(c) Atonement and Personality. — Love, the perfect expression of the Divine Personality, constrained God to identify Himself in Christ with us, and con- strains us to identify ourselves in Christ with God. Personality finds its perfection in fellowship ; self- identification with others is the ultimate of fellow- ship. Identification is the principle on which an interpretation of reconciliation most easily proceeds (see Reconciliation). Love is essentially self-im- partation. Reconciliation is an exchange, the giving and receiving of love; 'at-one-ment' is its issue. This is based in the Pauline thought upon the Divine initiative. God 'made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf,' that there might be identification of righteousness as well as of love in the reconcilia- tion, 'that we might become the righteousness of CJod in him,' 'not reckoning unto men their tres-
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passes.' These words suggest the idea of such an identification of men 'in Christ' that there is on God's part a general justification of mankind in the form of a non-imputation of sins, on the purely objective ground of God's satisfaction by self -giving in Him who knowing no sin was made sin on our behalf. Individual identification of man wiU follow, as, in response to God's entreating, each man is reconciled to God. 'For the love of Chi-ist con- straineth us ; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died ; and he died for all, that they which hve should no longer five unto them- selves, but to him who for their sakes died and rose again' (2 Co 5^^'). As the race died in Christ, His death is a true crisis in every man's history ; there is a new creation, which includes both a new status and a new creature. That aU died in Christ is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. St. Paul's fuU doctrine requires both ; their death is died by Hun, and His death is died by them. But in the order of thought He must first die their death, that they may die His. We never read that God has been reconciled ; He reconciled Himself to the world in Christ, but men are reconciled or ' receive the reconcihation.' St. Paul's judgment is that the atonement is a finished work, but that the 'at-one- ment' is progressive ; reconcihation is first a work wrought on men's behalf before it is wrought within their hearts ; it is a work outside of rnen, that it may be a work within them ; there is objective basis for the subjective experience.
Some interpreters, e.g. Denney,* would limit the reconciliation to what God in Chi'ist has done out- side of us ; others, e.g. Kaftan, f hold that nothing is to be called reconcihation unless men are actually reconciled. St. Paul's doctrineis consistent with the view that reconciliation is both something which is done and something which is being done. The ex- pression of that which is done and the source of that which is being done are seen in the solemn assertion that God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf. No exegesis is more than a halting in- terpretation of the profound significance of this say- ing. At least the words mean that He died for our sin in regard to its consequences. They seem, how- ever, to mean more ; but in what sense God's love in the gift of Christ can be said to be identified with 'sin on our behalf,' it is impossible to say. Certain it is that St. Paul had other and more usual ways of saying that the sinless One was a sin-bearer in the sense of an offering for sin. The strength of the saying is that He died to all that sin could mean, and that, in this dying unto sin once for all, the race with which He identified Himself in His suffer- ings and death died with Him ; it is a death which contains the death of all, rather than solely a death which would otherwise have been died by all ; in it their trespasses are not imputed unto them, and by the constraint of its demonstration of love they live not unto themselves but unto Him who died for them and rose again. The statement that aU this was the work of 'God in Christ' suffices to refute any reading of the process of reconciliation which sug- gests a contrast that approaches competition be- tween the righteousness of God and the love of Christ. It is identification which is supreme here. For, while it is no doubt ti-ue that the conception of Christ as substitute suits the interpretation of His death as sacrificial, the idea of representation best accords with the whole group of passages from which by induction St. Paul's law of redemption is to be gathered. In these, Christ appears as a central Person, in whom the race is gathered into an ethical unitjf, ha\ang one responsibility and one inheritance. In this identity even those realities usually regarded as inseparable from personality, such as sin and righteousness, are treated as separable entities pass-
* Death of Christ, 145. t Dogmntik, § 52 ff.
ing freely from the one participant in the identifica- tion to the other — sin to the Sinless One, righteous- ness to the unrighteous. An objective identity of this order, however, does not permanently satisfy so keen a thinker as St. Paul ; he cannot rest short of subjective identity between Redeemer and re- deemed. Not onty in virtual oneness by Divine ap- pointment, but in actual union by living experience, is identification to be achieved. This provides the basis for St. Paul's teaching on —