Following upon the Sacraments is the witness of Church History — the worship, the dogma, the art, the experience of the Christian centuries— which have all consistently gathered round the Cross. We are therefore entitled to hold that any inter- pretation of the Christian facts which shifts the focus from Calvary to Bethlehem or Galilee repre-
134
ATONEMENT
ATONEMENT
sents a departure from tlie historic faith, and tends to distort the Christian revelation.
Theories of the Atonement, of which the ^-iew that identifies it witli the Incarnation may be taken as the norm, have inevitably been popular in an age dominated by two great influences, physical science and Hegelian philosophy. But it may be doubted whether they have taken their rise in a study of the facts of Scripture and not rather in a determinist conception of the Universe, to which the Incarnation seemed to give a religious and Christian form. A consequence of this method of thought has been the revival, in this countrj- by Bishop Westcott and others, of speculations like those of Rupert of Deutz and the Scotists, which postulate an Incarnation independent of those con- ditions of human life which demand the forgive- ness of sins.* It is perhaps enough to say of this line of thought, \vith Dr. A. B. Davidson (OT Prophecy, ch. x.), that it involves 'a kind of principle, according to which God develops Him- self by an inward necessity,' and which ' is cer- tainly not a Biblical principle.' Such thinking invariably regards the Atonement merely as a mode of the Incarnation required by the conditions under which it took place. And whether tliis theory be specifically held or not, it has been a tendency of recent theology to fix the mind rather upon the ethical principle of the Atonement, i.e. the obedience or penitence or assent to God's abhonence of sin, of which death is the 'sacra- ment ' or visible sign, than upon the Crucifixion as a work intrinsically eflScacious apart from the moral qualities expressed in its accomplishment. Such \news are defective, not because they faO to give expression to aspects of Christ's redeem- ing work, but because they stop short at the point where explanation is necessary, why these qualities of the spirit of Jesus should have been directed towards the particular end of the death of the Cross. The climax of the account which St. Paul gives in the Epistle to the Philippians of the exaltation of Jesus, is neither the assumption of human flesh nor the suflering of death, but the obedience which accepted the humiliation of the Cross as the act whereby He fulfilled, not the general, but the particular will of God (Ph 2^-", cf. 1 P 1").
The Apostles, as we have seen, saw the purpose, and therefore the explanation, of this concrete his- torical event through the medium of the OT. Whatever view it may be expedient to take of the relation between Hebrew prophecy and Jesus of Nazareth, this fact is of primary importance, because it exhibits what in the view of the first messengers of the Cross was the essential char- acter of the good news it was their mission to pro- claim ; nor would the case be materially altered if the language of Law and Prophets had merely been chosen to illustrate the central idea of the Gospel. What we find is the remarkable manner in which the idea of the King and the Kingdom, consonant with contemporai-y Jewish expectation, is combined with that of the suffering ^Iessiah, so alien to the current interpretation of the Scrij)- tures as to present ' to the Jews a stumbling- block.' The antithesis between the Cross and the Resurrection was, indeed, such as to suggest that the death of Jesus was united to its marvellous sequel by a chain of causation removing it from the ordinary category of dissolution, and making it the interpretative fact of a career otherwise the most unintelligible in historj'. But the main
' These speculations must be distinguished from the teaching of the Calvinistic Supralapsarians of the 17th cent., which, reljing upon such passages as Eph 3", 1 P 120, Kev 138 (V), main- tained that the Atonement waa itself the fulfilment of an eternal purpose.
point to observe is that the Resurrection, being in the first instance the crucial fact of experience which marked off for the disciples their Master Jesus as the Son of God (Ro V opiaBifTos, cf. Ac 2036-43 1323.32.33)^ ratified, in the minds of those who had continued with Him in His temptations, that view of His work which had been before the eye of the Di^■ine Sufferer throughout His ministry, and which He had progressively disclosed to hearts slow of belief, until a hitherto invincible prejudice had succumbed to the decisive evidence of accom- plishment.
Tlie persistence with which early heresies con- nected themselves with the Baptism of Jesus reveals the prominence which the event assumed in the story of the ministry, and goes far to authenticate the details of the Synoptic narrative (Mt 3^^"", Mk P-'i, Lk p=^, cf. Jn l32-«), the correspondence of which with the Apostolic view of the Saviom''s mission is too subtle to warrant the theory that they are the glosses of a later tradition. In this narrative Jesus is represented as doing something more than declaring the obligation which rested upon Him to fulfil that righteousness characteristic or the Hebrew covenant. ' Thtis it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness,' i.e. by submitting to the baptism which John would have withheld because it involved repentance and provided for the remis- sion of sins. The Voice from Heaven, and the Temptation endured in the power of the baptismal Spirit(Mt4i, Mk 1'-, Lk4i), even if they be regarded merely as the interpretation of the subjective con- sciousness of Jesus, witness to the identity between the scheme of the ministerial life accepted from the first by the Son of Man and the gospel of the re- deeming work preached by the Apostles. For the Voice blends the prophecy of the royal Son (Ps 2') with that of the beloved Servant (Is 42>), and the