(>) The sacrificial death of Christ was an event which broke the power of sin as the dominant principle of humanity. It does not exhaust St. Paul's t«a<:hing as to the mode of Its elllcocy to say that, on the ground of the sacrifice, God accei>t« and sanctifies the sinner. lie also teaches that In the death of Christ there took place a death of mankind to sin, 'If one died for all, then all died" (2 Co 5'«, c». Ro if). Humanity
was then in a manner comprehended In Him, and, although the realization was to be partial and gradual, contemporaneously with His death it died in principle to the old order in which the flesh held the nobler elements in thrall. Christ routed sin in the sphere of human nature, and a new humanity was thus potentially created. While insuthciently recognizing the for- ensic aspect of Christ's work, Weizsiicker justly observes ; 'it consists not only with his doctrine of the Person of Christ, but also with the severul modes of thought of the great apostle, that Christ's work in death appears to him under this highest view-point of the destruction of a world and its power through a higher power and order, and that this clistiiiclion should take place in its own province, so that flesh is vanquished in the flesh, law through law, death through death' ( Avast. ZeUalt. p. HO).
(c) The Epistle to the Hebrews, though dealing very folly with the sacrifice of Christ, cliielly dwells on its parallelism to the Levitical sacrilices in re- spect of the ritualistic acts of the manipulation of the blood, and its superiority as regards its range and efficacy. There are, however, two points at whicli it propounds or develops a rellexiun which is of far-rcacliing importance in the field of specu- lation. The iirst relates to the question as to the precise nature of Christ's oflering, or the element whicli gave it its atoning value. In common with the apostles, the writer fixes our attention closely on the event of the bodily death as that which con- stitutes Christ the sin-bearer (9-^) and tlie instru- ment of our sanctilication (10'°). Hut behind tliis lay the question wherein the sacrificial value of the death consisted. Was the material of the .sacrifice the sum of the physical anguish, and of the accom- panying distress of spirit, which immediately pre- ceded death, and especially of the agony, the humiliation, and the dissolution of tiie final event? Or was it tlie spirit of self-sacrificing love which prompted Jesus to lay down His life? In other words, wa.s the sacrifice of Christ etticacious in virtue of its quality of a eufi'ering unto death, er in virtue of its quality of an obedience unto death ? Already St. Paul, in whose scheme of thought it was of vital consequence that Clirist sutt'ered the physical consequences due to human sin, had given expression to the thought that an element of fundamental value was the obedience of Christ. That we are justified by Uis blood, and that we are justified by His obedience, are parallel conceptions (Ilo S'-'"). This conception, which with St. Paul comes in somewhat incidentally, is very directly stated in He 10°-' 'Sacrifices and oflerings and whole burnt-ofl'erings and sacrifices for sin thou wouldest not ; then liath he said, Lo, I am come to do thy will ' (vv.*- »). Here the contrast between the Levitical sacrifices and the s.acrifice of Christ is developed in a peculiarly suggestive way. It docs not consist in this, tli.it in the former case animal victims are slain, in the latter a victim of pre-eminent dignity, but in the circumstance that in the one case the oll'ering is a material, in the other a spiritual oblation.
The second inijiortant passage is that in which the writer develops the parallel to the action of the high priest in the sanctuary on the Day of Atonement. Even as the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, bearing with him .sacrificial blood, which he ollered for himself and the peoiile (9'), so Christ entered heavenly places ' through his own blood,' or to present His .sacrifice before (!od (9""' v.^). From this representation it would ajipear that the vital moment of tlie sacrificial act was the presentation of His blood. And as it may be maintained that the object in presenting the blood was, not to bring into God's presence evidence of the consummation of the death, but to oiler that which the OT dcacribed as the seat of life, it would follow that the quality of satisfying God attached to Christ's oll'ering of a stainless sotil or a [lerfected obedience. The issue may be more sharply defined thus : Was the satisfaction rendered by Christ the death to which He voluntarily submitted, or wa-
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it the lifelong obedience which found in the death its last an<l most signal expression ? To many ujinds the thought embodied in the second alter- native has brought welcome intellectual relief. For the hard saying that God could be satisfied only by the death of His Son it substitutes the reasonable and even natural idea tliat the filial obedience manifested in the whole life of Jesus — in His inner life, and His ministry of teaching and beneficence, as well as in His faithfulness unto death — constituted the oirering with which God was well pleased, and which brought humanity into a new relation to God.