compassion ? This result will necessarily depend on a change in the moral condition of the world itself, in a turning from sin to goodness. But how can this be brought about? To this question, the gravest with which the human spirit can be confronted, the Gospel contains the answer. The whole life of Jesus was a manifestation of holiness and of communion with God, calculated by its exquisite beauty to awaken on the part of all who were its witnesses the aspiration for a similar perfection. But if this homage rendered to the majesty of goodness could exert in human hearts a hunger for holiness, it was not sufficient to repair the outrage offered to the Divine authority by human disobedience. Against this disobedience, flaunting itself so shamelessly in the world, there was need of a further protest than this simple example of a perfectly holy life ; there needed a definite repudiation of this revolt of the creature, one which should constitute a solemn disassociation from it of the human will. This decisive condemnation of sin could alone restore to the Divine holiness the glory which had been obscured and the authority that had been disowned.
This was the work accomplished, first of all, in the inner consciousness of Jesus. As the Jewish high priest who, in the holy of holies, before the Ark, symbol of the Divine throne, confessed the sins of the whole people personified in him ; so Jesus, in communion with the human family of which He had, by the fact of His birth, become a member, Jesus, the only righteous, the only One whose conscience was at the height of the Divine holiness, in the deepest depth of His being, condemned human sin, as God condemned it. By an unfathomable prodigy of love He entered into the horror of the sins of which He was each day witness, as though He had Himself been the responsible author of them ; and in the perfect union of His conscience with the Divine holiness, in this rencontre intime between God and Himself, He pronounced the condemnation to death of human sin, a sentence destined to be ratified later by the united conscience of all humanity. Sin, then, has been judged by man in this one typical, normal conscience, as God Himself judges it in Heaven ; not this or that sin, but sin in itself, which Jesus bore before God as though He had been the sole sinner upon earth. There took place there, in the conscience of Christ, between the Divine holiness and human sin, an encounter the mystery of which St. Peter compares to an abyss of which the angels themselves cannot sound the depths, but of which we may get some idea in listening to that cry of Jesus, « My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? » The abandonment to which God delivers over the sinner had at that moment become His portion. This is what Paul describes in other terms when he says : « God hath made Him to be sin for us. » This cry of anguish, of immense sorrow, which broke from the heart of Jesus into the ear of God, brought appeasement ; for that is the exact sense of the word which the Scripture uses to designate what took place in the heart of God. Here was the reparation, the true expiation in the Christian sense of the word. It is the act by which the offender himself condemns his sin, and by that condemnation, so far as depends on himself, makes it to utterly disappear.
It is true that it was in one conscience alone that this judgment of the world’s sin, the echo of that which God pronounces in heaven, took place. But as there is only one rationality in all intelligent minds, so in reality there is only one and the same conscience in all moral beings ; and thus it is that the cry of suffering which came from that one perfectly normal conscience is yet to re-echo in all other human consciences. There was in this solemn meeting between the Most Holy and the typal representative of humanity the dawn, as it were, of a new world yet to appear and to replace that condition of revolt which has reigned from the time of the Fall. Just as a change in the mode of existence and of action of the magnetic pole would be enough to bring about a movement and a transformation in the magnetic state of the whole world, so this transformation in the relation of man to God of which the heart of Christ was at once the operator and the theatre, in restoring God and man to their true place, has sufficed to bring into immediate prospect a similar revolution in the human conscience, and, it may be, everywhere where beings exist possessed of this Divine organ.
And it is this mighty and sacred reaction, the signal for which was given by the conscience of the Head of humanity, that, with its happy consequences, foreseen and willed, has formed the decisive fact whose action has so wrought upon God, transforming His love of compassion, as author of redemption, into a yet nobler love, that of satisfaction, of a communion with humanity full of tenderness, whence results the communication of His Spirit.
At the same time this reparation accomplished in the conscience of Jesus could not remain as a simple interior fact, known only to God ; it must be made manifest externally, in order that its action might extend over the entire human family. The Moral Substitution which we have just been describing needed undoubtedly to come first ; for it is the very soul of, and gives its whole value to, the external reparation. But the death of the Cross required to be added to it, in order to reveal to all eyes the serious reality of the moral work, and that it might become the object of faith. It is a law derived from the Divine holiness, that suffering, interior or exterior, is the inevitable consequence of sin. This law is the safeguard of the sinner himself, since it is by penalty alone that he is made to feel the necessity of repentance. Jesus accepted the application of this law to Himself under the most rigorous of forms. But the element of reparation in the death of the Cross did not consist in the unspeakable sufferings which accompanied it. That lay in the silent and absolute submission with which they were endured. It is not a suffering merely undergone which reconciles ; it is a suffering accepted, recognised as just. The child who revolts against its punishment has offered no reparation at all. The Cross, accepted by Jesus without resistance or murmur, was the striking manifestation of that interior judgment which He had just pronounced before God upon the sin of humanity. St. Paul said (Galates 3.13) that Jesus was made a curse for us, and this by having hung upon the cross, according to the saying, « Cursed is he who hangeth on the tree. » This exterior substitution is at once the consequence and the complement of the moral substitution described above.
It is on this double substitution, the moral and the exterior, that the Christian Atonement rests. And now it is our last question : What is needed that each separate human being shall participate in the « Divine appeasement » of which the Scriptures speak, and in that return to grace which is the consequence ? One thing. He who aspires to salvation must associate himself by faith in that travail of soul accomplished in the heart of Christ when He consented to be « made sin for us » ; he must look upon his sin with the same sense of reprobation ; unite himself with the sorrowing confession of Jesus, with His humble appeal to the Divine mercy when, before His Father, He judged sin as God judges it, and pronounced its sentence of death as God Himself pronounces it. This personal association with the sacred act of which the soul of Jesus had been the theatre was mysteriously wrought in the heart of that savage Bechuana who, on hearing the story of the Cross, deeply moved, exclaimed : « Jesus away from there ! That is my place ! »
Jesus Himself used an image which contains indeed the same thought when He says, « I am come to serve, and to give My life a ransom for many. » A ransom is paid for the captive whom it is desired to liberate, for the criminal we would deliver from punishment. That is the service Jesus came to render to humanity, once slave and criminal, the slave of sin and worthy of condemnation. To accomplish this double redemption He did not offer the sacrifice of some personal good that He might have enjoyed ; He offered up His own life, His very person, body and soul ; He, the innocent One, consenting to be made responsible before God for the sin of the world, and to be treated as such before the eyes of world. If I may so say, He descended into the gloomy prison-house where we lay, and in entering left open the door behind Him, that each captive who recognised in Him his ransom might secure his release and enjoy once more the pure outside air ; that each to drop the figure might seize with the hand of faith, the greatest of all life’s goods, peace with God, and the re-establishment of communion with Him.
The work of deliverance which Jesus wrought by the offering up of Himself did not end with the death of the Cross. As the Risen and Glorified One He continues it in the heavenly life by His work of intercession before God, as says St. Paul (Romains 8.34) and John (1 Jean 2.1), and as is vividly set forth in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hébreux 7.25), « Who ever liveth to make intercession for us. » The work of expiation accomplished here below was the point of departure for this heavenly intercession which is its simple continuation.
Every time that, by faith’s assimilation, the « for us » becomes a « for me, » at once a sorrowful and joyous « for me, » in the heart of man, and that to this « He for me » there comes as answer in the heart a grateful « I for Him » that heart is henceforth not only the object of God’s compassionate love, but also of that love of His which is satisfied, which adopts, which communes. The guilty child is folded in the arms of the Father. He has found grace. He was dead and is alive again.
I suppose that The Christian World, in seeking the views of so large a number of Christian writers on this supreme topic, has not so much wished for profound dissertations as for a personal profession of faith, with more or less of the grounds of it. Well, this is mine. The « For me, » understood as in the sense of « in my place » is, in my eyes, the centre of the Gospel, as it is the nerve of the Christian life. Christianity deprived of this becomes nothing more than a sword with its edge blunted, powerless in the hands both of the missionary who seeks to strike down other religions, and in that of the private Christian to deal a mortal blow at the heart of the old man, at the tyrannous domination of self. The Christ who became my substitute on the Cross has alone the right and the power to be substitute in my heart. « For the love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge that if one died for all, therefore all died ; and He died for all that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes died and rose again. » So says Paul (2 Corinthiens 5.14-15).
Jesus, praying in Gethsemane, at the moment when He penetrated to the depths of our dark prison, cried « Father, with Thee all things are possible » ; as though He Himself no longer saw clearly the necessity, in order to the world’s salvation, of all that was awaiting Him. Nevertheless, He submitted. And for ourselves, who are still, in part, in the twilight, is not this light, though imperfect, yet enough for our belief and obedience ?
If in these lines I have in any degree missed the truth, may God pardon me. During the sixty years that I have meditated this question I have found nothing better. « She hath done what she could. »