2. General character of the apostolic doctrine. — This, as presented in the literature of the Apostolic Age, is a unity in diversity. The diversity is aji- parent ; it emerges as the stress of the interpreta- tion of the death of Christ falls upon that which is accompUshed by it objectively to man's inner ex- perience and moral desert, in contrast with the effects subjectively achieved in the spiritual history of the individual believer and of the Christian community. The former represents what God does in and of and by Himself which, as exhibited in the life and death of His Son, justifies to Himself and in Himself the manifestation of His grace in the remission of sins ; the latter is what man experiences in actual cleans- ing from sin and in conscious reconciliation with God in Christ ; the former is represented as accom- plished once for all in the sacrificial obedience of Christ even unto death ; the latter is realized in the self-surrender of man under the constraint of the love of God in Christ, so that he enters into an in- ward spiritual fellowship with the suffering death of Christ, and in the power of his resurrection experi- ences the reality of ethical union with Christ ; the former is regarded as a finished work, the latter as a progressive achievement ; the former is atone- ment, the latter is ' at-one-ment.' The presence of this diversity of view in the faith of the Apostohc
* Cf. Life and LeUer.i of Dean Church, London, 1895, p. 274. + Faith and Criticism', London, 1H9.3, p. 222. t Aids to Reflection, ed. London, 1913, Com. xix.
Church seems undeniable. Both aspects are dwelt upon ; neither appears to be adequate alone. Each is carried back to the abiding purpose of God and regarded as the interpretation of His eternal love ; the juridical stands for a reality in His nature as truly as the ethical ; much in the apostohc doctrine is not covered by the conception of atonement which represents it as a perfect confession of sin on behalf of man by Christ as man's Representative ; the juridical conception is not fairly stated as an argu- mentum ad Judoeos, or as the mere inheritance of Jewish thought. For, although the idea of hteral substitution lay so near to hand in later Jewish theology and was everywhere enriched for them by historic and Divinely-appointed ritual observance, the apostohc thinkers so deepen and transfigure it that it no longer tolerates the superficial conven- tional idea of an easy or mechanical transfer of man's guilt and penalty to another so that the sinner is exempt from further responsibility.
An objective view of atonement exaggerated into a system of imputations and equivalents is not found in the teaching of the Apostolic Church, neither is it ever set forth as a device for overcoming God's reluctance to forgive sins. We are presented rather with an intensely ethical conception of God's re- quirements and with a mystical view of man's rela- tion to Christ as the Representative of the race. Substitution is thus deepened into moral identifica- tion and solidarity ; even the outstanding feature of the apostolic view of atonement as ' propitiation' is exphcitly correlated with the ethical nature of God ; behind the figures of speech and juridical phraseology the redeeming work of Christ is pre- sented as concerned primarily with personal rela- tions and moral reahties. In this reference in the processes of reconciliation to the Divine purpose and activity— ' God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself' — and, stiU further, in the recogni- tion of the fact that the sufferings of the righteous benefit the unrighteous, the unity of the apostolic doctrine is found. Objective and subjective views being thus regarded as manifestations of the self- imparting love of God, originating in Him, not in Christ apart from Him, justice and mercy as contrasted attributes in the Divine nature are tran- scended. The apostolic mind also rests more upon the declaration of the Divine righteousness in the blood of Christ than upon its satisfaction thereby. God declares Himself reconciled by something He had done whilst men were yet sinners. On Christ's part the reconciliation takes place through an act of self-emptying prior to, but manifest in, the Incar- nation, with its obedience unto death , even the death of the cross. The unity of 'objective' and 'sub- jective' is verified also in the true experience of personal redemption, which is never regarded in the apostolic teaching as adequate apart from an ethical surrender of the self to God in Christ by the obedience of faith. Union with God in Christ is in the apostohc teaching a closer definition of having 'received the reconciliation.'
3. Finality and authority of the apostolic doc- trine.^'I'he interesting question whether tlie apo- stolic doctrine of the atonement is final for tli(> thought of the Church and binding upon her teach- ers, is a phase of the hving controversy respecting the permanent place of apostolic teaching in Chris- tian thought, and lies beyond the scope of this article. It must suflSce to point out that the teach- ing of the Apostolic Church gives no sanction for the view that the illumination of the minds of men respecting the significance of the d(\ath of Christ is limited to one type of interpretation or to one generation of men. It is possible to recognize a distinction between the contingent thought -forms of the Apostolic Age and the essential spiritual life with its fundamental certainties in an experience