3/? ; Gforttell UniaerHttg Hibrarg Stljata, New fflorh BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 nl^llij^tg^^aows when this volume was taken. To renew this book copy the call No. and give to the librarian. HOME USE RULES OUi All Books subject to recall All borrowers must regis- }"t'^ ter in the library to borrow books for home use: '"""" All books must, be re- - . ■ ' ' turned at end of college year for inspection and repairs. Limited books must be returned within the four week limit and not renewed. Students must return all books before leaving town. Officers should arrange for the return of books wanted during their absence from town. .....J.A.N....2..5..I35a Y^T" M r"''^,H and of pamphlets are held in the library as much as MK^ iyii)b"ii"F A?«=?ri373ir^- possible. For special pur- poses they are given out for a. limited time. Borrowers should not use their library privileges for the benefit of other persons. Books of special value and gift books, when the giver wishes it, are not allowed to circulate. Readers are asked to re- port all cases of books marked or mutilated. s by marks and writias. Cornell University Library BR45 .B21 1915 Idea of atonement in Christian theology: Clin 3 1924 029 214 941 Cornell University Library ^ The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029214941 THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT BT THE SAME AUTHOR THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 1895. DOCTRINE AND DEVELOPMENT. 1898. CHRISTUS IN ECCLESIA. 1904. THE THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL. 1907. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 1909. IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION? 1914. CONSCIENCE AND CHRIST. 1916. THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY BEING THE BAMPTON LECTURES FOR 1915 BY HASTINGS RASHDALL D.LiTT. (OxoN.), D.C.L. (DuNELM.), LL.D. (St. Andrews) DEAN OF CARLISLE FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY FORMERLY FELLOW AND TUTOR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1920 95'o34l3 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO COPYRIGHT First Edition igig Reprinted 1920 EXTRACT FROM THE LAST WILL AND STATEMENT OF The Late Rev. JOHN BAMPTON CANON OF SALISBURY ..." I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes hereinafter mentioned ; that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice- Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, and to be performed in the manner following : " I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, a Lecturer may be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the Printing- House, between the hours of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the end of the third week in Act Term. "Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following subjects — to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics — upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures — upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church — upon the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost — upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and Nicene Creed. vi THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT " Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months after they are preached ; and one copy shall be given to the Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library ; and the expense of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons ; and the Preacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are printed. " Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice." PREFACE One of the most crying needs of the Church at the present moment is a serious attempt at re-thinking its traditional Theology. A large part of that theology has obviously become more or less unintelligible to modern men who do not possess technical knowledge of its history and contents. It needs to be re-examined, and (where necessary) reconstructed, in the light of modern philo- sophy, modern science, and modern criticism. How far the ancient formulae should be frankly abandoned, or how far they admit of re-interpretation in terms of modern thought and experience, is a question on which for the present there are likely to be considerable differ- ences of opinion : but there ought, I think, to be no dissent from the proposition that we should, as little as possible, go on using ancient formulae without knowing — perchance without caring — what was their original meaning, or how far that is a meaning which we at the present day can really appropriate. Personally, I am heartily in favour of the more conservative course of preserving (as far as possible) the continuity of Christian thought and expression. I believe that in very many cases the traditional language, when once its true meaning is known, will be found to be far more patient of a reasonable and a modern interpretation than is often supposed. It is, indeed, impossible that any educated person at the present day can really think of God and the universe exactly as was done by the men of the fourth century or of the thirteenth or of the six- teenth. The most conservative theologian's conception viii THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT of God and the universe has been altered by Copernicus and Newton, by Lyell and Darwin, by naodern concep- tions of history and modern biblical studies, even^ when what is technically called " the higher criticism " and its results are abjured or ignored. For all or most educated clergymen and laymen, in our own Church at least, a fundamental revolution has been effected by the abandon- ment of the older theories of biblical inspiration and an entirely altered attitude towards the biblical account of creation and the early history of the Jewish people. These changes cannot be without their influence upon our interpretation of dogmas and doctrines which grew up under the influence of the earlier conceptions. And yet it is quite possible that the old formulae may be re- interpreted without more violence to their original meaning than they have suffered over and over again during the past history of doctrinal development. Indeed in many cases, the kind of re-interpretation that is needed is simply a return to some earlier stage in the development of the traditional theology, though in others it will involve a continuation of some line of develop- ment to which the Church is already more or less deeply committed. The present work deals only with one department, or (better) one aspect, of the traditional theology — with what is technically known as the doctrine of the work of Christ as distinct from the doctrine of His Person. My object has been to examine the traditional doctrine of " salvation " through Christ — in particular of salva- tion through the sufferings and death of Christ — and the closely connected theories as to the way in which the salvation brought into the world by Christ is to be appropriated by the individual soul. This has involved some treatment of the " doctrine of grace," and, indeed, has occasionally led me into various other departments of theology ; but I have tried to confine myself as much as possible to the questions which centre round the doctrine of the atonement. Logically, no doubt, any enquiry into the " office " of Christ should pre-suppose a much fuller treatment of the doctrine of His Person PREFACE IX than will be found In these pages. But there are some advantages in beginning with an enquiry into the former subject. The need for fiirther study and bolder expression is here peculiarly pressing, and is perhaps more widely felt than in any other region. On the one hand, the idea that we ai^e to be saved through Christ, and in some sense through His Cross, is much dearer to the hearts of most religious people than any technical presentation of the incarnation : it is, indeed, very largely through its bearing upon the practical question, " How am I to be saved .'' " that the doctrine of Christ's divinity interests them at all. On the other hand, there has been far more that is definitely irrational, repellent, and immoral in many theories of the atonement than there has been in any accepted theory of the incarnation. The revolt against these theories is, indeed, already pretty general ; but the way to a healthier and more modern presentation of the subject is blocked by the surviving debris of shattered systems. Moreover, there has been far more variation in the Church's teaching on this subject than there has been as regards the doctrines of the Holy Trinity or of the incarnation. The doctrine of the atonement has never been defined by any Creed or " general " Council of the Church. The Creeds indeed decide no question connected with the subject which has ever been matter of dispute among Christians. The Apostles' Creed says literally nothing about it ; the Creed com- monly called "Nicene"or " Constantinopolitan " confines itself to the bare statements that the Son of God " for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven," and that He was crucified " for us." No Council that can possibly claim ecumenical authority has ever gone beyond such simple statements ; and, if we look at the whole course of development from the New Testament to the end of the scholastic period, there is no subject upon which less of a consensus -patrum can be alleged than on the question, " In what sense and for what reason can Christ be said to have died for us ? " In these circumstances there is perhaps some hope of getting a hearing even in conservative circles for a theological X THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT enquiry which is directed rather to the question " What is true ? " than to the question " What has been decided ? " Some will perhaps be disposed to complain _ that I have not confined myself more strictly to questions of present truth and meaning, instead of devoting so large a space to the history and development of the traditional doctrines. My reason for adopting the historical method of treatment is that it is not possible to enquire into the truth of any particular presentation of such a doctrine as that of the atonement till we know whence that pre- sentation comes to us, what authority it can claim, and what reason there is, or ever was, for believing it to be true. Theologians, and even philosophers, who have approached the subject without such a preliminary en- quiry have too often assumed that there is some one doctrine on the subject which can somehow claim to be the doctrine of the atonement, which has come down to us from the teaching of Christ or at least from the very earliest days of Christianity, which has always borne the same meaning, which has always , been accepted and always must be accepted as the central doctrine, if not as the whole, of Christianity. Writers who adopt this method often occupy themselves with finding ingenious apologies and explanations for precisely those features of the traditional theories which can least claim to repre- sent any reasonable process of thought, any profound religious conviction, or any compelling weight of authority. When philosophers, often personally quite unattached to traditional Christianity, have supposed themselves bound to find profound metaphysical explanations of what they take to be " ^ke Christian doctrine of the atonement," the result has often been some theory not particularly rational in itself, something which presents hardly any resemblance to the belief which it is supposed to interpret, and which has, almost avowedly, no real relation to the historical Personality in connexion with whose work all Christian theories of the atonement actually grew up. A due appreciation of the historical origin, and subsequent variations, of the doctrine is the essential pre-requisite of any attempt to mterpret or PREFACE xi re-interpret it in terms of modern thought. It is not worth while to find philosophical justifications for theories which originally rested upon some misinterpretation of Hebrew prophecy, or which represent some comparatively modern perversion or exaggeration of an earlier and more reasonable belief. I am aware, of course, that the historical enquiry has been very imperfectly carried out in these pages. I have been obliged, especially in the later periods, merely to examine the views of a few great typical writers without attempting a continuous history of opinion, and the historical enquiry stops altogether with the first phase of the Reformation. It would have been quite easy to fill another volume as large as the present with accounts and criticisms of later views ; but this would have carried me far beyond the limits permissible to a Bampton Lecturer, even when he avails himself to the full of his accustomed licence to print much more than was actually delivered in the pulpit. The development of the more or less authoritative dogma practically ends with the age of Luther and Calvin : the history of modern speculation on this subject I have deliberately regarded as lying beyond my province. I have consequently been able to take very little notice of modern, and especi- ally of contemporary, writers. But I hope it will not be supposed that I have failed to acquaint myself with their work or that I underrate its importance. I have, I believe, examined all the main lines of thought on the subject which find defenders at the present day, but I have only occasionally and by way of illustration men- tioned the theologians by whom they have been main- tained. I have not attempted to enter in detail into the particular forms which each type of theory assumes in the hands of particular writers. In the case of most of those writers with whom I seriously disagree it would, I believe, be possible to show that their views are only reproductions, sometimes in more or less dis- guised and attenuated forms, of some one or more of the older theories which have been fully dealt with in these pages. With regard to the writers with whose xii THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT general position I am in sympathy, I have usually ab- stained from mentioning even their names, not because I under-estimate their work, but simply because I have so often found it impossible to indicate in any short and summary way the extent to which I could appeal to them in support of my own views. I should be so far from claiming any particular originality for the general position taken up in these pages that I should claim on the contrary that it represents substantially the view which is now held not only by a consensus of the more " liberal " theologians, but by a large and increasing number of those who would not care to be so described. If there is any originality in my treatment of the subject, it lies rather in my view as to the origin of the traditional doctrine than in the statement of my own belief upon this supremely important subject. The question of the way in which human souls may be saved — that is to say, may attain to the highest ideal or true end of their being — is obviously one which leads the enquirer at every turn into the profoundest questions of Moral Philosophy, of Psychology, and of Metaphysic. A full and complete philosophy of salvation would involve nothing less than a philosophy of the universe. It would involve a discussion of all those questions about the ultimate nature of the universe, about its ultimate goal and destiny, about the relations between mind and matter, between subject and object, body and soul, the universal and the particular, God and man, the human will and the divine, necessity and contingence, time and eternity, which it is the business of philosophy and philosophical theology to answer. Into these ultimate questions I have rarely attempted to enter in the present work. I need hardly say that I have advanced nothing which I do not believe to be capable of philosophical defence, but I do not profess in these lectures to be writing philo- sophy for philosophers. In some cases I have been able to refer to other works in which I have discussed such questions more or less fully : in others I hope I may be able to deal with them hereafter somewhat less in- adequately. In these pages I am content to assume PREFACE xiii the general truth of the Christian attitude towards the universe, and to ask in what way, upon that assumption, the modern thinker is to interpret, in the language of ordinary theology and of ordinary life, the particular aspect of the traditional creed with which this book is concerned. My obligations to Professor Harnack's great work on the history of dogma will everywhere be obvious, in spite of my profound dissent from his attitude towards attempts, ancient and modern, to construct a Christian philosophy of the universe. On the historical side I should probably have been still more indebted than I am to the extraordinarily learned work, Le Dogme de la Redemption, by the Abbe Riviere, Professor at the Grand Seminaire of Albi, had it fallen into my hands earlier. As it is, I did not know of the book until the lectures were almost finished ; but I have freely used his help in discovering treatises or particular passages where the subject is dealt with by some of those later Fathers whom I do not pretend to have read from cover to cover, — especially in the additional chapter or long note which I have inserted between Lectures IV. and V. I must also acknowledge obligations of the same kind to The Doctrine of the Atonement by the Rev. J. K. Mozley — a brief but thoughtful and independent treatment of the subject. I regret that the very learned History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ by the Rev. R. S. Franks, Principal of Western College, Bristol, came into my hands only when most of the book was in type. Perhaps it may be well to add that, except as regards a few authors to whom I have referred in quite an incidental manner, the account I have given of patristic and other writers rests upon an independent study of their works. Except in the case of St. Augustine I have read through all the writings of the Fatibers whom I have dealt with at any length in the lectures : in his case I have read, I beheve, all that was at all relevant to my subject. At various stages in its x:omposition, the present work owes much to the advice and assistance of the Ven. A. L. Lilley, Archdeacon of Ludlow \ the Rev. B. H. Streeter, xiv THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT Canon Residentiary of Hereford ; the Rev. J. R. Wilkin- son, Rector of Winford; and the Rev. C. W. Emmet, B.D., Vicar of West Hendred. I am under especial obligations to Mr. Emmet, who has been good enough to read the whole of my first proofs, and to Archdeacon Lilley, who has performed a similar kind office for the final revise. I must also express my warm thanks to Professor Cooke, Canon of Christ Church, who has taken much pains in answering enquiries of mine on points of Hebrew learning. If I have escaped some of the pitfalls which await the student incidentally straying from the paths with which his own reading has made him tolerably familiar into those with which his acquaintance is very imperfect, I owe it largely to the kindness of these and other friends. H. RASHDALL. The Deanery, Carlisle, "Jth October 1919. CONTENTS LECTURE I THE TEACHING OF CHRIST CONCERNING FORGIVENESS PAGE Christ's conception of the kingdom of God : the eschatological sayings ....... i Christ's doctrine of salvation and its relation to contemporary Judaism . . . . . .14 Examination of sayings which have been supposed to connect salvation with His own death . . . .27 (1) The ransom passage . . . . ■ ^9 (2) The words at the Last Supper . . . -37 Christ's doctrine of atonement . . . . -45 Additional Notes : A. The ransom for many . . . .49 B. The sin against the Holy Ghost . . • 5^ C. The Last Supper . . . . • S8 LECTURE II THE PRE-PAULINE AND THE PAULINE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT I. Tie Origin of the Atonement Doctrine Ideas which prepared the way for the Church's doctrine of atonement ..... (1) The conception of Jahve as a Deliverer or Saviour (2) The Messianic kingdom (3) The institution of sacrifice (4) The idea of vicarious suffering : the Servant of Jahve (5) Philo ....•• (6) The mystery-religions .... 63 64 64 66 70 73 74 XVI THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT The teaching of the Primitive Church before St. Paul about atonement, based upon Isaiah liii. and other prophecies II. Si. Paul's Theory of the Atonement . III. St. Paul's Doctrine of Justification . Additional Notes : A. St. Paul's use of the terms atonement, reconciliation, justification, salvation, redemption, sanctification B. St. Paul's Christology .... C. On St. Paul's use of propitiation in Rom. iii. 25 D. On Romans v. (the elFects of Adam's sin) E. Jewish views of the fall and original sin F. The eschatology of St. Paul G. On St. Paul's later doctrine of salvation 75 108 124 127 130 133 135 139 141 LECTURE III THE TEACHING OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY General character of the teaching about atonement through Christ's death and about justification in early Christian literature (outside St. Paul) before Irenaeus The Epistle to the Hebrews The Petrine Epistles The Epistle of St. James The Apocalypse . The Synoptic Gospels and Acts The Johannine Gospel and Epistles The Pastoral Epistles The Apostolic Fathers and Apologists {Di, of Rome, Ignatius, Barnabas, Hermas, Theophilus, Melito, Justin Martyr, Epistle to Diognetus) 'dache, I and 2 Clement Additional Note . Other references to the atonement in the Apostolic Fathers (Ignatius, Polycarp, Hermas, Barnabas, Epistle to Diognetus, Elders cited by Irenaeus, Tatian) . 147 150 164 168 171 174 177 188 189 208 LECTURE IV PATRISTIC THEORIES Introductory Clement of Alexandria Irenaeus 221 222 233 CONTENTS xvu Tertullian . 248 Origen ...... 255 Additional Note : A catena on the atonement from Irenaeus Tertullian, and Origen — Irenaeus . . . 277 Tertullian ...... 281 Origen ...... 282 CONTINUATION OF LECTURE IV Later Greek Fathers General tendency of Greek Theology . 288 Hippolytus 289 Methodius 292 Athanasius 294 Eusebius of Caesarea 300 Adamantius or pseudo-Origen 302 Gregory of Nyssa 303 Gregory Nazianzen 308 Basil . 310 Cyril of Jerusalem 311 Chrysostom 312 Cyril of Alexandria 315 John of Damascus 316 LECTURE V LATIN THEOLOGY— AUGUSTINE, ANSELM, ABELARD General character of Latin theology : influence of the ransom theory . . . . . . -323 Earlier Western writers (Hippolytus, Arnobius, Lactantius, Hilary of Poitiers) . ..... 326 Immediate predecessors of St. Augustine (Cyprian, Ambrose, Ambrosiaster) . . . . . .327 Augustine . . . . . . -33° Note on Jerome, St. Leo, Gregory the Great, John Scotus Erigena, etc. ...... 349 Anselm . . . . . . .350 Abelard . . . . . . -357 Additional Notes : A. Abelard on the atonement (Extracts) . . . 362 B. M. Riviere on the ransom theory . . .364 XVlll THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT LECTURE VI SCHOLASTIC THEORIES PAGE Later history of ransom theory : influence of Abelard ; Peter the Lombard, Robert Pullus, etc. . . . -369 St. Thomas Aquinas, doctrine of the atonement . -373 doctrine of justification ..... 378 doctrine of the sacraments and indulgences . . 380 Duns Scotus, doctrine of the atonement . . . 382 ■ doctrine of justification ..... 385 William of Occam and the Nominalists . . .387 Value of the scholastic teaching .... 388 Additional Note : On the later realism (Bradwardine, Wycliffe, Huss, etc.) . . . . . -393 LECTURE VII LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION Teaching of Luther on the atonement and justification com- pared with that of St. Augustine and other Catholic teaching ...... General estimate of Luther and the Reformation teaching Criticism of the substitutionary view taught by St. Augustine and other patristic writers, and most fully developed by Luther ....... 397 420 LECTURE VIII THE TRUTH OF THE ATONEMENT General defence of the Origenistic or Abelardian view Examination of Dr. Denney's criticism upon such views How far does Abelard's view require modification in view of modern ideas of Christ's Person ? The atonement as a revelation of Love, an aspect of the Incarna tion or Revelation of God in Christ Does God suffer in Christ i . Importance of Christ's teaching in our general view of sal- vation through Christ .... Modern meanipg of the doctrine of Salvation through Christ 435 439 443 449 450 455 457 CONTENTS xix APPENDICES PAGE I. The atonement and Christian experience . . 467 II. Christianity and the mystery-religions . . . 479 III. Dr. Dale's view of the atonement and some other modern theories ....... 493 INDEX 497 rH LECTURE I THE TEACHING OF CHRIST CONCERNING FORGIVENESS But the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me a sinner. I say unto you. This man went down to his house justified rather than the other. — Luke xviii. 13, 14. LECTURE I THE TEACHING OF CHRIST CONCERNING FORGIVENESS For a large proportion of those who have professed the Christian religion, that religion has included the doctrine that salvation is to be won in some sense through the death of its Founder and through belief in the saving efficacy of that death. At times, though by no means always, that doctrine has been regarded as the central truth or even as the whole of Christianity. To enquire into the origin, the history, the meaning, the truth of that doctrine is the principal aim of the present lectures. A full and exhaustive treatment of the subject would involve a preliminary enquiry into the history of Jewish ideas about sin and its forgiveness, about the origin and meaning of sacrifice, and a number of other cognate matters. But such an enquiry would lie far beyond the scope of these lectures. For my present purpose it will be best to take as our starting-point the teaching of Jesus Himself, and only at a later stage to ask what light previous Jewish beliefs may throw either upon our Lord's own teaching or upon the later doctrine of the Church.^ "■ It may be well to state briefly the critical principles presupposed in the present lecture. I accept the usual " two-document theory," i.e. the view that the authors of the first and third Gospels had before them (i) Mark in its present form or a form closely resembling it, and (2) a document (consisting perhaps chiefly of sayings and possibly at some stage of its composition connected with the Apostle St Matthew) which used to be known as " the Logia," but is now commonly spoken of as Q^ {i.e. Quelle) — a document containing at least the matter common to Matthew and Luke which is not found in Mark, and probably some sayings or narratives only preserved by one of them. There were doubtless other documents, especially a Judaeo-Christian Apocalypse used in Mark xiii and the parallel passages in the two other Gospels, and a source peculiar to iLuke. On the much debated question about the priority of Q or Mark, I believe in the priority of Q, and I am strongly inclined to the view of Prof. Bacon {The Beginnings of the Gospel History) that Mark can be broken up into a document which he calls P — a body of teaching, oral or written, based on the teaching of St. Peter, extracts from Q and other 4 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. The first question before us is, then, " What did Jesus Himself teach about the forgiveness of sins ? Did He teach the doctrine that sin can only be forgiven through the atoning efficacy of His death, or anything like that doctrine ? " It should by no means be assumed that a doctrine is not true because it is not to be found in the teaching of Christ. More and more generally it is coming to be recognized that all Christian doctrine has arisen from the reflection of the Christian Church upon the life and work of its Founder, from its experience of what He has been and may be to the religious life of His followers, from the application of His teaching to the solution of problems which He did not Himself explicitly raise. But it is obvious that the authority which is claimed for a traditional doctrine and the interpretation which we put upon it may be profoundly affected by the relation in which it stands to the actual teaching of the Master. And in particular, if it should be found that the interpretation which is given to a doctrine and its comparative prominence as compared with other elements or aspects of the Christian religion have varied very widely, it is clear that our freedom to choose between these different interpretations may be greatly enhanced by the discovery that none of the conflicting views can claim to represent in any direct or exclusive manner the explicit teaching of its Founder. Still more will our attitude towards such interpretations be affected if it should be found that some of them are positively in- consistent with the teaching of Him whose mind they purport to represent. In this as in other spheres of sources, and the additions of an Editor. At the same time I am sceptical as to the possibility of definitely delimiting these elements with certainty, and I regard Prof. Bacon's distrust of Mark as exaggerated. I believe the third Gospel to have been written by Luke, the companion of St. Paul. On such minute questions as the precise limits of Q, as to whether the Mark used by the two Evangelists differed sufEciently from our text of Mark as to be properly designated a Proto-Mark or " Ur-Markus," as to whether Luke's special source was already combined with Q before it was used by him, and the like, I have not found it necessary to form a definite opinion. Decided opinions on such subjects must be left to those who have spent years of study upon the Synoptic problem. On points which can be affected by the solution of such questions, it is wisest for those who have only a general acquaintance with the problem to keep their minds open to alter- native possibilities. Fortunately it is often possible to form a judgement as to which version of a saying or an incident is the more primitive without committing oneself to a particular critical hypothesis. I THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM 5 thought questions of origin must be carefully distin- guished from questions of validity, but the question of validity cannot always be decided without a clear view on the question of origin. A doctrine of the atonement may be true although it has little starting-point, or no starting-point at all, in the actual teaching of Christ. But the very fact of the possibility makes it all the more imperative that we should discuss the question of Christ's own attitude on the matter without presuppositions, and without assuming that we are bound to discover in it, even in a rudimentary form, the later doctrine of the Church, or rather any one of the numerous doctrines of the atonement which have at various times been taught as the doctrine of the Church. It may be well to state at once that I hope to show you that there is a possible doctrine of the atonement which has as much authority behind it as any other, and the truth of which is quite unaffected by any conclusion that we can reasonably come to on the question of origin. What, then, was our Lord's teaching about sin, its punishment, and its forgiveness ? The question cannot be answered without a glance (it must necessarily be but a hurried glance) at His teaching about certain other subjects. The substance of His very earliest teaching is contained in the words : " Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand " ; and, all His discourses presuppose in the background, where they are not in the foreground, the closely connected ideas — the Messianic Parousia or manifestation, the Messianic judgement, the Messianic kingdom. He announced the near approach of the great judgement which had been foretold by the prophets of His nation, and which occupied a still more prominent position in the popular apocalyptic literature of the two centuries preceding His ministry. If I were to embark upon an enquiry into the exact nature of that judgement, I should almost inevitably become involved in the dis- cussion of questions foreign to my present purpose. No subject connected with theology is at the present moment more hotly debated than the question what our Lord actually taught about the kingdom of God, about His 6 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. own future coming, about the judgement which was to follow that coming, and about the real meaning of the language which he used in this connexion. It is not necessary for my present purpose that I should discuss these questions in detail. It will be enough for ine to indicate very briefly the general position which will be presupposed in these lectures. I believe that — probably not from the earliest days of His teaching,^ yet before the close of it — ^Jesus had become convinced that He was in some sense, though it may be in a much altered sense, the promised Messiah of His race. At Caesarea Philippi He accepted St. Peter's confession : " Thou art the Christ." ^ Even before that memorable moment in His career He had felt moved to preach that the promised kingdom of God was at hand. It is not im- possible that He began to announce the near approach of a personal Messiah before it had become clear to His own mind whether He or another were the promised Messiah or Son of God or Son of Man. But eventu- ally He accepted — if somewhat passively and almost 1 That this was so is suggested (a) by the form of the earliest teaching — simply that the kingdom was at hand, {b) by our Lord's frequent habit of speaking of the " Son of man " in the third person and in reference to the future, (6a(rev).^ It Is here already. " Thou art not far from the kingdom of God," ^ our Lord said to the scribe. It is implied that, if his spiritual condition were just a little higher, he would already be within the kingdom. " From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven sufFereth violence, and men of violence take it by force." ^ And there are parables — notably those of the sower, the mustard-seed, the leaven, the tares, the seed growing secretly — which, interpreted with any naturalness, seem to Imply that the kingdom of God was beginning to be set up here, now, In this world, as the teaching of Jesus began to sink into human hearts, and the little society of His disciples widened the circle of its membership and its influence. In the light of these sayings and parables there is no reason whatever for denying the historical character of the memorable words, " The kingdom of God is within you," or (as some would interpret the probable Aramaic), " in your midst," * although they rest upon the authority 1 Lk. xi. 20 (=Matt. xii. 28). ^ Mk. xii. 34. * Matt. xi. 12 ( = Lk. xvi. 16). The allusion is doubtless to the Zealots. ' Lk. xvii. 21. The fact that the words are addressed to the Pharisees is a difBculty in the way of supposing that the saying, if its context has been preserved, bore for our Lord Himself the meaning " within you," though the Greek ivrbs vixCov must certainly have this meaning : but the difficulty is not insuperable, and contexts of sayings are less trustworthy than the sayings themselves. Dalman favours the view that the original Aramaic meant " within." See Dalman, The Words of yesus, pp. 145-6. I THE ESCHATOLOGICAL SAYINGS ii of St. Luke alone.^ In all such passages it would only be a germinal or potential kingdom of Heaven that Jesus would have seen about Him in the little society of His followers : the true kingdom itself He no doubt regarded as future. But the very fact that the conception of the future kingdom could pass so easily into the idea of a present, ethical kingdom — that the eschatology could so easily become a " transmuted eschatology " ^ — shows that at bottom even the future and " eschatologi- cal " kingdom represents a spiritual and ethical ideal. Whenever, wherever, however it was to be set up, the essence of it was that it was a society in which the will of God should be perfectly done — a " reign of God " among men. It is, however, unnecessary for our present purpose to enquire how many of what are usually called the escha- tological sayings of Christ are genuine, and with what degree of literalness (so far as they are genuine) our Lord Himself understood the traditional apocalyptic language. For us — at least for our present purpose — all this eschatological language must be treated as the accidental historical dress in which the ethical and religious ideas of Jesus would appear to have clothed themselves ; and it is with those ideas themselves, and not with their historical setting, that we are now con- cerned. Little or nothing in the conclusions to which I shall hope to lead you will depend upon the acceptance or upon the rejection of any particular view as to the eschatological problem. They will remain but little affected if every eschatological utterance of Christ be accepted and interpreted with the utmost possible literalness ; they will be quite unaffected if the whole of them be set down as the aftermath of Judaeo-Christian imagination. Only one possible view of the eschato- logical question will be irreconcilable with the position here taken up, and that is the view which regards escha- tology as the real substance of Christ's message, and 1 Canon Streeter gives good reasons for supposing that the saying was contained in Q {Oxford Studies in the Synoptic 'Problem,'^, zo i). It may liave been omitted by Matthew simply because it was not understood. * von Dobschtitz, The Eschatology of the Gospels, p. 150. 12 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. systematically minimizes the importance of His religious and ethical teaching. That is a position with which I must not now attempt to deal. I would only remind you in passing that that question is not primarily one of criticism or history, but a question of moral and spiritual values on which we can all judge for ourselves without pretending to be experts in synoptic criticism or apoca- lyptic literature. What concerns us here is not so much the nature of the kingdom as the conditions under which it could be entered. There was, indeed, in our Lord's teaching very little eschatological detail.^ His teaching related almost entirely to the conditions of entering the kingdom. And here there can be no doubt about what He taught. The clear, unmistakable, invariable teaching of Jesus was that men were to be judged accord- ing to their works, including in the conception of works the state of the heart and intentions as scrutinized by an all-seeing God. The righteous were to be rewarded, the unrighteous were to be punished. All that is said about the nature of the rewards and of the punishments is vague and clothed in the language of metaphor — metaphor for the most part already elaborated and appropriated to this use by Jewish tradition. The wicked were to be shut out from the brilliantly lighted banqueting-hall when the duly qualified guests were taking their places at the Messianic banquet — to be left in the darkness outside, where there should be wailing and gnashing of teeth, and so on.^ Or the judgement is likened to a harvest in which the tares are thrown into the furnace and burned.^ In some of the recorded sayings we are told that the punishment of sin will be " aeonian." We need not linger over the meaning of the word. Its fundamental meaning in the Gospels would seem to be " belonging to the aeon, the age," that is to say, the coming age, the Messianic age. It certainly does not mean " everlasting," though sometimes no doubt it is applied to things which are everlasting. But it is ^ If we put aside the " little Apocalypse " and other sayings which seem to me of more than doubtful authenticity. ^ Matt. viii. 12 ( = Lk. xiii. 28) ; Matt. xxii. 13, xxv. 30. ' Matt. xiii. 40-4.3. I THE ESCHATOLOGICAL SAYINGS 13 highly probable after all that the use of this term and of others which suggest the same idea is due to the Evangel- ists (especially to the first Evangelist) rather than to our Lord Himself. There is little reason for supposing that Jesus thought of the punishment of the wicked as of everlasting duration. We have no means of deciding with absolute certainty which of the conflicting Jewish opinions on the subject our Lord adopted, even i^ indeed, it was a question on which He had any definite pronounce- ment to make. Neither the nature nor the duration of the punishment is defined. It is probable that His thoughts did not commonly travel much beyond the judgement and its immediate consequences. He cer- tainly thought of condemnation at the judgement as involving terrible consequences, whether the fate of the wicked were immediate destruction or destruction after a period of punishment or (though this is improbable) permanent exclusion from the joys of the heavenly kingdom and from the light of God's presence.^ And the question, who were to suffer such penalties and who were to be acquitted and admitted to that state of blessed- ness which He called the kingdom of God, was to be determined by their conduct and character. The wicked were to be punished, the good were to be rewarded. And the goodness which was to be demanded for admis- sion to the kingdom represents a higher, more spiritual, more universalistic morality than had ever been taught before. ^ I have discussed this subject more fully in an appendix to my Conscience and Christ, and will here content myself with summing up the conclusions there arrived at. (See also a scholarly article by the Rev. H. D. A. Major upon " AMkios : Its Use and Meaning especially in the New Testament," in the yournal of Theological Studies, No. 69, 1916.) (i) Our Lord did not commonly look beyond the judgement and gave no definite teaching as to the fate of those then rejected, though there are a few passages which might suggest a possibility of future amendment. (2) It is doubtful whether the passages which speak of an " eternal punishment " (aldivioi KdXaffn), all of them (if the revised reading be accepted in Mk. iii. 29), found only in the first Gospel, represent a genuine word of Jesus. (3) Even if that expression was used by Jesus, it probably meant simply " Messianic," the punishment of the future Messianic Age. (4.) It certainly cannot be proved that our Lord taught the doctrine of everlasting punishment, and, at least for those who think it improbable that He should have taught a doctrine so clearly inconsistent with the spirit of His own teaching about the love of God, it is probable that He did not. 14 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. It will be impossible here to examine at length the ways in which our Lord deepened, transcended, and spiritualized the ethical ideas of Judaism. But there are one or two points on which it will be desirable to say a word, as they have a close bearing upon the question " What was the doctrine of salvation taught by Jesus Himself ? " (i) In the first place He deepened morality by the emphasis which He laid upon the intention, the motive, the state of the heart and the will. The lascivious thought, prevented from passing into act by fear of the consequences, was as bad as adultery. The angry word might he as bad as murder if it expressed as much hatred. If He did not quite explicitly declare that all morality was summed up in the commandments of love to God and one's neighbour, He did explicitly teach that these were the two chief commandments ; and so much em- phasis was laid upon them that, even if it be an editor who has added the words, " On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets," ^ he has done no more than develope the logical implication of his Master's teaching. In proclaiming, therefore, that men are justified by their works, Jesus must not be supposed to have laid stress upon acts to the exclusion of thought and intention. This insistence upon the importance of the state of the heart was not, indeed, absolutely new, but it represents a truth which had never been insisted upon with equal emphasis. Matthew Arnold was not wrong in making its " inwardness " a characteristic feature, if it was not the characteristic feature, of the morality of Jesus. If He taught justification by works, that meant for Him justification by the state of the heart as judged by an all-seeing God, and the right state of the heart was one of fervent love towards God and one's neighbour. Works were interpreted to mean that state of the heart and the will from which external good acts 1 Matt. xxii. 40. Cf. Matt. vii. 12:" All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also to them : for this is the law and the prophets." The very reduplication makes it probable that in one, if not both of the passages the Evangelist was dependent upon a source. Mark may have omitted the words from dislike of legalism or indifference to all that concerned the Jewish law. I CHRIST AND THE JEWISH LAW 15 resulted as necessarily and naturally as the character of the tree reveals itself in its fruit. " By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but the corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit." ^ (2) What was the relation of Jesus to the Mosaic Law ? The problem is a difficult one, and its solution may be appreciably affected by the answer we give to various critical questions, by the estimate we form as to the genuineness of certain expressions of respect for the law on the one hand and certain " universalistic " sayings on the other. But, on the whole, it does not seem difficult to arrive at a tolerably decided answer which will not be much affected by the view we take of isolated sayings. It is certain that He disregarded altogether the elaborate extensions or developments of the law which were due to extra-biblical tradition or to the in- genuity of Pharisaic scribes. On the other hand He never expressly denied the binding authority of the Mosaic Law, except in so far as such a rejection was implied in that development of its strictly moral require- ments which has already been mentioned. When the letter of the Mosaic Law seemed to Him to stand in the way of some higher, more strictly ethical, more universal principle, he brushed it aside. Thus he disallowed the free- dom of divorce which the law had (" to them of old time ") permitted. " It was said also, ' Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement,' but I say unto you. . . ." ^ He would not let the duty of Sabbath observance stand in the way of mercy, humanity, or, indeed, of human well-being in general. " The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath " is a maxim of very far-reaching application. ^ And still more so, " The son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath." * 1 Matt. vii. 16, 17. ^ Matt. V. 31. ("To them of old time" is from the beginning of the passage, V. 21.) It is true that the emphasis "I say unto you " may be due to the Evangelist (being peculiar to Matthew), but the contradiction is implied in the saying itself. ' Mk. ii. 27. * Especially if we understand " Son of man " to mean here " Man," i.e. " Humanity in general " (Mk. ii. 28 = Lk. vi. 5). 1 6 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. Above all, He laid down the principle that that which went into the mouth could not defile a man, but only that which came out of the mouth. " Perceive ye not, that whatsoever from without goeth into the man, it cannot defile him ; . . . That which proceedeth out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, wickednesses, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing, pride, foolish- ness : all these evil things proceed from within, and defile the man." ^ These words cut away at a stroke the whole principle of Jewish legalism. The distinction between clean and unclean meats was, in a sense, the most important feature of the Mosaic Law considered as a code of ritual observances. The sacrificial system had little practical importance out of Jerusalem. The food restrictions and the idea of ceremonial pollution, on the other hand, affected the daily life of every Jew throughout the world, and were the main root of that social exclusive- ness which constituted the great defect of Jewish morality from the point of view of a more universalistic Ethic. St. Mark is not wrong in adding to the words of Jesus the comment, " This he said, making all meats clean." ^ In uttering those memorable words our Lord was practically cancelling the whole system of the Mosaic Law and its ancient taboos as a matter of eternal moral obligation ; and He could not have been altogether unconscious of this tendency. He did not explicitly distinguish between the moral part of the law and its ceremonial injunctions ; but practically, when He speaks with respect of the law, it is the moral part that is em- phasized, and even this required the filling out or com- pletion which He gave it. The ceremonial part is never insisted on, and often disparaged. He had (so far as His thought is disclosed) no desire to induce his country- men actually to give up the observance of the law when it did not conflict with a higher law. But it is clear that 1 Mk. vii. 18-23 (=Matt. xv. 17-20). Some critics look with suspicion upon this and other recorded explanations of our Lord's sayings, but in any case there can be no reason to doubt the saying itself. 2 Mk. vii. 19 (reading with R.V. KaBapii^ujv), I THE UNIVERSALISM OF JESUS 17 He no longer regarded those ceremonial rules as a part of the eternal law of God in the same sense as the moral part of it and the two supreme commands in which He summed it up. In the words of Loisy, " The emanci- pation of Paul, much more apparent, was not more real." 1 (3) The third question which it is relevant to my main subject to raise is this. Was Christ's moral teaching universalistic ? In principle that question is answered by what has already been said. If the non-observance of the law had no real tendency to defile, if non-observance of the law interposed no barrier between the soul and God, all ground was taken away for denying that a Gentile as a Gentile might be admitted to the Kingdom of God. For even orthodox Judaism did not regard the mere fact of race as constituting such a barrier. The law itself placed the Gentile fully on a level with the Israelite if only he had become a member of the Israelite Nation-Church by circumcision and submission to the law. Any sayings which seem to militate against this principle may therefore fairly be regarded as belonging, if genuine, to a period in which our Lord had not yet fully developed the implications of His own teaching. Doubtless He regarded His own personal mission as being a mission to Israel : He thought of Himself as the Messiah of His nation, although it was part of the Messianic mission to prepare for a universal world- judgement. There is no critically unassailable evidence that He ever spoke of actually converting the world to His Gospel or making Gentiles into members of a world- wide Church — at least before that divine recognition of His Messiahship to which He probably looked forward. But, in the light of His expHcit rejection of the food distinctions and His general attitude towards the law, we have a right to infer that, when He based human morality upon the law of love of God and one's neighbour. He meant by one's neighbour not the fellow-Jew but the fellow-man. And this interpretation is borne out by the explicit teaching of the parable of the Good 1 Mvatigihs Synoptiques, i. p. 569. C 1 8 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. Samaritan,! by His words to the Centurion,^ the story of the ten lepers of whom only the Samaritan returned to give glory to God,^ and a number of passages in which the Messianic salvation is made to depend upon a goodness which cannot with any naturalness be supposed to include submission to circumcision and observance of the ceremonial law.* The very heart of the mission of Jesus, as He con- ceived it even at the beginning of His ministry, was to preach the possibility of entrance into the Kingdom for the " spiritually disinherited masses " in Israel ^ — the tax-gatherers, " the sinners," the poor, the ignorant, probably the Samaritans. In this He was simply continu- ing the work of the Baptist. These classes must have 1 Lk. X. 30-37. As to a suggestion by M. Hale'vy (adopted by Mr. Claude Monte- fiore) that the original form of the parable was "Israelite, Priest, Levite," see my Con- science and Christ, p. 112. 2 Lk. vii. 9 ( = Matt. viii. 10). * Lk. xvii. 16. Cf. also the visit to Samaria and the rebuke to the sons of Zebedee in Lk. ix. 52-5;. ^ " I say unto you that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heavpu : but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth into the outer darkness " (Matt. viii. 1 1). These words in Matthew are certainly universalistic, since they are suggested by the faith of the Cen- turion. It is true that in Luke (xiii. 28) they are addressed to the people, and it may be that by the excluded are meant the Jews of the Dispersion. But {a) the saying itself comes from Q and the context cannot be relied upon ; and {b), if we take the saying by itself, it is extremely improbable that " the sons of the kingdom " meant the inner circle of Pharisees or the Jews of Jerusalem as opposed to the Dispersion. Dalman says : " The sons of the theocracy are thus those who belong to it in virtue of their birth, who thereby have a natural right to the possession of it " {The Words of Jesus, p. 115) : it is difficult to suppose that any Jews, least of all Galileans, would think of the Jews of Jerusalem as having this superior claim. There is the less reason for attempting to deny the universalistic character of Jesus' teaching, inasmuch as a certain kind of UniversaUsm was already believed in by many Jews. Parts of the book of Enoch are so far universal- istic that the Messianic judgement extends to Gentiles, and it is implied that some Gentiles would be acquitted at the judgement. In the Similitudes it is only the sinners who are punished, and it is especially " the kings and the mighty and the exalted and those who rule the earth" who will "go forth from His presence and their faces will be filled with shame, and darkness will be piled upon their faces " (cap. Ixii. ed. Charles). In a later section. Gentiles who have taken no part in the oppression of Israel are admitted to the New Jerusalem,after falling down and doing homage to Israel (xc. 30-33): "And the Lord of the sheep rejoiced with great joy because they were all good, and had returned to His house." Unwilling as he is to attribute any high ethical value to the teaching of Jesus, Schweitzer admits that " UniversaUsm is provided for in the eschatology of late Judaism and in that preached by Jesus, since it is assumed that among those elected to the Kingdom of God others will be revealed who do not belong to the people of Israel. UniversaUsm is there- fore uivolved in the Jewish conception of the Messiah. Whereas, however late Judaism and Jesus only represent it as reaUzed in the coming Supernatural Age,' Paul antedates it and affirms that distinctions were already abolished in consequence of the death and resurrection of Jesus " (Paul and his Interpreters, p. 108). 6 See the extremely important Introduction to Prof. B. W. Bacon's The Beginnings of the Gospel Story, p. xxxvi sq^ ^ I THE UNIVERSALISM OF JESUS 19 been but lax observers of the law, even when they observed it at all. Jesus was not an enemy of Judaism ; He was the declared enemy of Pharisaism as Pharisaism was understood by the Jerusalem scribes. The very notion that those who did not observe the law might be morally better than those who devoted their whole energies to observing it strictly, carried with it a latent Universalism. It is never suggested in His teaching to these classes that what was needed by them was a more rigorous observance of the Law, more sacrifice, more fasting, more avoidance of ceremonial uncleanness, more separa- tion from the Gentiles. Always and invariably the em- phasis is on moral righteousness, love of God and one's neighbour, the state of the heart. This being the general tone of Jesus' teaching, we need have no difficulty in sup- posing that He made the explicit declaration : " Many shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit down ... in the kingdom of heaven : but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth into the outer darkness,"^ nor need we assume that He was thinking merely of the Jewish " Dispersion " in contrast to the innermost circle of Judaism — the " sons of the kingdom " — in Jerusalem. But it will not matter very much how we settle these disputed critical details. The spirit of Christ's teaching is universalistic — so completely so that no one could drink at all deeply of that spirit without becoming universalistic also. St. Peter ^ was a Universalist no less than St. Paul, and Jewish Christianity soon became so no less than the Gentile Churches more directly under the in- fluence of St. Paul. Such in its general character was the righteousness which was to be rewarded at the judgement, and it was the corresponding kind of wickedness which was to be * Matt. viii. ii ( = Lk. xiii. 29). ' And this quite independently of the story of Acts x. The whole point of St. Paul's attitude in Gal. ii. 1 1 is that Peter had admitted the principle of Gentile Christi- anity without submission to the law, though he inconsistently shrank from acting up to his convictions in the presence of Jews. This admission (now generally made) under- mines the whole basis of the theory held by Baur and the Tubingen school, according to which the earlier history of the Church represents a bitter and internecine warfare between a Pauline and a Petrine Christianity. Of course there is a germ of truth in that theory, but it represents an enormous exaggeration : it was to James, not to Peter, that the Judaizing section appealed. 20 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. punished. Goodness thus understood was the one condition of entrance into the kingdom — that and not descent from Abraham, not the performance of any out- ward rite/ not the state of a man's intellectual belief, except of course in so far as morality itself implies some measure of belief. Only those whose righteousness should exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees should enter into the kingdom of Heaven.^ It is those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake to whom the kingdom belongs.^ " The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels ; and then shall he render unto every man according to his deeds." * " Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." ^ " Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." * ^ The question may be raised whether Christ commailded baptism. The only evi- dence that He did so is supplied by (a) Matt, xxviii. 19 and (if) the fourth Gospel. (a) In Matt, xxviii. 19, the risen Lord says : *' Go ye, therefore, and make dis- ciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost : teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you." Critics have always looked upon these words with some suspicion, because, wherever baptism is mentioned in the New Testament, it is always baptism "in the name of the Lord Jesus " (Acts ii. 38, xix. 5 ; 1 Cor. i. 13 ; Rom. vi. 3 ; so in Didache 9, though in cap. 7 the Trinitarian formula appears). It has recently been contended that Eusebius several times over quotes the words in the following form : " Go ye, and make disciples of all nations in my name, teaching them to observe whatsoever I commanded you." (See Mr. F. C. Conybeare's article on " Three early doctrinal Modifications of the Text of the Gospels " in the Hibbert yourndl^ vol. i. p. 102.) It is highly probable that this represents the earliest form of the saying, and in any case the words must be regarded as extremely doubtful. For an important reply to Mr. Conybeare, see the Bishop of Ely's article in the Journal of Theol. Studies^ vol. vi. p. 48 1 sq. I certainly cannot accept Dr. chase's conclusion that " the whole evidence . . . establishes without a shadow of doubt the genuineness of Matt, xxviii. 19." Even if the words should be genuine, they would not prove that our Lord made salvation depend upon baptism. (b) In John iv. I we read : " The Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although Jesus himself baptized not, but his dis- ciples " (cf. iii. 22). There is nothing intrinsically improbable in the statement that Jesus carried on the work of the Baptist, but nothing is said about any command or any utter- ance which would make baptism a necessary condition of admission into the kingdom. Even if we took John iii. 5 (" born of water and the Spirit ") as an actual utterance of Jesus, we need not treat baptism as, in Christ's view, more than a symbol of the moral change. 2 Matt. V. 20. * Matt V. 10 (peculiar to Matthew, but the same doctrine is implied in Lk. vi. 22, 23). ' Matt. xvi. 27 (cf. Mk. viii. 38). 5 Matt. vii. 19. The same principle is implied in Lk. vi. 43-45, though here there is no reference to the burning of the corrupt tree. 8 Matt. vii. 21. The saying in this form may be suspected of representing the Church's later view of the Person of Christ, and Dr. Moffat ( The Theology of the Gospels, p. 72) is perhaps right in regarding it as an eschatological version of Lk. vi. 46 : " Why I THE DEMAND FOR FAITH 21 Sometimes, it may be suggested, Jesus seems to treat acceptance of His own claims as one of the conditions of salvation or of acquittal in the Messianic judgement. " Every one therefore who shall confess me before men, him will I also confess before my Father which is in heaven." ^ It may be that in such passages the representation of the Evangelists has been more or less coloured by the later belief of Christ's followers and by the later teaching of St. Paul and the whole early Church as to the importance of faith in Christ.^ It is hardly possible that our Lord can have kept the fact of His Messiahship so close a secret till the very eve of the Passion, and yet have openly taught, at the beginning of His ministry, that non-recognition of His Messianic claims would involve condemnation at the judgement. But if we assume that the words are exactly reported and were spoken before the confession of Peter, after all the confession of Jesus before men does not necessarily imply acceptance of His Messiahship. Even if we take every such passage in the Synoptists as a faithful reproduction of the Master's teaching, we shall find that invariably it is obedience to the will of God as declared by Him and His disciples that seems to constitute the acceptance which is to be rewarded — obedience to His commands rather than any intellectual belief about Him or His Messianic work. Everywhere that work — whether definitely thought of as Messianic or not — is presented as primarily that of a prophet or teacher. He had come to call men, to call them into the kingdom, call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say ! " In either form there is the same stress on doing, as opposed to believing. ^ Matt. X. 32. In Lk. xii. 8 the words are " shall the Son of man also confess." The saying in some form comes from Q. In Matthew it forms part of the charge on sending out the Twelve — a discourse which seems coloured by the circumstances of the later Galilean mission. 2 That the cures of Jesus were in some cases, if not perhaps in the case of the pos- sessed, dependent upon the existence in the sufferer of some measure of faith in His power to heal is probable. This is strongly supported by the statement in Mk. vi. 5 that " he could there do no mighty work" because of their unbelief (weakened in Matt. xiii. 58) ; but faith of this kind does not necessarily imply faith in His Messiahship or even in His teaching, still less faith in the atoning efficacy of His blood. At the same time the emphasis in many passages of St. Mark upon the necessity for faith as a condition of the cure and the passages in which praise is bestowed upon faith may well be due (as is sug- gested by Prof. Bacon) to the " Paulinism " of that Evangelist, or (as I should prefer to say) to the influence of a later conception which was not at all exclusively Pauline, 22 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. to sow the seed of the word, to proclaim glad tidings. The only sign which He would give is the sign of Jonah — that is, He would preach repentance without any sign at all.i He had come to seek and to save that which was lost : He did that by teaching the poor and the ignorant, the men and women of ill-repute, whom no one had troubled to teach before. He came as a Physi- cian of souls : like the bodily physician. He effected His cures by advice, by warning, by prescribing a remedy ; and the remedy was to repent, to sin no more,^ and to obey the will of God as He declared it. It was in giving commands that He most definitely claimed exceptional authority for Himself: " It was said to them of old time, but I say unto you." ^ He called upon men to come unto Him, but it was just that they might learn of Him. He called upon men to follow Him, but it was in order that they might imitate Him — particularly in the case of those whom He called upon to follow Him most closely by becoming, like Him, preachers of His message to other men. Acceptance of Jesus meant acceptance of His message. If He ever spoke of His Messianic glory or dignity, it was always with reference to that future manifestation of His Messiahship to which He looked forward ; and at that manifestation the ques- tion would be not what men had believed about Him, but whether they had obeyed Him. " Every one therefore which heareth these words of mine, and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise man, which built his ' house upon the rock : and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house ; and it fell not : for it was founded upon the rock." * 1 Matt. xii. 39, xvi. 4 ; Mk. viii. 12 ; Lk. xi. 29. The explanation in Matt. xii. 40 (the parallel between Jonah's three days in the whale's belly and the Son of Man's three days in the heart of the earth) is no doubt (as the context and the parallels suggest) a later addition. " An important element is no doubt omitted in the statement of " remedies " His sympathy, but (a) the sympathy was expressed in the teaching, and (i) it could not well be insisted upon, though it was practically manifested, by Jesus Himself. Of. how- ever, " Come unto me, all ye that labour," etc. = Some critics would ascribe these words to the Matthean Editor, but this will hardly be done by those who claim that Christ taught the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. •^ ^ Matt. vii. 24, 25 (=Lk. vi. 47-49). I JUSTIFICATION BY WORKS 23 Nor does it appear that the teaching must necessarily be obeyed from conscious respect for the Teacher. Words spoken against the Son of Man might be forgiven, but not deliberate resistance to the voice of conscience,^ Those who were rewarded for having given meat to Christ when He was an hungred, and drink when He was thirsty, are not the people who acknowledged His claims, but those who had fed and clothed the least of His brethren.^ Such is one side of our Lord's doctrine about salvation. It differed from the common Jewish theory of justifi- cation by works merely in the fact that for Him " works " had a different signification. But side by side with this teaching about a judgement according to works, we meet with teaching equally explicit and equally simple about the possibility and the need for repentance, and the certainty of forgiveness when there was such repentance. There is no inconsistency between the two doctrines, for (as we have seen) our Lord always regards the works as indicative of the state of the heart. For Him judgement according to works meant judgement according to the present state of the heart, not the striking of a balance between the whole of a man's good deeds and the sum of his bad deeds in the past. And therefore it followed that, where there was sincere repentance, the man would be pronounced good at the judgement ; external good works would necessarily follow, so far as opportunity was given. The need for repentance formed the very essence of the appeal which Jesus made from the first days of His ministry, as indeed it had formed a part of the teaching of His forerunner, the Baptist. " From hat time began Jesus to preach and to say, ' Repent ye ; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' " * This was, indeed, from first to last Jesus' conception of His own mission — to proclaim that the kingdom of Heaven was open not merely to the respectable and law-observing scribe or the learned rabbi, but to the poor and outcast, those who knew not the law and those who had broken it, if only they would repent. " I came not to call the 1 Cf. below, pp. 56-8. 2 jvijtt. XXV. 34.-40. " Matt. iv. 17 (=Mk. i. 15). 24 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. righteous but sinners." ^ " It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." ^ There is no notion at all that He had brought with Him into the world any new way of procur- ing forgiveness of sins but this — the way of repentance. True, the same message had been delivered by the prophets and by the Baptist ; only Jesus' conception of the repentance demanded by God was deeper than theirs and His conviction of God's willingness to pardon more profound. And the purity of His doctrine was not marred by inconsistent additions. To Jesus, as is im- plied by the etymology of the Greek word fterdvoia as well as by the whole current and spirit of His teaching, repentance meant, not the mere offer of an apology to God or the desire to escape the threatened punishment, but a radical change of heart or character, or (if we think of the probable Aramaic original) a " return " — " a return to God." When and in so far as the man's will was rightly directed now, when and in so far as he condemned and abhorred the evil of his past, God would not reckon against him, or punish, the sins of the past. And that truth about the forgiveness of sins was simply an element or particular application of a much wider and still more prominent element of our Lord's teaching. He taught men to look upon God as a Father who loved impartially all human beings, and who in all His dealings with them would be guided by a desire for their true and highest good, now and hereafter. Such a view of the character of God is by no means incompatible with the idea of divine justice, with belief in the divine anger against transgression, or in future punishment for un- repented sin. But It does imply that punishment must be threatened and inflicted in love, with the view of making the sinner better. And when the change of character was already complete, there could be no further need of punishment. Everywhere in Christ's teaching the idea of forgiveness is treated as closely associated 1 Mk. ii. 17 (=Matt. ix. 13). Luke (v. 32) adds " to repentance." This is clearly a gloss, but substantially a true gloss. ^ Matt, xviii. 14. I REPENTANCE AND FORGIVENESS 25 with, as a necessary corollary of, His fundamental doctrine of God's fatherly love towards all His children. " When ye pray say, ' Our Father . . . forgive us our trespasses.' " Let us examine a little more in detail some of the passages in which this doctrine is clearly set forth. The bare call to repentance as the one great pre-requisite of entrance into the Kingdom, which formed the substance of the earliest teaching, implies by itself that God is willing to forgive ; and it implies with almost equal distinctness that forgiveness is dependent upon no condition whatever but repentance, and the amendment which is the necessary consequence of sincere repentance. The proclamation of the divine forgivingness is closely associated with the human duty of forgiving others. " If ye forgive men their trespasses," we are taught in the sermon on the mount, " your heavenly Father will also forgive you." ^ And the pattern prayer which the Master bequeathed to His disciples asks for forgiveness, as if the asking and the willingness to forgive others were all that was required to secure its fulfilment.^ The condition which makes forgiveness dependent upon our forgiving other men may be regarded as a corollary of repentance — a test and pledge of its reality. If a man does not forgive the wrongs that other men have done him, his repentance, his change of heart cannot be genuine or complete : he must still be wanting in that intense and impartial love to all his brethren which is the essence of the moral ideal — that moral ideal which is perfectly realized in God. " Ye therefore shall be perfect " — complete, impartial, all-embracing — in your love for others " as your heavenly Father is perfect," or, as St. Luke has it, "Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful." ^ This teaching is further illustrated and developed by many of the parables. There is the parable of the lost sheep, which illustrates the yearning of God for the repentance of the sinner, and His rejoicing when he 2 Matt 1 Matt. vi. 14 (=Mk. xi. 25). Of. Lk. vi. 37. :. vi. 12 (=Lk. xi. 4.). ' Matt. v. 48 ; Lk. vi. 36. 26 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. returns like the recovered sheep to the fold.^ The parables of the unmerciful servant ^ and of the two sons, one of whom refused to work in the vineyard but after- wards repented and went,* teach the same lesson. But the parables which most definitely emphasize this side of our Lord's teaching belong to that great section of St. Luke's Gospel which has no parallel in the other two Synoptists. In the two parables of the prodigal son and of the Pharisee and the publican,* we have the fullest expression of this fundamental idea — that God forgives the truly penitent freely and without any other condition than that of true penitence. In the second of these parables, and in this place alone in all the four Gospels, there occurs the word which was hereafter to play so prominent a part in theological controversy.^ The publican, who smote upon his breast and said, " God, be merciful to me a sinner," we are told, went down to his house justified rather than the self-complacent Pharisee. Whatever may be said of later usages of this term, here, at all events, we need not hesitate to say that justification means practically the same thing as forgiveness or acquittal. Forgiveness, then, according to Jesus, follows immediately upon repentance. No other " condition of salvation," to use the technical term of later theology, has to be fulfilled. There is not the slightest suggestion that anything else but repentance is necessary — the actual death of a Saviour, belief in the atoning efficacy of that death or in any other article of faith, baptism, confession to any but God, absolution, reception of the holy eucharist, Church membership — not a hint of any of these. The truly penitent man who confesses his sins to God receives instant forgiveness.^ Such was the 1 Matt, xviii. 12-13 ; Lk. XV. 4. To which St. Luke adds the parable of the lost piece of money (xv. 8-10). 2 Matt, xviii. 23-35. ^ Matt. xxi. 28-31 ; cf. Lk. xv. 11. In some form the parable must be from g : this is important as showing that the doctrine is not confined to Luke or his special source. ' Lk. xv. 11-32, xviii. 9-14. ^ In Matt. xi. 19 (=Lk. vii. 35) it is used in another sense : " The [divine] wisdom is justified by her works." " The necessity of repentance implies that in our Lord's thought salvation is never actually " merited." It cannot be demanded as a matter of right : forgiveness and REPENTANCE AND FORGIVENESS 27 only condition of salvation while Christ was yet on earth ; and in the whole range of our Lord's other teaching there is not the shadow or shade of a suggestion that the offer of salvation made to man while He was yet on earth was to be withdrawn, or narrowed, or saddled with fresh conditions in consequence of, or subsequently to, His death. Even those who formulated the theology upon which this notion has been based give no hint of such a thing. How far what they taught is reconcilable with what the Master taught will be matter for sub- sequent consideration. Here I only note that they do not suggest that their teaching on this head rests upon any express word of the Master, nor do they claim to be in any way authorized to contradict that teaching. There may be room — I hope to show that there is room — for a doctrine of the atonement through Christ which is wholly consistent with the teaching of the Master Him- self ; but, if that is so, it must be a doctrine which does not modify or contradict the simple teaching about the forgiveness of God which is taught by the parable of the prodigal son. It is surely a difficult thing to say — as must be done if some later doctrine of the atonement is treated as the very essence of Christianity — that what was taught by Christ Himself was not Christianity at all. Before turning from the teaching of the Master to that of His disciples it will be well briefly to examine one or two special passages which have sometimes been supposed to militate against this representation of Christ's teaching, and to justify the attribution to our Lord Himself of the doctrine that forgiveness of sins was dependent upon some objective consequence of His work and particularly of His death. I shall confine myself salvation are gifts. Of. Lk. xvii. 7-10. So far, no doubt, M. Gogiiel is right, but when {JJAp6tre Paul et yisus Christy p. 282) he insists that in the words " her . , . sins are forgiven because she loved much," the love must be taken not as the cause, but as the sign of pardon, he seems to me over-subtle. Jesus would never have pushed the idea that forgiveness cannot be merited to the point of denying that the moral condition of the penitent is a reason for God's forgiveness. This, in fact, can only be denied if it is held that forgiveness is bestowed on one and refused to another quite arbitrarily, and independently of the state of their will, i.e. without any repentance at all. The repudia- tion of such a view does not of course prevent our recognizing that the repentance itself is due to the grace of God. 28 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. for this purpose to the Synoptists, reserving the teaching of the fourth Gospel for later discussion. No scholarly defender of the Johannine authorship will contend that we can go to that Gospel for the ipsissima verba of the Master uncoloured by the later reflections of the disciples, the Church, and the Evangelist himself. I shall venture to put aside as irrelevant to the present problem those passages in which our Lord is represented as forgiving sins or declaring their forgiveness by God.^ In nearly every case this declaration was made in con- nexion with the healing of disease. Whether Jesus thought of all disease as in some sense a punishment for sin, 2 or whether He thought of the bodily healing as a sort of sign or pledge of God's forgiveness to the sinner, these passages not merely do not favour the idea that He looks upon the forgiveness as in some way dependent on an atonement to be effected by His death ; they are evidence against His having authorized any such notion, and still more explicitly do they negative the idea that the forgiveness was dependent upon belief in this atone- ment. The man with the palsy knew nothing about the future death of Jesus, nor, if the forgiveness was dependent upon this future event, could the statement, " thy sins have been forgiven," be true. It is not said " they will be forgiven," or even " may they be forgiven," but " they have been forgiven." In the case of the woman who was a sinner,^ that is even more distinctly the case. It is because she had much love, as was shown by the costliness of her offering, that her sins had been 1 M. Loisy is disposed to think tliat in Mk. ii. 5 (=Matt. ix. 2 ; Lk. v. 20) the claim to pronounce that sins are forgiven is unhistorical. He points out [B-vang. Synopt. i. p. 88) how naturally the words, " Arise, take up thy bed," etc. (Mk. ii. 1 1), will follow the words, " Saith unto the sick of the palsy " in v. 5 ; and how satisfactorily the hypothesis of an insertion in the original source will account for the curiously awkward parenthesis, " He saith to the sick of the palsy, I say unto thee." This hypothesis seems to me not impossible, but I cannot agree with M. Loisy that in " Thy sins be forgiven thee," our Lord " ne dit pas et il n'entend pas dire : ' Tu es gu^ri ' " (ibid. p. 4.7 j). Taking the passage as it stands it seems clear to me that the announcement that the man's sins have been forgiven is intended to imply, or at least to be the condition pre- cedent to, the bodily healing. * He certainly did not think of it as implying any particular degree of sinfuhiess in the particular sirmer. Cf. Lk. xiii. 2-4.. ' Lk. vii. 47 {i.(pio>vTai). There is no need to assume that our Lord's knowledge of this woman was confined to this single act. Cf. Goguel, UApStre Paul et yisus Christ, p. 281. I THE RANSOM FOR MANY 29 forgiven, and for that reason alone : no other is suggested. These declarations of forgiveness being then put aside, there are two passages, and two only, which can be thought to favour the theory that Jesus Himself taught that forgiveness was in any sense dependent upon His death. The two passages are the words, " and to give his life a ransom for many," and the language used at the Last Supper. With regard to the first of these passages, two questions arise. (a) Is the saying genuine .■' and (b) what, if genuine, was its original meaning ? (a) The genuineness of the first saying — the passage about the ransom — is very far from being beyond question. The words are found in Matthew and in Mark ; that is, according to the usually received critical theory, they come originally from Mark, and from Mark were intro- duced into the first Gospel by its author. The whole passage is substantially the same in Matthew ; in the verse which contains the actual words, there is verbal identity.^ When we turn to the Gospel of St. Luke we find no exact equivalent for them. We find the contention as to who should be the greatest, without, however, the incident about Zebedee's children, and in another context. The dispute is made to take place at the Last Supper. We get the reply about the Kings of the Gentiles, and the words, " He that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger, and he that is chief, as he that doth serve." And then follow the words, " For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth .? Is not he that sitteth at meat .? But I am in the midst of you as he that serveth." ^ The additional words in St. Matthew and St. Mark are of exactly the kind which are spoken of by critics as ecclesiastical additions. They suggest a report coloured by the later doctrinal teaching of the Church. The version of the saying given by St. Luke seems to me far more natural, far more suitable to the context, and far more obviously in harmony with the > Mk. X. 4.3-45 (=Matt. XX. 26-28). * Lk. xxii. 27. 30 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. rest of our Lord's teaching than the version adopted by St. Mark.i (b) The hypothesis of a doctrinally coloured insertion is to my own mind the most probable account of the words about the ransom. Still, I am far from denying that they may possibly represent a genuine saying of the Lord, and the question arises what, if they are genuine, was their original nieaning } In answering this question, it is important to bear in mind the context in which they stand. The words come just after Jesus had begun to speak of His approaching sufferings and death. It is probable on many grounds that the allusions both to the crucifixion and to the resurrection on the third day must have been, to say the least, much vaguer than the language of the Evangelists might lead us to suppose : otherwise the astonishment and dismay with which His death filled His followers is quite unintelligible ; ^ nor could we explain His afterwards contemplating, even for a passing moment, the possibility that the cup might pass from Him. Still, there is no reason to doubt that Jesus was beginning at this time to feel a growing presentiment or conviction that His career on earth was to end in a violent death, and that it was somehow through death and apparent defeat that His Messianic task was to be fulfilled and the Messianic Kingdom set up.^ And then follows an incident which (as related by St. Mark) ^ For further discussion of this question, see below, pp. 49-56. ^ In two of the most definite predictions (Mk. ix. 9, 31 ; Matt. xvii. 9, 22-24.) the reference to the resurrection on the third day is omitted by Luke, though he has the prediction of betrayal in the second case (Lk. ix. 44) ; in the third all three Evangelists record the prediction both of death and resurrection (Mk. x. 33-34 ; Matt. xx. 17-19 ; Lk. xviii. 31-33). If the predictions were so explicit, the scattering after the Crucifixion (testified to by Matt. xxvi. ;6 ; Mk. xiv. 50 ; Gospel of Peter, 13, which very possibly represents the lost ending of St. Mark) would be as difficult to account for as the surprise which the Resurrection visions seem to have created. St. Luke tells us that they understood not the saying, but (as he puts it) it is too definite for misunderstanding to have been possible. These statements are probably based upon much vaguer and more indefinite anticipations, which assumed the form of definite predictions in the minds of the disciples after the event. ' It is possible, but less probable, that He discovered references to the death of the Messiah in the prophets, as He is represented as doing in Lk. xviii. 3 1, xxiv. 25-27 • but even in these passages nothing is said of any expiatory effect of the Messiah's death. The prophecies are merely used to show that the violent death of the Messiah was part of the " determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God," and therefore no disproof of the Messiahship of Jesus. I THE RANSOM FOR MANY 31 has all that air of characteristic originality which so often carries far more conviction of authenticity than elaborate critical arguments. The sons of Zebedee asked that they might sit the one on the right hand, the other on the left in His kingdom.^ Our Lord replies by the memorable question whether they were able to drink of His cup, by the assurance that they should drink of that cup, and the declaration that to determine who should sit on His right hand and on His left was not His to give. Then with the view of allaying the indignation of the ten, and exposing those misunderstandings as to the nature of the Messiah's kingdom out of which such ambitious questionings arose. He continues, " Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you : but whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister ; and whosoever would be first among you shall be servant of all. For verily the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." ^ Now, if we assume that these words are correctly reported, especially if we suppose that their connexion with the incident about the sons of Zebedee is historical, there is something to be said for the view that they were meant to be taken quite literally, that the deliverance spoken of was a physical deliverance from actual, physical death.^ Jesus may have felt that the ministry to His disciples, which was the object of His whole life, was to be pushed to the point of dying for them, and that in some way this death of His would save their lives — at least for the present. He was to die, but they were to live. The Jewish rulers who were arming themselves against Him and His followers would be satisfied with one life. The surrender of His life would make it unnecessary for them to lay down theirs. Such ^ Luke's suppression of the incident, if it stood in Q, is easily accounted for by his habitual desire to omit anything which might seem to reflect on the character of an Apostle. St. Matthew tries to save the character of the two sons by putting the blame upon their mother. It is quite possible that the connexion of this incident with the following discourse may be due to the Evangelist. 2 Mk. X. 42-45 (= Matt. rs. 25-28). ' So far as any interpretation of them can be considered to suit it. 32 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. a meaning would suit the context well. In that case the death would be spoken of as a kind of service. Just as His life had been a life of service for others, so would His death be. And in this His disciples were to imitate Him. To offer a unique expiatory sacrifice for the sins of the whole world was clearly a kind of service which was wholly beyond their power. To work, to suffer, and, if need be, to die in the service of others was quite within their reach. The chief reason against limiting the meaning of the saying to the idea of dying physically that others might physically live is that the words are undoubtedly, if not exactly a citation, yet at least an echo, of prophecy. The words " to give his life " recall the words applied by the later Isaiah to the " suffering Servant of Jehovah," " his soul was given over unto death " ; and the " for many " still more certainly recalls the immediately following words, " he bare the sins of many." ^ The word ransom is found in the same section of Isaiah, but in a much earlier chapter and in quite a different application.^ In the passage before us the word may be with much more probability supposed to have been suggested by the passage in Job : "If there be with him an angel, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness ; and he be gracious unto him, and say. Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom." ^ 1 Is. liii. 12 (LXX.). ^ " I have grven Egypt as thy ransom " (Is. xliii. 3). 3 Job jaxiii. 23-24 (R.V.M.). Cf. also Ps. xhx. 7 : " None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him." (Cf. RitschI, Die christliche Lehre ■von der Rechtfertigung, ii. 8 3 scj.) If the passage in Job was the source, it would no doubt imply to an early Christian the whole theory of the descensus ad inferos, which the most " eschatological " of interpreters will hardly attribute to Jesus Himself. Jesus no- where else shows a knowledge of Job. We may think also of Hosea xiii. 14.. But in truth the idea of the ransom is so common in the O.T. that it is unnecessary to look for some particular passage to explain its use here. The word Xirpov in the LXX. (rd Xirrfo, plur., 17 times out of 20) is the equivalent for four Hebrew words : (i) kopher " ransom " (root, kaphar, kipper), Ex. xxi. 30, xxx. 1 2, usually explained from the Arabic to mean a covermg or propitiatory gift ; but the original sense is more probably to be found in the Bab.-Assyr. usage of the verb, " to wipe off " by a ritual act ; so in Syriac, " to wipe." Driver (art. " Expiation " in Ency. of Religion and Ethics) holds that in Hebrew the idea of purgation was early associated with the word ; hence the thought was of expiation rather than of propitiation. God is never the object of "kipper" (or IMckoixm in LXX.) as is constantly the case in pagan writers (2) g''ullah " redemption " (root ga'al, lit. " to enforce a claim that has lapsed," so " to re-claim," " vindicate "), the act or right of re-claiming, redeeming, a field or I THE RANSOM FOR MANY 33 Such a combination of isolated expressions from the Old Testament is much more likely to come from the Evangelists or from tradition than from Jesus Himself. But if our Lord did use these words, and if in using them He had in mind the passage of Isaiah about the suffering Servant, it is improbable that He should have thought of His death as benefiting " many " merely in the literal and prosaic sense of saving them from a similar physical death, though this reference need not be altogether excluded. The " ministry " which would be performed by His death would be thought of as something like that rendered by His life ; the benefit which it would procure for them would be some kind of spiritual service, and a service which would have a liberating, releasing effect. We need not, if they are the words of Jesus, ask for a very definite answer to the question, " From what, or from whom, was His death to release them .'' " If Jesus used the words, it might be very much in the sense of the great saying that the man who would save his life should lose it. His death would be the means of procuring an abundant spiritual life — the life of the Messianic kingdom, a life which was none the less thought of by Jesus as spiritual because in its fulness it could not be enjoyed till the kingdom had slave. Lev. xxv. 24, the payment made for redemption, Lev. xxv. 26, 51 sq. {^) pidhyon, fdhuyim "ransom" (root, padhah), Ex. xxi. 30, Num. lii. 48 sq., 51, the price paid as a ransom. (4) m^hir "price," "gain" (verb not used). Is. xlv. 13. If used by our Lord, the most probable original appears to be kopher in an Aramaic form. If the saying is due to the Evangelist or to tradition, we need not suppose an Aramaic equivalent. The idea of Xijrpov might easily be got out of the general idea of redemp- tion (aTToXiJTpciJo-ts). That God had redeemed Israel, i.e. bought it and so made it His property, is an idea of which the O.T. is full, and in the N.T. it is transferred to the spiritual Israel (Eph. i. 14 ; Acts xx. 28). The thought thus requires no answer to be given to the question to whom the ransom was paid, nor even a very definite answer to the question from what the people of God were delivered : the main thought is that they were boughtybr God, i.e. the Kingdom, salvation, eternal blessedness. The word Xijrpov is not found in St. Paul, though we have dTroXi^rpwo-ts several times, and the idea occurs in I Cor. vi. 20, vii. 23 : " Ye were bought with a price." The statement that Christ gave Himself as a ransom is found in i Tim. ii. 6, where the right reading is avTiKvTpov, M. Riviere (Le Dogme de la Redemption, p. 49) remarks that " in the New Testament — and most often also in the Pathers — we only find the preposition avrl when it is called for by the word * ransom.* " It is noticeable that sometimes God is said to '* ransom " i^vrpovv) His people in the sense of " deliver " or " save " in passages where no sort of price or equivalent is paid, e.g. Exod. vi. 6 {ga'al), Deut. xxi. 8 (padhah). So in Jer. xviii. 23, Ps. Ixxviii. 38, where kipper is used of God's action, " purge away " will represent the idea; Driver translates' "expiate," but the thought at least comes near to " pardon." D 34 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. been fully set up in the age that was yet to come.^ The main thought suggested by the term " ransom " is the idea of a price paid to secure benefits for another — particularly a price paid to secure life or liberty. If we must say in black and white what the benefit was which Christ expected His death to assist in procuring for many, it would be doubtless admission to the kingdom of Heaven, The idea that the sufferings of the righteous were in some way accepted by God instead of the suffer- ings of the guilty, had a place in Jewish thought long before the time of Christ.^ Its classical expression is that very section of the deutero-Isaiah of which these words are almost certainly an echo. Later Jewish tradition did not usually identify the suffering Servant with the Messiah,^ though that interpretation was not, 1 Prof. Wendt (Teaching of Jesus, Eng. Trans, ii. 226) understands the words in the sense of Matt. xi. 28 (" Come unto me, all ye that labour," etc.) ; but it is difficult to see how Christ's death (as distinct from His teaching) could have a liberating effect upon souls oppressed with the weight of the law, unless we attribute to Jesus the fully developed theories of St. Paul, which Wendt is of course far from doing. Another account of their probable meaning given by Prof. Menzies also deserves consideration ( The Earliest Gospel, p. 202) : " Now, considering the ideas on which He was dwelling at this time, the profit He speaks of as accruing to many from His death must have consisted in their being in the Kingdom which was to be open to believers afterwards, and not excluded from it and left outside. Thus we are led to the belief on His part that His death would have the result of bringing into the Kingdom many who might otherwise have been left outside it. In what way precisely He expected this to come about we cannot determine. His followers as yet were few ; He had by no means succeeded in gathering Jerusalem into the fold. But If He died, a change might take place in this particular. The death of the Messiah must have a profound influence on the chosen people. It must arrest the national conscience and bring about a general movement, such as His preaching had failed to produce, towards the Kingdom. In this way He might regard His death as a means of blessing to ' many,' His life as a ransom for many. His blood as shed ' for many.' As much as this seems plain. If Jesus expected, as can easily be shown that He did, that the Kingdom would be visibly erected the moment after [I should say " not long after "] He died, and if it was to be erected, as He must have beUeved it would, on a scale worthy of God and of the chosen people, with multitudes in it who showed no sign yet of turning towards it, then His death must have seemed to Him to be the means by which those multitudes were to be saved." This seems to me rather too modern and elaborate. I should prefer to substitute the simpler thought suggested by Prof. Burkitt, that the Messiah's death would end the long- suffering of God towards Israel, and hasten the Kingdom. More than this the complete absence of any parallel in the teaching of Jesus makes it impossible for us to say. 2 See below, p. 71 sq. s Some of the Jewish interpreters (in the Talmud, the Targums, and later) did identify the Servant of Jehovah with the Messiah, but even some of these, while admitting that the concluding verses of Is. lii. referred to him, explained Is. liii. in other ways, and in Is. liii. the verses which seemed to speak of the death (as distinct from the sufferings) of the Messiah were explained away. Others identified the Servant with historical individuals — Jeremiah, David, Hezekiah, etc. ; but the prevailing interpretation (especi- ally after Rashi in the eleventh century) was that which has been generally approved by modern critics, i.e. that which identifies the Servant with Israel or the idealized Israel (as is distinctly implied by Is. xli. 8, 9, xlix. 3). There is no evidence to show that in or THE RANSOM FOR MANY 35 indeed, unknown, and may possibly be pre-Christian, It is certainly possible that our Lord may have applied Isaiah's conception of the suffering Servant to the Messiah, and so to Himself; or that, without any such identification, He may have thought of His death as benefiting others, not in any unique or exclusive way, but just as the sufferings of other righteous men had done and might yet do — perhaps, as Prof. Burkitt has suggested in his striking paper on the parable of the wicked husbandmen, by causing the Lord of the Vineyard to hasten the judgement,^ to take away the vineyard from the sinful generation which had rejected His Son and to give it to others — and so bring about the deliverance of the faithful in Israel. Or, less definitely, it may be supposed that the thought is that His sufferings would be accepted by His Father, and procure benefits for many, just as the prayers and inter- cessions of the righteous might do. But, in whatever sense Jesus may have expected that the sufferings of the Messiah were to benefit others, the assertion that they would do so is a long way off from the dogma that for- giveness of sins could be purchased in this way and in no other. There is nothing to suggest that the particular benefit which His death would win was the forgiveness of sins, or that the benefit which it would procure was anything sui generis — different in kind from the benefit which the sufferings of other righteous men might obtain for them, or that the way in which it was to before the time of our Lord the idea of a Messiah who should suffer and die was known. See the collection of translations in The Fifty- Third Chapter of Isaiah according to the jfewish Interpreters by Driver and Neubauer (with Introduction by Pusey, 1877). Some modern writers still hold that in particular places the prophet is thinking specially of some historical individual. Schultz, for instance {Old Test. Theology, i. 3 14.), thinks that the prophet speaks of himself in xlviii. 16 sq., 1. 4. sq. (and elsewhere), but only ^as " the common mouthpiece of all in Israel who are faithful to their God." Among the later Jews (apparently not till after a.d. 135) there was a doctrine of a preparatory Messiah, the son of Joseph, who was to suffer and die as a warrior in defending the nation and prepare the way for the true Messiah, the Son of David, but no atoning effect was attributed to His sufferings. See Stevens, The Theology of the New Testament, p. 15 ; Dalman, Der leidende und der sterhende Messias. In 4. Esdras vii. we find a human Messiah who is to die after a reign of 400 years ; so the Samaritan Messiah {Taei or " Restorer " [.']) dies after reigning no years, his death being followed by the judgement. Such conceptions are entirely different from the idea of the " Suffering Messiah," though sometimes confused with it. See Mr. Emmet's article " Messiah," in Encycl. of Rel. and Ethics, vol. viii. pp. 577"^ 579*- 1 Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Religions, vol. ii. p. 32f sq. 36 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. operate was by constituting an expiatory or substitutionary sacrifice. To say that the sufferings or the prayers of Himself and other righteous persons would benefit many is not inconsistent with the teaching of His saying about the forgiven publican. To understand the words as meaning that apart from His death there could be no forgiveness would be to make His teaching in this passage wholly and irreconcilably inconsistent with the teaching of that parable and, indeed, with all the rest of His teaching about the love of God and His willingness to forgive the sinner on the one condition of penitence. And even if we ignore that consideration, and insist on reading into this passage the doctrine — hard, literal, fully developed — of an expiatory sacrifice for sins, even so there is not a single trace of the doctrine that the appropriation of the forgiveness is conditional upon the individual's belief in the efficacy of that atoning sacrifice or upon belief of any kind or sort. Considered as a purely critical question, the prob- abilities for and against the genuineness of the words, taken as an isolated saying, are about equal ; but, when we look at them in the context supplied by the general tenour of Christ's teaching as a whole, I feel that the probabilities are very strongly against them. It is, I admit, not inconceivable that our Lord may have come to identify Himself more or less definitely with the suffering Servant of Isaiah's prophecy, though the use of the words by no means necessarily implies that He did so. He may have applied to His own case the principle which the prophet had applied to the inter- pretation of the sufferings of the righteous in Israel without thinking of Himself as the only suffering Servant of Jehovah. The chief difficulty in the way of believing that He identified Himself in any exclusive way with the suffering Servant and thought of His death as having any vicarious efficacy, is the fact that this solitary sentence of Mark is the only trace of His having done so.^ If • "The parable of the wicked husbandmen (Mk. xii. i), while it represents Jesus as predicting His death, is strong evidence against the notion that He attributed any saving efficacy to that death : all that it does is to hasten the judgement. It is not the sin of man, but the unbelief of the Jews which called for the sending of the heir. And the I THE LAST SUPPER 37 He did utter the words, they must represent a passing reflection rather than the central idea of His Gospel. Had He really believed that deliverance from sin and Its penalty was in any paramount and exclusive way dependent upon the effects of His death, still more had He thought of this dependence as being the vital essence of His message, it is inconceivable that He should not have taught that doctrine in a much more definite and explicit manner than this ; it is inconceivable that He should have taught so much that is inconsistent with it : it is inconceivable that such teaching, had it been given, should have failed to be remembered ; most incon- ceivable of all is it that a few days or a few hours later He should have prayed that the chief purpose for which He came into the world should remain unfulfilled. On any view of this passage it teaches nothing at all approach- ing the traditional doctrine of the atonement ; certainly it does not show that Christ regarded His own death as a vicarious punishment, a substitutionary sacrifice, or even an objectively valid expiation without which sin could not be forgiven. Thus, even if the words are genuine, the only doctrine of the atonement which can trace itself back to Jesus Himself is the simple doctrine that His death, like His life, was a piece of service or self-sacrifice for His followers, such as they themselves might very well make for one another. The more the interpretation of the saying is made to involve something nearer to the traditional atonement doctrine than this, the greater becomes the historical improbability that it was ever uttered by our Lord. We may be quite sure that either the words were not uttered at all, or that their meaning fell very far short of the doctrine of the atonement in the form which eventually obtained currency in the Church. There is one other Synoptic saying or group of sayings which may be appealed to as a proof that a certain expiatory value was attached by our Lord Himself to heir was sent, not to die and save, but to deliver tlie same message. Tlie death, so far from saving, is the cause of their condemnation. (See the article referred to above, p. 35 n. I.) The notion that the purpose of the death was to increase the guilt of the Jews was held by strongly anti- Jewish Christians," such as the author of the so-called Epistle of Barnabas. See below, p. 195- 38 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. His approaching death. They are to be found in the narratives of the Last Supper. It is well known that the four accounts which have come down to us of our Lord's words on that occasion are not consistent with each other, and in several of them there are difficult questions of reading.^ Not all these reports can be literal history ; for in point of detail they contradict one another. Even if we put aside minor differences, it is difficult to suppose that all of them can be genuine ; for they seem to represent different and not easily reconcilable conceptions of the symbolical acts which they record. Some of them have certainly more prob- ability of being genuine than others. Only one of the versions contains any reference to the forgiveness of sins, and the words which contain this reference are precisely the words which may most confidently be set aside. In St. Matthew the words " unto remission of sins " are added after the words " this is my blood of the covenant which is shed for many." Matthew's account is obviously dependent upon Mark's, and the most con- servative critic will have no hesitation in treating this addition as an explanatory gloss by the author or last editor of the first Gospel. If these words are set aside, there is no explicit reference to the forgiveness of sins in any of the narratives ; the question remains whether there is anything to suggest even by implication the idea of an expiatory or a vicarious efficacy in the death. Allusions to the blood of the covenant are found in all the accounts except the shorter text of St. Luke. There are some difficulties in the way of supposing that these words come from our Lord Himself. In the first place, there is the singularity of Mark's expression, " my blood of the covenant," which looks very much as if it had arisen from a conflation of two readings — " my blood " and the " blood of the covenant." ^ And then 1 The four narratives are Matt. xxvi. 26-29 i Mk. xiv. 22-25 > Lk. xxii. 15-22 (verses 19A, 20 being omitted in the best MSS.) ; i Cor. xi. 23-25. I accept the text of Westcott and Hort, who treat the doubtful words as an interpolation. 2 Matthew and Mark have the words " This is my blood of the covenant " • St. Paul has " This cup is the new covenant in my blood." In the shorter text of Luke there is no suggestion that the cup was symbolical of blood : the cup is given only with the worda " I will no more drink," etc. It is highly probable, therefore, that Luke I THE LAST SUPPER 39 the idea which the words imply seems quite different from that suggested by the words which follow with slight^ variations in all the accounts except St. Paul's : " Verily I say unto you I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." If our Lord thought of the meal which He was celebrating with His disciples as itself the Messianic banquet, or if the real significance of the giving the cup was that it was simply that this was the last time He would take a meal with them before He sat down with them to the Messianic banquet in the Kingdom of God, it is not very likely that He thought of it also as symbolizing His own blood and of that blood as ratifying a covenant between God and His people.^ And the argument against their genuineness is strengthened by their omission in the shorter text of Luke.^ But even represents the earliest tradition, and that the words " this is my blood " were intro- duced later on the analogy of " this is my body." Both expressions — " this is my blood of the covenant " and " this is the covenant in my blood " — are so awkward that they look like an attempt to conciliate two traditions, in one of which the words were " this is my blood," and in the other " this is the blood of the covenant " or " this cup is the covenant." If the first version was really a saying of Christ, it would have to be understood in whatever way we interpret " this is my body " ; if the latter version should be regarded as genuine, it will remain doubtful whether the wine was simply regarded as symboUcal of blood in general — the blood such as would be necessary for the ratification of a covenant, or whether the wine was meant to be symbolical of Christ's own blood, and that this was the blood with which the covenant was to be ratified. In any case it is dii£cult to suppose that, if the words about the covenant were used at all, there was not some reference to His own death, since it is improbable that the symbolism of the cup and of the bread should have nothing in common. If we suppose that the cup was only given with the words " I will not drink," etc., this objection will hardly apply. In that case there was originally no symbolism in the cup (except what is implied in the common religious meal) but only in the bread. ^ The impossibiUty is perhaps not so absolute as it is made by M. Maurice Goguel {UEucharistie des origines a yustin J\dartyr, p. 8i sq., who adopts the suggestion of Volter), but the probabilities are against it. M. Goguel (p. 85) insists further (with Baur, Volkmar, Bousset) that to suppose that our Lord thought of Himself as inaugurat- ing a new covenant would be inconsistent with His own view as to His Mission and His relations to Judaism, and that it may therefore be set down as a " Paulinizing addition." But as the new covenant was distinctly foretold by the prophets (especially in Jer. xxxi. 31) in connexion with the Messianic epoch in a way which would naturally be under- stood to make its inauguration the work of the Messiah, the objection does not seem to me fatal. In any case, as M. Goguel admits, the difficulty may be got over by rejecting the word " new," which seems to be the true reading only in St. Paul, and understanding the idea as the renewal of the Old Covenant rather than the making of a new one. At the same time I feel that the other saying (" I will not drink," etc.), in spite of its absence in St. Paul (who may have omitted it as irrelevant to his purpose), is much less likely to have been invented afterwards, and that it is improbable that both are genuine. Prof. Burkitt treats the saying about the covenant as genuine, and understands it in the same way as he understands Mk. x. 4.5 (in the article referred to above, p. 35 "• ')• 2 I assume that the true text of St. Luke is the shorter version, omitting the words " which is given for you : this do in remembrance of me " in Lk. xxii. 19 and the whole 40 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. if this saying be genuine, it will not bear the interpretation which has been put upon it. The new covenant which is here referred to can hardly be other than that new ^ covenant spoken of by more than one prophet, especially by Jeremiah : " Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah : not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. . . . But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord ; I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it ; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people ; and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord : for they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more." ^ There is nothing sacrificial about such a covenant as this : there is no suggestion that the forgiveness promised had anything to do with a sacrificial death, or was dependent on any condition whatever. The covenant was not, indeed, properly speaking, a covenant at all, for it was unilateral : it was a " covenant which is no covenant," ^ because it consisted simply in the announcement of free forgiveness. It may be said that our Lord's teaching elsewhere suggests that He might have thought of Himself as inaugurating a new covenant-relation between God and His people. There would be no great difficulty in supposing that He may have done so ; and if He did. He might of verse 20. These verses are pronounced by Westcott and Hort to be a " Western " interpolation, arising, of course, from a desire to accommodate the Lukan narrative to the others. They are also rejected by Nestle, who says, " It is to be observed that the last discovered Syriac omits the nominative clause rd virkp vjxwv iKx^vofievov after Tif ai/iari /ioi;, vifhich is the only member that seems to be derived, not from i Cor. xi. 24 f., but from Matthew and Mark, and that does not agree in construction with the rest. This confirms the supposition that these two verses are not part of the original text " ( Textual Criticism of the Greek Testament, p. 277). It is strange that M. Goguel should prefer the longer text. 1 The word new {Kawri^) is found in St. Paul and in some MSS. of Matthew and Mark. 2 Jer. xxxi. 31-34 (quoted in Heb. viii. 8, x. 16). It was, of course, thought of as superseding the covenant of Ex. xxiv. 7, 8. ^ Menzies on Mk. xiv. 23. I THE LAST SUPPER 41 quite conceivably have spoken — with a touch of bitter irony — of His blood as supplying that ratification by blood without which in ancient times a covenant was not thought of as complete.^ But if the blood used in ratifying a covenant — originally the blood of the covenant- ing parties themselves, afterwards that of an animal victim — may be considered as in a sense sacrificial blood, the sacrifice was in no sense expiatory or propitiatory. The custom points back to that possibly older idea of sacrifice which implies communion rather than expiation or propitiation. Equally little is there any idea of expiation or propitiation in those other words which have more probability of being genuine — the declaration that He would not drink of the fruit of the vine until He should drink it new in the Kingdom of God. Here the wine is not regarded as in any way symbolical of blood or of death. If it is treated as symbolical at all, it is as a sort of anticipation of the Messianic feast. There remain the words " This is my body which is for you" in St. Paul,^ or, as they stand in St. Mark, " Take ye : this is my body." Here we can have little difficulty in accepting the last version as the more primi- tive, especially as the " for you " is absent also from the genuine text of St. Luke. The four words, " This is my body," are the only words which are absolutely identical in all four narratives. The words, " Take ye : this is my body," do not even necessarily involve any definite, or at all events any exclusive, reference to the ^ It 13 the more difiicult to suppose that He thought of the cup as symbolizing that blood because of the different significance which He gives to the blood in the saying, " I will no more drink," etc. If the saying is genuine, it may be the Evangelist who has put it into close connexion with the giving of the cup. ^ The longer text of Luke adds " which is given " (SiS6/t.evov). I do not think it necessary to ask whether, when St. Paul says that he received the tradition " from the Lord," he refers to an ecstatic vision or simply to the established tradition of the Church. If he does refer to a vision, the vision may well be supposed to have been influenced by the established usage of the Church, nor does he claim to be adding anything to the Gospel tradition. The phenomena of the Gospel texts are a sufficient proof that dis- crepant traditions soon began to circulate in the Church, possibly arising out of differences of local usage in the celebration of the eucharist. Whether St. Paul is supposed to be recounting a vision or to be repeating his version of the common tradition, his authority cannot be regarded as final ; or, indeed, when it adiis to the other versions, as superior te what may be supposed to come from Q or St. Mark. The tradition that was put into writing later may obviously be more primitive than one that was written down earlier. St. Mark may therefore represent an earlier tradition than St. Paul, and St. Luke an earlier tradition than either. 42 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. Impending death at all. Still it is difficult to believe that the coming parting was altogether absent from the Master's thought. The most natural interpretation of the words is simply this : " As I give you this bread, so I give, I devote myself wholly to you {to you rather than for you). I desire to identify myself with you in the closest possible manner : take this as a farewell expres- sion of our spiritual union." ^ It has been suggested that the original Aramaic word for body is one which was also used to mean ** self." " I give myself to you." 2 But this suggestion must not be taken as certain. Better established is the metaphorical interpretation of bread in the sense of doctrine sometimes found in the Talmud .3 But we need not assume that there is 1 The idea afterwards elaborated by St. Paul about the Church being the body of Christ will thus have had a germ in our Lord's own mind, in the suggestion that in giving them the bread His disciples were mystically becoming partakers in the body which was soon to be broken on the Cross ; this supplies, however, no foundation for the theory that sins could only be forgiven through the efRcacy of that death. We are told, indeed, that in the apocalyptic and rabbmical conceptions of the Messianic Supper " the good to be enjoyed is the Messiah Himself, and it is to this that Jesus refers when He speaks of the bread and wine as His own body and blood " (Denney, The Death of Christy p. 3^]., who refers to Spitta, Die urchrUtlichen Tradittonen und Sinn des Abendmahl). Jesus may conceivably have been influenced by this conception, but that would not imply either a theory of a vicarious atonement or the doctrine that reception of the eucharist was essential to salvation or admission to the kingdom. 2 Castellus {i.e. Castle) Lex. to Walton's Bibl. FolygL sub •voce says that "guph" (lit. " body ") is used In the sense of person or self in later or Rabbinic Hebrew and in the Aramaic of the Talmud, but he does not support this statement by a quotation. In Pirke Aboth iv. 10 (ed. Taylor) there is a saying of R. Jose (2nd cent, a.d.) : *' He will himself (gupho) be honoured by men." There is a somewhat similar usage in Ex. xxi. 3, 4., where the Hebrew " b^ gappo," which signifies literally " in his body," is employed in the sense of " by himself." The evidence from Palestinian Aramaic is later, third or fourth century, e.g. Talm. B. Beja 3a : " This law is itself (guphah) only a precaution." 1 owe this suggestion to the Rev. J. R. Wilkinson, and some of the above information is derived from Prof. Cooke, who himself doubts whether our Lord used the word *' guphi " and in this sense. 3 On John vi. 51 (" the bread that I will give is my flesh ") John Lightfoot (Horae Hebraicae, i^$-^- lii- p. 307) remarks : " He tacitly confutes that foolish conceit of theirs about I know not what dainties the Messiah should treat them with j and slights those trifles by teaching that all the dainties which Christ had provided were Himself. Let them not look for wonderful messes, rich feasts j He will^give them Himself to eat \ bread beyond all other provision whatever ; food from heaven ; and such as brlngeth salvation. . . . There was nothing more common in the schools of the Jews than the phrases of ' eating and drinking ' in a metaphorical sense. . . . 5re.3£^ is very frequently used in the Jewish writers for doctrine. So that when Christ speaks of eating His fleshy He might perhaps hint to them that He would feed His followers not only with His doctrines, but with Himself too." Lightfoot {lib. cit, ili. 308) adds : *' There is mention even among the Tahnudists themselves of eating the Messiah," and quotes *' Rabh " [Abba Arika, third century] as saying, " Israel shall eat the years of the Messiah," and from Hillel the words, " Messiah is not likely to come to Israel, for they have already devoured Him In the days of Heze- kiah." The word translated " devoured " may, I believe, mean simply " destroyed." I THE LAST SUPPER 43 any reference to such rabbinic notions. Quite apart from any such speculations, it was not only in death but in life that Jesus devoted Himself to His disciples. There is no necessary reference to the death ; still, it is probable that the words were uttered with especial reference to the parting and the death which He regarded at least as probable. But for our Lord to say that He was giving Himself for His disciples involves no idea of atonement — still less of an atonement upon which the forgiveness of the sins of the whole world depended. Even if we retain the words " which is for you " after " body," or if without them we take the giving as having an exclusive reference to the death, the words can at most mean no more than this : "I am going to sacrifice my life for you. I am ready to face death on your behalf — in the fulfilment of the Messianic mission which God has entrusted to me for your sakes." In that case our Lord will be thinking of His death as sacrificial or vicarious only in the sense in which any great leader of men might regard a martyr's death as an act of self- sacrifice on behalf of his followers. Doubtless He may have felt that the death of the Messiah had a signifi- cance which the death of no other man could have, but He claims for it no unique expiatory value. When we come to the giving of the cup, we do indeed find that all the authorities except the shorter Luke see in the cup a symbol of Christ's blood, while St. Matthew and St. Mark add the words, " which is poured out for many " (Mark) or " concerning many " (Matthew) ; but as these words are not found in St. Paul or in the shorter text of St. Luke, their genuineness becomes doubtful. Without them there is nothing to suggest that the death was thought of as having a vicarious efficacy or even any sort of efficacy. Even if they are retained, they will at most, like the gift of the bread, suggest the idea that our Lord looked upon His approaching death as an act of self-sacrifice for His disciples. In the case both of the bread and the wine, the words " for you " are in all probability a later addition ; and in the shorter text of St. Luke there is not even any word to suggest that 44 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. Jesus ever thought of the wine as in any way represent- ative or symbolical of blood or of death, or as being more than the cup of the last Passover which He would celebrate with them. The addition of words which suggest that view seems to have grown out of the desire to find in the giving of the cup a meaning analogous to that which Jesus probably did attach to the giving of the bread. The shorter text of St. Luke gives us by far the best attested narrative of the whole incident. I will read the words as they stand there, that you may see how Httle there is in them to suggest the idea of an expiatory death : " With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer : for I say unto you I will not eat it until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he received a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, ' Take this, and divide it among yourselves : for I say unto you, I will not drink from henceforth of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God shall come.' And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and gave to them, saying, ' This is my body. But behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.' " ^ The Lukan account seems to me the most primi- tive narrative which has come down to us. Here there are no words which can imply that the death was "instead of" or even "on behalf of" the disciples: the body is given to them as His life had been given to them. At the same time I wish to insist upon the point that our conclusions will not have to be seriously modified, whatever view we take of the critical points. If only ^ On the whole this account is the simplest and seems most pcimitive ; and yet in two points there is something to be said for the other versions, (i) If we hold (as is frequently done) that the Fourth Gospel is right in representing that the Supper took place on the day before the Passover, we must suppose that the words (peculiar to Luke) implying that it was a Passover must be a later insertion, unless, indeed, as Prof. Kennett has suggested, the words mean " I will make this meal a Passover." (2) It seems probable that the words " until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God " represent a modification of Mark's " until that day when I drink it in the kingdom of God." The alteration may be intended to avoid the suggestion of a literal eating and drinking in the kingdom. None of the narratives, except St. Paul's and the longer Luke (which is doubtless based upon St. Paul), imply that our Lord thought of Himself as founding a permanent institution. St. Paul's words, " Ye do show the Lord's death till he come " (as Mr. J. R. Wilkinson suggests), may easily have grown out of the words " until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God." I THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 45 we reject Matthew's addition " for the remission of sins," there is nothing in any of the narratives to suggest that the approaching death was in any way whatever to bring about the forgiveness of sins, or that Jesus was dying " for " His followers in any other sense than that in which He had lived for them — in any sense but that in which other martyrs have died for their cause and for their followers. That the death of the Messiah had more significance than the death of other martyrs is true ; that the service which in life and in death the Messiah was rendering to the world was a greater service than others could render is equally true. It is true that in actual history the death of Christ has had spiritual effects incomparably greater than those which have flowed from any other death ; but the fact remains that there is nothing in the sayings attributed to the Master at the Last Supper which implies any fundamental difference in kind between the service which He was conscious of performing and the service to which He was inviting His disciples. Christian experience may after- wards have discovered such a unique significance; but that does not justify our reading back into Christ's own words an idea which there is nothing in His language to suggest. We have found, then, nothing in either of the two places which we have examined which can compel us to abandon the conclusion that our Lord never taught that His death was necessary for the forgiveness of sins, or that any condition was required for forgiveness but the supreme one of repentance and that amendment which is implied in all sincere repentance.^ The only doctrine of the atonement which can with any certainty, or even with any probability, be traced back to our Lord Himself is the simple doctrine that His death, like His life, was one of self-sacrifice for His followers, and that such a death of self-sacrifice would be a continuation of that spiritual service of the brethren to which His life had been devoted.^ That is the doctrine already implied 1 As to the " Sin against the Holy Ghost," which may be thought to be inconsistent with this statement, see Additional Note B, below, p. 56. 2 Dr. Dale's statement {The Atonement, p. 71) that " the same fundamental concep- tion of His death appears in them all " {i.e. all the passages in which He alludes to His death) 46 THE TEACHNG OF CHRIST lect. in the simpler words of St. Luke : «" But I am in the midst of you as he that serveth," when read in the light of his approaching death ; and even if the Markan addition be genuine, it will not appreciably add to what is implied in them. Simple as it is, the doctrine which they contain is, indeed, one of profound significance ; and it is the basis of all that is true and eternal in later doctrines of the atone- ment. The fact that the Messiah should be thought of as dying — and dying by an agonizing and a shameful death — implied a fundamental change in the whole idea of Messiahship and of the Messianic kingdom. It repre- sents the whole difference between the sense in which Jesus at the end of His ministry accepted the Messianic title, and the sense which it had hitherto borne for the Jewish world. The thought that it was through suffer- ing, through the death and apparent defeat of His chosen One, that God was going to set up His kingdom, and that those who would participate in the joys and glories of that kingdom must follow Him in the path of self-sacrifice, was no arbitrary appendix or addition to the teaching of the Master. It only added a crowning illustration of the ethical principle which ran all through that teaching — the principle that love is the highest thing in human life and the highest revelation of the divine nature. The doctrine that God will forgive the sins of the penitent upon the one condition of sincere repentance and amendment is, as we have seen, simply a consequence and particular application of that prin- seems to me the direct opposite of the fact. The whole treatment of the subject by Dr. Dale is absolutely pre-critical and unconvincing. It is based upon the assumption that every word attributed to our Lord by any Evangelist — including the fourth — represents His ipshsima •verba, even when it is absolutely inconsistent with other alleged sayings. Equally unconvincing are the arguments of Dr. Denney {The Death of Christ), and they are only the more illogical inasmuch as he does not share Dr. Dale's uncritical assumptions. His suggestion that our Lord's submission to a baptism of repentance proves that His death had an expiatory effect is a fair specimen of his arguments (l.c. 13 sq.). No scholar will now be prepared to defend the view that when our Lord spoke of Him- self as coming " to fulfil the law " He meant " to suffer instead of the guilty the death which the law denounced for sin." Anybody who wants to realize the gulf which divides even conservative theologians from the orthodoxy of two generations ago should read Smeaton's The Doctrine of the Atonement as taught by Christ Himself (iSyi), where this interpretation is defended. Unfortunately many theologians fail to realize that the older theories which they still defend have no foundation except in a system of exegesis which they have abandoned. I THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 47 ciple. And that being so, we are already able to find a meaning in the later doctrine which sees in the death of the supreme Revealer a pledge or symbol of the forgive- ness which He had preached and promised. In so far as " the doctrine of the cross " means the supreme beauty of loving service, and in particular its efficacy in touching the heart and regenerating the lives of others, the doctrine of the cross may be traced back to the teaching of our Lord, and forms the very centre of it. The germ of all true theories of an atonement through the death of Jesus is to be found in that teaching of His : no one of those theories is actually there. How far the later doctrine or doctrines of the atone- ment constituted a legitimate development of the idea which was really involved in the teaching of the Master — whether, in so far as it added to that teaching, what was added was simply based upon the experience of Chris- tians as to the life-giving efficacy of their Master's life and death, and how far the later development of Christian thought involved ideas of a quite different origin and character — these are the problems which we shall be investigating in subsequent lectures. On no account must we rush to the conclusion that, if we find in the later doctrine anything which was not due to the explicit, or even the implicit, teaching of Jesus, it can possess no truth or permanent value. The legitimacy and the necessity of development in Christian doctrine are as indisputable as its actual occurrence. Many things may be true about Christ which Christ Himself never taught. Many things may legitimately be inferred or deduced from Christ's teaching which He never deduced from it Himself. Many things may even be added to it which cannot even be said to be logically deducible from it. Many things which Christ never Himself taught may nevertheless be true, may even be so far absorbed into the teaching of the Christian Church as to become in some sense a permanent and indispensable part of Christianity ; for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and of His presence in the Church which Christ founded is as important an element in Christianity as the belief 48 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. in a supreme revelation of God through the historical Christ. But some continuity, some consistency, some congruity there must needs be between the development and the germ from which the development has sprung, if the religion which has grown out of Christ's teaching is to claim any identity with the religion which was preached by its Founder. In the following lectures I propose to examine the later doctrine, or rather doctrines, of the atonement, and to ask how far they are consistent with the teaching of Christ on the one hand, and on the other with the reason and conscience of the present. But I shall venture from the first to assume two things : (a) That, though a doctrine of the atonement may add something to the actual teaching of Jesus, no doctrine of the atonement can be a legitimate development of our Lord's teaching, no doctrine of the atonement can be genuinely Christian, which contradicts a feature of that teaching so fundamental as the truth that God is a loving Father, who will pardon sin upon the sole condition of true repentance. And (F) that there is only one way in which any more developed doctrine of atonement can possibly be in harmony with this fundamental element in Christ's teaching. The only atoning influence that can be recognized in the death of Christ, or in any other aspect of His work, is one which operates by actually helping to produce that repentance and moral regeneration upon which, and upon which alone, according to the Master's express teaching, forgiveness depends. I have not entered upon any formal argument in favour of the truth or the adequacy of Christ's own doctrine about the forgiveness of sins. That doctrine is one which many Christians will be disposed to accept simply upon the authority of Christ Himself, when once they are satisfied that it is really His. But for those who feel that the authority which is attributed to Christ must in the last resort be based upon the appeal which His character and teaching make to the moral consciousness of mankind, there is no necessity to base the doctrine upon the bare ipse dixit of the Master. It I CHRIST'S DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT 49 is one that may be trusted to appeal to the reason and conscience of mankind on its own merits. That sin ought to be forgiven when there is sincere repentance is a truth which, like all ultimate ethical truths, must be accepted simply because it is self-evident. Or perhaps it may be better described as a deduction from, or im- plication of, that doctrine of universal love which is itself an immediate affirmation of the enlightened con- science. For those who believe in a righteous God, God must be supposed to act in the way which the moral consciousness approves. If a man has actually returned to the right moral state — for that is what repentance means — a righteous God must forgive the past, must judge him according to what he is, and not according to anything that he was and has ceased to be. The doctrine is, as we have seen, no arbitrary appendix to Christian theology or to Christian ethics. It is a truth which flows directly from Christ's funda- mental doctrine that the most essential element in the moral ideal of man and in the nature of God Himself is love. Christianity is the religion which for the first time proclaimed in all its fulness those twin-truths which are best expressed in the simple phrases — the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man ; and the most direct and immediate corollary of that doctrine is the truth that he in whom the sinful will has been changed, and in proportion as it has been changed, is already reconciled to God. ADDITIONAL NOTES TO LECTURE I NOTE A THE RANSOM FOR MANY (Matt. XX. 28 ; Mk. x. 45) It seems desirable to support the view of this passage which I have taken in the text by some further critical considerations. The first gospel notoriously contains many passages which are commonly set down as ecclesiastical additions — passages added by the E so THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. first Evangelist or his latest editor to the sources which he used in common with the other Evangelists vi^hether on the basis of some later tradition or on his own responsibihty, and they are often of a kind suggestive of later ecclesiastical organization or doctrinal develop- ment. In this category are commonly placed St. Peter's walking on the water, the words about binding and loosing, the committal of the keys to St. Peter, the injunction to bring quarrels to be settled by the Church, the resurrection of the bodies of the Saints, the allusion to baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity in the parting words of Jesus.l All these sayings or narratives are peculiar to St. Matthew. It is certain that, if the words about the ransom were found in St. Matthew's Gospel only, few modern critics would have any hesitation in putting them in the same category, and treating them as an insertion made by the author or editor in the light of later Christian doctrine, or perhaps as a still later gloss or addition which had got into the text. But the words are as a matter of fact found also in St. Mark. Yet, after all, few will be disposed to deny that ecclesiastical or doctrinal additions to the earliest tradition are to be found even in St. Mark, or to contend that St. Luke's Gospel never preserves the original form of sayings better than the other two Synoptists, even when these are agreed. There was no theological reason why the author of the third gospel should have omitted the words if he had found them in his text of Mark : if (as I believe) the author was Luke, St. Paul's companion in travel, he would have welcomed a saying which to him would certainly have suggested something like the doctrine of that Apostle. The fact that he omitted it, therefore, points to one of two things — either (a) that in this case he relied upon some other authority — presumably O (so Loisy), or his own special source, or (some would say) a special source in which Q had already been more or less embodied ; ^ or (i) that these words were absent from the copy of Mark used by Luke though present in some later copy employed by St. Matthew. To prefer the authority of Q to that of Mark (if that be the alternative adopted) is a critical opinion which needs no apology. There is, I think, a balance of authority for supposing that Q is earlier than Mark, and was more or less used by him. On any view the authority of Q is as good as that of Mark, and a saying that was omitted by Q, when the immediate context is preserved, must be held to be doubtful — much too doubtful to justify our attributing to our Lord with any confidence a doctrine which there is no other satisfactory evidence of His having taught. If we look simply to the attestation, the saying is doubtful : if we look to the character of the words — to the fact that this is just the kind of doctrinal gloss which was so often inserted by transcribers — it seems to me the more probable view that they were never uttered by our Lord : and that probability is increased if we accept the view that St. Mark's Gospel ^ Matt, xxviii. 19. See above, p. 20, n. i. 2 See Prof. Vernon Bartlet's article in Oxford Studies of the Synoptic Problem, p. 315 sq. I THE RANSOM PASSAGE 51 IS here and there coloured by the influence of St. Paul, or rather, as I should myself be disposed to say, by the later doctrine of the Church which was by no means exclusively Pauline. But perhaps the strongest objection to them is their irrelevance to the context. Our Lord has been speaking of His death as a kind of service — a service which His disciples were to imitate. There is a sudden transition to a different order of ideas — which is then immediately dropped and in no way followed up or explained. As Loisy remarks, " L'idee de la vie donnee en ranfon appartient a un autre courant que celle de la service" {Evan. Syn. ii. 241). Wellhausen calls it a fjurafiaa-i.'s ets aX\o yevos. Those who regard the words as genuine can only escape the force of this argument by very strictly interpreting the passage in the light of its context, and understanding the death simply as a con- tinuation of the life of service. It is much more probable that our Lord may have thought of His death — the death of the Messiah — as foretold in Scripture than that He should actually have taught that it was the means, and the sole means, by which sin could be forgiven. The first belief would not be inconsistent with His general teaching about God and the forgive- ness of sins : the latter would be a contradiction of it. He is repre- sented as teaching that His death had been foretold in Scripture in the following places : {a) "The Son of Man goeth even as it is written of Him " (Mk. xiv. 21 ; Matt. xxvi. 24. Cf. Lk. xxii. 22). {b) " For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me. And he was reckoned among the transgressors." (Lk. xxii. 37). Here He actually quotes Is. liii. 12, but not that part of the chapter which may conceivably be understood as implying the doctrine of an expiatory sacrifice for sin. Because the Messiah had to die, it does not follow that everything said of the suffering Servant was applied by Jesus to Himself in a literal and an exclusive sense. (f) "And Jesus saith unto them. All ye shall be offended because of me this night, for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered " (Mk. xiv. 27 ; Zech. xiii. 7). {i) " Behoved it not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory ? And beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them inall the Scriptures the things concern- ing himself " (Lk. xxiv. 26, 27). In this case the passage rests on the authority of a single Evangelist, and cannot be regarded as much better historical evidence than if the Evangelist had (as is so often the case elsewhere) simply noted the fulfilment of prophecy on his own account. But if all these sayings are correctly reported, no one of them shows that Jesus in any way made the forgiveness of sins dependent on His own death. It is of course possible that our Lord might here Himself have evolved the conception of the suffering Messiah out of Is. liii. ; but it is extremely improbable that He should have done so in view of the facts : 52 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. (i) That the passage about -the ransom contains the only trace of His having done so. (2) That such an interpretation of Isaiah was unknown in His time. (3) That the idea of a suffering Messiah is absent from the boolc of Enoch and the other apocalyptic literature in which the more escha- tological critics find the chief source of His Messianic conceptions. It is to be noted that in Matt. xii. 18 the Evangelist represents Jesus as fulfilling the prophecy of the suffering Servant not by His death but by His works of mercy, quoting Is. xlii. 1-4. In the sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus applies Is. Ixi. 1-2 to Himself, but regards Himself as fulfilling it simply by His preaching (Lk. iv. 17-22). The argument against the words may be strengthened by showing that there are parallel cases where Mark introduces later ecclesiastical or dogmatic language, while one or both of the other Evangelists give a simpler and more historically probable version of Christ's words : ^ {a) In Mk. i. I, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." No other Evangelist applies the term " gospel " to his book or indeed uses that term at all. {b) In Mk. i. 13 (Matt. iv. 11) the statement that angels ministered unto Christ after the temptation is omitted by Luke. This is the more significant in view of the frequency of allusions to angels elsewhere in St. Luke's writings. (c) In Mk. i. 14, Mark speaks of Jesus as preaching "the gospel of God," and in the next verse gives our Lord's words as " Repent ye, and believe in the gospel." These last words are omitted by Matthew and by Luke (but Luke is not here closely parallel). {d) In the passage about the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, Luke has preserved the shortest and simplest form 01 the saying (xii. 10), "Every one who shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him ; but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven." Here Mark adds, "but is guilty of an aeonian sin," and Matthew, " neither in this aeon nor in that which is to come." Mark and Matthew agree (substantially) in prefixing the words, "All their sins shall be forgiven, etc." (Mk. iii. 28 ; Matt. xii. 31). Matthew is no doubt dependent on Mark, and Luke may preserve the simpler saying as it stood in Q (but see below, p. 57). {e) All three Synoptists (Mk. viii. 35 ; Matt. xvi. 25 ; Lk. ix. 24) give the saying, "Whosoever would save his life, etc." Mark alone after " for my sake " adds " and the gospel's." There is a similar addition in the saying, " There is no man that hath left house or brethren ... for my sake " (Mk. x. 29 ; Matt. xix. 29 ; Lk. xviii. 29). (/) In Mk. X. 39, our Lord is made to say, " The cup that I drink ye shall drink ; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal 1 For a number of minor " editorial touclies " in Mark (not reproduced by Matthew or Luke) see MoiFat, Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament, p. 233. I THE RANSOM PASSAGE 53 shall ye be baptized." The last clause referring to baptism is omitted by Matthew. is) In the " Little Apocalypse " Mark alone has the words, " The gospel must first be preached unto all the nations" (xiii. lo). This is absent in Matthew, but a little later Matthew varies the saying "ye shall be hated of all for my name's sake " (which is found in all three) by inserting after " all " the word " nations " (Matt. xxiv. 9 ; Mk. x. 1 3 ; Lk. xxi. 17). Here (xiii. 13) we find Mark alone introducing the technical word " gospel," while Matthew follows Mark in introducing words which make our Lord expressly contemplate the mission to the Gentiles. Luke is free from either addition, and yet nobody will suggest that, had he found them before him either in Mark or in a separate copy of the apocalyptic source used by all three, he would have had any disposition to leave them out. In view of Luke's " universalism " this is a remarkable instance of his tendency to preserve sayings of the Christ in their original form, free from " ecclesiastical " or doctrinal additions. {A) It is more probable that a Roman centurion would say, "Certainly this was a righteous man" (Lk. xxiii. 47) than "This man was a Son of God " (Mk. xv. 39 ; Matt, xxvii. 54). The agreement of Matthew and Mark against Luke throughout the Passion- narrative is particularly noticeable. (z) If we accept the " shorter text " of Luke's account of the Last Supper, his narrative is far the simplest and least influenced by later eucharistic ideas. (See above, pp. 43-44.) It would seem then that Mark, or the last editor of Mark, has a tendency to make slight additions expressed in later ecclesiastical or doctrinal language, where Luke preserves the simpler and more probable form of the saying. Sometimes he is followed by Matthew, sometimes not. What is the explanation of this last fact is a question for the critics. It may be that sometimes Matthew had before him a copy of Mark from which the addition was absent, or he may in these particular passages have been following Q and not Mark. It cannot be too strongly insisted that, when a common source is inferred to account for the resemblances between two or more Gospels, we can never be sure that any two Evangelists had before them the same text of that source except in so far as they actually exhibit verbal identity. All the Gospel sources must have been more or less subject to a process of constant and gradual correction — at least in small details. In the case of the ransom passage, if we adopt the view that Q contained no Passion - narrative or discourses leading up to the Passion, we may suppose that Luke was here using his special source (the existence of which is particularly obvious in the Passion-narratives) ; but in view of the verbal identity of the rest of the verse, it is more probable that Matthew was following a copy of Mark in which the insertion had already been made, while Luke had before him a better text of Mark. Apart from the theory that Q had no Passion-narrative, the simplest supposition would be that the words were absent from Q, and that Luke here followed Q. The hypothesis of later assimilation to S4 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. Matthew is also one that cannot be ignored.^ On any view of the critical question at issue, few will be disposed to deny that, in a particular case where Luke disagrees with Matthew or Mark, Luke may have preserved the more primitive form of the saying. I will quote two opinions on the general question of Luke's merits as a reporter of our Lord's sayings : "The general opinion is that the latter's [Luke's] setting of the Logia is in many, perhaps in most cases superior to Matthew's " (Moffat).2 " Although the stylistic corrections of St. Luke are so numerous, we cannot say that he has completely obliterated the characteristics of his exemplar. Indeed, in spite of all, we cannot but recognize that his work of revision is ever carried out in a conservative spirit, and that his readers receive from him a just impression of our Lord's style of discourse " (Harnack).^ Harnack after quoting and adopting Wernle's conclusion that St. Luke had before him the discourses of the Logia -source in their primary form, not in a secondary edition, adds, " Wernle is also correct in his further remark 'Almost everywhere St. Matthew has preserved a better text than St. Luke ' ; yet he ought to have added that in St. Matthew there are to be found many alterations of the text of a very drastic nature — far more drastic than any St. Luke has allowed himself to make." * To the instances above given of Mark's tendency to introduce matter coloured by later ideas we should have to add a whole series of others if we accepted Professor Bacon's view of the second gospel as a whole. According to him the Gospel is based upon Q, a Petrine narrative (P) and other traditions, put together by an editor (R) who used his material with extreme freedom and with a strong Pauline tendency. His object is to exhibit Jesus as the wonder-working Son of God, in the full Pauline sense, to negative what had now come to seem the too legalistic teaching of Q, and to emphasize everywhere the Pauline ideas of salvation through the free gift of God on the condition of faith. The editor wrote at Rome, was decidedly universalistic, and strongly anti-Jewish. Without denying a considerable element of the truth in Prof. Bacon's view of the Gospel, I cannot but feel (i) that some of Prof. Bacon's illustrations of a Pauline tendency are somewhat fanciful and far-fetched ; (2) that very often ideas which he calls Pauline should be rather described as the ideas common to the whole later Church ; * (3) that the whole construction is highly speculative. It represents what very well may have happened, but what the evidence is scarcely sufficient to show did happen. For this 1 " In some passages (e.g. iii. 22 f.) it is even possible tliat the canonical Mark has been affected by Matthew or Luke " (Moffat, Introduction to the Literature of the Neiu Testament, p. 205). 2 Introduction to the Literature of the Neiu Testament, p. 195. ' The Sayings of Jesus, p. 115. * /i. pp. 116, 117. ^ For a more moderate estimate of the Paulinism of St. Mark, see Menzies, The Earliest Gosfel p. 38. Cf. also Moffat, Ic. p. 235. I THE RANSOM PASSAGE 55 reason I abstain from adding to the above list a number of cases very similar to the passage about the ransom, and have confined myself to cases where there is demonstrable evidence of the existence of a tradition from which the additions are absent. Prof. Bacon ascribes not merely the words about the ransom but the whole verse (Mark X. 4;) to the editor, though he admits that the teaching of the words (" came not to be ministered unto, but to minister ") is implied in the context, which he accepts as a genuine saying of Jesus. To my mind the last clause, but not the whole verse, reads like a subsequent gloss. If it stood in Luke's copy of Mark or of Q, I cannot see why he should have omitted it. It may be well to mention some authorities on both sides of the question. The words are accepted as genuine by Ewald, Renan, Hilgenfeld, O. Holtzmann, Keim, Albert Rdville, Beyschlag, Wendt, Goguel, Schweitzer, but most of them would not interpret them in the sense of the later atonement doctrines. Until recently few modern writers who treat the saying as genuine understood them in a strictly expiatory sense. Of late, however, it has been precisely the writers who most definitely treat the expiatory idea as an illusion who are the chief champions of the genuineness of the words, and who most distinctly attribute to Jesus the expiatory meaning, e.g. Schweitzer. It is of course useless to add the names of the older theologians for whom all words attributed to Christ in the Gospels are genuine, even when they contradict each other. The genuineness of the words is denied by Pfleiderer, Wrede, Wellhausen, Schmiedel, Loisy, Bousset, Bacon, Montefiore. Among those who seem doubtful may be mentioned Jo. Weiss and Prof. Menzies. The authority of some of the writers who reject the words may seem to be discounted by the fact that they deny that Jesus anticipated His death at all, or even (in the case of Wrede) that He claimed to be the Messiah, but this is by no means the case with all of them. Loisy, for instance, can hardly be accused of minimizing the eschatological element in the teaching of Jesus, though he does not (like Schweitzer) make it the whole, or treat the ethics of Jesus with contempt. There is room for difference of opinion on the subject ; but any one who, in the teeth of this conflict of Gospel-texts and of modern authorities, is really prepared to say that the genuineness of these words is certain, and to make his whole interpretation of the teaching of Jesus turn upon the assumption of their genuineness, must be a person who has little sense of the nature of historical evidence. If he confines himself to holding that there is a slight probability in their favour, that is an opinion which cannot be positively refuted ; but it becomes less probable the greater the superstructure which the words are made to bear. That it occurred to Jesus as a passing thought that His sufferings were another instance of the prophetic principle that the sufferings of the righteous redound to the benefit of the nation — it may be (since He was the Messiah) a crowning instance of that principle — is a possible view ; but to interpret His whole conceptioil 56 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. of His mission in the light of this solitary utterance tends to the refutation of the hypothesis which involves such an improbable corollary. If the vs^ords are genuine, they must be interpreted in a way which is congruous both with the context of the particular passage and with the ideas of Jesus as revealed by His other reported sayings. If it is insisted that they can only bear the meaning which later dogmatic theology put upon them, they cannot be genuine. On any view of the historical question it is impossible to rest our whole doctrine of salvation upon a doubtful interpretation of a single doubtfully genuine word of the Saviour. The salvation of mankind cannot depend upon a critical possibility or even a ciitical probability. The only reasonable course is to arrive at some conception of the general character of Christ's teaching independently of this passage, and then to ask what meaning the words (if genuine) may bear consistently with that general character. NOTE B THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST Since prima facie the saying about the sin against the Holy Ghost may be regarded as an exception to what has been said about the un- restricted offer of forgiveness on the one condition of penitence, it seems desirable to say a word about it, although the difficulty of the passage is as great for those who suppose our Lord to have taught a doctrine of atonement through His own death as for those who deny it. The saying occurs in different forms and in different contexts. In Mark and Matthew it is connected with the controversy about casting out devils through Beelzebub ; in Lk. xii. lo it comes after the declaration, " Every one who shall confess me before men, etc." Here it has no connexion with the context. In Mark it is thrust in at the end of the Beelzebub passage in a way which suggests that its place is due to the Evangelist. It is therefore very doubtful whether the context can help us to its meaning. It may be well to print the three versions side by side : Mark iii. 28-9 Verily I say unto you, All their sins shall be for- given unto the sons of men, and their blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme : but whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin {alijivlov afiaprifj^TOs) ; because they said. He hath an un- clean spirit. Matthew xii. 3 1 Thereforel sayuntoyou. Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men ; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be for- given. And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him j but whoso- ever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in that which is to come. Luke xii. 10 And every one who shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him ; but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven. I THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 57 Now it is clear that, if we compare Luke and Mark, there are two ways of interpreting the facts : (1) We may suppose that Luke's is the earlier, and that Mark has tried to get rid of the suggestion that blasphemy against the Son of man could be forgiven (consistently with his plan of exhibiting Jesus as_ the wonder-working Son of God) by altering " against the Son of man " into " unto the sons of men " (a strange and unusual expression in the New Testament) ; and the greater simplicity of Luke in the latter part of the saying is a reason for preferring his version, which omits the words " he is guilty of an aeonian sin " (a difficult and un- precedented expression). We may then suppose that both Luke and Mark took the saying from Q ; Mark has distorted it, and also brought it into connexion with the Beelzebub incident ; while Matthew has put together the original Q saying and the secondary Markan version, and substituted " neither in this world nor in that which is to come " for the mysterious " is guilty of an aeonian sin." Or (2) we may admit that Matthew has combined Mark and Q, but may suppose that the variation between Mark and Matthew points to Mark's version as the original reading of Q, and that Matthew altered the unusual " sons of men" into "men," while Luke or Luke's copy of Q altered it to " against the Son of man." Which interpretation is preferred will depend in part on the view that is taken of the general nature and tendencies of Q. If we accept Prof. Bacon's view of Mark as a writer who systematically altered the simpler teaching of an earlier narrative (based on the teaching of Peter) and that of Q, in order to exhibit Jesus everywhere as the wonder-working Son of God, the critic may be disposed to agree with him in accepting the first explanation.^ On this view the meaning, if we accept Mark's context, will be: "To speak against the Messiah may be forgiven, but to speak against the Spirit of God, whose work these healings are, shall not be forgiven. To suggest that this work of God is due to the powers of evil is to speak, not against man but against God." If the context is not accepted, it is really hardly worth while to attempt to give possible meanings to the saying, for the exact shade of meaning will depend upon the context. We can only assume that some act which might be regarded as an offence against Himself led Jesus to say that an offence against the Messiah was a less sin than sin against the Holy Ghost, by which no doubt He meant wilful and persistent resistance to the voice of conscience. The second view has the advantage of giving us a more easily intelligible saying. If Mark's version (apart from the context) be the original one, there will be nothing at all about blasphemy against the Son of Man. The saying will be simply that the one sin which will not be forgiven at the judgement is the sin against the Holy Ghost. The saying will be still simpler if we take the absence from Luke of "but is guilty of an eternal sin" to imply that Mark has added these words (by way of explanation) to the saying which he (like St. Luke) ' Tie Beginmngs of the Gospel Story, p. 38 sq. 58 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST lect. found in Q. On the whole, this seems to me the most probable explanation. There is some reason for believing that " aeonian " is a technical word, the Aramaic equivalent of which did not belong to the vocabulary of Jesus Himself. That allusions to the " Son of Man " were sometimes introduced by the Evangelists into a saying in which it was originally absent, is generally admitted. In no case has the passage really any bearing upon our Lord's general teaching about forgiveness. It is implied that the sin is one which has not been repented of. Our Lord says that such a sin will not be forgiven at the judgement, and He does not generally look beyond the judgement. Without the addition of Mark and Matthew, nothing is said about the duration of the punishment which will follow the judgement. On the critical question cf. Streeter, Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem, p. 171. NOTE C THE LAST SUPPER The view which I have taken as to the genuineness and original meaning of the words attributed to our Lord in the institution of the Eucharist is largely based upon the work of M. Maurice Goguel, V Eucharistie. I will quote the passage in which he expounds his view as to the original meaning of the Saviour's act : " Le don de soi qu'exprime la c^ne ne pent Stre compris que comme un don que Jesus fait i ses disciples. L'idee d'expiation etant ecartee, la question de savoir si Jesus pense au passe, au present ou a I'avenir, perd beaucoup de son importance. Ce que Jesus donne aux siens, c'est lui-meme, c'est-a-dire I'essence meme de sa pensee, de sa foi, de son cceur, il se d^pense sans compter pour allumer en eux la flamme qui le devore, pour faire naitre et pour entretenir en eux et chacun d'eux les aspirations, les energies, les certitudes qui I'animent. II se donne, c'est-a-dire, il se communique lui-meme a eux, il veut les associer a son ceuvre et pour cela rien ne lui coute, il ne recule ni devant les fatigues, ni devant les souffrances, il ne reculera pas meme devant la mort s'il arrive que Dieu dresse la croix sur son chemin. Ainsi compris le don de Jisus ne pent etre enferme ni dans le present, ni dans le passe, ni dans I'avenir. Rien ne vient limiter ce que Jesus exprime par la distribution du pain comme son corps. La comprehension de cet acte est tris large, elle enferme le minist^re de J6sus tout entier et ces heures de supreme rdunion qu'il passe avec ses disciples dans la chambre haute, les souffrances, la mort, la crise quelle qu'elle soit qui est imminente, mais aussi le triomphe final qui est certain, le retour glorieux, la reunion dans le Royaume de Dieu.''^ Some of these last expressions seem to be hardly justified, but on the whole I have not seen a better account of the original meaning ^ V Eucharistie, pp. loo-i. I THE LAST SUPPER 59 of our Lord's acts and words. I should differ from him in the following ways : (i) In accepting the shorter text of Luke as the genuine text of that Evangelist. (2) I should be disposed to find in them a rather more definite reference to the coming death. A true explanation must give a meaning both (a) to the comparison of the bread to the body, and (i) to the giving. I do not think the first condition can be satisfied without supposing an implicit reference to the death, though the thought need not be limited to the death. Cf the very similar view of Prof. Bacon : "At the (ordinary) evening meal — not the passover supper, which would have presented the closer symbol of the slain lamb — Jesus assumed his usual part as dispenser of the food. But on this occasion he made the loaf a symbol of his body. Its destruction should not be dissolution, but a stronger union of the brotherhood by as much as the sacrifice made for its sake was now greater." ^ The words " This do in remembrance of me" are found only in St. Paul's account (and the longer text of Luke), and may certainly be regarded as a later addition. If we set these words aside, there is nothing to suggest that our Lord had the intention of founding an institution or permanent rite of any kind. Whatever exactly happened at the Last Supper, the idea of perpetually commemorating that supper or of investing with a new significance the Jewish offering of cup and bread at the table was the work of the Church, not of its Founder. Whatever we may regard as the true meaning of the Eucharist for the later Church or for ourselves as a permanent and often repeated rite, no such significance must be read back into our Lord's own words : though I should strongly insist that a true doctrine of the Eucharist for the later Church should at least be based upon the meaning which our Lord's act had for Him, so far as we can discern it. There can be little doubt that the Eucharistic rite grew out of and added a fresh meaning to some Jewish rite. As to what Jewish rite it was which was invested with that new meaning, there may be some difference of opinion. Many critics not usually disposed to prefer St. John to the Synoptists as an historical authority, admit that he is right in holding that the Last Supper was not a Passover, though the meaning and associations of the Passover may subsequently have been transferred to the Sacrament which grew out of it. There is much to be said for supposing that it was the KiddAsh, the religious rite still celebrated by strict Jewish families after the lighting of the lamps on the eve of Sabbaths or great Festivals, at which there is a solemn blessing of the cup and the bread by the father of the family.^ 1 Tie Beginnings of the Gospel Story, p. 204. 2 See Box, Journal of Theological Studies, ii. p. 357, and the more recent work by Drs. Oesterley and Box, The Religion and Worship of the Synagogue, pp. 346 sq. LECTURE II THE PRE-PAULINE AND THE PAULINE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf ; that we might become the righteousness of God in him. — 2 CoR. v. 21, LECTURE II THE PRE-PAULINE AND THE PAULINE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT I. The Origin of the Atonement Doctrine In my last lecture I tried to show that our Lord Himself taught the simple doctrine that God is, and (it is implied) always has been, willing to pardon the sins of the truly penitent. The Church of later times has — no doubt with many degrees of consistency and of emphasis, in a great variety of forms, phrases, and senses, but still almost universally and continuously — taught that forgiveness of sins, and the salvation of which forgiveness may be considered the first step, are to be obtained through the influence of Christ's work ; and in that work a conspicuous and sometimes an exclusive place has generally been assigned to His death. Moreover, the appropriation or applica- tion of this redemptive and saving efficacy has — in a less uniform and unqualified way, but still pretty generally — been supposed to depend on the individual's belief about Christ, and sometimes even upon his belief in this par- ticular doctrine as to the efficacy of His atonement. When, why, and by what stages did this immensely important evolution of doctrine take place ? That will be the main subject of the succeeding lectures. This morning we shall deal with the first beginnings of this great development. But before we proceed to a consideration of these questions it will be necessary very briefly to glance at 63 64 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. some of the Jewish ideas which paved the way for the Christian doctrine of atonement, and provided (so to speak) the medium in which it was developed. (i) In all early forms of religion there is a tendency to look upon gods as deliverers or saviours. In the most primitive religions the deliverance is not at all a deliver- ance from sin, but from national or personal dangers of some quite material kind. The whole history of Israel was such as to strengthen and emphasize this tendency. Long before the Israelites came to regard their national God Jahve as the only God, they were distinguished above other peoples by the intensity and exclusiveness of their loyalty to that national deity. And this solemn and exclusive marriage of Israel to its God (to use the meta- phor of the prophets), if it did not begin with the deliver- ance from Egypt, was at least strengthened and rendered indissoluble by that national rebirth. When the pro- phets in later times reproached the people for disloyalty to their God, it was always the deliverance from Egypt that was put at the head of Jehovah's claims upon His people's allegiance. The exile brought with it the cry for a fresh deliverance ; and that extraordinary event, almost unparalleled in history — the actual return of the people after seventy years of captivity in a foreign land — still further strengthened the tendency to look upon Jahve as the Deliverer or Saviour.^ (2) Time would fail me here to trace the growth of the expectation of a new and still greater deliverance, of a coming establishment of a kingdom of God in- definitely more perfect and more worthy of the name than 1 Some enquirers would even say that the very earliest conception of God (at least among Semites) is that of Saviour. There is a myth which goes back to an indefinitely remote period of human history, in which the sea is regarded as identical with, or the abode of, a great monster (Tehom, Leviathan, eventually identified with Satan), and which tells of his defeat by a Saviour (" Heilbringer ") who is thought of at first as a semi-divine earthly hero and then as a God in heaven, who has partly vanquished, and will perhaps more completely vanquish, this monster. This myth has assumed all sorts of forms, and has left many traces of itself in much later Jewish literature (Is. xxvii. i, li. 9-11; Ps. Ixv. 6, 7 ; Amos ix. 3, etc.). In Judaism the delivering Deity was at a comparatively early period identified with Jahve. The Jewish belief in a Messiah who should eventually complete the conquest of this enemy, and inaugurate a Icingdom of God on earth, may be said to be one of the forms in which the much more widely diifused belief in an ultimate deliverance of humanity or a future age of gold has clothed itself. On this subject see Dr. Oesterley's most interesting work, The E-volution of the Messianic Idea. n MESSIANIC IDEAS 65 the golden age of David and Solomon, of a great judge- ment of the heathen who persecuted and oppressed the people of Jahve (now fully recognized as the only true God, the Creator of heaven and earth), and (at certain periods) of an ideal king by whom the deliverance should be effected, but the Saviour and Judge is always Jehovah Himself. The pictures that were constructed of the ideal king and the ideal kingdom varied widely. Sometimes the Messiah was thought of as a conqueror and national emancipator ; at other times, the kingdom is invested with more supernatural, and in the highest prophetic teaching more ideal and ethical, attributes. Even in the greatest of the prophets the kingdom is still represented as a terrestrial monarchy, with its capital in the ancient stronghold of Zion ; but still that kingdom is a kingdom of righteousness and peace, something much more righteous and more spiritual than any monarchy the earth had ever seen. In the later apocalyptic writings the judgement assumes a more distinctly supernatural character, and the kingdom which it inaugurates hovers more doubtfully between heaven and earth. The idea of a deliverance from the Syrian or the Roman tyranny came to be more and more closely associated with the anticipation of some great physical catastrophe, an end of the world or of the present stage in its history. And before the time of Jesus there were many apocalyptic writings in which the political side of the Messiah's work had almost disappeared. He had become a completely supernatural Being : the judgement had become a universal judgement, extending over the whole world ; the kingdom which He was to inaugurate assumed a more and more transcendental character, though it never altogether ceased to be a kingdom in which exceptional privileges were to be enjoyed by pious Jews. All this tended to emphasize the idea of a future salvation — salvation for the nation from its foes, salva- tion for the individual in the day of the Messiah's judge- ment. It was the recognized function of the Messiah to save pious Israelites at the judgement and to condemn F ee ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. others.! j^ proportion as the idea of the judgement became more universal and more ethical, the nature of salvation became more ethical too, and by consequence more individual. To prepare for the coming judgement, to become fit to meet the Judge, to become worthy of admission to the Messianic kingdom, became the form in which the Jewish mind expressed that desire for emancipation from sin and its consequences which in all peoples and under all conditions is the natural aspira- tion of the awakened and developed religious conscious- ness. Jesus, if He accepted the Messianic position, and used some of the traditional language about the Messiah's appearing in glory, did so with many reserves. The very notion that He, a human being, a " man of sor- rows and acquainted with grief," was to be the Messiah, implied a profound change in the conception. Jesus completed the spiritualization of the Messianic idea and of the judgement which He foretold. If some of His followers may have been disposed to revert to earlier and lower conceptions of the Messianic dignity, there came a time when the Church accepted or even carried further that spiritualization of the Messianic idea and the Messianic kingdom, and interpreted in a purely spiritual sense the language which prophets and psalmists had used about the Messianic salvation. Even Jewish Christians accepted the principle that salvation was for the whole world and not for Jews only. The Messiah was thought of as one who had brought with Him deliverance from sin, and would secure for those who had accepted Him deliverance at His second coming in judgement — a coming which the early Christians long continued to expect in the near future. (3) So far there has been nothing to connect the idea of salvation with that of suffering or death. That con- nexion is supplied by the primitive institution of sacri- fice, and in particular animal sacrifice. I will not enter into any elaborate discussion as to the origin of this strange rite. It is probable that there is much truth 1 " When he hath reproved them [the wicked], he shall destroy them. For the rest of my people shall he deliver with mercy " (4 (2) Esdras xii. 33, 34). n SACRIFICIAL IDEAS 67 in the view that its explanation is closely connected with totemistic ideas. The tribal ancestor-god being sup- posed to be incarnate in some species of animal and the life of the animal to reside in the blood, the slaying of the animal, the eating of its flesh and the drinking of its blood, were regarded as the means of communion with the tribal God. It is a matter of profound signifi- cance for the history of religion that the original idea of sacrifice should be thus shown to be not so much propitiation as communion.^ At the same time the distinction between the two ideas must not be pushed too far. The propitiatory idea could easily grow out of that of communion. The eating of the sacrificial flesh, and still more the drinking of the sacrificial blood, were the means of renewing or restoring communion with the god when for any reason he was supposed to be angry or displeased with the sacrificers. But, when we remember the extreme fluidity and inconsistency of primitive religious ideas, we must not seek for too much definitiveness and precision in this matter. The idea of communion is always liable to be degraded into that of propitiation ; and in earlier religion the higher idea was perhaps never entirely free from adulteration with the lower. In primitive religion the external rite is the important thing : different explanations might be given of it at different times, by different people at the same time, or even by the same persons at different moments. Perhaps the two interpretations were never sharply distinguished even by the same people at the same moment. The essential point for our purpose is the primitive human belief that gods or spirits could be influenced by the kilHng of animals. Originally there was nothing particularly ethical about this mode of seeking for divine assistance, except in so far as the god was thought of as friendly to the tribe, and in so far as the common worship of him contributed to the strength- ening of the tribal bond. If you wanted the help of a 1 The classical expression of this view is Robertson Smith's great work, The Religion of the Semites (new ed. 1894, p. 269). Cf. also Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, ed. 2, p. 131 sq. 68 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. king or other potentate, you offered him a present. If you wanted to establish, or to renew when interrupted, friendly relations with the tribal god, you offered him a sacrifice. In proportion as the idea of the god and the purpose for which his help could be effectually invoked became more ethical, the idea of sacrifice became more ethical too.^ In primitive Judaism the idea of sacrifice had very little to do with sin ; or at least sin was regarded merely in the light of ritual irregularity, the disastrous effect of which, quite apart from the motives or intentions of the offender, had to be counteracted by some other ritual observance. As the conception of Israel's God Jahve became purer and loftier, the idea of satisfaction for moral transgression became more promin- ent : still more so when Jahve came to be thought of as the one and only true God, the Creator of heaven and earth. Not all the Jewish sacrifices, but some of them, were regarded in this light. In particular the ritual of the great day of atonement emphasized that particular aspect or explanation of sacrifice according to which the votive offering was looked upon as a substitute for the offender. It was not, indeed, so much the goat that was killed as the goat that was sent forth into the wilder- ness which was supposed to be the bearer of the nation's sins : but still the sacrifice of the other goat was an essential part of the process by which the consequences of sin could be averted, and possibly (though this is more doubtful), for the higher religious consciousness of later Judaism, the actual sinfulness of the heart taken away. This, I say, is more doubtful ; for that spiritualization of Jewish religion by the prophets which so largely paved the way for Christianity, did not, to any great 1 Prof. Kennett (developing previous suggestions) maintains that the earlier pro- phetic attacks upon sacrifice, and upon the moral abominations connected with it, both at the " high places " and in the Temple at Jerusalem, were not merely (as commonly supposed) an assertion of the comparati'ue worthlessness of sacrifice, but a deliberate opposition to the whole institution. Not till the reform of Josiah was a compromise effected between the prophetic and the priestly religion ; sacrifice was confined to Jeru- salem and purified from its Immoral associations, after which this minimum of sacrificial observance was tolerated by the later prophets. See his article on " The Conflict between Priestly and Prophetic Ideas in the Church of Israel " in The Interpreter, vol. riv. No. 2 (Jan. 1918). This'/view assumes that Deut. xii.-xxvi. belongs to the sixth century B.C. — a later date than is assigned to it by Driver and the older critics. n SACRIFICIAL IDEAS 69 extent, take the form of investing with symbolical or sacramental meanings the old sacrificial rites. The prophets and the more spiritual psalmists openly dis- paraged animal sacrifice, and insisted that the blood of bulls and of goats could not really take away sin or procure its forgiveness. What was needed was simply true repentance and amendment. " Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it thee, but thou delightest not in burnt offerings." ^ But, whatever may be thought about the later Jewish ideas concerning sacrifice, the important point for us is not so much the explanations that have been given of the institution as the fact of its existence. Whatever explanation might be given of it, however much it might sometimes be disparaged in comparison with moral righteousness and inward re- pentance, not the most spiritually-minded Jewish teacher, at least after the reconciliation between the prophetic and the sacerdotal Judaism under Josiah — still less any rabbi of the early Christian period — had any thought of actually doing away with animal sacrifices or denying their necessity, though it was by no means invariably that they were in any very close way connected with the forgiveness of other than ritual transgressions. And I need hardly remind you that the institution of sacrifice was common to Jew and Gentile. The early Christian writers lived in a world in which on every side the altars reeked with the blood of slain victims, in which the very idea of religion was barely separable from the practice of sacrifice. And, whatever might be the case with the highest religious minds, the popular notions about the remission of sins, whenever and so far as they were thought to be sins against a god, were intimately connected with the idea of slain victims. With the few the sacrifice might be felt to be a mere symbol or expression of penitence or piety ; for the popular imagination the guilt and its consequences were taken away by the actual performance of the rite. In such a world it was almost inevitable that any new remedy for sin should be treated and spoken of as a new 1 Pa. U. 16. 70 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. kind of sacrifice. For men living in such an environ- ment the most spiritual conception of salvation, the very idea that repentance was the one only condition of forgiveness with God, could hardly express itself more simply and intelligibly than by saying that repentance was the true reality of which animal sacrifices were but the shadow : " The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit : a broken and contrite heart, O God,shalt thou not despise."^ When repentance came to be closely associated with belief in a crucified Messiah, the application of sacrificial language to His death was, independently of any more definite cause, an easy and very probable development of existing ideas. Actual experience of the emancipat- ing, cleansing, life-giving effects which flowed from the Messiah's life and death could hardly express itself more simply and naturally than by calling Him " the Saviour," by speaking of His outpoured blood as the symbol of all the benefits which had resulted from His life and His death, as the true sacrifice for sin which made all other sacrifice unnecessary. Belief in salvation through a Messiah whose blood had been shed upon the cross wanted very little in the way of definite external sugges- tion to pass into the idea of salvation through that blood. (4) But there was another source for the idea, which connects, in a far deeper and more spiritual way, the taking away of sins with the suffering of another. Ac- cording to the creed of primitive Israel Jahve rewarded loyalty to himself by national success and personal prosperity, and punished disloyalty by national defeat and personal misfortune. The great problem for the devout Jew was to account for the apparent exceptions to this simple philosophy of history. In particular the experiences of the exile branded the difficulty upon the nation's heart, and compelled a fundamental revolution in its theology. The nation had never been so faithful to its God ; the law had never been so well observed ; individual piety had never been so general and so pro- found. Yet the sanctuary of God was trodden under foot by the Gentiles : the nation was in captivity ; the 1 Ps. li. 17. " VICARIOUS SUFFERING 71 individual Jew — all the more so in proportion as he kept aloof from heathen religious rites and heathen modes of A? — ^^^ ^" °^i^^^ °^ persecution, scorn, and derision. Many were the expedients devised by the religious con- sciousness of the time for reconciling theology with fact. Sornetimes the sufferings were regarded as a national expiation for a national guilt, though the expiation fell upon others, and not upon the actual offenders. At other times they were a trial or probation, intended to test, and by testing to deepen and strengthen, national and individual faithfulness to Jehovah. In this way suffering might not only expiate the past ; it might regenerate the character for the future, and the benefit of this regeneration might be experienced by many besides the sufferers. Thus suffering came to be looked upon as a mark not of God's wrath, but almost of His favour : " Blessed is the man whom thou chasten est, O Lord," we read in the Psalms.^ The ideal Jew came to be represented as normally and naturally poor and afflicted : the righteous nation was a suffering nation ; and it was the really faithful and religious kernel of the nation on which the heaviest load of suffering was laid. All these ideas found their fullest and most perfect expression in that picture of the suffering Servant of Jehovah which forms the central core of the second Isaiah's prophecy. It is the generally accepted view of criticism that it is the Jewish nation, or perhaps sometimes the ideal Israelite, the true and spiritual Israel within Israel, as it were, that is represented as " despised, and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." It was the idealized Israelite who was wounded for the transgressions of his people ; upon whom the chas- tisement of its peace was laid, and with whose stripes it was healed, on whom the Lord had laid the iniquity of all.2 These chapters paved the way for a doctrine ^ Ps. xciv. 12. ^ Is. lili. 3, 5, 6. To ask how far the prophet thought of the saving influence of Israel upon the heathen world as strictly expiatory, and how far he was thinking of moral and religious influence, heightened by the example of patient suffering, is too large a ques- tion to be entered on here. Cf. J. K. Mozley, TAe Doctrine of tie Atonement^ p. 26 sq., and the striking passages from modern writers there quoted. ' 72 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. of atonement by the blood of Christ. They impressed upon the religious consciousness of the Jew, and of Gentile Christians also when they came to know the Jewish scriptures, the undeniable reality of vicarious suffering— that profoundly true and spiritual idea which so easily degenerates into the superstition of vicarious expiation, and even the more immoral notion of vicarious punishment. And the doctrine is prominent in later Judaism — in the Apocalypse of Baruch for instance, whose author was St. Paul's ^ contemporary, in the fourth book of Maccabees, and in the teaching of the rabbis.2 In this doctrine there was contained the germ which might easily develope into the doctrine of an innocent Messiah who should suffer and die for his people. It has sometimes been supposed that such a develop- ment had already taken place before the time of Jesus, but the evidence is quite insufficient to show that this was so. There is no satisfactory evidence that up to this time the Servant of Jehovah had ever been identified with the Messiah. Certainly this was not the usual interpretation. But once that step was taken, the development of a doctrine of atone- ment through the Messiah's sufferings was natural, 1 " Lo 1 Thou hast shown me the method of the times, and that which will be after these things, and Thou hast said unto me, that the retribution, which has been spoken of by Thee, will be of advantage to the nations " (Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch^ ed. Charles, xiv. i). " And if others did evil, it was due to Zion, that on account of the works of those who wrought good works she should be forgiven, and should not be overwhelmed on account of the works of those who wrought unrighteousness " {ibid. xiv. 7). Cf. cap. Ixxxv., where the prophets intercede for sinners. So in 4 Mace. vi. 29 the martyr Eleazar prays : " Make my blood a purifying sacrifice (Kaddpa-iov), and my soul a substitution for theirs {dvTi^vxov aifrCjv)" Cf. i., ii., ix. 24., xii. 18, xiii. 22, and xviii. 4. Cf. also 2 Mace. vii. 33, 37. 2 " As a much higher aspect of this solidarity ... we may regard the suffering of the righteous as an atonement for the sins of their contemporaries. ' When there will be neither Tabernacle nor the Holy Temple,' Moses is said to have asked God, ' what will become of Israel I ' Whereupon God answers, ' I will take from among them the righteous man whom I shall consider as pledged for them, and will forgive all their sins * j the death of the perfect man, or even his sufferings, being looked upon as an expiation for the shortcoming of his generation " (Schechter, in the J'ewisA Quarterly Re-view, vol. iii. p. 43 sq.). Mr. Claude Montefiore remarks : " Vicarious atonement was not unknown to them [the Rabbis]. The passages cited by Weber are quite accurate. ' There lies atoning efficacy in the deaths of the righteous.' * When there are righteous men in a generation, God lets them die (or suffer ?) for the sake of others ; when there are no righteous, then the innocent children are taken ' " (" Rabbinic Judaism and the Epistles of St. Paul " in yewish Quarterly Review, vol. xiii. p. 200). " PHILO 73 and indeed, in the then state of human thought, inevitable. (5) One more possible source of the later theories about the atonement may be briefly noticed. Were we engaged upon a general history of Christian doctrine, we should have to say much about that Jewish-Alex- andrian philosophy which is best known to us through the writings of Philo. Here we need do no more than briefly notice the fact that, among the attributes and functions of the Philonian Logos, one was that of mediator — mediator between God and men. The neo-Platonist conception of God tended to remove Him to the utmost possible distance from the material world, and conse- quently to make Him unknowable, inaccessible, un- approachable by man. Only through a mediator could He be brought even into that degree of contact with matter which was implied in the fact of creation : only through a mediator could He be known by man. For Philo this mediator was the Logos — a spiritual entity of which it is impossible to say whether it should be described as personal or impersonal, a principle or a substance, a creation or an emanation, a being independ- ent of God or an aspect, an activity of God Himself. This conception exercised, I need hardly say, enormous influence over Christian theology from the date of the fourth Gospel onwards. It may have contributed some- thing to the development of St. Paul's conception of the pre-existent Christ. And at a later date — through the Gnostic systems or more directly — the Philonian idea of mediation strengthened the tendency to think of the Son as a mediator. But the mediation of the Philonian Logos was chiefly performed through the bringing of knowledge. The Logos is the Saviour chiefly because he takes away ignorance, which is the cause of sin ; though the Logos is also represented as in some sense atoning for sin and strengthening the sinner against temptation.^ The high - priest's acts on the great day of atonement are treated as a symbol of this 1 Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria (2nd ed. p. 45 sq.) and the references given in Dr. Bigg's notes. 74 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. atoning function of the Logos. The mediation of the Logos is not brought into connexion with the Messianic idea, still less with the idea of a suffering or dying Messiah. Nevertheless, these Philonian conceptions certainly in- fluenced later theories about the atonement ; this in- fluence is particularly evident in the Epistle to the Hebrews.^ It may conceivably have affected even St. Paul. But the origin of the doctrine is not to be sought for in this quarter. There is nothing in the Jewish- Alexandrian philosophy to explain precisely the feature of it which most requires explanation — the idea of an atonement effected by the death and sufferings of an historical Messiah. (6) There are those who will not be content with a theory which finds the origin of the atonement doctrine in so simple and obvious a cause as the existing beliefs of the Jewish people. They will remind us of the wide diffusion of ancient myths about Osiris, Attis, and other dying gods, and in particular of the " mystery-religions " which had already obtained a considerable hold over the civilized world of the time, one at least of which, the religion known as Mithraism (in which, however, there is no dying Saviour), proved a formidable rival to Christianity in its struggle for ascendency in the Roman Empire. So long as we are concerned merely with the origin of the doctrine in its simplest form, such theories are, as I shall hope to show, wholly gratuitous. If the purely Jewish ideas which have been enumerated are sufficient, when taken in connexion with the actual facts of the life and death of Jesus and the actual experi- ence of Christians, to account for the growth of the atonement doctrine, we need not seek for it a remoter or more recondite origin. These Jewish ideas had of course themselves something in common with the ideas about atonement or expiation which are discoverable in other religions of the ancient world. The Christian 1 Especially in the conception of the great High-priest. In later times the influence is greatest precisely in the theories of the atonement other than those which eventually became the dominant conceptions in the West. The Philonian theory of atonement has much in common with Clement's, something in common with that of Athanasius — little or nothing in common with the theories of Tcrtullian or Augustine. n THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS 75 doctrine of the atonement, both on its higher and on its lower side, owed its existence to the same spiritual needs and the same psychological tendencies which under other conditions have produced other doctrines of atonement and expiation. And at a somewhat later date, when Christianity was transferred from Jewish to pagan soil, it can hardly be denied that the fully elaborated Christian doctrine of the atonement, and still more the sacramental ideas more or less connected with it, were to an appreciable and an increasing degree coloured by the influence of the mystery-religions, their phraseology and their ritual, by the ideas about sin and salvation, initiation and purification which were con- nected with these mystery-religions, and by the rituals and organizations to which they had given rise. We may even recognize that, if the origin of the doctrine was Jewish, the atmosphere of the Hellenic world at the same time was eminently suited to its acceptance and its development ; and that atmosphere was one which was undoubtedly permeated by the ideas associated with the mystery-religions.^ To what extent it is necessary to look beyond the Old Testament for the source of the doctrine is a problem the solution of which must obviously depend upon the answer which is given to the fundamental question : " When and where did this doctrine originate ? " To this question a fairly definite answer can be given. Many people sufficiently critical to see that in all proba- bility the theory does not come from Christ Himself vaguely suppose that it must be due to St. Paul.^ That ^ The question is further discussed in Appendix II. The whole question of the in- fluence exercised by non- Jewish religions upon Christianity has been investigated in an extremely sober and judicial spirit by Clemen in Primiti-ve Christianity and its non- Jewish Sources (Eng. trans.), to which work the reader may be referred for further information about the subject and its literature. He does not regard the doctrine of atonement, as distinct from the sacramental beliefs connected with it, as one which owes anything to non- Jewish sources. He should perhaps have emphasized more than he has done the Hellenistic (but not strictly Hellenic) atmosphere in which it probably grew up, or at all events reached its full development. . 2 See for instance Goldwin Smith, His Life and Opinions, p. 223. Goldwm Smith is a typical representative of the vague English liberal theology of the last generation. Even Loisy seems to me to attenuate the significance of i Cor. xv. 3, and attributes the growth of the doctrine mainly to St. Paul. Cf. also Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, p. 1 5.J.. 76 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. view is rendered absolutely impossible by a single sentence in one of the practically undisputed Epistles of St. Paul himself. " I delivered unto you . . . that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins accord- ing to the scriptures." ^ The belief that in some sense Christ died for sin — in order that sin might be forgiven and removed — was thus quite certainly part of what St. Paul received. It was already an article of the Church's traditional creed when the Apostle of the Gentiles was baptized into it. It was due neither to the theorizing nor to the visions of St. Paul. It resulted from the reflection of the Church in the interval which elapsed between the Crucifixion and St. Paul's conver- sion — a period which cannot have been more than a very few years. From the tone in which St. Paul alludes to the recognition of his Gospel by St. Peter it is natural to infer its eventual acceptance by the Church of Jerusalem.^ At the same time it is important to notice the complete absence of such a doctrine in the early speeches attributed to St. Peter and to St. Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles. In so far as these speeches may be supposed to be based on early documents or trustworthy tradition as to the char- acter of the earliest apostolic preaching, they suggest that there may have been a period when the idea of salvation through the death of Christ formed no part of that preaching. Of the doctrine that salvation is to be attained through the Messiah's work and through belief in Him they are full : and also of the idea that Christ's death had been foretold by the prophets. But so far salvation is thought of as something due simply to the Messiah's teaching, and to the sentence of acquittal which He will hereafter pronounce at the judgement upon those who have accepted Him as the Messiah and listened to His call for repentance. The resurrection and not the death of Christ is the central fact of the Gospel message, being regarded as the proof of His Messiahship and the pledge of His power to save at ^ I Cor. XV. 3. 2 Gal. ii. 2-4, 14-16. But the efficacy of Christ's death is not here in question. " EVIDENCE OF THE ACTS 77 the judgement. If these speeches are not treated as historical testimony to the character of the earhest apostolic preaching, they equally point to the survival in some part of the Church of a type of theology in which the saving efficacy of Christ's death played no part, or at the very least to the existence of Christian circles in which very little stress was laid upon it. Whatever may be thought of the use I have made of the Petrine speeches, it will hardly be denied that in the speech of St. Stephen we have, reproduced with con- siderable fidelity, a genuine and most interesting monu- ment of the earliest Christian thought. One of the ideas which run through this closely reasoned historical argument is this — that, so far from the sufferings of Jesus and His rejection by the nation militating against the conception of His Messiahship, they go to establish it. For all through Jewish history their fathers had persecuted the prophets and messengers of Jehovah. But the inference which is drawn from this fact and from other facts in the history of Israel is not that it is through the sufferings of the Messiah that salvation is to be won ; but rather that the special privileges of the Israelite nation are no essential or permanent part of God's self- revelation of Himself, that the law is but an episode in the history of God's dealings with His people, that the worship of God is not limited to Jewish soil, to the Temple area, to any place or any people. The germ of all the Pauline ideas about Gentile liberty, and the uselessness of the law to secure justification or salvation, of all the universalism taught by St. Paul, is to be found in St. Stephen's teaching. We may perhaps say that by implication it is suggested that the justification which the law could not secure was in some way to be obtained through Christ. That idea was, indeed, involved in any possible teaching of Christianity as a universal religion for Gentile as well as Jew, whether the technical phrase " justification " was used or not. But still there is not a word about the remission of sins through the death or sufferings of Jesus. Whatever may be thought of the negative evidence supplied by the earliest speeches 78 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. in the Acts, they at all events supply us with no positive evidence as to the date at which the forgiveness of sins began to be definitely and specifically connected with the death of Jesus. The one certain datum for our enquiry is the fact that by the date of St. Paul's conversion, which may have occurred at any time between a year and six or seven years after the crucifixion, the Church or certain circles in it had come to believe that Christ died for our sins. It is natural to conjecture that it was in the more Hellenized atmosphere of Antioch or Caesarea or Damascus that this doctrine had been elaborated, while the Church of Jerusalem — or those in it who regarded James as their leader — adhered to the more simple doctrine that for admission to the kingdom nothing was required but repentance — a repentance which, however, some of them at least interpreted as involving and including obedience to the Jewish law.^ By what process was the new conviction reached .'' The same all-important sentence of St. Paul will tell us. " Christ died for our sins," and it was " according to the scriptures " that He so died. Jewish prophecy then was the source of the idea. The early Christians came to believe that Christ had died that sins might be forgiven because they found it, as they thought, dis- tinctly foretold that He should do so in books which they regarded as in the most literal and plenary sense ^ It was certain " men of Cyrene " who, after the dispersion of the Jerusalem Chris- tians caused by the " tribulation that arose about Stephen," preached the Gospel for the first time to Greeks at Antioch (Acts xi. 19, 20). It was in this circle perhaps that the doctrine was first developed. Stephen had prepared the way for it by his universalistic preaching, but the special significance attached to the death of Christ is still absent from his great sermon in Acts vii. Philip, it will be remembered, was one of the same circle of Hellenistic Christians. See Kirsopp Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, p. 408 s^. Prof. Lake notices the significance of the fact that it was chiefly in writing to churches where Palestinian Jews were carrying on a propaganda that St. Paul has to defend his doctrine. In addressing Gentile churches such as Corinth he takes it for granted, show- ing that it was the Gentile churches which found the doctrine most congenial to their mode of thought. The doctrine was not " derived " from the " Mysteries," but it was congenial to people familiar with the " mystery-religions," and perhaps suggested itself first to them. St. Peter must have accepted the doctrine independently of St. Paul or the argument described in Gal. ii. would hardly have been possible, but he may no doubt have been influenced by St. Paul's emphasis upon it as he certainly was by St. Paul's Universalism. St. Luke need not, therefore, be treated as necessarily unhistorical in putting the doctrine (in a simple form) Into St. Peter's later speeches in the Acts. I may add that Prof. Lake's brief study of the historical situation presupposed by the Epistle to the Romans is of the utmost value, but it would be out of place to enter further upon the historical aspect of the Epistle. n INFLUENCE OF PROPHECY 79 inspired writings. In that fact I believe we can discover the historical origin of the atonement doctrine. We have seen that the view that the sufferings of the righteous might be in some way accepted on behalf of the nation at large, that they would in some way redound to the benefit of others, was already a familiar Jewish idea. It is probable that the suffering Servant of Is. liii. had not been identified with the Messiah in any exclusive or pre-eminent fashion ; but in the light of the actual facts — of the fate which had actually befallen Him who was, as His disciples had trusted, to redeem Israel — nothing could be more natural than such an identification. It is certain that the Servant of Jehovah was explained to mean the Messiah from a very early period in the history of the Church : and, when once the idea was suggested, it was not difficult to discover allusions to the suffering Messiah in all parts of the Old Testament. But no passage is so frequently quoted in early Christian literature as this great chapter of Isaiah. It was by the 53rd of Isaiah that Philip proved the Messiahship of Jesus to the Eunuch.^ And what a solution the Messianic interpretation of this magnificent prophecy must have supplied to the great problem with which the Christians were occupied during the first days after their Master had left them — the stumbling-block, the " scandal," of the cross 1 We are told in the Acts how the Jews of Berea searched the scriptures daily whether these things — the teaching of Paul and his com- panions — were so. It was doubtless out of similar searchings of the scriptures that the Christians of these earlier days discovered the solution of their enigma.^ The most formidable obstacle .to the acceptance of Jesus and His religion by Jewish minds, and not (as we see very clearly from the objections of Celsus) by Jewish minds only, was the difficulty presented by the idea of a suffering Messiah. How could one whose career had ended in the malefactor's cross be the mighty Conqueror of whom the prophets told or the heavenly being of the Apocalypses ? How could one who was 1 Acts viii. 31-35. ' Acts xvii. ii. 8o ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. despised and rejected of men be a God or the Son of God ? The Resurrection vision and the anticipated second coming in glory were to those who accepted them a partial solution, but it was just the foolishness of the cross that prevented their being accepted. What a clearing-up of all these perplexities must it not have been to find that it had been foretold that the Messiah was to suffer, and that it was precisely by His suffering and death that He was to perform His Messianic task of saving from sin all who believed on Him ? The marvellous applicability of every word of that moving chapter to the events of Christ's life and death when considered in the light of this idea is such that, even in the full light of modern criticism, we find it difficult to part with the notion that it was originally intended to apply to a personal Messiah. Any vague language which Jesus Himself may have used about the necessity of His death, about its being in the counsels of the Father a necessary condition of the coming of God's kingdom, or about His dying " for " His followers, any suggestions which He might have made as to His death not separating Him from those He was leaving but binding them all more closely together,^ would inevitably be remembered, and interpreted in the light of that and other prophecies. If Jesus had ever, even for a passing moment, applied to Himself the language of Isaiah, still more if He had actually used the metaphor of the ransom or any expres- sion which a Jew familiar with the LXX. could so trans- late, the rapid development of the doctrine would be all the easier : but the supposition is by no means necessary. It is inconceivable that the followers of Jesus, sharing the common ideas of His time, could read the 53 rd chapter of Isaiah in the days after He was taken away from them without the idea occurring to some of them that this was He of whom the prophet had spoken, and to whom might literally be applied the prophet's language about the saving, vicarious efficacy of His sufferings and His death. On the presuppositions of the early Christian — with his ideas about prophecy and inspiration 1 See above, pp. 42, 58, 59. II INFLUENCE OF PROPHECY 81 — ^it was simply inevitable that the theory, once suggested, should meet with wide acceptance. And when once this interpretation was accepted, he required no further proof for a doctrine of atonement through Christ's death. The belief was accepted on authority. It became part of the Christian's accepted creed that sins were forgiven through the death of Jesus, because God had expressly revealed that by this and by no other means were they to be forgiven. In many and marvellous ways doubtless such a supposition fell in with, and seemed to explain, the actual experience of individual Christians and of the Church at large. Since they had accepted the simple teaching of Jesus about the Fatherhood of God, since they had come to beheve that this Jesus who had been crucified was now sitting as the glorified Messiah on the right hand of God, since they had become members of the rapidly growing society of His followers, they had felt the burden of sin lightened, they had experienced a moral transformation and regeneration which they had never known before. And when once they had dis- covered from Isaiah that Jesus had died to save men from their sins, still more when it had become part of the traditional creed which they accepted at baptism, it would seem natural to believe that it was the death that had caused all these effects — not indeed to the exclusion of other parts of Christ's work (that was never believed by the ancient Church), but as an essential condition of the forgiveness which Christians believed themselves to have obtained. It is not true to say that the origin of this belief in the saving effect of Christ's death is to be found in the " experience " of Christians. In the absence of some authoritative statement, no experience could testify, or could well have been believed to testify, to the fact that precisely the death of Christ rather than any other of the things which Christians believed about Him was the cause of what they experienced — the sense of forgiveness, the change of heart, the consciousness of reconciliation. But as soon as this authoritative pronouncement was forthcoming, experi- ence might well be so interpreted as to confirm the 82 ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE lect. doctrine : the transition from the idea of salvation through a Saviour who had been crucified to the idea of salvation through His crucifixion was a natural and easy one, but no experience could by itself prove such a doctrine ; it could hardly even have suggested it. In fact it may be doubted whether the experience could have existed apart from antecedent belief in the actual, objective fact of forgiveness.! Apart from some authoritative assurance that God had forgiven, and forgiven in con- sequence of Christ's death, there was nothing to sug- gest any special connexion between what the Christian experienced and the death of the Messiah. At all events, if we look to the way in which the doctrine was actually asserted by the early Christians, we shall see reason to believe that in point of fact it was always the language of prophecy which was given as the ground for the belief. Most commonly the belief was asserted, as we shall see hereafter, in actual quotations from Is. liii. or other prophecies, or in short traditional formulae which were obviously based upon and derived from such passages. In the first instance, it cannot be too strongly or too confidently asserted, the doctrine was accepted simply and solely on authority. And this is the clue to the entire absence in the greater part of the early Christian literature of any uniform or definite theory as to why Christ's death was necessary, and how it made possible a forgiveness which would otherwise have been impossible. The Church accepted the state- ments of Isaiah : every one was free to interpret them as he pleased. Simple Christians wanted no further theory about the meaning of Christ's death. But it was inevitable that minds trained either in the Rabbinic or in the Hellenic schools should not be satisfied to accept the faith of the atonement without some attempt to explain a doctrine of salvation which to the reflecting mind surely required some explanation. And a long series of theories were ' At first no doubt this assurance was supplied simply by the statement of Jesus Himself that sin would be forgiven at the judgement. The language of prophecy would connect this forgiveness with His death. II INFLUENCE OF PROPHECY 83 accordingly constructed : the first, the most famous, ultimately though not immediately the most influential, was that of St. Paul. What was St. Paul's theory ? I will try to state it briefly. II. St. PauPs Theory of the Atonement. There are two ways of setting forth St. Paul's teaching about sin, forgiveness, justification. We may look at his actual words, at his actual theories, in the spirit of the accurate and critical historian of thought, and set them forth in the form in which they presented them- selves to his intellect. From this point of view it is all- important to avoid the temptation to which so many historians of thought have yielded — the temptation to read back modern ideas and systems into the great thinkers of antiquity for whom they feel admiration and rever- ence. Or, on the other hand, we may try to penetrate behind the formulae, sympathetically to realize the religious and moral convictions which expressed them- selves in those theories, and to find in them, or translate them into, ideas which shall be of present and eternal significance. The same alternatives present themselves in dealing with any ancient thinker. If we adopt the first method, no ancient thinker (Christian or pagan) has ever proved entirely acceptable to the modern mind : if we adopt the other, we find the most ancient thinkers dominating the highest thought of the present, almost to a greater extent than was the case in any period of modern history since the Renaissance. There are no modern philosophers who actually accept the systems of the universe propounded by Plato or Aristotle ; yet in a very profound sense there are among us many Platonists and many Aristotelians, while there is hardly any serious philosopher who does not acknowledge im- mense obligations to these and other ancient philosophers. Both methods have their value in dealing with such a writer as St. Paul, as they have in the interpretation of Plato or Aristotle ; but intellectual honesty and clear- sightedness demand that they should not be mixed up 84 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. with one another. I shall regard it as a duty pertaining to intellectual honesty first to exhibit St. Paul's theories as they must present themselves to the cold, impartial, critical exegete ; and then to ask how far they represent ideas of permanent value to the Christian Church. It is chiefly in two epistles — the Epistle to the Galatians and the Epistle to the Romans — that St. Paul's theories of atonement and justification receive their fullest elabora- tion, and the Epistle to the Galatians is probably no more than an anticipatory sketch of the ideas afterwards more fully developed in the great doctrinal epistle. We may therefore in the main confine our attention to this writing, though we shall constantly have to seek for further elucidation in other epistles — particularly in the two Corinthian Epistles which belong in thought and in date to the same group.^^ I may add that there is much in these great epistles besides the theories which we are examining — much teaching the spiritual value of which is quite independent of the theories enunciated in their more argumentative parts, but it is with the theories that we are for the moment more immediately concerned. The great problem which St. Paul sets himself to answer in the Epistle to the Romans is this — how was it possible for Gentiles to attain through Christ admission to the kingdom of God, acceptance with God, justifica- tion and salvation, without observance of the Mosaic law .'' Did not such an attitude towards the law make the promises of God to the Jews contained in the Old Testament of none effect ? How could the law, which St. Paul still accepted as the supernaturally revealed law of God, be really a disclosure of His will, if those who at least attempted to observe it were to be rejected by God at the Messianic judgement, while Gentile Chris- tians who made no attempt to do so were, as St. Paul had proclaimed, in the way of salvation ? Such was the problem which presented itself to Jewish and Judaiz- 1 As to St. Paul's later doctrine of salvation, see Additional Note G at the end of this lecture (p. 141). It may be convenient to say that I accept the genuineness of all the Pauline Epistles except the Pastoral Epistles, though I recognize that the genuine- ness of 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians is not so certain as that of the rest. n PAULINE THEORY OF ATONEMENT 85 ing Christians. Such was the problem which even to St. Paul's own mind presented a real difficulty which he had to put forth all his rabbinical learning and all his dialectical subtlety to meet. The argument of the epistle divides itself into two halves. The first half is negative, the second positive. The first part of the argument seeks to prove that justi- fication was not obtainable by the works of the law, the second half that it was obtainable through a new " right- eousness of God " which Jesus the Messiah had brought into the world. The first part presents little difficulty. When St. Paul speaks of the law, he does not distinguish as sharply as we should do between the moral and the ceremonial parts of it. While it is to the moral part of it that he attaches primary importance, he is very em- phatic in asserting that he who is circumcised is bound to observe the whole law, including the most arbitrary of external rites and ceremonies. He appears to regard the Mosaic law as the most perfect expression, prior to the coming of Christ, of that divine law of which the Gentiles also possessed a less perfect knowledge written in their own consciences. And this moral law was the will of God. God had enjoined upon all the observance of the moral law, and upon Jews that of the ceremonial law also, offering rewards to those who should keep it, and threatening punishment in the form of death to those who disobeyed it. Those who kept the law had earned justification : that is to say, such persons would be pro- nounced just by God, because in fact they would be just, and acquittal was no more than their due. But St. Paul appeals both to the authority of scripture and to universal human experience^ to show that nobody ever had kept or could keep the whole law of God in all its com- pleteness and exactingness. The universality of sin was simply a fact of the world's experience. Neither Jew nor Gentile had attained to the righteousness of God — righteousness as God 'conceived it, the xighteous- ' The appeal to well-known facts is the primary foundation of St. Paul's conviction, and occupies the first two chapters. In chapter iii. he introduces a confirmatory appeal to scripture. 86 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. ness which would satisfy His requirements. " There is no distinction ; for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God." ^ We need not dwell on St. Paul's teaching about the true function of law in creating or deepening the sense of sin/ and even the sin itself, or about the relative and temporary advantages which the Jew enjoyed over the Gentile in possession of the oracles of God and other spiritual privileges. This side of his teaching is very important for his theology in general, but it is not of primary importance for our present purpose. All that we need insist on is the fact that according to St. Paul the sentence of justification or acquittal, the judge- ment that a man is righteous in God's sight, cannot in the actual condition of human nature be pronounced upon any child of man on account of his performance of the works of the law. How far, and in what sense, this universal sinfulness was regarded by St. Paul as neces- sarily resulting from the sin of Adam — how far it was thought of as inherited guilt or liability to punishment and how far as an inherited sinfulness, how far the origin of sin is to be found in the fall of Adam and how far in the intrinsic weakness and sinfulness of man's fleshly nature — these are questions upon which there has been much dispute, and which for our present purpose we need not discuss elaborately. Innumerable attempts have been made to get rid of the concep- tions of original sin, of predestination, and of the ideas associated with these conceptions, from St. Paul's teach- ing. I cannot but think that they all fail. It is true that the theory that the source of sin is the fall of Adam is scarcely to be found in the Old Testament,* and plays ^ Rom. iii. 23. 2 " The law came in beside (TrapeiaiiXdev) that the trespass might abound " (Rom. V. 20). This was one of St. Paul's most original conceptions, and yet there is a suggestion of it in the Apocalypse of Baruch (ed. Charles, xv. 5, 6) : " Man would not rightly have understood My judgement, if he had not accepted the law, and if his fear had not been (rooted) in understanding. But now, because he transgressed, though he knew, yea, on account of this also, he shall be tormented because he knew." 3 »' The fact rernains that the Old Testament supplies no trace of the existence, among the sacred writers, of any Interpretation of the fall-story comparable to the later doctrine of the Fall " (Tennant, The Fall and Original Sin, p. 93). " The serpent is not identi- fied, apparently, with Satan" (p. 104.). n ORIGINAL SIN 87 a smaller part in later Jewish speculation than its promi- nence in Christian theology might lead us to suppose. It is true, again, that, so far as the origin of sin was sought in an historical event, the fall of the sons of God recounted in Gen. vi. is more often alluded to than the fall of Adam. But there can be no doubt that the idea of the yezer hara or inherited tendency towards evil was known to the Jews long before the time of St. Paul, and that the derivation of human sinfulness from the fall of Adam was a fairly prominent conception both with the rabbis, and with the apocalyptic writers who lived just before or during St. Paul's lifetime.i There is no reason therefore for attempting to explain away the ■prima facie meaning of St. Paul. He tells us that " through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin ; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned." 2 What St. Paul actually states is not that sin was transmitted to all men, but death ; and he em- phatically declared that the penalty was endured even by those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression. When he says " all sinned," he is prob- ably thinking of a collective or constructive sin : * he means that all sinned in Adam in much the same sense as that in which (according to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews) Levi paid tithes in Abraham.* But if we look to the whole drift of his argument, it is im- possible to doubt that he does mean to connect the fact of universal sinfulness with the fall of Adam. The whole object of his argument is to establish a universal sinfulness : the introduction of Adam would be irrelevant if this universal sinfulness was not causally connected with Adam's fall ; and it is quite clear from his picture of the condition of fallen humanity at the beginning of ^ See Additional Note E at the end of this lecture (p. 135). ^ Rom. V. 12. ' " So soon as we grasp the thought that it was not in truth the first man as an individual who was the subject of the fall, but man as man, we see the historical beginning to be merely the form which expresses the universality of the principle which has no beginning ; and thus the substantial agreement of the passage [Rom, v. 12 sq.'\ with the line of thought in Rom. vii. is placed beyond doubt " (Pfleiderer, TauUnismy E.T., 2nd ed. i. 46). See Additional Note D on this passage at the end of this lecture (p. 133). * Heb. vii. 9, 10. Cf. 2 Cor. v. 14. : *' One died for all, therefore all died." 88 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. the epistle, as well as from the passage in which he speaks of his own personal experiences, that this sinful- ness was no mere constructive or imputed sinfulness. It is true that he seems to allow the possibility that some at least of those between Adam and Moses had not actually sinned, or at all events that they had not sinned wilfully in the teeth of an express command like Adam, and that therefore sin was not imputed to them as it was to those who had received the law. But he cannot be supposed to mean (in Pelagian fashion) that the bulk of Adam's posterity became actually sinful merely through following Adam's bad example, or that they just hap- pened of their own free will to sin as Adam had done. He means undoubtedly that Adam's posterity inherited a sinful tendency which normally resulted, especially in those in whom the evil tendency was stirred into activity by the law, in a sinful heart and actually sinful deeds. Side by side with this theory, there is, indeed, another which underlies all St. Paul's thought about the matter : and that is the theory (so powerfully suggested by obvious facts of experience, and widely diffused at a certain stage of religious development) that the flesh is the source of moral evil : ^ man is necessarily sinful because he has ^ Rom. vii. 14, viii. 3, 7, 10 ; i Cor. xv. i^.-50. Of. WeizsickcT, A^osiolic Age, i. p. 1 50. Much controversy has taken place as to what flesh (adp^) means for St. Paul. It is probable that it practically includes the whole of men's natural desires and inchnations. Thus St. Paul speaks of " the mind {tppbvf^^m) of the flesh," Rom. viii. 6, 7, " the desire of the flesh" (Gal. v. 16, cf. 24), " the will [or volitions, de\-qfi.a,Ta\ of the flesh " (Eph. ii. 3), though the very form of expression shows that there is a certain distinction between the literal flesh and the psychical activities connected with it. On the other hand Mendgoz goes too far when (on the strength of Rom. vii. 18) he defines adp^ as " I'homme tout entier, corps et Sme," for St. Paul does not regard the human irvev^a as identical with the Spirit of God (" the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit," Rom. viii. 16). There is a human spirit as well as the divine Spirit which acts upon it, and the human Trveviia. is not part of the aap^. A more measured statement is Weizsacker's : " After all this there can hardly be a doubt that for Paul the antithesis of flesh and spirit ultimately rests on the nature of flesh, i.e. on the natural quality of men " [Apostolic Age, i. 152). " This is of course not incompatible with the power to understand the divine command, or with a secret Inclination to it fostered by his own mind before, any more than after, the fall (Rom. vii. 22). But the power to fulfil the divine will is not included in this ; it only comes through the Spirit " (ib.). Elsewhere St. Paul speaks of a vovs — a Greek term which does not seem to stand in any definite relation to the Hebraic antithesis between spirit and flesh. Sometimes it appears to mean the intellect as opposed to the spirit in the sense of the higher spiritual aspirations (i Cor. xiv. 14, 15 j cf. Col. Ii. 18) : at other times it is practically equivalent to the spirit as opposed to the flesh (Rom. vii. 25). When used in the sense of intellect, It may become enslaved to the flesh, so that St. Paul can speak of the " mind (j/oOs) of his flesh " (Col. ii. 18). It is not to be supposed that St. Paul has any absolutely strict and uniform way of using these terms, any more than most of us (when not writing II ST. PAUL'S PREDESTINARIANISM 89 a body which creates evil impulses and weighs down the higher part of his nature. This theory played quite as prominent a part in St. Paul's thought as the theory of the fall. But the two are not inconsistent : it is natural to infer that Adam's fall was itself the necessary result of his fleshly nature.^ If the first man was essen- tially " earthy " (^oiVco?), he could hardly have avoided sinning. I cannot therefore doubt that St. Paul does believe in an hereditary sinfulness (as well as an hereditary penalty) which normally resulted in actual sin. And this consequence was a necessary consequence : it is impossible honestly to understand the ninth chapter of the Romans in any but a strictly predestinarian sense. Man is as clay in the hands of the potter. God has willed to make some vessels to honour and others to dishonour. " So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth." 2 These words cannot be explained away. It is impossible to deny that on the whole the Augustinian and Calvinistic ^ inter- philosophy or psychology) are consistent in our use of such terms as " mind," " soul," " spirit," " self," " will," " desire." How far the doctrine that the flesh is the source of sin came to St. Paul from Hellenic sources (directly or through Alexandrian writers such as Philo) is disputed. (Clemen holds that it did.) The idea is so natural that it does not require such a hypothesis, though a certain Philonic influence on St. Paul (direct or indirect) is not improbable. It should be observed that it is " the flesh," not specifically (as with dualistic thinlcers) " matter," which is for him the source of evil. The logical development of this doctrine would involve something like a docetic view of Christ's person, and St. Paul goes near to such a position when he represents Christ as being merely sent " in the likeness of sinful flesh " (Rom. viii. 3) or coming in the outward form (yttop0^) of a servant (Phil. ii. 7). But fortunately he never did develope the doctrine. His idea probably was that the heavenly and sinless nature of the Messiah's Spirit (identical with the Spirit of God) prevented the flesh from having its usual eff^ect in producing sin, and so made possible the transmutation of His body into an aethereal or " glorious " body — something between matter and spirit. ^ Weizsacker is probably right in holding that the universality of sin is for him the consequence of a divine decree, referring to Rom. vii. 23 {Apostolic Age, 152-3, cf. 149). The failure of both Jew and Gentile to attain righteousness by the works of the law is part of the providential arrangement by which they are pre- pared for the righteousness which comes by the free favour of God, so that the ultimate purpose is one of mercy. " God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all " (Rom. xi. 32). I cannot admit with M. Goguel (L'Af6tre Paul et Jesus-Christ, p. 184) that the statement of Rom. xi. 32 " goes very clearly (' trJs nette ') against Predestination. It is only inconsistent with it in the sense in which all state- ments about human freedom and responsibility made by Determinists appear inconsistent to those who do not hold, and perhaps do not understand, the philosophical doctrine of Determinism. ^ Rom. ix. i8. ' At least that of the sub-lapsarian Calvinists. Whether St. Paul would have accepted the position of the supra-lapsarian Calvinists — that the fall itself was necessary — is not quite so clear, but it is highly probable that he would. 90 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. pretation of St. Paul as regards these questions is justi- fied, with the momentous exception that St. Paul knows nothing of everlasting punishment. The wicked are punished, but they are punished by annihilation or in some way which ends in annihilation. The punishment of sin is literal death. St. Paul knows nothing of a natural or universal immortality : the redeemed alone are immortal. ^ Whatever answer we may give to these much dis- puted questions, the important point for the under- standing of St. Paul's theory of redemption is the fact that all men are now actually sinful. They have all sinned, and consequently all have incurred the doom of death. They are unjust, and cannot therefore be pro- nounced just on account of anything they have done. Justification cannot be obtained through the works of the law : how then can it be obtained ? St. Paul's answer may be considered under two heads, though in his own argument these are not very sharply dis- tinguished. We may ask what is the objective ground of justification, or we may ask what is the subjective con- dition of its appropriation by the sinner. The objective source or ground of justification is the death of Christ. The righteousness by which the Christian attains justification is a righteousness of God : a righteousness which is not due to the sinner's works at all — not even to his repentance. It is something brought into existence by God as a free act of favour or mercy (the word " grace " has become so technical that we are apt to forget its original meaning) through the sending of the Messiah, the pre-existent and sinless Son of God, into the world. If we ask what it is in Christ's work which secured this justification, the answer is not, indeed, as consistent and clearly cut as it is in modern theological systems. Sometimes reconciliation or justi- fication or salvation ^ is attributed generally to Jesus 1 See Additional Note F at the end of this chapter on " The Eschatology of St. Paul" (p. 139). ... 2 As to the difference in meaning between the terms reconciliation, justiiication, salvation, redemption, sanctification, see Additional Note A at the end of this lecture (p. 124). 11 EFFECTS OF CHRIST'S DEATH 91 the Christ and to the outpouring of the Spirit. Christians are said to be "justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God " : ^ sometimes it is treated as in a special manner the effect of the resurrection,^ which was, we must remark with St. Paul, not merely the pledge, but in some sense the direct cause, of the transformation of the mortal body into an immortal one.^ But there can be no doubt whatever as to the prominent place which the death of Christ plays in St. Paul's thought. Christians are "justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus : whom God set forth to be a propitiation [or as others translate " propitiatory "] through faith, by his blood, to shew his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God ; for the shewing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season : that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus." * That is the main thesis of the Roman Epistle. The intimate connexion between justification and the death of Christ is stated over and over again. We are "justified by his blood." ^ We were " reconciled to God through the death of his Son." * And so on. The justification of sinners was made possible by God through the death of Christ, though the death is not emphasized in such a way as to exclude from any share in the justifying effect all other aspects of His work. St. Paul does not quite say why God could not remit the penalty of sin without the death of His Son. But it cannot be denied that those theologians who declare that this would be incompatible with God's justice — the justice which requires that somehow sin should be punished — or with the consistency which demands the 1 I Cor. vi. II. So " God was in Christ" — throughout His work — "reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. v. 19). ^ Rom. iv. 25 ; i Cor. xv. 17. ' " Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body" (2 Cor. iv. 10). Still this transformation is due in our case as in Christ's to the power of God (2 Cor. xiii. 4.). In Rom. viii. 1 1 the transformation is effected through the Spirit of God : " He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you." * Rom. iii. 24.-26. 5 Rom. v. 9. " Rom. v. 10. 92 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. t infliction of the particular punishment which God had threatened, namely death — are only bringing out^ the latent presuppositions of St. Paul's thought.^ This at least is what his argument requires. It is, indeed, difficult to say in what relation, according to St. Paul, physical death stands to spiritual death — death in a moral and spiritual sense together with all its conse- quences.2 He seems to regard them as in some sense convertible terms or as involving each other. If St. Paul believed in immortality only for the saved, the identifica- tion is easily explained : physical death involved spiritual as well as physical annihilation, just as physical resurrec- tion was the necessary presupposition of complete and permanent spiritual life, though a sort of foretaste of it was possible here below. At all events it is part of his argument that sin in some way demands death. And it is clearly St. Paul's conception that Christ has paid that penalty in order that man may not have to pay it. It is impossible to get rid of this idea of substitution, or vicarious punishment, from any faithful representation of St. Paul's doctrine. True, the idea of substitution is not so much emphasized as it is by later theologians. St. Paul seems led into it, as it were, against his will by the necessities of his argument. He never uses the ^ It is difEcult to find in the Old Testament a distinct enunciation of the principle, though of course particular sins have the penalty of death annexed to them. St. Paul can hardly have thought of Ezek. xviii. 20 (" the soul that sinneth, it shall die ") with its distinct repudiation of the doctrine that one man is punished for another's sin. (The very next verse contains the assurance that the wicked who returns from his sins shall live.) More probably he had in mind the actual infliction of death upon Adam and his posterity, though there is in Gen. iii. no universal threat of death for all sin. And he read these chapters of Genesis, as do Christians, in the light of a kind of Haggada, which is really of other origin. " There is clearly a logical hiatus in St. Paul's scheme here. Was the death threat- ened for disobedience to God's commandments phyncal death such as Adam suffered ? But others suffer that also, even the redeemed. If the penalty deserved was spiritual death, why should the necessity for such a death be removed by the physical death of Jesus? St. Augustine was obviously puzzled to answer this question. M. Mendgoz has insisted on this hiatus (Le Tichi et la Redemption, p. 75). The difficulty can best be met if we suppose that St. Paul thought that, though even the redeemed had to undergo the penalty of physical death, they escaped its full severity by their subsequent resurrec- tion, while the spiritual accompaniments of the new life brought into being through Christ were something graciously bestowed by God over and above the mere resurrection or restoration of physical life. It must be remembered that, though Christians occa- sionally died, St. Paul thinks in his earlier epistles of salvation without any death at all as the normal case. The discovery that some Christians could die before the Parousia had caused serious perplexity at Thessalonica. n VICARIOUS PUNISHMENT 93 preposition uvtI (instead of) but always v-n-ep (on behalf of) in this connexion .^ Christ is always said to have suffered " on behalf of" men, not " instead of" them. And that preposition virep by itself conveys no suggestion of expiation or substitution or equivalence, unless such a force is given to it by the context. But some such notion seems directly to be involved in such passages as the following : " God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, con- demned sin in the flesh." ^ It is true the word offering is not actually in the Greek, but irepl ap,apTia^ ("for sin ") is the usual Septuagint term for the " sin-offering." What can this mean but that in the death of Christ the judge- ment pronounced against the sin of Adam and his posterity was satisfied .? Again in the Epistle to the Galatians we are told that " Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us : for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree." * According to this argument, it may be noted 1 In I Thess. v. lo and Gal. i. 4. the MSS. waver between virip and ■wepl. 2 Rom. viii. 3. Probably St. Paul's idea is that the actual " flesh " which caused the sin and was permanently the source of sin was punished, and in some sense destroyed — and with it the sin— when Christ died. Flesh, like sin, is to St. Paul a sort of half- personal entity. It is obvious that this idea makes it difficult for St. Paul to avoid either (i) a Docetic view of Christ's body or (2) the admission that Christ became sinful. It is certain that he intended neither. ' Gal. iii. 13. Dr. Denney notices that St. Paul avoids applying to Christ the precise words of Deut. rxi. 23, " accursed of God." Weinel writes : " So the curse spent itself on Him, the innocent, that knew no sin, and thereby it is done away. All they that were ' under the curse ' have now been redeemed by Him. This is the clearest, the most consequent theory that St. Paul advances of the death of Jesus. But just like the belief in sacrifice, it rests upon a strange idea of primitive man, upon his conception of the curse, upon its objective reality, so to speak. Just as Isaac's blessing works itself out, because it is uttered, and neither God nor Isaac can alter it in anywise, so this curse of the law must also spend itself on some one. Now if it lights on one who was not doomed to die through his own guilt, then it has ' worked itself out,' its force is spent, for it has put itself in the wrong. And so the curse being removed, God's mercy has free play " [St. Paul, Eng. trans, p. 308). This account of the matter may be accepted, except that (i) like all attempts to reduce St. Paul to a theory, it probably errs on the side of over- definiteuess and excluslveness, and (2) though St. Paul's conception has clear affinities with the notions of primitive man, his thought is not quite so primitive as Weinel sup- poses. It could be more fairly stated in terms of that theory about the intrinsic necessity of punishment to wipe out guilt or " vindicate the moral law," which is still held by eminent philosophers. No doubt this notion itself is ultimately derived from the instincts and superstitions of primitive man, but it is always a mistake to suppose that the thought of a reflective and highly civilized age is tie same as that of the primitive nations which have contributed to produce them. In much the same spirit it is insisted by Pfleiderer that Paul understands by sin *' not as we might think, a permanent tendency of the will, evil inclination, bias, or the like, but with the usual personifying tendency of antiquity, he makes the sinful principle 94 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. parenthetically, it was not merely death that was needed for the forgiveness of sins but this particular kind of death. Nothing but crucifixion or some similar mode of execution could have the required effect. The point is interesting because it illustrates the complete depend- ence of St. Paul's argument upon the authoritative letter of prophecy. So again, " Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf ; that we might become the righteousness of God in him." ^ This can hardly mean anything but that God treated the sinless Christ as if He were guilty, and inflicted upon Him the punishment which our sins had deserved ; and that this infliction made it possible to treat the sinful as if they were actually righteous. There are, indeed, only a few passages which necessarily suggest the idea of substituted punishment or substituted sacrifice. But there they are, and St. Paul's argument is unintelligible without them. Granted that the death of Christ was in some sense a sacrifice or a punishment, why should the endurance of such a penalty by an innocent Being make it just or right for God to forgive those who were really sinful .'' To this question there is no clear, definite, and categorical answer to be got out of St. Paul's arguments, elaborate as they are. It is true that Jesus was sinless, and there- fore had no penalty to pay on His own account : " him who knew no sin, he made to be sin on our behalf." ^ Again, there is great insistence on the voluntariness of the death. " Ye know the grace [mercy] of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor." * Another reply might be that Jesus an independent entity, an active subject to wiiich all manner of predicates can be attached " (Primiti-ue Christianity, 1. 277). But after all the conception of " sin " for St. Paul is primarily ethical, and had best be treated as such in any modern interpretation, though his ethical conceptions are connected with theories of the universe, and particularly of the spiritual world, which are not ours. It is too much to say that " he really saw in sin a demonic spiritual being which takes possession of men," etc., except in so far as he undoubtedly connected the existence of sin with a personal devil and other evil spirits. 1 2 Cor. V. 21 ; cf. Col. i. 19-23 ; Eph. ii. 11-16. In this last passage the enmity which is " slain " by the Cross is primarily the enmity between Jew and Gentile, but the context implies that this was effected by the cancelling of an enmity between God and man occasioned by the law which had made the Gentiles " children of wrath." ^ 2 Cor. V. 21. ' 2 Cor. viii. 9. The words clearly imply pre-existence : so in Phil. ii. 6-8. II VICARIOUS PUNISHMENT 95 was for St. Paul not only sinless, but the Messiah, the pre-existent Son of God. If St. Paul never calls Him God, if he habitually distinguishes Him from the Father to whom alone the name God is actually applied, still he does say that " God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." ^ God was in Christ in a unique and paramount sense. But these considera- tions do not answer the question why the voluntary death of such a sinless Son of God should justify or make possible the gratuitous acquittal of the guilty. The later theory that the merit earned by a voluntary death of the divine Son was so transcendent that it could earn the pardon of sinners as of right is not perhaps far off from the thought of St. Paul in some places : ^ but it is not actually elaborated. St. Paul's general disposition is to explain the arrange- ment simply by the will of a God who is merciful but none the less arbitrary. God in the plenitude of His power chose this particular way of cancelling the guilt which had been incurred, " having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us : and he hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross," ^ and substituting therefor a righteous- ness which was wholly due to His goodwill and pleasure. At other times some attempt is made to establish a rational connexion between the death of the One and the acquittal of the many. The most definite solution is that supplied by the words : " because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died." ^ It is tempting to treat such passages as the utterance of deep feeling, and to regard them as wholly metaphorical ; but if we do so, we must abandon the hope of presenting St. Paul's doctrine in a theoretical form. Behind all the ^ 2 Cor. V. 19 i Rom. ix. 5 is ambiguous. 2 Of. Phil. ii. 5-9. The notion that deliverance could only be effected by One who was God as well as man, or that the death of a God-man must have infinite value, is not found in St. Paul, though a very easy development of what he does say. For a further discussion of St. Paul's Christology, see Additional Note B at the end of this lecture (p. 127). ^ Col. ii. 14. Here remission is only coimected with death upon the Cross by a metaphor which explains nothing. The death of Christ could only be regarded as a guarantee of forgiveness because God had proclaimed that it was so. * 2 Cor. v. 14. 96 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. passionate sense of a new spiritual life springing from Christ and His influence, of which St. Paul was immedi- ately conscious, there is a theory ; and the theory seems to be that, because Christ died, each individual believer may be considered to have really died also, and so satisfied the divine decree that sin shall bring death, and thereby become free also from obedience to the law, which lost its hold on the man when once its extreme penalty had been endured. " One died for all, therefore all died." It is not easy to put a very precise meaning upon such a statement. As is natural with so difficult a conception, St. Paul's own interpretation of it seems to waver. Sometimes it looks like an arbitrary arrangement on the part of God, a legal fiction by which He agrees to assume that all men died, because of the exceeding worth of Him who did literally die. The arrangement is more or less arbitrary, and yet there is a natural fitness or appropriateness in it on account of the parallel which it affords to that sin of Adam which involved all his posterity in its consequences. " So then as through one trespass the judgement came unto all men to condemnation ; even so through one judgement (St/canw/iaTo?) " — one judicial sentence of acquittal ^ — " the free gift came unto all men to justification of life. For as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners " [KaTeardOrjaav, were constituted, placed in the position of sinners] " even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made [or constituted] righteous." ^ At other times the notion seems to be more mystical, or (better) metaphysical. The whole human race are, as it were, summed up in Christ — the perfect Man, the Man from heaven, the pattern Man, the crown and realized ideal of the whole human race, the universal of " Humanity," as a modern philosopher might say — in the same sort of rabbinical-mystical way as that in which, according to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek in Abraham because " he was yet 1 Not, as A. v., " the righteousness of one," or R.V., " one righteous act." * Rom. V. 1 8, 19. II VICARIOUS PUNISHMENT 97 in the loins of his father, when Melchizedek met him." ^ That is the notion which seems to be most directly suggested by the words, " One died for all, therefore all died." ^ At other times again the thought becomes more ethical, and consequently more metaphorical or symbolic. It is through an act of spiritual surrender or emotional unity or identification with Christ at baptism that the Christian may be said to have really died, and so to have suffered the penalty of sin with or in Christ, and with Him to have risen to a new life of righteousness here and of glory hereafter. Thus we read : "Are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death ? We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death : that, like as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life." ^ And again in the Galatian Epistle : " They that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof." * The death of the fleshly element in man satisfied the judgement that the sinner should die. It is clear that a metaphor is here passing into a theory. There is nothing in common between baptism and death except that in both cases there is a going down and a rising up ; while, if we think of the thing signified in the sacrament, the laying aside of sin is not really death. It is doubtless true that in the deepest religious consciousness of St. Paul the idea of death presents itself less as a penalty than as a necessary stage in the passage to a new and higher life.^ But still the formal 1 Heb. vii. lo. This aspect of the death of Christ will thus be a particular application of the principle of the incarnation in general — ■" to sum up all things in Christ " (Eph. i. 10). 2 2 Cor. V. 14. ^ Rom. vi. 3, 4. * Gal. v. 24.. 5 Cf. Rom. iii. 25, 26. On this ground Weizsacker attempts to get rid of the idea of substitution from St. Paul {Apostolic Age, i. 1 60-63). But it is obvious that, so far as this is St. Paul's theory, it turns on a metaphor which does not wholly correspond to the facts. Converted and baptized Christians do sin. I caimot think that Weizsacker is successful in his attempt to explain away all punitive or expiatory ideas in the teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul nowhere actually speaks of baptism or the act of justification as at once trans- forming the natural and mortal body (which included the lower soul or 'f/vxv) into a spiritual and immortal body, but there is much in his teaching to suggest this idea (e.g. 2 Cor. iv. 10). He was prevented from developing it in a consistent manner by his H 98 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. thesis which St. Paul is trying to establish cannot be established unless the metaphorical or spiritual death to sin is regarded as somehow equivalent to the literal death which had been denounced as the punishment of sin. Doubtless St. Paul in such passages was not unconscious that there was an element of metaphor in his argument ; but rabbinical arguments often turn upon an exegesis which takes metaphor for literal fact and literal fact for metaphor, and yet they are quite seriously intended as arguments. And it must be remembered that, though the effect which St. Paul attributes to Christ's resurrection was an ethical effect, it was not to him merely ethical ; he thought of the participation in Christ's death as directly killing that fleshly nature which was the source of sin, and beginning that transformation of it into a new and incorruptible body which had taken place in Christ's case already, and which for the redeemed portion of humanity would be completed at the Parousia or second coming. Such is in barest outline St. Paul's doctrine when coldly dissected by the critical understanding. Honest exegesis will not let us get rid of this idea of expiation or substitution. And yet that is an idea which can be reconciled neither with the demands of the moral con- sciousness as interpreted by the modern intellect, nor with the plain teaching of St. Paul's Master and ours. It is, indeed, important to note that St. Paul never actually applies the word " punishment " to the death of Christ. He seems instinctively to shrink from it, even when his argument is leading him straight up to it, and only in three or four places does he employ definitely sacrificial language. Generally his thought is juridical rather than sacrificial. Only in three or four passages is the death of Christ actually described as a sacrifice. There is the passage already quoted in Eschatology. The judgement, the resurrection, the transformation of mortal bodies into immortal were in the future. The present transformation could therefore be only a sort of potential transformation, the sowing of a seed which could only be reaped at the resurrection. How St. Paul's suggestions about the transformation of the corruptible body into the incorruptible were developed by the Greek Fathers we shall see hereafter (below, p. 239 sy.). II CHRIST'S DEATH A SACRIFICE 99 which the traditional word for sin-ofFering is applied to it (jn-epl d/j,apTLa<;). Again, St. Paul tells us that Christ " gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a sweet smell." ^ Then there are the words, perhaps used with reference to the approaching paschal festival, " Our Passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ." ^ And finally, and perhaps most important, there is the statement that God sent Him forth " to be a propitiation " * or " to be propitiatory." Here it may be observed that, though the word used must in honesty be so translated, its association with " mercy " and " mercy-seat," if not its actual derivation, makes the thought of God's mercy more prominent than the means by which the mercy was obtained. It was not as an object of the Father's wrath that the Son effected the propitiation, but because it enabled the Father to pass over the sins done aforetime and to provide another way of making man righteous than by punishing.* In all these passages there is probably a certain amount of metaphor about the sacrificial language used. And yet it is difficult without the use of such terms as " vicarious sacrifice " or even " vicarious punishment " to describe an arrangement by which the innocent endured a death which would otherwise have had to be endured by the guilty, and which had the effect of reconciling the guilty to God.5 It is probable that St. Paul was more conscious of the metaphor in the sacrificial passages, than in the legal. The Jewish sacrifices did not play a large part in the religious ideas of Rabbinism — least of all probably 1 Eph. V. 2. The metaphorical character of the language is here particularly evident. Of. Phil. iv. 18, where he speaks of almsgiving as " an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God.'* 2 I Cor. V. 7. The " for us " is omitted in R. V. ' Rom. iii. 25 (iXatrTifpioc). Drs. Sanday and Headlam take the word to be an adjective. For a further discussion of this passage, see Additional Note C at the end of this lecture (p. 130). Cf. also Rom. v. 9. * And yet " that he might himself be just " as well as " the justifier of him that hath faith " (Rom. iii. 26) seems to suggest that the forgiveness was possible because Christ bore the penalty. 5 "According to biblical ideas, therefore, there is no such thing as 4 ' vicarious ■punishment of Christ,' inasmuch as vicarious suffering is the negation of punishment, is expiation instead oi punishment " {P{leiieTeT,,Paulinism, i. 96-7). The distinction is not altogether ungrounded, but it is a fine one. After all it only comes to this — that a punishment which is borne by the innocent is not strictly a punishment. The same might be said about any theory of " vicarious punishment." loo ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. among the Jews of the Dispersion. It is otherwise with the juridical language. That is vital to his whole doctrine. St. Paul naturally thought in terms of law. At the same time one element — and that the most dis- tressing — of later substitutionary theories is entirely absent. There is no suggestion at all that by the death of Christ an alteration was effected in the attitude of God to man ; so that, whereas He had formerly been angry and hostile, He was placated (the very word has often been used in later times) by the death of an innocent victim, and made, as He previously was not, propitious, loving, willing to forgive and to renew. " For St. Paul as for Jesus, it is in the last analysis the love of God which is the true cause of pardon for sins and of salvation."^ Amid all the difficulties and ambiguities which we encounter in endeavouring to interpret St. Paul's thought, this at least is clear. All through his epistles the atone- ment is presented as an arrangement due to the eternal and unchangeable love of God. He constantly speaks of our being reconciled to God through the death of Christ, never (in the unfortunate knguage of our Articles) of God as being reconciled to us. " We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were intreating by us : we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God." ^ And still more definitely : " God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." ' It is true that the death of Christ is exhibited as satisfying the anger of God, however un- intelligible to us may be the thought of a righteous anger which can nevertheless be satisfied by the death of the innocent : but at all events the anger is in the thought of St. Paul anger against sin, anger not incompatible with love of the sinner. " God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." * The love of Christ is always treated as a revelation of the Father's love. His character as a revelation of God's character ; no opposition or antagon- sm is ever suggested between the justice of the Father 1 Goguel, L'Afdtre Paul et Jisus-Chr'nt, p. 331. 2 2 Cor. V. 20, 2j. ' 2 Cor. v. 19. « Rom. v. 8. II A REVELATION OF LOVE loi and the lo-\dngkindness of the Son. If he had been pressed with the question why this method rather than another was adopted, St. Paul might very probably have replied by his favourite metaphor of the clay and the potter : he might have said, " God wills it : that is enough." But we should not be going very much beyond the language which St. Paul actually uses if we were to say (with later thinkers), " because this method was the one which showed most love, and was calculated to call forth most love in us, and so best to accomplish God's ultimate purpose of saving many from sin." Such a theory is suggested by many a passage in St. Paul, but actually to represent this as St. Paul's own con- sciously adopted and consistent theory would be to attribute to him what he does not actually say, and to ignore much which he does say. St. Paul certainly does attribute to the death of Christ an actual, objective efficacy, though by far the greater part of what he says may well be explained and justified by the subjective effect which the love of God revealed by Christ produces in the soul of the believer. This side of the matter — the appeal to human love and gratitude made by the amazing love of God shown in the sending and the death of Christ — ^is the side of the atonement doctrine increasingly insisted on in the later epistles,^ in which the problem of the law and all the difficulties which it raised are no longer before his eyes. There is no getting rid of the substitutionary element in the theology of St. Paul, and yet, with all the elabora- tion of the Roman Epistle, there is no quite clearly formulated theory as to why the death of Christ was necessary, or as to what it does for the sinner. Many theories are suggested ; none is deliberately adopted and systematically worked out. And if we bear in mind what we have seen to be the probable origin of the whole doctrine, the absence of any real theory is in- telligible enough. The belief in the efficacy of Christ's 1 Phil. ii. 1-8 ; Col. i. 12, 13 ; Eph. i. i-io, v. i, 2. The idea of a transaction in the past which still has an objective effect is not absent from these epistles. But there is a tendency to emphasize (i) Christ's self-sacrifice as an example, (2) the outpouring of knowledge through the Revelation in Christ. See Additional Note G below, p. 141. I02 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. death rested for St. Paul, as for the Church in general, upon the authority of the Old Testament ; and so does the theory by which St. Paul endeavours to explain or at all events to justify that belief. At every turn he appeals to Old Testament authority. It is the Psalmist who proves that man is universally sinful ; it is the book of Genesis or the prophecy of Ezekiel which proves that man must die because he had sinned : it is the book of Deuteronomy which proves that Christ was accursed because He was crucified. It is the Jewish doctrine of the " Man from heaven," derived from the book of Enoch and elsewhere, which proves that Humanity was restored to what had been lost by the first Adam through the action of the second Adam — the Man from heaven. It is probable that, if St. Paul were distinctly asked how he knew that Christ's death had procured forgiveness, he would have said, " God has said so in the Scriptures." ^ He does attempt to theorize ; but his theories of sub- stitutionary punishment or sacrifice go very little beyond a statement of what seemed to be implied in the language of Isaiah liii. when combined with the teaching of the Old Testament about the necessity of the sinner's death. By a curious accident that chapter, so universally appealed to by other early Christian writers, is only once actually quoted in St. Paul.^ Yet it is not too much to say that it is always being paraphrased by him, and even when the passage was not actually present to his mind, he had before him the tradition of the Church which was mainly based upon that section of Isaiah, and in the light of which he found the same doctrine in other prophecies. At bottom St. Paul's conception of God was the same as that of his Master. Directly or indirectly he had learned it from Him, though doubtless there was much in later Judaism and in the immediate environment of St. Paul to pave the way for such a conception. But that conception of God carried with it the belief that He must have a gracious purpose towards Gentile as ^ That the will of God was inscrutable, that His commands, e.g. as to sacrifice, were to be obeyed without asking why, was of course a familiar thought in the later Judaism. Cf. 2 (4) Esdras iv. 11, vii. 19, viii. 2. ^ " Who was delivered up for our trespasses " (Rom. iv. 25). But cf. Rom. v. 19. II PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 103 well as Jew. Possibly even before his conversion he may have striven to reconcile a universalistic conception of God with the teaching of the Old Testament. And now he had seen evidences which he could not dispute of the presence of God's Spirit among Gentiles as well as Jews. He had felt himself called by God to carry on that work of Gentile conversion : he had felt the im- possibility of observing the law in all its strictness even for Jews, and the hopelessness of the attempt to impose it upon Gentiles. But, unlike Jesus, he was a rabbi, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and he could not all at once disencumber himself of all the old traditions and beliefs of orthodox Judaism — the thought of God as a jealous God, an exacting Judge, a stern enforcer of the law and executor of vengeance for disobedience to it, of the obligations of the ceremonial law, of the plenary inspira- tion and authority of Scripture in the very letter of it. He had to find some way of intellectually reconciling the old conception and the new. Hence he was driven to discover somehow within the circle of Old Testament ideas a theory which would explain how it was that God was at one and the same time the stern promulgator of the law with all its terrible penalties and the gracious and merciful Father who would forgive the penitent, restore him to His favour, and bestow upon him the holiness which he could never win by means of the law and his unaided efforts to obey it.^ He could effect this reconciliation by his theory of the substituted death of an innocent Son of God. We who are not encumbered as he was by the presuppositions of Judaism, who do not feel bound to see in the Jewish law a direct, complete, ^ Mr. Claude Montefiore has energetically protested in various articles in the yetnish Quarterly Review (" First Impressions of Paul " in vol. vi., " Rabbinic Judaism and the Epistles of St. Paul " in vol. xiii., " Rabbinic Conceptions of Repentance " in vol. xvi., etc.) against the tendency of Christian theologians to assume that St. Paul's feeling about the burden of the law really represents the whole truth about Rabbinic Judaism, and has declared himself unable to understand this attitude of St. Paul towards the law. In his more recent book, Judaism and St. Paul, the same writer has suggested that the law was more felt as a burden among the Jews of the Dispersion who were brought into more frequent relations with Gentiles. Whether he is equally right in representing the Judaism of Tarsus as Judaism of a lower type than the strictly " rabbinic Judaism " of Jerusalem, I will not venture to say. He is no doubt justified in saying that the idea of the forgivingness of God was a prominent feature of rabbinic teaching, but he hardly denies that this teaching was not logically reconcilable with the Pentateuch as a whole. I04 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. and unique manifestation of God's will, or in every prophetic phrase an infallible prediction of the future which had to be literally fulfilled, may feel that after all St. Paul was but pouring new wine into old bottles. There is a real contradiction between the spirit of the Old Testament and the spirit of Christ which St. Paul's theories fail to bridge. We can bridge that gulf by methods which were not open to St. Paul, but only on condition of subordinating the older revelation to the new to an extent for which St. Paul was not prepared,^ and adopting an attitude towards the Old Testament which has only recently been adopted even by Christian theologians. Before we leave the question of the connexion of Christ's death with the forgiveness of sins, we must notice another aspect of St. Paul's argument. In fact we may almost say that it is the most important point of his argument in the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians. That God had forgiven sin through Christ, and pre- eminently through His death, was common ground between himself and his opponents. It was part of the common faith of the Church. That connexion is assumed rather than proved. What St. Paul aimed at proving was that not only forgiveness but salvation was possible without the works of the law, that the law had no longer any binding hold upon those who had been so redeemed. He wanted to show that the death of Christ was the ground not merely of the individual's forgiveness ^ " Between the fundamental Pharisaic view on the one side — according to which God is the stern Judge who does not forgive without demanding payment or expiation, and the law as an absolute tyrant who inexorably insists upon his rights — and, on the other side, the Christian consciousness for which God as the Father of Jesus Christ is the will of Love, and the law only a ' paedagogic ' institution of temporary significance — between these two standpoints there is undoubtedly an inconsistency which cannot be logically removed, but only psychologically explained. From the consciousness of Paul, in which the filial spirit of Jesus had to struggle with the legal spirit of the Pharisee, there could only spring a theory of redemption which vacillated between the two. But for this very reason — because, namely, it was a compromise between the two, fighting the legal religion with its own forms in order to open up the way for the freedom of the children of God — for this very reason it was from the first, and ever afterwards, an ex- cellently adapted means of transforming the legal into the evangelical consciousness by elevating the former into the latter " (Pfieiderer, Primitive Christianity, i. 336-7). " The Pauline doctrine of the righteousness of God, which, on the ground of the expiation which has been made, justifies the believer, was a compromise between the prophetic and the Pharisaic theories " {ib. 364). n SUPERSESSION OF THE LAW 105 for the past, but of the cancelling of the law's claim upon Jew and Gentile alike, the removal of the burden which he had himself found so intolerable, " Christ IS the end of the law unto righteousness to every one that believeth."! And yet, though this is St. Paul's object throughout, the connexion between this supersession of the Law and the death of Christ is not very easy to trace. The only formal argument is contained in the com- parison of the relation between man and the law to the relation between husband and wife. As • the wife is released from the tie that binds her to her husband by the death of the latter, so by union with Christ, implying a participation in His death, the bond that binds the Christian to the law is severed, and he becomes united to Christ.2 It has been remarked ^ that the parallel really requires that the law should be dead, not the man who was subject to it, and that is precisely the thing to be proved. Putting aside the somewhat unconvincing parallel, what the Apostle really means is no doubt that the constructive death through participation in the actual death of Christ has satisfied the law's claims over the sinner.* The penalty for transgression having been paid, that penalty which gives the law the only hold that it has upon the sinner, there is no further duty of obedience. St. Paul assumes — he does not really prove — that ^ Rom. X. 4. In Gal. ii. 21 he argues that, if justification could be obtained by the law, Christ would have died in vain. If this is regarded as an attempt to prove the point, it must be admitted that it is an attempt to prove the theory by itself, but it may of course be an argumentum ad hominem, based on what the opponent had in common with the writer. * Rom. vii. 1-6. ' Gog:uel, UApStre Faul et yisus-ChrUt, p. 135. * Perhaps St. Paul does not sharply distinguish this theory from the idea that the flesh being killed (constructively in Christ's death), the source of evil inclinations is removed. Cf. Rom. vii. 4, 6, " Ye also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ. . . . For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were through the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we have been discharged from the law, that being dead in which we were held ; that we should serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter." Here most comment- ators take " that in which we were held " {h ij KaTeixip-cSa) to mean " the law." Drs. Sanday and Headlam hold that the meaning is " the old state," the antecedent being loosely suggested by the context. The revisers read diroBavSvTes instead of d-TToffai'Si'Tos and translate " having died to that wherein we were holden." In any case there is here no real argument. St, Paul does not explain why the removal of sinful inclinations should emancipate from the ceremonial requirements of the law. io6 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. the remission of the penalty for past transgression carries with it emancipation from all requirements of the law for the future. The antinomian consequences of such a doctrine would be appalling enough, but for the fact that the Spirit's presence — which was for St. Paul as important an effect of Christ's coming as the forgiveness of past sin — carried with it a disposition, and a capacity, to observe all that was of eternal obligation in the law. Verbally St. Paul is inconsistent in this matter. Side by side with strong assertions as to the total emancipation of Christians from the duty of observing the law, there is the doctrine that the ultimate object of the sentence of ac- quittal or justification is that " the ordinance of [righteous conduct required by] the law might be fulfilled in us."^ But if the law is still to be observed, why not, we may ask, the whole law, ceremonial as well as moral ? The two sides of his doctrine can only be brought together by the assumption that there are two elements in the law, one temporary, the other eternal. This assumption is really made, but never avowed, by St. Paul. Still less does he discuss the principle upon which the temporary is to be distinguished from the eternal, the ceremonial from the moral. We may suppose that, had the question been put to him, he would have said, " That is one of the secrets which the Spirit directly communicates to believers." We should not be going much beyond St. Paul's real thought if we substituted as a modern equiva- lent the statement : " The distinction is revealed by the human conscience now purged, stimulated, and en- lightened by the teaching and influence of Christ." And here I may take the opportunity of saying that in my belief the influence of the character, example, and teaching of Jesus — particularly His moral teaching — upon the mind of St. Paul was much more powerful and important than it is at the present moment fashion- able to admit. It is true that in St. Paul's theories more is said about the glorified Messiah than about the human Jesus. It is true that the actual words of Jesus are not often formally quoted. But if we ask what were the ' Rom. viii. 3, 4.. " CHRIST AND ST. PAUL 107 influences which predisposed St. Paul's mind to the conversion which was completed by the vision on the road to Damascus, what were the psychological causes which accounted for the change in his attitude towards Judaism and the law, the first place must be given to the influence of Christ's teaching and personality, whether based upon personal knowledge or upon what he had learned from Christians. St. Paul's conversion implied a moral and religious transformation, not merely a change of opinion. There is nothing in the vision of a glorified Messiah, taken by itself, to account for such a moral change, though it may well have confirmed a conviction arrived at on other grounds or prepared the way for the subsequent influence of Christ's teaching. And as a matter of fact the allusions or echoes of the Master's sayings in his writings are so numerous as to suggest that some theologians who have written about St. Paul are not very familiar with the Gospels.^ Still more striking is their agreement in ethical ideal. And this identity between St. Paul's moral teaching and His Master's, this appreciation of its very essence, cannot be a mere accident ; it can be accounted for by no theory so natural as the supposition that, like other Christians, he knew the traditions about Christ's teaching which were afterwards embodied in the Gospels. The very existence of the Gospels is a sufficient proof of the place which Christ's life and teaching played in the actual conscious- ness of the Christian community, if not in their formal statements of doctrine. St. Paul could not have been ignorant of them, nor could they have failed to influence him. No Christian need hesitate to admit that the influence which turned St. Paul from a Pharisee of the Pharisees into an Apostle was no less the work of God's Spirit because some of it was due to the teaching of our Lord, and perhaps not so much to his ecstatic experiences as he himself supposed. It was from Jesus that he had learned that the vital essence of the law was all contained in the two great commandments. It was from 1 See an admirable chapter in M. Goguel's VAp6tre Paul et Jesus-Christ on " Ce que Paul connait de la vie ct dcs paroles de Jesus " (Pt. I. chap. iii.). io8 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. the teaching of Jesus that he had learned that such a fulfilment of the law as the Pharisee of the parable could boast would not satisfy God's demands for absolute purity of heart, and perfect love towards one's neighbour. It was from Jesus that he had learned that the penitent publican would be forgiven, though he had not fulfilled the law. It was from Jesus that he had learned that that which went into the mouth could not really defile either Jew or Gentile. All these things he had learned from Jesus, by whatever channel the influence reached him. And these truths were really inconsistent with the doctrine which St. Paul had learned from the Old Testament — that the soul that sinneth shall die without any hope of forgiveness, though doubtless there was much in the prophets and later Jewish writers which was equally inconsistent with such a doctrine. To suggest that Jesus had borne that threatened death for all, and that that was the reason why a just God could also show Himself to be a merciful God, seemed to him to meet the difficulty. It is because for modern minds it does not meet the difficulty, that St. Paul's theory of the atone- ment cannot be our theory of it ; and, in spite of all St. Paul's authority, it was never really accepted by a great deal of later Christian thought. III. Si. Paul's Doctrine of Justification And now we must turn to the other side of St. Paul's doctrine. The objective source of justification is a free act of God which operates in some way through Christ's death : its subjective condition is faith. But what does faith mean to St. Paul } Does it mean belief .? And if so, belief in what } I think it cannot be denied that St. Paul does habitually identify faith with intellectual belief. That is shown by the illustrations which he gives to prove that even before Christ's coming faith had been the root-principle of goodness in the holy men of old. Abraham's faith ^ 1 Faith [wldTis) never seems by St. Paul to be used in the sense of trust, except so far as trust is implied in believing the statements or promises of another. n JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH 109 consisted in believing God — believing the various divine communications made to him, in particular believing that he should beget a child when he was a hundred years old. The verb which corresponds with faith is always " believe." The faith which justifies a Christian is clearly, at least in the argumentative passages, belief of some kind about Jesus. When we come to ask what about Jesus is to be believed, St. Paul's answer is not quite so clear or so consistent. " If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thy heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." ^ Here the two salient points of the creed which saves are the Messiahship of Jesus and His Resurrection : not a word about any special significance in the death except in so far as that death is presupposed by the Resurrection. More frequently St. Paul's lan- guage is even vaguer. He speaks of faith in general, or of faith in Christ.^ It is doubtful whether there is a single passage in which faith is categorically said to be faith in His blood, though one passage is so translated in the Authorized Version.* We should not perhaps be going very far from St. Paul's real meaning if we said that the belief to which St. Paul attributes the justifying effect was belief in the whole revelation of God through Christ, in God's whole scheme of supplying out of His special grace or favour a means of justification to those who had failed to obtain it as of right through the law of Moses or the law of their own consciences. But the variations of his language on this point show how far he is from the stereotyped systems of later times — particularly the Reformation systems. In one passage of the Roman Epistle he actually attributes salvation not to faith at all but to hope.* No doubt, to the deepest religious consciousness of St. Paul faith was much more than belief. If we ask what faith really stood for in St. Paul's inner experience, » Rom. X. 9. ' Phil. iii. 9. ' " whom God sent forth to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood " (Rom, iii. 25, A.V.) : the R.V. is no doubt right in connecting the words with " propitiation," and placing commas before and after " through faith." * Rom. viii. 24. no ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. we may well say that the " new and significant peculiarity in St. Paul's conception of faith is the mystical union with Christ, the self-identification with Christ in a fellowship of life and death " ; or speak of an " unreserved, self- forgetting surrender of the whole man to the Saviour," ^ or of "an intense personal apprehension of Christ as Master, Redeemer and Lord " ; ^ or we may even (with Dorner) speak of faith as " a general expression for sub- jective religion." But these conceptions have little in common with Abraham's faith in the promise that he should have a son when a hundred years old. All such definitions do quite truly represent what St. Paul means by faith in his passages of deepest and most personal religious emotion, but they are not the sense in which the word is used in his formal argument, and it is with this that we are immediately concerned. For St. Paul in his logical moments faith means belief. How and why does faith procure justification ? And what does justification mean ? Does justification mean, as Protestant theology has held, the declaring righteous or, as medieval and Roman theology affirm, the actually making righteous ? As to the actual signification of the Greek word, there cannot be a moment's doubt. The verb St/catotu means to " declare righteous," not to make righteous. Equally little doubt can there be that the whole trend of St. Paul's thought requires that God shall be supposed of His own free grace to pro- nounce men righteous who are fioi yet in point of fact actually righteous.^ The idea of justification (in ^ Both these expressions are from Pfleiderer [IPrimiti've Christianity, i. 347), and are quoted with approval by the Dean of St. Paul's (Dr. Inge) in " Faith and its Psychology." " Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 162. On p. 33 the writers enumerate the various senses in which the term is used by St. Paul, but they do not ask themselves how far this variation affects the logical validity of his argument. ' The original meaning of SiKaiba is " to treat justly, to do justice to," as a judge does. This might sometimes be done by condemnation or punishment, just as in Scot- land a man who is hanged is (or was) said to be " justified " ; and this meaning occurs in Ecclus. xlii. 2 ; but in practice the word is usually employed in the sense of treating just'y the innocent party, avenging him if he is the accuser, acquitting him if he is the accused. Cf. 2 Sam. xv. 4, where Absalom wishes that he were " made judge in the laud, that every man which hath any suit or cause might come unto me, and I would do him justice " (SiKaicuffo)) ; here the meaning might cover the rejection of an unjust plaint, but the emphasis is clearly on the other side, and generally the meaning is to decide in favour of a cause or person. Thus, when the object is a person (as distinct from a n MEANING OF JUSTIFICATION iii this connexion) is primarily " acquittal " : but, when the acquittal has not been earned by the merits of the accused and is due solely to the undeserved mercy of his judge, acquittal becomes practically equivalent to for- giveness. It is definitely a part of St. Paul's thought that God does, in consequence of or by means of the work of Christ, forgive those who have done nothing to deserve forgiveness. So far the righteousness which is ascribed to them is (to use the technical term) an " im- puted," 1 in other words an unreal righteousness. But at the same time there is no idea that God pronounces some men just, treats them as if they were just, and yet leaves them exactly as unjust as they were before. On the contrary the moral and spiritual effects of justification are more prominent than its retrospective efficacy. To put it in the later technical language, sanctification necessarily accompanies or follows upon justification .^ If justification and sanctification are not in St. Paul actually identified, the justification is immediately and necessarily followed or accompanied by sanctification. The effect of this free forgiveness on God's part, when it meets with the response of faith in the sinner's heart, is to make him willing to keep God's commandments, and to enable him to do what he was not able to do before. " Now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end eternal life." * The Holy Spirit was for St. Paul communicated by or at baptism,* and that baptismal cause) it practically means " acquit," e.g. in Solomon's prayer : '* judge thy servants, condemning the wicked . . . ; and justifying the righteous, to give him according to his righteousness " (i Kings viii. 32). ^ '* Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned unto him for righteousness " (Gen, xv. 6, LXX., quoted in Gal. iii. 6 ; Rom. iv. 3, 22). In the last passage the A.V. translates " imputed." The word {iXoyiffd-q) does not necessarily imply that what is reckoned or imputed does not correspond with the actual fact. Cf., e.g.^ i Cor. iv. i : " Let a man so account of us," etc. j 2 Cor. x. 2, xi. 5 ; but when God is represented as " not imputing to them their trespasses," it clearly has the meaning of not taking account of trespasses which really have been committed. There is, however, no trace of the characteristic Protestant notion that Christ's righteousness is imputed to us. 2 " And such were some of you : but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified inl the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God " (i Cor. vi. 11). ' Rom. vi. 22. And in that way the ordinance (SiKaiwfm) of the law was fulfilled " in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit " (Rom. viii. 4.). * Or the laying on of hands if this already followed immediately after baptism. 112 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. profession of repentance and faith, which in those days followed so immediately upon acceptance of Christianity that in the earliest Christian thought little distinction was made between them. And the presence of the Spirit brings with it a moral change of which the baptized is immediately conscious, and which shows itself forth- with in his life. Christians know in themselves that Jesus Christ is within them : those who do not are no longer in the faith.* The presence of the Holy Spirit is the presence of Christ. " No man can say, Jesus is Lord but in the Holy Spirit," ^ and " the Lord is the Spirit." ^ We can hardly even, after the fashion of later theology, speak of faith and justification as the conditions precedent of sanctification : if faith is im- possible without some measure of the Spirit's presence, at least the beginnings of sanctification must precede justification. And the presence of the Spirit must produce good works. St. Paul assumes that believing in Christ involves becoming " obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered." * The death to sin of which St. Paul speaks is thus something very much more than the fictitious payment of a penalty, or the passive acceptance of that payment by the believer : it is only the negative side of a newly created slavery to righteousness.^ " We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live therein ? " ^ It carries with it the reality, and the consciousness, of sonship. " Our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer 1 " Try your own selves, whether ye be in the faith ; prove your own selves. Or know ye not as to your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you ? unless indeed ye be reprobate " (2 Cor. xiii. 5). 2 I Cor. xii. 3. It does not seem necessary for our present purpose to examine St. Paul's conception of the Spirit or of the relation with God's Spirit or Christ's Spirit (which are practically identified) and the human spirit. Possibly " even the Pauline TTvev^a. is in itself a transcendent physical essence, a supersensuous kind of matter, which is the opposite of the earthly, sensuous materiality of the crdp^ " (Pfieiderer, Paulinism, i. 201). It is extremely important to bear such considerations in mind when the attempt is made to treat St. Paul's intellectual notions as eternally binding dogmas for all subse- quent Christianity ; but they do not affect the nature or the value of his strictly religious and ethical conceptions, with which we are here mainly concerned. The idea of the Holy Spirit was of course not unknown to Judaism. " Whatever the righteous do, they do through the Holy Ghost " (Jewish Prayer-book). ' 2 Cor. iii. 17. ' Rom. vi. 17. « Rom. vi. 19, 20. ' Rom, vi. z. II JUSTIFICATION AND SANCTIFICATION 113 be in bondage to sin ; for he that hath died is justified from sin." 1 The last argument would have no force if justification meant merely a counting righteous which was not accompanied or followed by a making righteous. The hearing of faith brings with it the presence of the Spirit.2 The process of sanctification is no doubt thought of as a gradual process — not indeed to be com- pleted till after the judgement — but it begins with con- version or baptism ; the measure of the Spirit which is then and there communicated is an earnest or pledge of a fuller outpouring. He that " anointed us is God, who also sealed us [sealing is no doubt associated with the idea of baptism, if it does not actually mean baptism], and gave us the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts." * The earnest means of course a part-payment which is the pledge of full payment. " As many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ." * Christ here stands for an ideal of life, an ever present influence, not a mere means of escape at the judgement. " God sent forth His Son . . . that he might redeem them which were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." ^ The act of adoption is no doubt treated as a sort of legal sentence on the part of God, an anticipation of the sentence which shall hereafter be pronounced at the judgement, for it takes place once for all when a man becomes a Christian. This idea is forced upon St. Paul in order to make out that God's promises to Israel have been fulfilled : he could only treat the Gentiles as Israelites by applying to them the ideas anciently con- nected with legal adoption,* which made men members of a family into which they were not born. But for St. Paul the idea of this legal adoption is almost swallowed ^ Rom. vi. 6-7. 2 " Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith i " (Gal. iii. 2). " But unto us which are being saved it [the word of the cross] is the power of God" (i Cor. i. i8). ' 2 Cor. i. 22 ; cf. Eph. i. 14 {" the earnest of our inheritance "). * Gal. iii. 27. = Gal. iv. 4., 5. * According to Prof. Ramsay " the legal processes referred to in the Galatian Epistle are Graeco-Asiatic as applied in practical administration by the Romans," rather than distinctively Roman. The Jews had no such ideas about adoption. This is therefore a good instance of the influence upon St. Paul's mind of Graeco-Roman ideas and in- stitutions. 114 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. up in the thought of the moral regeneration and the consciousness of communion with God in Christ which immediately followed. " Ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear ; but ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God : and if children, then heirs ; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ." ^ " Because ye are sons," because ye have been formally adopted by God, " God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father." ^ And the consciousness of sonship must produce actual good works. The most precise statement of the relation between Christ's death and the moral transformation which it produces in Christians is to be found in Rom. viii. 3, 4. We are there told that " God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, condemned sin in the flesh : that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit." St. Paul here passes with such swift transition from the idea of a sacrificial or juridical expiation of past sin to that of an actual destruction of sin's power in the believer that he can hardly be supposed to have dis- tinguished very sharply between the two things. At all events it is made perfectly plain that St. Paul did think of the act of justification as destroying the power of sin for the future, and producing in the believer a capacity to fulfil henceforth the law of God not in the letter but in the spirit — that is to say, to fulfil henceforth the ethical principles implied, if inadequately expressed, in the old Mosaic Law, to obey henceforth that higher law of which love is the fulfilling. St. Paul does teach justification by faith without the works of the law, but never justification by faith without good works. It is only the works of the law — works done in obedience to the law and apart from the new motive power supplied by Christ and the presence of His Spirit — which are expluded from any saving effects. The works of the law are excluded not because they are not good, but 1 Rom. viii. 15-17. 2 q^x. iv. 6. n FAITH AND WORKS 115 because men can never do enough of them to satisfy the old law's requirements. But there is a higher law revealed to the Christian conscience by the indwelling Spirit, to which the Christian is still subject. " So then, I myself with the mind " — the higher part of the man which is acted upon by the Spirit of God — " serve the law of God." 1 This is what St. Paul means by obeying the law not in the oldness of the letter, but in newness of the spirit.^ And such obedience is necessary for sanctification and final salvation. Justification is some- times thought of as a judicial sentence already passed by God at the moment of belief, sometimes as the final sentence of acquittal at the great judgement ; but only when justification is followed by sanctification will the first sentence anticipate the last. Sanctification is thought of as a gradual process : salvation is the completion of that process. Christians are not usually spoken of as persons already saved : they are only " being saved." They are not fully saved till the moral transformation is com- pleted and recognized at the judgement. Primarily salvation means acquittal at the judgement or the blessed life with Christ which follows that acquittal ; though by anticipation the Christian is thought of as already begin- ning to some extent even here the life which will be his in completeness hereafter. Whether the process of salvation will ever be completed, depends emphatically upon conduct.^ Side by side with his doctrine of justification by faith there is in St. Paul a very explicit doctrine of judgement by works.* " We must all be made manifest before the judgement-seat of Christ ; that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, ^ Rom. vii. 25, ^ Rom. vil. 6. * St. Paul's language is still more full of "transmuted Eschatology" than his Master's. " The eschatological living with Christ changes itself, therefore, in the mind of the Apostle into the ethical new life of the Christian present " (Pfleiderer, Faulinitm, i. 196). * Faith is thought of as both a xtipicr/ua or gift of God (Rom. xii. 3 ; i Cor. xii. 8, 9) and a response of the individual will (" your work of faith," i Thess. i. 3). There is no in- consistency in this for any one who does not regard the existence of self-determination as inconsistent with a rational Determinism. Nevertheless St. Paul would not perhaps have used the expression " zuork of faith " after the complete development of his theory of " free grace " in Romans. ti6 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. whether it be good or bad." ^ Only those who have been made really righteous can survive that judgement or "be saved." And thus at bottom the Catholic theory of justification finds more support in St. Paul, and is far nearer his real thought, than the Protestant theory in its strict traditional form. If grammatically and for the purposes of his quasi -juridical argument justification means counting righteous, practically it means for St. Paul a making righteous as well. Justification, in the sense of present forgiveness, may be by faith on/y, but not so ultimate salvation. St. Paul's language often seems to assume that faith in Christ will invariably have all these moral effects. And yet it is obvious enough that if we say that faith is to have these moral effects, faith must be something much more than that mere intellectual assent in which, according to his own formal statements, it ought to consist. The Apostle is generalizing from his own experi- ence. Directly we leave St. Paul's formal arguments and treat his language as a revelation of his own personal religious experience, our difiiculties begin to disappear. In him belief in Christ, submission to His influence, reception into the Church and all the new spiritual influences and experiences which followed upon that reception, did have these transforming effects. The effects of his new conviction were so overwhelming, in his own case and in that of whole masses of other Christians, that it was natural enough for him to assume that the same effects would follow in the case of all Christians. And yet they did not, and do not now. According to the logical requirements of his theory all Christians ought to be good Christians. But they are not, and were not even in St. Paul's day when profession of Christianity cost so much that baptism might well be taken as a proof of real inward change. Over and over again he deplores the moral defects of his converts. Even in his own case he contemplates the possibility that, after having preached the Gospel to others, he might himself be rejected .2 And he never falls back 1 2 Cor. V. 10. 2 I Cor. ix. 27. n MEANING OF FAITH IN ST. PAUL 117 upon the_ device of saying that such ultimate defec- tion, in himself or in others, would show that they had never possessed true faith at all, and never were really justified. The doctrines of "assurance" and "final perseverance " in their Calvinistic form, can derive no support from his pages.^ Thus, if we are to make St. Paul consistent with himself, we must say that it is not all faith which justifies, but only one particular kind of faith. When he recognizes that there is a kind of faith so strong that it could remove mountains,^ and which is yet worthless in the sight of God because it is unaccompanied by charity, he is un- saying all that the letter of the Epistle to the Romans logically implies. If we would penetrate to St. Paul's deepest meaning, we must interpret the teaching of the Epistle to the Romans by that magnificent panegyric on charity which is so much dearer to the heart of modern Christendom than St. Paul's theory of justification. " Faith, hope, charity, these three ; but the greatest of these is charity." ^ That could not be so if faith — in the sense of the Epistle to the Romans — were the only 1 Two closely connected questions about St. Paul's doctrine of Election have been much controverted : (i) There is the question whether it is the Church that is elected or the particular persons composing it. (This is connected with, or another form of, the more modern question whether it is the individual or the Church which is primarily the subject of justification.) The two views are not mutually exclusive unless the suggestion is made that, while the Church was elected and predestined to glory, the particular persons who were to compose it were quite undetermined. Of this view, often maintained by Anninians, there is no trace in St. Paul. (2) There is the closely connected question whether election is to a certain spiritual status in this life — to be members of the Church, to possess the knowledge of Christ — or to ultimate salvation. As to this we may say that St. Paul usually thinks primarily of the former, but he does at times assume that the first carries with it the second. " To predestinate " is clearly to St. Paul the same thing as " to elect," and the elect will be saved. " Whom he foreordained, them he also called : and whom he called, them he also justified : and whom he justified, them he also glorified " (Rom. viii. 30). The first step carries with it all the others. All who are called into the Church are justified, all who are justified are glorified. As a matter of exegesis, the Calvinist is right here, except that St. Paul, unlike the Calvinist, would probably have assumed that all the baptized were converted and consequently justified. St. Paul certainly would not have spoken of one who would be condemned at the judgement as justified. But no less certainly he elsewhere assumes that many Christians might be finally condemned, * It may be suggested that this faith is merely the faith that works miracles and that this removes the inconsistency ; but surely St. Paul would not have admitted that the faith which does this is a different faith from the faith by which a man believes in Christ. And if it is, that involves the admission that St. Paul uses the word in differ- ent senses without explicitly distinguishing them. ' I Cor. xiii. 13. ii8 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. thing wanted for justification and salvation. Once more in this matter of justification, as in his views about the atonement, we have discovered a contradiction — a con- tradiction in words and in strict logic — between St. Paul's theories and his deepest spiritual convictions. It was a matter of immediate experience with him that since he had been converted, had believed, had been baptized, had shared the spiritual life of the Christian community, he had become another man, and had been enabled to fulfil — not indeed in absolute perfection but as he had never fulfilled it before — the law in its true inner meaning, that new meaning which Christ had taught him, and which he so perfectly expressed in the emphatic declaration that all the commandments " are summed up in this word, namely, ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' " ^ For him faith carried with it all these moral consequences, but it did not do so for all who believed ; and yet the theory which he had adopted required that it should. The theory required that faith should mean nothing but belief: in the real experience of the man it stood for all the effects which faith had produced in him — a passionate devotion to the doing of God's will, a sense of union and communion with God through Christ, active love for his fellow-men. Once again, as in the language which he uses about the effects of Christ's death, there is a hiatus between the formula and the deepest experience of the man. Can we do anything to explain this contradiction between the theory of the rabbinic theologian and the real convictions of the man ? I believe that we can. St. Paul's theory of justification is to be explained, as the theory of atonement through Christ's death is to be explained, by the source from which it came, i.e. the Old Testament. Justification by faith was no new doctrine. Whether men were to be justified by faith or by works was a standing matter of controversy among the rabbis, and each side appealed to Scripture.^ St. Paul's theory ^ Rom. xiii. 9. 2 The controversy over faith and works was an old Jewish controversy. Dr. Schechter quotes from the Talmud the words " Our father Abraham came into possession of this world and of the world to come only by the merit of hisfaith " {Jfewish Quarterly Re-vU-ui, 11 SOURCE OF ST. PAUL'S DOCTRINE 119 is based upon the authority of passages in the Old Testa- ment — the erroneous LXX. translation of Habakkuk : " The just shall live by faith" ; ^ the supposed precedent of Abraham ; Isaiah's declaration that " whosoever believeth on him shall not be put to shame " ; * Joel's statement that " whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved," * and the like.* He was driven into the theory by the necessity of reconciling the freedom of vi. p. 41 3), but the contrary view was also common. And so among Christians the same stock instances are appealed to on each |Side (cf. St. Paul and Heb. xi. with James il.). Among the Jews (as, indeed, in St. Paul) we sometimes find both views taken by the same writer. Cf. Apocalypse of Baruch xlii. 2 : "As for what thou didst say ..." To whom will these things be, and how many (will they be) ? ' — to those who have believed there will be the good which was spoken of aforetime, and to those who despise there will be the contrary of these things." But in li. 7 sq. we read of " those who have been saved by their works. . . . They shall be made like unto the angels, and be made equal to the stars." In 4 (2) Esdras vi. 5 we read : " Before they were sealed that have gathered faith for a treasure " ; yet in vii. 77 the angel says to Ezra : " Thou hast a treasure of good works laid up with the Most High." In viii. 32, 33 God is represented as " merciful, to us, namely, that have no works of righteousness " j but " the just, which have many good works laid up with thee, shall for their own deeds receive reward," and in ix. 7 faith and works seem alternative modes of salvation : " Every one that shall be saved, and shall be able to escape by his works, or by faith, whereby he hath believed." (Something like this seems to be impUed in Acts xiii. 39.) On the other hand, in xiii. 23 the saved are " such as have works and faith toward the Almighty." See also Additional Note E (below, p. 13 s). In speaking of St. Paul as a " rabbinic theologian " I do not mean to assume that St. Paul's ideas about the burden of the law are typical of the Judaism of the Jerusalem schools. Even those who doubt whether St. Paul was really brought up at the feet of Gamaliel do not, I suppose, doubt that his education, wherever received, and whatever type of Judaism it represented, was that of a future rabbi. 1 Hab. ii. 4 (Rom. i. 17). The real meaning is " by his faithfulness," i.e. to God's commands. " Is. xxviii. 16, LXX. (Rom. x. 11). This is really the decisive point of St. Paul's argument. " On him " is not either in the Hebrew or the LXX. ' Joel ii. 32 (Rom. x. 13). In Joel " the Lord " means of course God. The use of this passage is noticeable as showjng how little St. Paul had a defin_jte theory as to the particular belief about Christ which must be entertained as a condition of salvation. * Sometimes (cf. Johannes Weiss, Christ: the Beginnings of Dogma, E.T., p. 72) the Old Testament passages which St. Paul cites only prove his point by the aid of some addition, which no doubt for him was really implied, but which is not in the Old Testament at all, e.g. (i) " So also it is written. The first man Adam became a Uving soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit " (i Cor. xv. 45). The first sentence is a quotation from Gen. ii. 7 (the exact words are " the man became a living soul ") ; the second is not " written " at all, unless he is quoting from an apocryphal book. It is probable that St. Paul is here impressed by the exegesis of Philo, who made Gen. i. an account of the creation of man's body (the first Adam), while the second chapter records the creation of the second Adam, the heavenly man who was to appear at the end of history (Joh. Weiss, he. pp. 73-4). (2) In Gal. ii. 16 : " For by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified " ; where Lightfoot remarks : " A quotation from the Old Testament, as appears from the Hebraism oi -iraa-a, and from the introductory Sn. The words are therefore to be regarded as a citation of Ps. cxliii. 2 : 01) diKaiu- BTjcreTai. ivdnriiv m\i was ^Siv." But the whole force of the argument turns on the " by the works of the kw," which is not in the O.T. at all. The same argument is used in Rom. iii. 20, except that there St. Paul, while introducing the quotation, makes it a conclusion from his own reasoning. I20 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. Gentiles from the law with the teaching of the Old Testament, and the dogma of its plenary inspiration. The hiatus is quite undeniable. And yet after all St. Paul had himself in his Epistle to the Galatians done much to bridge it by the simple phrase " faith working through love." This amounts to the admission that it is only when faith produces, as it does not always produce, love, that God pronounces just the man who has it. The Protestant theory of justification by faith — hardly perhaps the ultra-Protestant watchword "justification by faith only " — has on its side the letter of St. Paul's teaching. The scholastic distinction between an unformed faith (^fides informis), mere intellectual belief, which saves not, and a perfected faith (fides formatd) which saves because it produces love, comes far nearer to the deepest con- victions of the man and to the teaching of his Master. Our Lord taught that God forgives the truly penitent. In so far as St. Paul meant by faith in Christ an attitude towards God as revealed in Christ — a devotion inspired by the thought of God's love exhibited in Christ, an absorption of Christ's spirit, a union or self-identification with Christ — which actually creates penitence and love, the difference between Master and disciple tends to vanish away.^ How much modern meaning we can discover in St. Paul's theories of atonement and justification is a question which we shall have to consider more at length hereafter. But perhaps in the light of the contrast which we have discovered between the logic of St. Paul's theories and his strongest moral and religious convictions we can already discern a partial answer to our problem. St. Paul's theories rest mainly upon exegesis, largely mistaken exegesis or mistranslation, of the Old Testament, and are 1 " Ce qui permet de mieux apprdcier la fiiiViti du paulinisme i renseignement de J^us c'est de constater la moindre fiddiitd d'autres theologies. C'est ainsi que le johan- nisme ne fait plus aucune place \ I'id^e si importante de I'appel des p^cheurs par le Christ " (Goguel, VApStre Paul et Jisus-Christ, p. 378 note). This is true enough, except that the contrast between St. Paul and St. John is, I think, exaggerated. The same writer goes on to say : " II enseigne qu'il n'y a pas \ ce salut d'autre condition que la foi, c'est-i-dire le don du ca:ur i Dieu en dehors de tout m^'ite propre de I'homme " {l.c. p. 379). I agree that this is the modern equivalent of what St. Paul teaches. We may even say that he teaches it explicitly, but it cannot be denied that he teaches much else which is not easily reconciled with such a conception of faith. 11 VALUE OF THE PAULINE THEOLOGY 121 constructed in order to reconcile his new Christian convictions with old Jewish ideas which we do not share. The premisses rest upon exegesis : the logic by which inferences are made from them is rabbinic logic : the exegesis is rabbinic exegesis. The most conservative theologian of the present day will admit that we can- not attach much meaning to the exegesis which identifies Hagar with Mount Sinai in Arabia and interprets it of the Jerusalem which now is,^ or to the idea that the rock which Moses struck and the stream which flowed from it was Christ,^ or to the argument which St. Paul bases upon the distinction between " seed " and " seeds " in the promise to Abraham.* Why should we feel bound — as even liberal theologians, especially of the Lutheran variety, often seem to assume — to accept theories which St. Paul arrives at by precisely the same kind of premisses and the same kind of logic ? We must be bold enough to admit that there is an element in St. Paul's teaching — not so prominent an element as it has sometimes been made — which the developed moral consciousness simply cannot accept. We do not and cannot share St. Paul's views about the law, his theories of inspiration, his rabbinic exegesis or his rabbinic logic. Therefore we cannot accept the conclu- sions which he reaches by those means — his theory of atonement through the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ or his theory of justification by belief, in the form which he actually gives to them. St. Paul's deepest moral and religious convictions on the other hand rest upon the deliverances of his conscience, upon what he had learned from Christ, upon his own religious insight, and upon his personal experience of the effects which flowed from acceptance of Christ. And these are of infinitely greater value to us, as they have been of infinitely greater value in the history of Christianity, than the rabbinic theories which even the Church of the Fathers never accepted without large, if unavowed, qualifications. At bottom St. Paul's conception of God's character was the same as our Lord's : it was from Him that he learned it. 1 Gal. iv. 25. 2 I Cor. x. 4. ' Gal. iii. 16. 122 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. But he could not — in a day or even in a life-time — com- pletely rid himself of the old legalistic conceptions which he derived from the religion in which he was brought up and the school in which he was educated. In him the Hberal and universalistic doctrine — the doctrine of Gentile Christianity — which he had learned from Jesus and from the Hellenistic interpretation of His teaching, contended with the rabbinic traditions and prejudices and theories which were not really consistent with the newly found idea of God. He was therefore driven into stating the new doctrine in terms of the old, defending it by arguments borrowed from the old, elaborating theories which really bring back the conception of a God who was not a loving Father but a stern, exacting, and some- what arbitrary Judge who has threatened penalties of which in a gentler mood He repents, and yet who must still keep His word. We shall be most faithful to the spirit of St. Paul's teaching by dropping the inadequate formula in which he endeavoured to make his presenta- tion of Christianity intelligible to the rabbinic mind, and adhering to that genuinely Christian conception of God which the formula unsuccessfully strove to express. Interpret St. Paul according to the letter of his rabbinic theories and we must needs pronounce that his religion was a different religion from that of his Master, and a religion which cannot be that of the modern world. Interpret St. Paul in the light, not of his rabbinic argu- ments, but of those inmost convictions which were dictated by his own experience, and at once we begin to see the possibility of a doctrine of the atonement which is intelligible to the modern mind, and which is as much in harmony with the teaching of his Master as his theories are in contradiction to it. The world can no longer accept Jesus as Lord and Master because He fulfilled the prophecies which were supposed to point to a vicarious expiation through His death, or believe in justification by faith on the evidence of St. Paul's quotations or misquotations from Genesis and Habakkuk. But all that St. Paul says about the unchangeable love of God as exhibited in the coming of Christ, all that he n VALUE OF THE PAULINE THEOLOGY 123 says about the redeeming and regenerating effects of that supreme revelation of God's nature made once for all in Jesus, is confirmed by the experience of thousands both among those who have accepted, and among those who have been very little impressed by, the Apostle's formal theories. Look at the letter of St. Paul's theories in his most rabbinical moments, and the God of St. Paul may well seem to be a wholly different Being from the God whom Christ taught men to believe in by the Sermon on the Mount, by the parables of the returning Prodigal and the repentant Publican, by His life of toil and His death of self-sacrifice for man. Look at St. Paul in his less logical but more inspired moments — at his outbursts of praise and thankfulness to God for the love shown in Christ, at his actual teaching about the character and ultimate purposes of God, about God's love to man and willingness to forgive the penitent, about His presence in the hearts of men through the Spirit ; look at his matchless words of exhortation and his application of Christ's teaching to the practical needs of the growing Church ; — and there we have a Paul who is in complete harmony with his Master. When St. Paul is so understood, Christ's God is Paul's God — a God whose wrath needs not, and never needed, to be satisfied by the death of His own Son, but whose nature, whose love, whose willingness and power to save from sin, have been most fully and finally revealed by Jesus Christ, by His character and by His words, by His life and not least by that one event in which was so com- pletely summed up the spirit of that life, His death upon the Cross. We may even add that without St. Paul's help we should hardly have understood the full signifi- cance of Christ's message and Christ's work — all that He could be to the world, and all that He may be to each one of us who tries to approach God through Him, and to accept the way of salvation which He first opened up. And above all we should not have understood to the full the additional force and persuasiveness which have been added to the Gospel which Jesus preached not only by the life of love which He lived but by the death of love 124 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. which He died.^ The rejection of St. Paul's theory of substitution diminishes littie from the debt which is owed to him by the Church of all ages. ADDITIONAL NOTES TO LECTURE II NOTE A ST. Paul's use of the terms atonement, reconciliation, JUSTIFICATION, salvation, REDEMPTION, SANCTIFICATION What was the distinction between these terms ? (l) Reconciliation {KaTakXayrj) or the corresponding verb is except in one passage (z Cor. v. 20) spoken of as something that happened in the past : " For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by his life ; and not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation" (Rom. v. 10, II, here only translated "atonement" in A.V. Cf Rom. xi. 15 ; z Cor. v. 18, 19, 20 ; Eph. ii. 16; Col. i. 20). Considering the large place which the idea has occupied in later systems, it ^vill surprise some people to discover that these are the only passages in which St. Paul uses the term. It seems to imply something that takes place in a definite time : yet it is not clear at what moment the change of relations between God and man takes place. Sometimes the reconcilia- tion is thought of as effected once for all by the death of Christ or generally by His work on earth (" God was in the world reconciling " — which suggests a gradual process) : but in z Cor. v. 20 he exhorts his readers, though already Christians, " in the name of Christ " to be "reconciled to God"). The use of the aorist (KaraAAayijTe) suggests a definite time in the future, and yet St. Paul can hardly mean to imply that his hearers are unconverted. " Make quite sure that you have been reconciled, and that the reconciliation is complete enough 1 " If to recognize that ' morality is the nature of things 'is to turn it into religion, and so give it an infinite access of strength ; then St. Paul's bold proclamation of the doc- trine that it wras through death only that Christ the Son of God could open up the gates of life, was the most important step ever taken in the development of Christian thought ; for it made the ethical principle of self-abnegation into a revelation of the divine order in the government of the world " (Edward Caird, Evolution of ReligioTt, ii. 20 1). That St. Paul did much to develope this idea, and to stamp it upon the consciousness of Christen- dom, is true enough ; but I have tried to show that it was the discovery of the Apostolic Church rather than of St. Paul alone. I will add another quotation from Pfleiderer : " Thus, beneath the harsh dogmatic form of a vicarious expiation, there shows itself as the true kernel, the profound thought of a re-birth of mankind through the inspiration and renewing power of a divine-human deed of love " (Primiti've Christianity^ i. ^41). In spite of the fact that Pfleiderer was still too much influenced by a survival of the TQbingen theories, and in spite of the progress on the critical and historical side which has been made by others, I should like to acknowledge the value of Pfleiderer's work which it seems the fashion with EngUsh theologians to depreciate. He was not a worse theologian because he was also a philosopher. 11 ST. PAUL'S USE OF TERMS 125 to lead to ultimate salvation," would perhaps express his meaning. St. Paul nowhere sanctions the idea that " conversion " must take place at a definite moment : in fact there is no term in his vocabulary which can be identified with conversion. The Christian life begins with belief or with baptism, and though the two vi^ere in his time closely associated, they could not have been actually simultaneous : so little has he worked out a system which can be identified either with later Catholicism or with later Protestantism. Mr. J. K. Mozley i quotes Dr. Driver's statement that the English word atonement formerly meant "reconciliation," while now it suggests chiefly the making amends or reparation, and remarks himself that " whereas the idea of reconciliation is implied in the word ' atonement,' however the latter be interpreted, the reverse, if atonement is not interpreted as at-one-ment, is not necessarily the case." (2) There are passages in which justification (StKaiWts) seems to be spoken of as still future : Rom. iii. 30 (one God who "shall justify the circumcision by faith," etc.). Cf. Rom. ii. 13, iii. 20 : but these passages are not conclusive, for St. Paul is speaking of the results which were to flow in the future from what Christ did once for all in the past. Usually at all events justification is spoken of as something past in the case of Christians, "being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus " (Rom. iii. 24) ; so v. i (" being justified by faith, let us have peace with God") ; v. 9 ("being now justified by his blood, shall we be saved"); Rom. viii. 30 ("he also justified") ; I Cor. vi. II ("but ye were justified "). (3) The terms " save " and " salvation " are used in such a way that it is often impossible to say whether the salvation is thought of as something past, as present and progressive, or as wholly future. But in some places it is clearly one or other of these. Normally, we may say, it is something future, and is so far something distinct from reconciliation : so in Rom. v. 9 (" Much more then, being now justified by his blood, shall we be saved from the wrath of God through him "). In the next verse (quoted on p. 124) it will be observed that, while reconciliation is attributed to the cjeath of Christ, future salvation is said to be due to His life. This probably does not mean the influence of Christ's life on earth but the action or influence of the risen Lord. So I Cor. X. 33. To be saved means to be acquitted at the judgement. This appears very distinctly in I Cor. v. 5 (" that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus ") and i Cor. iii. 15. But in i Cor. i. 1 8 Christians are spoken of as persons who are " being saved " (o-tofo/xevot). So I Cor. xv. 2 (" by which also ye are being saved . . . if ye hold fast"). St. Paul clearly thought of salvation as a process which begins now and is completed at the judgement. The only instance in which salvation is spoken of as something which has already taken place is in the later Epistle, Eph. ii. 8, " by grace have ye been saved .(io-re a-£cr(Da-/xevot) through faith." (4) The term redemption (aTroAvrpwcrts) is occasionally used in much ^ Doctrine of the Atonement, p. 1 1 note. 126 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. the same sense as salvation, but here there is naturally a more distinct reference to the price paid by Christ rather than to the resulting state of those whom He saves. In Gal. iv. 4, 5 we are told that " God sent forth his Son . . . that he might redeem them w^hich were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." The bondage from which the Gaktians had been set free is explained as the bondage " to them which by nature are no gods " {i.e. probably, in St. Paul's view, to evil spirits worshipped as gods). In Rom. iii. 24 Christians are said to be "justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." In Rom. viii. 23 he speaks of them as " waiting for our adoption, the redemption of our body." Here, as in several other places, the work of Christ (nothing is said as to what part of that work) is thought of as actually producing or causing immortality by its direct action — a thought enormously emphasized and developed by later Greek theology. In these cases the redemption is clearly future : it takes place at the judgement. So in Eph. i. 7 we read " in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgive- ness of our trespasses." Here the redemption might be thought of as something already accomplished, but it is more probable that " we have" means that it is already secured to us. In Eph. i. 14 and iv. 30 ("the day of redemption ") it is undoubtedly future. In I Cor. i. 30 Christ is said to have been " made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption " where redemption may actually be supposed to come last, and to be the consequence of the preceding justification and sanctification. It would seem then that no very precise distinction is made between the use of all these terms : they are aspects or stages of one and the same process. Primarily they all refer to the acquittal at the judgement and entrance into the Kingdom which Christ's work will secure for believers, but all may be used to indicate the present status of believers and the moral effects of that status. These moral effects — the deliver- ance from actual sinfulness — are particularly prominent in the case of " salvation " : and in this case the effect of Christ's work is definitely looked upon as a gradual process but one fully completed only at the judgement. The term " sanctification " still more definitely refers to the moral effects : and here the possibility of a less or more naturally becomes most prominent. But justification and sanctification are not as sharply distinguished as in later Protestant theology. They are so closely connected that no definite distinction of time can be supposed to be made between them, although "justification" is more closely connected with immediate forgiveness, sanctification more explicitly with the continuing process. " But ye were sanctified, but ye were justified" (i Cor. vi. 1 1) : here justification is put last ; in 1 Cor. i. 30 "sanctification" is mentioned before "redemption." In both cases sanctification is treated as belonging to the past. In i Thess. iv. 3 it is progressive and future : " This is the will of God, even your sanctifica- tion." So I Thess. v. 23 ("sanctify you wholly"), and Eph. v. 26 ("that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word "). II ST. PAUL'S CHRISTOLOGY 127 NOTE B ST. Paul's christology The question of St. Paul's Christology lies beyond the scope of these Lectures, but it will be convenient to notice a few points in it which have a bearing upon our subject, (i) St. Paul thought of Jesus as the Messiah, and therefore, in his view of what Messiahship meant, a heavenly Being, the Son of God, who existed with the Father before His manifestation on earth (Rom. viii. 32 ; more distinctly in Phil. ii. 5-7). Nothing is said as to whether the pre-existence was eternal or had a beginning. The world was made and is governed " through Him" (Rom. xi. 36 ; Col. i. 17 ; i Cor. viii. 6). (2) Jesus is always very sharply distinguished from the Father. " For us there is one God, the Father, . . . and one Lord, Jesus Christ " (l Cor. viii. 6). (3) Christ is very closely associated with the Father e.g., in benedic- tions, and is altogether so exalted and supernatural a Being that we may well say with M. Goguel that for St. Paul "il y a en Christ quelque chose de divin." The strongest unquestionable statements of St. Paul on this head are that " God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. v. 19), and (later) that "in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. ii. 9 ; cf. i. 19). There is no place in which He is certainly called God, though it is not quite impossible that in the passage " who is over all, God blessed for ever" (Rom. ix. 5), the last words do refer to Christ and are not a separate sentence.^ (4) Christ is everywhere thought of as subordinate to God the Father, and St. Paul, at least at one period of his thought, looked forward to a time when "the Son shall also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all " (l Cor. xv. 28). The period during which Christ was the Vicegerent of God in the rule of the universe would have an end. This conception would be difficult to reconcile with the Christology of the later Epistles. It is impossible, however, to treat Phil. ii. 6 {ovk a.pTrayp,hv ■rjyrjcraTO rh tlvai tira Q«f) as implying divinity or equality with the Father. It is distinctly implied that He is not equal to the Father ; His condescension consisted just in this — that (unlike the rebellious angels) He did not aspire to this absolute equality, but on the contrary descended below His true position by voluntarily becoming man or at least appearing in the "likeness of men." It is implied that He was only just below, but not equal to, God. (5) It is important to note the difference between St. Paul's position and that of the later fully developed Logos theology. In St. Paul Christ did not, as that theology holds, pre-exist as a Being who was God but not man, and then become a Being who was both God and 1 Titus ii. 13 is probably translated rightly (by R.V.) : " Our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ." In i Tim. iii. 16 the right reading is certainly d's, not Geis. 128 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. Man. It was " the heavenly man " that pre-existed, or (what is for him the same thing) a Spirit — perhaps with a glorious or heavenly body — a body of a line, celestial quality. (This idea is attributed to him by Johannes Weiss, and not without probability, on the analogy of the "spiritual body" with which the redeemed are to be clothed, but there is no passage which absolutely justifies this attribution.) There is in St. Paul no distinction between the human (yet superhuman) Jesus and the pre-existent Son of God. And this implies that St. Paul could not attribute to Him such an identity with God as the later doctrine of the Trinity {e.g. in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas) postulated. Germs of this later theology can be detected side by side with ideas which might naturally be developed into Arianism ; but St. Paul would never have accepted, and would not have understood, the idea that the Father and the Son are but one single Consciousness — " una mens," in the language of St. Augustine. A Trinity (subject to the reserves mentioned above) we can discover in him but not an " undivided Trinity." (6) St. Paul sometimes identifies the Son with the Spirit (i Cor. XV. 45 ; 2 Cor. iii. 17), and practically, especially in the Epistle to Colossians and the other later Epistles, attributes to Him the functions of the Stoic or the Philonian Logos. (The word is not used, though he has the Philonian term €ik(ov.) At other times the Spirit is placed side by side with God and Christ (l Cor. xii. ■} sq. ; 2 Cor. xiii. 14). This shows how far his Christology is from being a completely thought- out system. The explanation of the ambiguity seems to be that where Christ is thought of as a historical Person, a human (though now glorified) Being, He is distinguished from that indwelling influence which is for him equally the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ (Rom. viii. 9, 1 1 ; Gal. iv. 6 ; Phil. i. 19). On the other hand where Christ is thought of as either a pre-existent Being or as the source of the indwelling influence in human souls, the Spirit can be absolutely identified with the Christ or Son of God. Thus he can equally speak of " Christ in us " (Rom. viii. 9), of the Spirit of God (identified in the same verse with the Spirit of Christ, Rom. viii. 9), or of " the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ" (Phil. i. 19). The identification of the Logos or Son with the Spirit is of course found also in some of the earlier Fathers. (7) The clue to St. Paul's Christology is to be found in the Christology of later Judaism. " Recently, as against this view [that St. Paul arrived at his Christology by independent reflection on the appearance of the Risen Christ to himself] Wrede and Bruckner have conclusively shown that Paul, before his conversion, held the belief as a Pharisee, that the Messiah existed from all eternity with God in heaven ; he looked with longing for the day when God should reveal His Son, and with passionate energy put forth his whole strength, to realize that righteousness which alone could bring down the Christ from heaven. Then, in the moment that Jesus appeared before him in the shining glory of His risen existence, Paul identified Him with his own Christ, and straightway transferred to Jesus all the conceptions n ST. PAUL'S CHRISTOLOGY 129 which he already had of the celestial being — for instance that he had existed before the world, and had taken part in its creation." ^ To regard these apocalyptic ideas as the main source of St. Paul's Christology, is quite consistent with recognizing that he may have been directly or indirectly influenced also (i) by Philo or other representatives of Alexandrian Judaism, (2) by the Stoic conception of the Logos which a native of Tarsus must have imbibed with the air he breathed, (3) and perhaps to some extent by the ideas embodied in the " Hermetic Literature," as to which see Reitzenstein, Poimandres, p. 330 sq. The question that interests us here is how far St. Paul's conception of the atonement was connected with his Christology, and to this question a quite definite answer can be given. Many later atonement- theories (1?.^. the views of St. Athanasius or St. Anselm) St. Paul could not have held, for there is in him no such absolute identification of Christ with God, and no such distinction between the human and the divine element in Him, as these theories presuppose. On the other hand the theory of pre-existence as a heavenly and glorious Being is vital to his thought. For it is the condescension of this heavenly Being in voluntarily coming down to earth and assuming human flesh, the flesh of sin — in a way which nevertheless did not involve personal sinfulness on His part — which enabled God, by allowing Him to be crucified, to condemn " sin in the flesh," i.e. to punish with death the flesh which in Adam and his posterity had sinned. And it is this love and humility which call forth that fervent and adoring gratitude which is the source of all the subjective effects of belief in Christ in himself and other believers. In two directions these considerations will be of great importance when we ask how far St. Paul's doctrine of the atonement can be accepted by those whose conception of Christ and His relation to the Father is different from St. Paul's : {a) We must remember that there could not be such an isolation of Christ's death from other aspects of His work as is responsible for the worst features in some later theories. Even when St. Paul seems to dwell exclusively upon "the death of the cross," the thought of the voluntary descent from heaven and the whole life of obedience and humiliation is always there in the back- ground (he became obedient even to the point of death, /^exP' Oa-varov, Phil. ii. 8, but not only in death). Equally little is the thought of Christ's death ever separated from the thought of the resurrection and exaltation of Christ and all the effects of that resurrection upon the redeemed. "We shall understand Paul's thought only if we remember that when he speaks of the death of Christ, the resurrection is at the same time always in his mind. Every one of his declarations concerning the death of Christ really means death turned by the resurrection into triumph." ^ And {b) we must remember that orthodox dogmatic thought has not accepted, nor can any modern philosophical re-interpretation of that thought accept, such an absolute separation of the pre-existent heavenly Being from God the Father, and such a ^ Johannes Weiss, Christ: the Beginnings of Dogma, p. 63. 2 Johannes Weiss, lib. cit. p. 109. K I30 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. subordination of Him to the Father, as we find in St. Paul. St. Paul's theology is only saved from Di-theism (in so far as he looks upon Christ as in any sense divine) by his thorough-going Subordinationism. How far this consideration must influence a modern re-interpretation of the atonement, I shall consider in my last Lecture. NOTE C ON ST. Paul's use of propitiation (IXaa-T'qpiov) IN ROMANS HI. 25 The one passage in which St. Paul uses the word lX.acrTripi,ov of Christ has played such a large part in controversies upon the subject that it seems desirable to deal with it in somewhat greater detail than has been possible in the Lecture. The adjective iXao-xTjpios means "propitiatory": the substantive lAao-TTjpiov means a propitiatory sacrifice or propitiation. Attempts have been made to connect the meaning of the word in St. Paul with its use in the LXX. for the " mercy-seat." The facts about this use seem to be as follows. The word lX.aa-ri}piov occurs in Ex. xxv. 17, where the Hebrew has the words, " and thou shalt make a Kapporeth [A.V. mercy-seat] of pure gold." Kapporeth means a cover, and it has sometimes been supposed that it is used here to imply that this piece of ritual furniture had the effect of covering sin. It seems, however, that its real meaning was simply " the cover or lid of the Ark." The LXX. translators understood it in this way, and rendered it by eTTt^cyua, but they added the adjective Waxn-f^piov as a theological explanation of the term : koX iroujcrcis i\a.vh Th a.p.apTdviiv, De Vita Mosis, iii. 17 : kira. S' ovSiv twi' ev yev€ The Fall and Original Sin, p. 265. n ST. PAUL'S ESCHATOLOGY 139 Paul's view and the Tezer hara on the ground that the doctrine rfegards this tendency as implanted in Adam by the Creator, while St. Paul seems to treat Adam's sin as wilful. But (i) St. Paul says nothing which is inconsistent with the view that such an evil impulse may have been the cause of Adam's fall, and (2) it is not suggested that St. Paul accepted the Jewish doctrine without any modification. The^ doctrine was extremely fluid, and assumed various forms. Originally the notion of a Yexer hara had nothing to do with the theory of a fall of Adam which involved the ruin of all mankind. But in later Jewish thought (especially 4 Esdras) the two theories seem to have a tendency to coalesce. 4 Esdras is the work which exhibits the closest approximation to the doctrine of St. Paul. All the materials for St. Paul's doctrine are to be found in the Jewish thought of his age, but of course his doctrine of original and universal sin could not — logically at all events — be held by an orthodox Jew. To hold a doctrine of absolutely universal sinfulness without a remedy would be to admit that God's promises to Israel had failed. To admit that men could be righteous otherwise than by observing the law would be to go beyond strict Judaism, though doubtless Jewish teachers often insisted on the mercifulness of God. It was just because St. Paul's opinions or his experience forced on him the conception of universal and inevitable sinfulness that he was driven to the idea of a righteousness which did not spring from such observ- ance ; or (quite as probably) his belief in a salvation which did not come from the law left him free to push to extremes tendencies which were already at work in Judaism, but which a consistent Jewish thinker could hardly develope to the full. St. Paul could make sinfulness universal, just because he believed in a remedy which was equally open to all. The really important matter for us is not to determine exactly how much of St. Paul's doctrine was actually to be found in any particular Jewish teacher, but to take note that all the questions which St. Paul discusses were matters of common controversy in the Jewish schools. It is probable that no feature of St. Paul's doctrine was without its supporters except so far as his faith in Christ differentiated his whole position from that of any Jew. None of the writers quoted were so decidedly anti-Pelagian and deterministic as St. Paul ; even Esdras only maintains that few are saved : the Tezer hara does not seem to be irresistible (vii. 92). But from the polemic of Baruch in favour of free-will it seems clear that there were some who denied it, and it is not probable that he was thinking only of St. Paul and his followers. NOTE F THE ESCHATOLOGY OF ST. PAUL I have thought it best not to interrupt the argument of Lecture II. by dwelling upon the details of St. Paul's eschatology, since they do not really affect his attitude towards the main question here discussed, I40 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. i.e. his doctrine of salvation through the death of Christ. Neverthe- less, it may be well briefly to call attention to the nature of his doctrine of the last things, if only in order to illustrate the fact that a vast gulf is fixed between his real teaching and those who in modern times have made the loudest professions of accepting that teaching to the letter. The details of the eschatology varied at different times. It was the belief of St. Paul, as of the Church generally, that Christ would come again in a startling, supernatural manner, deliver or save all Christian believers and admit them to a glorious immortality, while supernatural pains and penalties would fall upon the rest of the world. So much was the Christian hope of immortality associated with this personal coming of Christ that in Thessalonica some were anxious about the fate of those who had the misfortune to die before the Parousia. Hence St. Paul found it necessary to declare that those who were then alive would have no advantage or precedence over deceased Christians. The dead in Christ would rise first. Then those which were alive would be "caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air" (i Thess. iv. 17), and would be ever with the Lord. Here nothing is said as to the fate of those who are not saved. In 2 Thessalonians it is explained that before the Parousia comes there must first be a revelation of the " lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth " (ii. 8). His coming is declared to be " with all deceit of unrighteousness for them that are perishing (rots o.TvoX.Xvfj.ivoi'i, ii. 10) ; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." It is implied that these too will be "slain," or "destroyed," i.e. cease to exist. In I Cor. XV. it is further implied that after the judgement there is to be a reign of Christ — presumably (to judge from indications given elsewhere as to the general belief of the Church, e.g. the Apocalypse of St. John) upon this earth. After this comes " the end when he shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father" (i Cor. xv. 24-27). "Then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all " (l Cor. xv. 28). In this process of subjecting all things under Him, there would be room for some punishment of the wicked besides immediate annihilation. But it seems to be implied that the punishment, whatever its nature, would be followed by extinction, while the saved would enter upon their full life of glory, presumably in heaven. Some punishment of the wicked before extinction seems to be implied in the statement of 2 Cor. V. 10 that "we must all be made manifest before the judgement- seat of Christ ; that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad." There is only one passage in St. Paul which suggests the possibility of an ultimate salvation for those who have not heard of, or who have rejected, Christ here, and that is the passage in which he hopes that all, or at least all Jews, will ultimately be saved (Rom. xi. 32). It may be that he is thinking of the future acceptance of so much of the II ST. PAUL'S LATER DOCTRINE 141 nation as should live to be converted and accept Jesus as Messiah, but this is diiBcult to reconcile with the idea of a speedy Parousia. We must not expect to find in St. Paul a completely consistent theological system. The one thing that is perfectly plain about his view as to the fate of those rejected at the judgement is that there is no room in his thought for the idea of everlasting punishment. It is evident that his argument would be greatly improved, and far more consistent with his conviction that the ultimate purpose of God is to have mercy upon all, if we did understand him to mean that the process of salvation might be begun or continued hereafter in some at least of those to whom Christ had not brought salvation in this life. Possibly, when he wrote Rom. xi., that thought was in his mind, but we can hardly attribute that view to him as a definite doctrine. Even if we do understand "All Israel shall be saved" to include both the spiritual Israelites and at least the good among the Israelites after the flesh, it is probable that St. Paul would still think of the fate of the wicked as ultimately annihilation. It must be remembered that, while all Pharisaic Jews were agreed as to the resurrection of the just, all sorts of beliefs were held as to the fate of the wicked. NOTE G ON ST. Paul's later doctrine of salvation The account which has been given in Lecture II. of St. Paul's view of the atonement is chiefly based on the second group of his epistles — Romans, Galatians, i and 2 Corinthians. It seems desirable to add a few words as to the doctrine of salvation taught or implied in his later epistles. It must not be forgotten that the doctrine of the epistles to the Romans and Galatians was intended to serve a particular controversial purpose. The doctrine that justification depended upon the death of Christ appropriated by faith was thought out in St. Paul's mind as a solution of the problems connected with the obligation of the Mosaic Law. It supplied the basis for his answer to two questions — (i) the theoretical question why the Messiah died, and (2) the practical question why it was that the law was no longer binding — no longer to be observed by Gentiles, not in any strictly religious way binding even upon Jews. On the practical question St. Paul's view triumphed : even the Jewish section of the Church conceded the admissibility of the Gentiles to the Church. In St. Paul's later days the battle may have been largely won ; and, as the stress of this controversy was less felt, the prominence of the doctrine developed in the Epistle to the Romans and the others of the same group began to diminish. Of course he never gave up the fundamental idea — salvation through Christ's death, a salvation dependent upon God's free favour and to be attained through faith. But the emphasis on it becomes less, the antagonism between faith and works less violent j the necessity of something besides faith was more and more impressed upon St. Paul's mind by experience. 142 ST. PAUL'S THEORY lect. Thus in the Epistle to the Philippians the voluntary death of Christ is insisted upon partly as an example of humility and unselfish- ness, partly as the ground of His subsequent exaltation to the right hand of God, which was the basis of all the Christian's hope for the future (ii. 5-1 1). The idea that salvation demands effort becomes more prominent. "God is the cause of your good will and your exertions," he tells his readers, " and that influence of His depends on His good pleasure, but all the same you must work out your own salvation" (ii. 12, 13). He still emphasizes the fact that his own hopes of salvation depend solely upon a righteousness which proceeds from God and is founded upon faith : but God's goodness is looked upon as a motive for perseverance. " I press on, if so be that I may apprehend that for which also I was apprehended by Christ Jesus" (iii. 12). The tendency of this epistle is towards the increased identification of the " imputed " righteousness of God with its moral effects (iii. 9-1 1) — a fact which has quite absurdly been made a ground for disputing the genuineness of the epistle, as if there might not just as well be a development in the Apostle's thought as in that of a disciple ! In the Epistle to the Colossians there occurs one of the strongest assertions of the retrospective effects of Christ's death, the passage about Christ " having blotted out the bond written in ordinances " (ii. 14). But here greater emphasis is laid upon the prc-existent supremacy of Christ and the revelation of God in His incarnation than upon the actual death. Here the Apostle is warning his readers against a form of Judaism; but it is not the Pharisaic Judaism which would impose the Mosaic Law as a necessity of salvation ; rather a Jewish (possibly Essene) Gnosticism which insisted upon asceticism — asceticism going far beyond the requirements of the Mosaic Law. And these things are attacked not so much because to insist on them would involve the false principle of reliance upon works, but because of their spiritual uselessness for one who has appropriated the moral and spiritual results of Christ's death and resurrection. Throughout the epistle the knowledge attainable through Christ, and the moral effects of that knowledge, are more insisted upon than the forensic theory of justifica- tion. " Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom " (iii. 16). The fact that St. Paul could now think of his own sufferings as filling up " that which is lacking in the afflictions of Christ " (i. 24) seems to indicate an approach to a more ethical, and less juridical, way of thinking of the effects of Christ's death. The general tone of the Epistle to the Ephesians is much the same, though the references to an Essene-Gnostic mode of thought are less explicit. The new feature in this epistle is the increased prominence of the idealized Church. The mystical or moral union with Christ which is prominent in every one of St. Paul's epistles here becomes more distinctly thought of as realized in the Christian society. The influence of Christ is so dependent upon that of His Church that the Church is regarded not only as His body but as His " fullness " (TrX'^pco/xa) — that without which Christ Himself (or the revelation of God in Him) would 11 ST. PAUL'S LATER DOCTRINE 143 not be complete (i. 23).^ It would be perhaps too much to say that redemption is thought of as reaching the individual only through his union with the Church ; but this idea — hereafter to be enormously developed — is distinctly suggested by the epistle. Throughout all this quite perceptible development there is ab- solutely no giving up of any one Pauline idea or formula, and there- fore the existence of such a development constitutes no reason whatever for questioning the genuineness of the epistles. The whole develop- ment exhibited in these epistles may be summed up by saying that the tendency is towards an insistence upon Christ's work as revelation rather than as retrospective atonement, and upon the moral effects of that revelation rather than upon the juridical acquittal which it effected. And here St. Paul points the way towards just the development of his doctrine which is required for those who would adapt his teaching to the needs of the modern Christian. To a large extent, as we shall see, that development was worked out in the actual teaching of the later Church. ^ Cf. Armitage Robinson, Ephesians^ pp. 42 jy., 255 sq. LECTURE III THE TEACHING OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY 143 Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us ; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. — ^i John iii. i6. LECTURE III THE TEACHING OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY In my last lecture I tried to show that the true origin of the doctrine of atonement through the death of Christ, unknown to the teaching of our Lord Himself, is to be found in those passages of Jewish prophecy — especially the great fifty-third chapter of Isaiah — which seemed to speak of a Messiah who should suffer and die for the sins of His people. The doctrine was at first accepted simply and solely upon authority ; and for that reason it was accepted without explanation. It was accepted as a fact revealed, in the strictest and most supernatural sense, to the prophets. There was no generally received theory as to the reasons which made the death of Christ a necessity, or as to the way in which that death secured forgiveness to the sinner. I have endeavoured to show that this view of its origin is supported by St. Paul's express declaration that he had received as part of the traditional creed of the Church the doctrine that "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures," and by the fact that, in so far as he gives reasons for the belief, those reasons are simply citations from Scripture. I shall hope in the present lecture to show you that this view is strongly confirmed by a study of the earliest Christian literature outside St. Paul. Everywhere in that literature importance is attached to the death of Christ, though hardly that paramount importance which is ascribed to it by St. Paul and the later theology which exaggerates even the teaching of St. Paul. And as to the way in which it is spoken of we may notice three things : 147 148 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. (i) Wherever in these writings there is anything which suggests the idea of a substituted punishment or an expiatory sacrifice, the suggestion is invariably con- tained in the express words of prophecy — most often in quotations from the 53rd of Isaiah, or in stock tradi- tional formulae which are so clearly based upon such passages as to be virtual quotations. They amount to the bare statement that sins are forgiven through Christ's death, through His blood, or through His Cross ; that Christ was a sacrifice for sin ; that He died " for " or "on behalf" of mankind and the like. The doctrine is put forward authoritatively, dogmatically — most often without defence, explanation, or theoretical development. (2) When and where anything like a reason or theory or explanation is given, it is, for the first century and a half of the Church's history, invariably a theory of an ethical or spiritual kind. St. Paul stands absolutely alone in adopting — though even he does so doubtfully and tentatively — a theory of substitution or vicarious punishment or something very like it. Everywhere else — with one possible and partial exception of which I shall speak shortly — the efficacy attributed to Christ's death is subjective rather than objective, prospective rather than retrospective, moral rather than juridical. Invariably explanation of the traditional language is founded on some appeal made by the death of Christ to reason or conscience or emotion. We constantly feel that the theories hardly justify or account for the tradi- tional formulae which they profess to explain — taken at their face value. These statements about the death of Christ would doubtless never have been accepted upon the basis of mere authority unless they had seemed to be confirmed by the reflection, or by the moral and spiritual experience, of believers. But at every turn one feels that there is a certain hiatus between the formula, taken literally, and the experience which is supposed to confirm it. The dogmatic formula seems at least to speak of some objectively valid, vicarious act of atone- ment : the explanation demands only some subjective and ethical effect exercised by the contemplation of Ill PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY 149 Christ's death or (much more often) of His whole life, teaching, and work. The formula demands that Christ's atoning work should be accomplished in an exclusive or at least a paramount way by His death : the ex- periences testify to spiritual effects derived from belief in or attachment to the incarnate Son of God, His life, His teaching, and His Church ; but not to any such exclusive efficacy of His death as the formula, on the face of it, would seem to demand. (3) Most significant is the fact that St. Paul's theories about atonement and justification exercised almost no influence. We find, in many of these writings, abundant evidence of the impression left by St. Paul upon the Church. The great battle of St. Paul's life — the struggle for Gentile freedom — was crowned with rapid and magnificent success. Even Jewish Christianity soon abandoned the attempt to impose circumcision and the law upon Gentile converts. St. Paul's universalism, his ethical teaching, his doctrine about the sacraments and the Church, less universally and immediately his language about the Person of Christ, made a profound impression upon succeeding writers and upon the general belief of the Church. But the characteristic ideas of the Epistle to the Romans were simply left on one side — partly no doubt just because they were an innovation, and an innovation which stood apart from the main current of the Church's tradition ; partly because they did not altogether commend themselves or fit in with the pre-existing ideas and intellectual tendencies of either Jewish or Gentile converts ; but probably most of all for the simple reason that they were not understood. Even when St. Paul's language about atonement and justification is actually quoted or echoed, the language is used in a more or less altered and rationalized sense. Like the older traditional expressions, St. Paul's own words eventually, though very gradually, themselves became accepted formulae ; and then they too, like the older and vaguer formulae, were explained in a more or less non-natural manner. This was what occurred in regard to the Pauline statements about salvation by i^o PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. the death of Christ, and still more unmistakably with the formula of justification by faith, which was not uni- versally and unreservedly accepted even as a formula. These generalizations hold good, I believe, alike of the writings included in the Canon of the New Testament and of the earliest Fathers before Irenaeus. The Epistle to the Hebrews. There is, however, one canonical book which might at first sight be supposed to constitute a conspicuous exception to this generalization. Later theories of atonement are based quite as much upon the Epistle to the Hebrews as upon the teaching of St. Paul. These theories have in fact resulted from a somewhat uncritical combination of the juridical language of St. Paul with the sacrificial language of the Epistle to the Hebrews. On the face of it nothing can seem more crudely, more uncompromisingly sacrificial, objective, expiatory, than the language of this writer. The principle of the old law was that without shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins ; its one deficiency was, he seems to say, that the victims were the wrong victims. Just as under the old Jewish system, or in any other sacerdotal and legalistic religion, it was of no use to slaughter a goat when the true expiation was a lamb, so the mistake of Judaism was to suppose that the blood of bulls and of goats could take away sin. A much more precious victim was required — even that Messiah or Son of God whose superiority to the angels through whom the old law was given the writer takes so much pains to exhibit. Christ was to " taste death on behalf of every man." ^ He was to make " propitiation for the sins of the people," ^ " to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself,"* to bear, or rather "bear away," the sins of many.* Christ is the High- priest who once for all offered Himself — a new and 1 Heb. ii. 9. =1 Heb. ii. 17, R.V. (A.V. reconciliation). 2 Heb. ix. 26. 1 Heb. ix. 28 {iveveyKeLv) — a condensed quotation from Isa. liii. 11. Of. Stevens, The Christian Doctrine of Sal'vation^ p. 84. Ill EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 151 un-Pauline thought, suggested no doubt by Philo's language about the priestly function of the Logos. The writer is fond of such words as sacrifice, purification, altar, consecrate, sprinkling, and the like, and the references to the blood of Christ are more frequent in this one Epistle than in all St. Paul's Epistles put together. Such is the first impression, but I believe it is an erroneous, or at least a very one-sided, impression. The full reasons for this conclusion could only be exhibited by a detailed examination of the Epistle. Here I can only call your attention to a few of the most important points : (i) It is quite certain that there is in this writer no trace of the idea that Christ's death was a vicarious punishment, and we must not import this idea into our own interpretation of the sacrificial language which he undoubtedly does use.^ It is doubtful how far to the Jewish mind sacrifice ever implied the notion that the victim was substituted for the sacrificer : certainly there is no trace of that notion in this Epistle. Nor is there any suggestion of a sacrifice which in any way satisfied the wrath or the justice of God. Even from the point of view of strict exegesis, we are entitled to say that to the writer, though Christ's death was a sacrifice, the sacrifice was not substitutionary, not what in ordinary modern language would naturally be understood by a propitiatory sacrifice, though the word propitiation is once used ; ^ even the word " expiatory " has associations which are foreign to the author's mind. Wherever the writer attempts to tell us what sort of sacrifice it is which Christ offered, it would seem that it was for him a sacrifice ^ " The apparatus of a juristic philosophy of atonement is not only wanting here, but is incongruous with the method and nature of the author's thought. The efficacy of Christ's work stands cormected, for his mind, with his conception of the supersensuous, archetypal world of reality, of which it is a part. For Paul, Christ's death saves in- directly by providing a way of salvation ; for our author it saves directly through its inherent power to cleanse the life " (Stevens, The Christian Doctrine of Salvation, p. 88-9). 2 Eis t6 iXdaKea-Biu ras afxaprlm toD XaoC, Heb. ii. 17. (A.V. reconciliation, R.V. propitiation.) The verb is used in the New Testament only here and in the publi- can's prayer (Luke xviii. 13), where the passive {VKaadrp-l fj,oi) is translated "be merciful to me." 152 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. of purification. The effects which he attributes to it are purification, sanctification, perfecting — not so much mere retrospective cancelHng of guilt, as the actual removal not only of guilt but of sinfulness. The Son, " when he had made purification for sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high." ^ " By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are being sanctified."^ The only question that can fairly be argued is how far this effect was thought of as resulting directly and objectively from the sacrifice, and how far it was thought of as due to the moral and subjective effect on the be- liever's mind. And to this question it is probable that no definite answer can be given. The two things were so closely associated together in the writer's mind that he did not definitely distinguish them.' (2) There is, indeed, one passage in which the purpose of Christ's death is said to be " that through death he might bring to nought (KaTapy^arj) him that had the power of death, that is, the devil ; and might deliver (aTraWd^y) all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." * This passage supplies the most plausible basis to be found in ^ Heb. 1. 3 {KadapLCT^jv). 2 Heb. X. 14.. It is strange that the R.V. should retain the A.V. " are sanctified." ^ The offering of Christ is compared, or contrasted, with many different kinds of sacrifice. The one High-priest is contrasted with the many Jewish priests " who offer the gifts according to the law " (viii. 4). In x. 1 1, 1 2 the sacrifice of Christ is treated as the reality symbolized by the daily Temple sacrifice (which was not strictly the sin- offering), but is here spoken of as a " sacrifice for sins " (/Afai/ vir^p afiapTLUJV dvaiav) and later as an " offering " (Trpoo'^opd), but the effect of Christ's sacrifice is said to be the perfecting of those who are being sanctified [rereXeicoKev). In ix. 7 Christ is compared to the High-priest entering into the holy of holies " not without blood " — the blood of the goat and also perhaps of the bullock slain as a sin-offering (Lev. xvi. 9 ; cf. Heb. xiii. 1 1). Later (ix. 19) comes a reference to the blood of the victims slain by Moses at the inauguration of the first Covenant with which the book and the people were sprinkled. In the O.T. the people are sprinkled, not the book. The only importance of these details is that they show that (i) the author vaguely thought of all the sacrifices of the ancient law as somehow intended to (but failing to) " take away sin," without much distinguishing between one sort of offering and another ; (2) there is a marked absence of any reference to the burnt offering in which the destruction of the victim is most pro- minent J (3) there is a complete absence of any reference to the substitutionary idea (he dwells upon the use of the blood of the goat slain, but not of the goat sent into the wilder- ness, which might be interpreted, rightly or wrongly, to mean that the sins of the people were laid on him) j (<^) the most prominent effect of sacrifice is with him not retrospec- tive forgiveness, but perfecting or purification (x. I, 22) — present moral improvement. We may remember, too, without exaggerating, the principle so much insisted upon by Bishop Westcott — that blood in the O.T. suggests the idea of life rather than of death. « Heb. ii. 14. Ill EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 153 Scripture for the later theory of the death of Christ as a ransom paid to the devil : but it by no means supports that theory. Nothing is said about payment to the devil, or about the satisfaction of any just claim on his part. All that it does is to attribute efficacy to the death of Christ in overcoming the devil's work — both by setting men free from sin and by restoring the im- mortality which had been lost through the fall.^ But there is nothing in these words which cancompel us to adopt any particular theory as to the way in which that work was accomplished : they are quite intelligible if we understand this efficacy of the spiritual and ethical effisct of Christ's victory. Indeed, the language used by the writer seems positively to suggest that he thought of this victory as accomplished by Christ's resistance to temptation and patient endurance of suffering, and the encouragement which this achievement, combined with the resurrection that followed, has given to believers. It is by the will of God, which Christ came to fulfil, that Christians have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Christ once for all.^ The atonement was effected by the removal of fear and the sense of guilt. On the whole, therefore, this may be set down as a passage of the usual primitive type — an assertion of objective atonement expressed in traditional language followed by an ethical or subjective explanation. (3) We must remember the general aim of the Epistle. The writer is addressing Christians who were Jews by birth or adoption. It was perhaps written at the moment when the destruction of the Temple was threatened or not long after that destruction was accomplished, though a later date is by no means impossible. The writer's object was not so much to combat Judaizing influences as to counteract a tendency to a general relaxation of confidence in their Christian faith. He seeks to con- vince them that the promises of God made to the Jewish 1 Cf. 2 Tim. i. 10, " Christ Jesus, who abolished death " {KaTapyqaavTOi flip rbv BivaTov), and Rev. xii. ii, " Tliey overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb." For the later development of the idea that Christ's death weakened the power of evil spirits, cf. below, pp. 195, 242 j^., 262 .ry., etc. * Heb. X. 10. 154 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. people had not failed, but were already fulfilled in part, and would be completely fulfilled hereafter, by Jesus. What he fears is not so much Judaizing, in the sense of continued insistence upon the law on the part of Christians, as relapse into actual Judaism through wavering faith in the superior claims of Christianity. The writer's Chris- tianity is unlversalistic : so far he is the disciple of St. Paul. But his way of reconciling his hearers to a Christianity which proclaims the supersession of the law was totally different from St. Paul's.^ The old sacrificial system never appears to have had much interest for St. Paul, though of course it was accepted as part of the law : in the Hebrews we hear little of the law except on its ritual and sacrificial side. And the writer exhibits this sacrificial system as originally intended to be merely a transitory and visible type of the new, and only effectual, mode of reconciliation with God which Christianity provided. To carry out this purpose he had to represent the death of Christ as the true sacrifice which would secure the remission of sins, symbolized, but not really secured, by the ritual sacrifices of the old law. The old ritual, as he says, was a " parable referring to the time now present." ^ To develope the parallel, to emphasize the contrast, to show the infinite superiority of the one true sacrifice which Christianity provided, he fairly revels In sacrificial language ; he makes the most of every detailed point both of outward similarity and of inward difference which he could discover between the old ritual and the one true sacrifice to which it pointed. As the sacrificial victims were slain without the camp, so Jesus suffered without the gate of Jerusalem.* As the High-priest entered the holy of holies with blood not his own, so the great High-priest entered into heaven by the sacrifice of Himself.* As the first covenant was not dedicated without blood, so the new covenant 1 " For Paul, Christ has abolished the law : for our author he has fulfilled it. In this matter, as M. M&^goz says, the writer of Hebrews is an evolutionist, while Paul is a revolutionist " (Stevens, Christian Doctrine of Sal'uafion^ p. 78). ^ Heb. ix. 9 : 7rapa/3oX7j eh rbv Katpdv rbv ^vearyiKOTa. ^ Heb. xiii. T I, 12. * Heb. ix. 24-27. ni EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 155 required the shedding of the Messiah's blood.i And so on. But it remains quite possible that in such passages the writer is to some extent identifying himself with the point of view of his hearers, while leading them on to the higher and more spiritual theology which he had adopted for himself. " If you insist that a sacrifice for sin is necessary," he seems to say, " then the Christian revelation has provided such a sacrifice in the death of Jesus." His language is quite consistent with the belief that the sacrificial terms which the writer adopted were to him largely symbolic and metaphorical — un- consciously or even consciously an adaptation to the spiritual needs of men who, as he reminds them very pointedly, were not yet on the highest religious level, spiritually babes in Christ not yet fitted for solid food.^ That this is so, is powerfully suggested by the way in which the metaphor or symbol is so often mixed up with the reality which it symbolizes. It is the conscience that is by the blood of Christ cleansed from dead works to serve the living God.^ It is the heart that must be " sprinkled " * with the blood of Jesus. The blood of sprinkling " speaketh " better things than the covenant of Abel.^ The writer could hardly have indicated more clearly that the death of Christ operates by its moral effects. The carnal ordinances of the old law, he tells us, could not " as touching the conscience make the worshipper perfect," ® and were only imposed — not till a more efficacious victim could be offered — but till a " time of moral reformation." ' There is no notion of the mere cancelling of guilt ; the effect of the ^ Heb. ix. 1 5-20. The argument here turns upon the ambiguity of the word diaSriKij, which means both " covenant " and " testament." The Jews applied the word denoting covenant to the Roman institution of a testament or will, and the identification of lan- guage enables the writer to maintain that what is true of a " will " {i.e. that it only operates after the death of the testator) was true also of the new " covenant " inaugurated by the death of Jesus. I cannot believe that i-jri v^Kpois actually means " when made over a slain victim," as is contended by some who try to interpret the whole argument as referring to covenants and not at all to testaments. 2 Heb. V. 12. ' Heb. ix. n.. * Heb. X. 22. Of. the " sacrifice " of praise — that only sacrifice which still remains to be offered by the Christian (Heb. xiii. 15). 5 Heb. xii. 2^. ' Heb. ix. q. ' Heb. ix. 10 {ji^xpl KatpoO diopdibtreojs). 156 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. death of Christ is a moral effect which could hardly be supposed to operate merely ex opere oferato. (4) The writer was a Jew, but he was a philosophical Jew ; one whose mind had been steeped in that Alex- andrian philosophy which was disposed to interpret, not merely the ritual requirements but even the historical events of the Old Testament as simply types and symbols of higher spiritual truths. His indebtedness to Philo almost beyond a doubt amounts to close literary dependence.^ And this Philonian attitude was only a particular development or application of that Platonic philosophy which regarded the whole phenomenal Universe as merely a manifestation of supersensible, intelligible realities or " ideas." ^ From this point of view the death of Christ upon the cross, though it was in a sense the antitype to which the Mosaic sacrificial system pointed, was yet after all only a visible embodi- ment or representation of some deeper spiritual reality. We may not be able quite definitely to formulate what this reality was : it is likely enough that the author himself would have admitted, on the evidence of the established Christian tradition, that there was a deeper mystery about the death of Christ than he could fully express in words. But it would not perhaps be too much to say that to him that reality was Christ Himself, or the mediation of Christ — not so much the past death of Christ, or any continuing effect of that death, as the present activity of the Christ who died but who is now in heaven,* and who both intercedes for men and directly exercises a saving influence upon the souls of believers, purifying them from their sins and leading them to ' See an excellent discussion in Men^goz, La Thhlogie de I'Ep. aux Hdbreux, p. 197 sq. The writer may also have been influenced by the Fourth Book of Maccabees. See Mr. Emmet's Introduction to his edition of that work {Translations of Early Documents^ Series II.), p. 20. 2 It is possible that for the author of the epistle some of these realities, though super- sensible and not exactly material, are thought of as having a concrete, local reality in Heaven — like the Ark and (for Christians) the Church, which were supposed to be pre- existent in Heaven before their manifestation in time. ^ " La propitiation pour le p&he est transporte'e de la terre dans le ciel. . . . Ainsi la mort du Christ sort de I'histoire et prend le caractjre d'un acte mdtaphysique une fonction sacerdotale, un acte transcendant de purification rituelle, accompli hors de rhumanitd " (Sabatier, La Doctrine de Vexpiation et son Evolution historique^ p. 36-7). Ill EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 157 God — a work which is going on now and will be com- pleted at the Parousia. In accordance with the funda- mental idea of the Alexandrian philosophy, he was profoundly convinced of the necessity of a mediator to enable men to approach God. And for him that mediator was Jesus, the Son of God : but the outpoured blood was to him the symbol of the true mediation rather than the substance of it. The death was essential, because in that way alone could the incarnate Son pass through the heavens into that glorious region in which He ever lived to make intercession for men. Doubtless a high- priest must have something to offer ; but what Christ offered was " Himself." ^ The phrase is notable ; the sacrifice was not His death or His sufferings, not even His life, but Himself or His Will. And it was " through the eternal spirit," ^ be it noted, that He " offered " Himself — in some transcendental, spiritual sense far removed from the more commonplace associations of the term. In another place, after quoting the language of a very anti-sacrificial psalm (" Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not "), he continues, " Then said I, Lo, I am come (in the roll of the book it is written of me), to fulfil thy will, O God." * The sacrifice was the sacrifice of perfect obedience. (5) Whenever the writer attempts anything like an explanation of the way in which Christ's blood has a redeeming or saving effect, he immediately becomes quite ethical, rational, and spiritual. It was necessary, he teaches, that the Mediator should be in all things tempted like as we are, yet without sin.* And His sufferings were necessary both for the perfecting of His own character, and as making possible that sympathy with others which would enable Him spiritually to help them, " It became him ... to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings."^ "For in 1 Heb. ix. H. 2 Heb. ix. 14.- ' Heb. X. 5-7. * Heb. iv. 15. ' Heb. ii. 10. The word dpXTY^s '"'^s specially used of the leader of a Greek colony, who conducted the immigrants into the new country, showed them the way into it, and ruled them after their arrival in it. So the idea seems to be that Jesus, by His sufferings and the resistance to temptation which they involved, was the first to win salvation or perfection for Himself, and so, both by the example which He affords and the help which 158 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted " ; ^ " who . . . though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which he suffered ; and having been made perfect, he became to all them that obey him the cause of eternal salvation." ^ How did He do this ? The old sacrificial language is once again employed : " For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are being sanctified." * But in the very next sentence comes the ethical interpretation : " And the Holy Ghost also beareth witness to us : for after he hath said, This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord ; I will put my laws on their heart, and upon their mind also will I write them ; then saith he. And their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more." A very different covenant this fromi the new covenant of traditional theology ! It would hardly be possible more directly to suggest that it was the new knowledge of God's Will which Christ brought with Him into the world, the increased power of doing that Will, and the consequent outpouring of the Spirit on the Church and on the individual, to which the atoning, sin-remitting, sin- removing efficacy of Christ's work was really due. The thought of Christ as the great example of faith in God and obedience to God — an obedience involving suffering and culminating through death in a glorified life — is very prominent in this Epistle. No doubt it is assumed that there was a sort of ritual necessity or appropriateness in the new covenant, like the old, being ratified with blood ; but the blood-shedding was not the covenant itself, nor is there a single trace of a covenant which assumes the form, " Believe that your sins are forgiven by the blood of Christ, and they are forgiven." The new covenant itself was simply the fuller revelation of God's Will, He supplies, makes it possible for others to follow Him, as it were, into the promised land. 1 Heb. ii. 1 8. No doubt this help is thought of as active help, going on now, not merely the help affordeo by the present knowledge of what Christ has done in the past. For the author, as for the Philonian, the world was full of such spiritual influences, good and bad. 2 Heb. V. S. 8 Heb. x. 14.. Ill EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 159 and the closer communion with God which the coming of Christ brought with it. The way for this communion was no doubt prepared by the fulfilment of the promise, " Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more " : but it is significant that, apart from this quotation, no word exactly answering to " forgiveness " occurs in the Epistle. We hear of the putting away of sin, but the idea of retrospective forgiveness is merged in the idea of present and prospective cleansing, purifying, perfecting.^ It is difficult in reading this Epistle to say exactly where metaphor or symbol ends and spiritual reality begins. It represents a stage in the development of thought in which types, symbols, visible embodiments of invisible and spiritual realities, parallelisms between the past and the present, were things of no small importance. We may even say that there is a tendency almost to identify or to confuse the symbol with the thing sym- bolized.^ And that is because the symbol was often to him more than a symbol. The writer was full of the idea of mysterious spiritual influences exercised through * Pfleiderer insists that the sacriBce of Christ is represented '* as the doing away, not with the power of sin upon the will, but with the tormenting and defiling conscious- ness of sin (consciousness of guilt) in the conscience " (Paulinism^ ii. 67). No doubt this is the case ; but I doubt whether the writer would have distinguished the two things so sharply as his commentator. He does undoubtedly look upon the work of Christ as producing an assurance of forgiveness which no repentance or moral change would have given by itself, but then he thinks of the work of Christ as producing repentance and moral regeneration at the same time that it conveys the assurance of forgiveness. I should say much the same with regard to Pfleiderer's insistence (p. 68) that " the fact that this word (ix. 13 and 14) is replaced and explained by Kadapii^eiv, shows that dytdfetp, or the effect of the death of Christ, does not denote moral sanctification, or giving a new direction to the will . . . But the blood of sacrifices has this real significance, that it ' sanctifies ' those who were defiled with regard to external theocratic purity j that is to say, it places them in the condition of belonging to God, according to the relations established by the theocratic covenant. Accordingly, we are compelled by analogical reasoning to understand the ayidi^eLv, which is the effect of the death of Christ, to mean the sanctification by luhich 'we truly belong to God in accordance with the relations estab- lished by the new covenant " (xiii. 11, 12). No doubt all this is true enough as far as it goes, but it does not alter the underlying implication that the " sanctification " under the old covenant was merely formal and ritual, while the " sanctification " under the new covenant implies a moral change. * How closely he identified the symbol with the thing symbolized and the thing symbolized with the symbol may be illustrated by the passage in which he speaks of the things in the heavens being " cleansed (Kadapl^ecSai.) with better sacrifices than these." Of course he could not have thought of any actual use of the physical blood of Christ (though I have heard this idea defended in a sermon by an eminent scholar of the last generation), but still the writer's " heavenly things " are to him something more concrete than the Platonic " ideas." i6o PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. the medium of visible things. Doubtless he believed in a mysterious necessity for the death of Christ which went beyond anything which he could articulately express. But, so far as his thought is articulate, there is no effect which he attributes to the death of Christ which may not perfectly well be understood of a subjective influence exerted upon the believer by the revelation of God contained in the teaching, character, and personality of Christ, by the belief in His Resurrection and future Parousia and the immortality which it would bring with it. In the revelation which had these spiritual effects the example of perfect obedience pushed to the point of self-sacrificing death held a prominent place. But no theory of substituted punishment or of substitutionary sacrifice, of retrospective efficacy or expiation, can derive any real countenance from the language of the Epistle to the Hebrews — so long as we attend to the explanations which the author offers in his own words, and not to the traditional phrases and formulae which he dutifully repeats. In so far as he attributes salvation to any objective efficacy of Christ's work, he lays stress upon the continuous influence of the risen and glorified Christ upon the believer now, upon His continued intercession with the Father, and upon the salvation which He will accomplish for the redeemed soul hereafter, rather than upon anything already accomplished by Christ in the past. The death was rather the indispensable prepara- tion and condition of the true sanctifying work of Christ than the work itself. When we turn from the language used about the death of Christ to the subjective conditions of salvation, we find the difference between this writer and St. Paul hardly less striking. The writer echoes St. Paul's language, and was not uninfluenced by his teaching. But he can hardly be said to accept St. Paul's doctrine of justification by faith ; for both the word and the idea of justification are absent. The word justification be- longs to the vocabulary of law, and the writer thinks in terms of ritual rather than of law. He quotes, indeed, St. Paul's favourite passage in Habakkuk : " My just Ill EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS i6i one shall live by faith." ^ Faith is no doubt for him, as often in earlier and purely Jewish thought, necessary to salvation : and faith does imply for him, as for St. Paul, belief. But it is primarily belief in God. He nowhere speaks of faith in Christ. " Without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto him, for he that Cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he shows himself QyiveTai) a rewarder of them that seek after him." 2 And faith is with him, much more clearly than in the controversial passages of St. Paul, valued for its effects rather than for itself. The magnificent panegyric upon faith in the eleventh chapter seems at first sight Pauline enough in spirit, though after all it may rather be an echo of the old Jewish doctrine and the stock Jewish examples upon which St. Paul's own teaching was unquestionably based. The faith which saved Gideon and Baruch and Rahab was no doubt belief in the promises of God, though (if the illustrations are really to prove anything) it must include, or at least carry with it, the moral energy or will-power which enabled them to act. But it will be observed that it is not said of these heroes of the old covenant and of the new (as it is in St. Paul) that their faith was imputed to them for righteousness ; or that it actually constituted by itself a new and technical kind of righteousness, entirely different from the righteousness of ordinary morality : on the contrary it was their faith which actually enabled them to do good works, and by these good works (it is implied) they were saved. " Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, waxed mighty in war, turned 1 Heb. X. 38. The writer inserts the jxov which St. Paul omits. The MSS. of the LXX. vary between SlKaios iK iriaTeJis fiou and 5t/cai6s fj.ov ^k ■7ri. aux HS. p. 141). I see no reason to believe that uw6(TTa.ai.s ever actually means a subjective state of mind, though doubtless the assertion that faith is the reality can only be true in the sense that a strong conviction is equivalent to the reality. " Realization " may perhaps be accepted as suggesting this. Cf. Dante, Par. xxiv. 52-78. HI EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 163 the Pauline conception of faith in Christ.^ It is a belief in God's promises which produces patient endurance of trial and persecution, and enables men to do the will of God and so obtain the promised reward.^ We might perhaps infer from the writer's own procedure that the mystical significance of the death of Christ belonged for him rather to the perfection of a Christian's belief, that perfection to which he invited them to press on under his guidance, than to those " principles " or " elements " which a Christian learned at baptism, and without which he could not be a Christian . That there was this mysterious significance in the death of Christ, he undoubtedly held ; but the very fact that the teaching about it belonged to the inner mysteries of the Christian religion suggests that for him the actual pouring out of Christ's blood upon the cross was rather the outward symbol or mani- festation — though doubtless a deeply important symbol — of a more spiritual reality than a sacrifice in the cruder pagan or Jewish sense. The writer would clearly have no sympathy with those who would make the doctrine of an atonement through Christ's death both the begin- ning and the end of all Christian teaching. A misleading impression may be given as to the teaching of the epistle if a word is not said as to its attitude towards baptism. Its teaching is spiritual, but this by no means excludes considerable emphasis on the outward symbols of spiritual realities. The necessity for baptism is always presupposed, although the stress is laid rather upon the act of repentance which accom- panied the immersion than upon the rite itself. What exactly the writer would have thought as to the efficacy of repentance without baptism it is impossible to say : he would certainly have attached none to baptism without repentance and the sincere declaration of belief which accompanied it.^ And the one great baptismal repent- ^ Menegoz, (p. ii) refers to De migratione Ah- 9. 2 " That ye be not sluggish, but imitators of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises " (Heb. vi. 12). " Ye have need of patience, that, having done the vi^ill of God, ye may receive the promise " (Heb. x. 36). 3 M&^goz (p. 147) seems to think that the writer thought of baptism as purifying from ritual impurities committed before the man's entrance to the Church. I see no ground for this theory. r64 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. ance was the only repentance which could be accepted. " If we sin wilfully after that we have received the know- ledge of the truth, there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgement and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adver- saries." ^ This appalling doctrine of the one repentance is found nowhere else in the New Testament, but there can be no doubt as to the intense earnestness with which it was believed by the early Church or that section of it by which the doctrine was accepted. It is one which, not indeed without a struggle, the voice of the later Church has happily refused to endorse. The Petrine Epistles In the first of the Epistles attributed — in all proba- bility mistakenly attributed — to St. Peter,^ there is much emphasis upon the sufferings of Christ — not exclusively, be it noted, the death. The writer emphasizes the fact that those sufferings were foretold by the prophets, and that it was through them that the promised Messianic salvation was to be accomplished.^ He duly repeats the traditional formula about redemption through Christ's blood. His readers are those who are elected " unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ." * " Knowing that ye were ransomed {eXvdpdid'qTe) not 1 Heb. X. 26, 27 ; so in vi. 5, 6. I see nothing to warrant Pfleiderer's attempt {Paulinism, ii. 92) to limit the unpardonable sin here spoken of to a relapse into Judaism. Any grievous and deliberate sin would be included ; but no doubt the doctrine does practically involve something like the later distinction between venial and mortal sins. 2 The great objection to the Petrine authorship (apart from the weak external attesta- tion) is, to my mind, not so much the dependence upon St. Paul, which has been greatly exaggerated, as the style and language of the Epistle. It seems to be admitted by those best qualified to judge (including some who are nominafly defenders of the Petrine authorship, e.g. Dr. Bigg who defended even 2 Peter), (i) that the work was not written in Greek by St. Peter, and (2) is not a translation. It is a fine piece of Greek rhetorical writing. To say (with Bigg) that the Epistle was written by Silvanus in the name of St. Peter is really to admit that the work is pseudonymous, and does not convey the ideas of St. Peter, but of somebody else. It is, to say the least of it, extremely difficult for one man to write a book and for another to supply the language. If the book is pseudony- mous, we must impartially ask what is its probable date, and the tone is certainly much more suggestive of the post-apostolic age than of the apostolic : it is addressed to the " dispersion " in Bithynia and the neighbouring countries, which makes it extremely tempting to connect it with the persecution recorded by Pliny In a.d. iio, though it may of course be earlier than that actual date, 3 I Pet. i. 10, ir. 4 I Pet. i. 2. in THE PETRINE EPISTLES 165 with corruptible things, with silver or gold, from your vain manner of life handed down from your fathers ; but with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ." ^ The reference to the lamb recalls Isaiah ; the language about redemption is also drawn from Isaiah and other prophets. " Christ suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous." ^ And there is an express quotation from Is. liii. and an application of it to the death of Christ : " Who did no sin, neither was»guile found in his mouth : who, when he was reviled, reviled not again ; when he suffered, threatened not . . . who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree ... by whose stripes ye were healed." * But except in these quotations there is nothing to suggest the idea of substitution. The re- demption is, indeed, always stated as a matter of objective fact, but the explanations added are always ethical, prospective, subjective. It was not from the guilt of past sins, or the punishment that was their due, that his hearers were redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, but from a "vain manner of life."* Christ suffered, not to cancel the guilt, but " to bring us to God." ^ The whole object of the Epistle is to exhort its readers to the patient endurance of persecution, and the references to Christ's sufferings are usually introduced by way of example : it is as an example that he quotes the passage of Isaiah about the sufferings of Jesus.^, His readers are told that they are partakers in these sufferings,' as they could not well be if the writer thought of them as constituting a unique, expiatory sacrifice. And the effect of Christ's death is so closely associated with that of the resurrection that it becomes doubtful whether it is not really to the hope and encouragement supplied by that event, or to some actual, objective influence attributed to it, that the saving effects of the death are ascribed. " The sufferings of Christ " were foretold by the prophets, but they are closely associated with 1 I Pet. i. 18, 19. 2 J Pet. iii. 18. ' 1 Pet. ii. 22-25. * ' P^t- '• ^^• 6 I Pet. iii. 18. " I Pet. ii. 21. ' I Pet. iv. 13. 1 66 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. " the glories that should follow them." ^ It is by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead that Christ has " begotten us again . . . unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away." ^ A new feature in this Epistle is the idea of Christ's descent into Hades, and it is important to notice that it is by the preaching of Christ in Hades (nothing is here said about the death) that the disobedient generation of Noah are to be saved.^ Baptism is distinctly spoken of as the source of salvation, but it.is at once explained in a way which makes it doubtful whether it is the outward rite that is meant or the repentance and amendment which it signifies : it is " not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the interrogation of a good conscience toward God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ," * which really has the saving effect. Faith is much insisted upon, but the word is used rather in the sense of the Epistle to the Hebrews than in that of St. Paul. It is faith in God ^ — not faith in Christ. It is always closely associated, on the one hand with hope, and on the other with obedience. It is not faith in a past transaction but faith in a living Christ whom having not seen they love, and in His future Parousia. The end of faith is salvation, but there is no notion at all that faith will save otherwise than by the good works which it produces. " The truth " and " the gospel " are not so much things to be believed, as things to be " obeyed." ^ The influence of St. Paul upon the language of this Epistle has seemed to some so manifest that it has frequently been treated as the chief objection to its genuineness. But it is only the vaguer and wider ideas of St. Paul which can be discovered here : the distinctively Pauline doctrines are absent. There is no explanation of the death of Christ as something demanded by the justice of God, no idea of substituted punishment, no language suggesting expiation except in actual words 1 I Pet. i. II. 2 I Pet. i. 3, 4. a j pgj ;;; ,g_ g^^ ^[_ gpjj^ -^^^ ^_ . * I Pet. iii. 21, 22. The " interrogation " suggests the questions put at baptism. 5 " Who through him are behevers in God, which raised him from the dead, and gave him glory ; so that your faith and hope might be in God " (i Pet. i. 21). ® I Pet. i. 22, iv. 17. Ill THE PETRINE EPISTLES 167 derived from prophecy, no disparagement of the law and its works, no insistence upon the gratuitousness of salvation so marked as to suggest that salvation is not salvation by the works which faith produces quite as much as by the faith which inspires them. After all, the doctrine of the Epistle is rather the common faith of the Church, coloured by recollection of St. Paul's language and influenced by his Universalism, than a reproduction of his characteristic tenets.^ The Epistle testifies as much to the triumph of St. Paul's general conception of Gentile Christianity even in circles pre- dominantly Jewish as to the limited influence of the specifically Pauline theology. The probably later Second Epistle of St. Peter calls for little special notice except for the light which it throws upon the kind of reception which St. Paul's Epistles met with in the Church at large. St. Paul's works are reverentially treated ; but it is recognized that they are dangerous, for they have now been abused by the Gnostics and have to be explained — perhaps ex- plained away. His writings contained " things hard to be understood, which the ignorant and unstedfast wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction." ^ The writer declares that " the long-suffering of our Lord is salvation ; even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote unto you, as also in all his epistles." * This is a very much attenuated version of St. Paul's doctrine of salvation through faith. The tendency of the Epistle is to make the gift conveyed by Christ con- sist chiefly in the knowledge of God ; and practically to identify faith with obedience. God's " divine power hath granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness ; " but the revelation works " through the knowledge of him that called us by his own glory and 1 It would be difficult to prove for certain that the writer had read any one Epistle of St. Paul's, though of course the later the date assigned the greater becomes the probability tliat he had read some of them. The influence of Hebrews is much more unmistakable, especially in the expression " unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ " (i Pet. i. 2). 2 2 Pet. iii. 16. '2 Pet. iii. ij, 16. 1 68 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. virtue." 1 Salvation comes from the knowledge of God conveyed through Christ, especially knowledge of His promises.2 The object of the Epistle is to keep alive the waning hope of an immediate Parousia. And the effect of the Parousia will be that Christians become " partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust." ^ This may possibly be the first appearance of this immensely influential idea — that salvation amounts to an actual deification. Here the effect is attributed to the know- ledge conveyed by Christ — not so much, as afterwards, to any direct effect upon the mortal body of the incarna- tion or the resurrection. There is an allusion to the " cleansing from his old sins," * which no doubt means baptism : otherwise no saving efficacy is anywhere attributed in this Epistle to the death of Christ. The Epistle of St. James We must pass on to that other Catholic Epistle in which the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith is not merely ignored but explicitly contradicted. All sophistical evasions notwithstanding, it is impossible to doubt that the Epistle attributed to St. James is intended as a protest against the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, or at least against the use which was made of it in certain circles. The author does not deny the value of faith in the sense of belief, but he attributes value to belief only in so far as belief inspires action. The case of Abraham — in St. Paul's hands the classical instance of the principle that it is belief which justifies — is turned the other way. Abraham was justified by works " in that he offered up Isaac his son upon the altar." ^ " What doth it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but have not works } can that faith save him .''... Even 1 2 Pet. i. 3. ^2 Pet. i. 3, 4. ^ " whereby he hath granted unto us his precious and exceeding great promises ; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust " (i Pet. i. 4). Cf. ii. 20 : " After they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." * z Pet. i. 9. * Jas. ii. 21. Ill THE EPISTLE OF ST. JAMES 169 so faith, if it have not works, is dead in itself. ... I, by my works, will show thee my faith." 1 And the illustration given of the belief which inspires love and works is simply belief in one God, and this is expressly declared to be of no value without works : " the devils also believe, and shudder." ^ The general conclusion is that " by works a man is justified and not only by faith." ^ Faith and works — not faith only — a doctrine of which we shall hear again, possibly not a very different doctrine from what St. Paul really meant, but one hardly to be reconciled with the letter of his teaching, and certainly not to be reconciled with the teaching which has made a watchword of " justification by faith only" ! Nowhere in this Epistle is there the smallest indication of any special efficacy in the death of Christ. Its teaching about the forgiveness of sins is the simple teaching of the Master Himself: " He that converteth a sinner from the error of his way, shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins." * To Luther this Epistle was a worthless " epistle of straw." And so it ought logically to be to all who hold the doctrine of the atonement to be the whole, or at least the central truth and the only possible expression, of Christianity. We cannot with certainty infer that the writer would have repudiated the simple traditional statements of the early Church about the saving efficacy of Christ's death. And yet it is not at all impossible that it does represent the teaching of that Jewish section of the Church which did not even receive the doctrine that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures : at all events it represents the teaching of a Church in which the Messiah was thought of chiefly as a Teacher, though He was also a Messiah who had risen from the ^ Jas. ii. 1^-18. 2 Jas. ii. 19. ' Jas. ii. 24.. * Jas, V. 20. It may be suggested that the previous words, " if any among you do err [or wander, TrXavrjd^] from the truth, and one convert him," preclude such an inter- pretation as I have put upon the words. I do not say that " wandering from the truth " might not in the writer's view include forsaking or giving up belief in Jesus as Messiah, but the verse would be inconsistent with the whole teaching of chapter ii., unless we suppose that he was thinking primarily of practical apostacy from the moral teaching of the Gospel. The concluding words of v. 20, " and shall cover a multitude of sins," are difficult to interpret. The simplest interpretation seems to me the most probable : " Repentance will cause a multitude of sins to be forgiven." lyo PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. dead, and would shortly come again in judgement.^ The Epistle of St. James has sometimes been disparaged as a half-Jewish and but half-Christian writing. Jewish it may have been in the sense that its Christology is undeveloped : but there is no trace of Jewish opposition to Gentile liberty. Fully Christian it is not if Chris- tianity necessarily means a doctrine about the death of Christ. But no epistle in the Canon is so full of quotations from or allusions to the teaching of Jesus, and no New Testament writing is more full of His spirit. The Pauline Universalism has been absorbed, but not any doctrine which can be regarded as distinctively Pauline. It would be rash to assume, after the manner of Baur, that the epistle represents the teaching of a Petrine party bitterly opposed to the teaching of St. Paul : but it most undoubtedly represents a Church in which his influence was at a minimum. If we had to choose between the debt which the Church owes to St. Paul and the debt which it owes to this Epistle, few would have much hesitation in acknowledging that the greater debt is due to St. Paul. If the admission of this Epistle to the Canon had involved the rejection of the Pauline Epistles, we might have put up with the exclusion of " St. James." As it is, we may welcome the ultimate decision of the Church, after long debate, to accept this epistle, though the accepted view of its authorship is probably erroneous. It represents a valuable protest against the exaggerations of St. Paul, and the far more serious exaggerations which have sprung from his teaching in later times. On two conditions only can any one who respects that decision of the Church contend that it was right in including both St. Paul and " St. James " in its Canon. In the first place, we must abandon the notion that the acceptance of all St. Paul's theories — or even of the traditional language about the death of Christ — is a necessary and vital part of Chris- tianity : and secondly, St. Paul's doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ must be so understood as not to exclude the equal truth of St. James' doctrine of salvation by 1 Jas. V. 8. ni THE APOCALYPSE 171 works — not, indeed, by the observance of all the " works of the law," but by the practice of Christ's own royal law, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The way to such a solution of the antinomy was, as has been already pointed out, prepared by St. Paul's own doctrine of a faith which works by love : but such a doctrine, if it is really insisted upon, must involve the admission that much of the teaching of the Epistle to the Romans requires a good deal of correction, or at least of non-literal interpretation and toning-down, before it can be harmonized with that simple teaching of Jesus Himself which is the direct and immediate source of the Christianity revealed by the Epistle of St. James. By any one who accepts the teaching of this Epistle, St. Paul's doctrine of salvation by faith can only be accepted in a sense which makes it equally permissible to speak of salvation by works. The Apocalypse One other writing there is in the New Testament which has sometimes been treated as a document dis- tinctively representative of " Jewish Christianity," and that is the Apocalypse. In a sense this view of the writing is even truer than was suspected at the time when the Tubingen school attempted to portion out the New Testament writings between the supposed Petrine and Pauline parties : for most scholars would now be pre- pared to accept the view, if not that the " Revelation of St. John " is a single Jewish Apocalypse re-edited by the Christian hand which also prefixed to it the epistles to the Seven Churches, at least that most of its imagery is derived from the language of Jewish Apocalypses which have been adapted to Christian use or trans- formed into Christian Apocalypses before they were put together into this definitely Christian writing. Un- doubtedly in tone and temper this book is more Jewish than any other writing of the New Testament : yet we may easily exaggerate its Judaic character. There 172 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. is no trace in it of any attempt to impose the Jewish law upon Gentiles, or even to insist upon its observance by- Jewish Christians. It is entirely universalistic ; though the writer was no doubt more interested in the twelve thousand who were sealed from each of the twelve tribes than in the great multitude which no man can number, who stood before the throne clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands. ^ Nor does it teach a very low doctrine of the person of Christ : strangely unlike as is the martial Messiah who rides on the white horse to the Logos of Philo or the later Johannine writings, Jesus is actually called " the Word of God." ^ He sits near to the throne of God, or even on the throne,^ and salvation is due to Him as well as to God. Honour and praise are bestowed upon Him, perhaps worship of a kind.* He is the Son of God, but He is not treated as God. Here, however, we are not concerned with the writer's general theology. The question for us is, " What does he teach about the death of Christ ? " And the answer to this question is not difficult. He is simply full of that earlier and simpler doctrine of the atonement which was certainly pre-Pauline, and which was generally taught in churches little or not at all influenced by St. Paul. The doctrine that Christ " loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood," ^ appears in the opening verses of the book — in the first of the letters to the Churches : and the central scene of the Apocalypse itself is the praise of the Lamb, a Lamb that had been slain. " Worthy art thou to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain and didst purchase unto God with thy blood men of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation." * The saints overcome the Devil " because of the blood of the Lamb." ' The " virgin " saints were " purchased from among men, to be the first-fruits unto God and unto the Lamb." * These are ^ Rev. vii. 9. ^ Rev. xix. 13. ^ Rev. xxii. i. * Rev. v. 8-14. '' Rev. i. 5. I accept the Revisers' reading. The allusion to the " ransom " idea will be noticed here and in the following passages. * Rev. V. 9. ^ Rev. xii. 11. * Rev. xiv. 4 (cf. 3). Notice the expression, " the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world *' (Rev. xiii, 8). It shows (a) the feeling of a necessity arising in THE APOCALYPSE 173 the common, traditional metaphors, derived ultimately from the Jewish prophets : the influence of Is. liii. is conspicuous in the very application to Jesus of the term " lamb." 1 But of any definite answer to the question why the death of Christ was necessary, or how it operated to produce the salvation which somehow sprang from it, there is no trace. The way in which the death of Christ is spoken of in the Apocalypse is, no doubt, a significant illustration of the fact that the idea of salvation by the death of Christ lived rather in the imagination of the early Church than in its thoughts. If there is nothing that reminds us of St. Paul in the teaching of this book about the death of Christ, still less is there anything which suggests a distinctive doctrine of salvation by faith. It is assumed that none will be saved but those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life, and these are no doubt those who possess Christian faith. But this faith is conceived of as a very practical thing : the saints were those who " keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus." ^ Salva- tion is not by faith but by works, though it is assumed that none but Christians can perform the works which are necessary to salvation. It is not their faith, but their works that follow the departed souls.* The dead will be judged " out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works." * We need not believe that it is St. Paul or any associates or followers of his that are attacked in the message to the Church of Ephesus as men who " call themselves apostles, and they are not." ^ Nevertheless it remains true that the Apocalypse is almost as un-Pauline as the Epistle of St. James. If we remember its position as a Chris- tianized version of Jewish Apocalyptic, we must not lay from prophecy, {b) that the death of Christ was surrounded by a sense of mystery. The statements about it in this book must not, therefore, be accepted in a too literal and prosaic sense. The actual, visible sacrifice did not take place before the foundation of the world ; it was a symbol of something deeper and eternal and changeless. 1 In spite of the fact that the LXX. Isaiah uses d/iKis, and the Apocalypse apvlov, Swete (on Rev. v. 6) suggests that the latter may come from Jer. xi. 19, or from a non-Septuagintal version of Isaiah. 2 Rev. xiv. 12. ^ Rev. xiv. 13. * Rev. XX. 12. ' Rev. ii. 2. 174 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. too much stress upon its dogmatic silences : but we may safely say that, but for its acceptance of Gentile Chris- tianity, it shows no trace either of the highest or of the more questionable elements in the great Apostle's teaching. The Synoptic Gospels and Acts This will be a convenient place to say a word about the teaching on this subject of the historical books of the New Testament — the Gospels and the Acts — or rather about the state of opinion which they represent in their authors and the Church generally, as distinct from their evidence as to the teaching of our Lord Him- self. As to the Synoptic Gospels it will be enough, perhaps, to say that they all contain traces of the common belief of the Church as to the redeeming efficacy of Christ's death ; but in none of them is there any definite theory, substitutionary or other, as to the source of its necessity or the nature of its efficacy. A necessity in the death is always recognized, but it is more often than not simply the necessity that prophecy should be fulfilled : and its saving effect is always expressed in the language of prophecy. If the passage about the " ransom for many " be not a genuine saying of Jesus, it must represent a current formula of the Church. It occurs, as we have seen, in the two first Gospels. Much has been written about the " Paulinism " of St. Mark; but it is doubtful how far the emphasis upon Christ's sufferings, and upon saving faith, which it exhibits was not rather due to the common belief of at least the Gentile Churches than to any distinctly Pauline doctrine. Whatever "Paulinism " there is in St. Mark is reproduced in St. Matthew, though it is there combined with much that is more Jewish in tone. St. Luke is full of the Pauline spirit in his emphasis on the love and forgivingness of God to Jew, Gentile, and Samaritan : this is shown especially in sayings which he alone reports; but there is not a trace of distinctively Pauline doctrine, or of any special significance attached to the death of Christ beyond the fact that it fulfilled the prophecies. in SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS 175 I have already commented on the complete absence of any allusion to the atonement in the earlier chapters of the Acts.^ Even in the later speeches of St. Peter and St. Paul the references to any such doctrine are sur- prisingly slight. The Hellenistic Evangelist Philip dis- tinctly tells the eunuch that the words of Isaiah about the sufferings and death of the Servant were fulfilled in the death of Jesus,* but he does not quote the passages which suggest vicarious efficacy. Only St. Paul is made to proclaim that through Jesus " every one that believeth is justified from all things from which ye (the Jews) could not be justified by the law of Moses " ^ — but not specifically through His death or through faith in that death : rather (it is implied) through the resurrection which has just been mentioned. St. Peter is made to say that the hearts of the Gentiles were cleansed by faith.* Everywhere the preaching of the Apostles — of St. Paul no less than of the others — is of the Messiahship of Jesus, the fulfilment of prophecy in His coming, His death,^ His resurrection, and the out- pouring of the Spirit, the judgement to come, salvation through belief in Him and obedience to His teaching, the proof of His Messiahship and hope of immortality affbrded by His resurrection. In only one passage of the whole book is the forgiveness of sins distinctly connected with the death of Jesus : and that is in the farewell of St. Paul to the elders of Miletus, who are exhorted " to feed the Church of God, which he purchased with his own blood." ® Here we have the old prophetic metaphor which underlies the use of the term "ransom " in early Christianity, but there is no trace of the Pauline insistence upon Christ's death — still less of St. Paul's characteristic theories about it. ^ Above, p. 76. The expression " hanging him on a tree *' (Acts v. 30 and x. 39) doubtless contains a reference to Deut. xxi. Z3. 2 Acts viii. 28-3J. ^ Acts xiii. 39. * Acts xv. 9. 5 " How that the Christ must suffer, and how that he first, by the resurrection of the dead, should proclaim light both to the people and to the Gentiles " (Acts xxvi, 23), But the light comes through the resurrection, not through the death. ° Acts XX. 28. In xxvi. 18 St. Paul speaks of Christ (at his conversion) as sending him. to preach to the Gentiles " that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me," but without reference to the death. 176 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. I do not of course dwell upon these facts to show that the formula, " Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures," was unknown to the early Church, or to question the immense importance attached to it by St. Paul — at least in the period covered by his letters. But the evidence of the Acts probably points to the existence of a period or of circles in which the doctrine was unknown, and certainly to a period in which it occupied a very subordinate place in the general belief of Christians, especially of Jewish Christians.^ It may seem at first sight almost incredible that such a doctrine should have been accepted, and yet not made a very prominent feature in the teaching of those who accepted it. The explana- tion probably lies in the fact that the death of Jesus was looked upon mainly as the necessary prelude to the resurrection. The resurrection was valued as setting a seal on the Messiahship of Jesus, as guaranteeing the truth of His teaching and the certainty of salvation 1 In definitely Jewish-Christian or anti-Pauline circles it continued to be unknown. There is strong evidence of this in the pseudo- Clementine Recognitions. This work proceeds from the anti-Pauline section of the Church j but, whether or not owing to judicious omissions and corrections of the translator, Rufinus, the anti-Paulinism is of a mitigated and attenuated order. There is no insistence on the observance of the law ; indeed the chief purpose of Christ's coming was to put a stop to animal sacrifices, which had previously been tolerated rather than commanded by God. St. Paul's apostleship is denied by implication (" neque Apostolus praeter nos," iv. 35), and James is regarded as the chief of the Apostles, while the succeeding Bishops of Jerusalem are the chief bishops (" ut nuUi doctorum credatis, nisi qui Jacobi fratris domini ex Hierusalem detule- rit testimonium, vel eius quicumque post ipsum fuerit "). From the beginning to the end of the work there is no special insistence upon the death of Christ, nor any suggestion that salvation comes -through His death, though there is much insistence upon the fulfil- ment of prophecy — a fact which confirms the view that it was among Gentile Christians that the atonement doctrine originated. Salvation is obtained by repentance and bap- tism (i. 39, i. 63). Belief in Christ is implied in baptism, and it is distinctly taught that sins " cannot be purged by any other," but that is because no one else could so powerfully persuade men to repentance and righteousness (i. 51). Belief in Christ means practically obedience to His teaching (i. 33). He is primarily "the true prophet." The most important articles of faith are belief in the commands of Christ and in His teaching about the future judgement. (" Fides autem futurum esse dei indicium credens continet hominem a peccato," v. 3.) Justification by works is as clearly taught as in the Epistle of St. James. ('* Si bene agentes salutem consequi meruimus," ii. 21. Of. iv. 5, v. 6.) Great stress is throughout laid upon free-will. 'The teaching of the writer is everywhere based chiefly on the Synoptic Gospels, but there are slight echoes of the fourth Gospel. Baptism is to be in the name of the Trinity (iii. 67). The Eucharist is occasionally mentioned side by side with baptism as necessary to salvation (i. 63). The writing shows how largely, for many sections of the Church, Christianity consisted chiefly in Monotheism, acceptance of the moral and religious teaching of Christ, and a strong confidence in the efficacy of baptism j but the worthlessness of baptism without re- pentance and amendment is duly insisted upon. The teaching of the Clementine Homilies is much the same, except that the anti-Paulinism is here less veiled. Ill JOHANNINE GOSPEL & EPISTLES 177 and immortality for those who believed and practised it. It was a matter of indifference therefore whether men spoke of being saved by Christ's blood or of being saved by His resurrection or more vaguely of being saved through Christ. Even as regards St. Paul himself the evidence of the Acts (upon the assumption of the Lukan authorship) must be held to show either that his characteristic and distinctive theories about the death of Christ found little expression in his ordinary teaching, or that this side of his teaching ^ was little understood and appreciated even by his immediate disciples. It is probable that both interpretations of the facts represent part of the truth. The love of God as shown by Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection taken together must assuredly have formed part of St. Paul's habitual teaching : but the definite theory that the death was necessary to satisfy the wrath of God against sin was perhaps reserved for occasions when some controversial purpose demanded a further explanation of the Messiah's death than was supplied by the commonly accepted doctrine that it was foretold by the prophets and the necessary prelude to the resurrection. And this distinctive doctrine long exercised, as we shall see hereafter, very little influence even in those sections of the Church in which St. Paul's authority was at its highest. The Johannine Gospel and Epistles The influence of St. Paul upon the Gospel and Epistles of St. John is of a very different kind from any which can be traced in the rest of the New Testament. The influence of St. Paul's spirit is immense. In his high Christology, his developed Universalism, his high and spiritual conception of the Church, his intense appreciation of the Christian ethic, their author represents the culmination of Paulinism. But there is a complete 1 To say " I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified " (i Cor. ii. 2) is not (as is often assumed) the same thing as " I determined to preach nothing but the doctrine of the atonement." Even in his Epistles — which deal expressly with disputed matters — St. Paul has much to say about Christ besides the effects which he attributed to His death. N 178 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. absence of St. Paul's distinctive theories or at least of his phraseology, of all that we specially associate with the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians. The Paulin- ism which he recalls and developes is rather the Paulinism of the later Epistles — especially the two Epistles specially addressed to the Churches of Asia Minor. The char- acteristically Pauline ideas about salvation are not so much either adopted or contradicted as transcended, and swallowed up in a Christianity which was remoter from ordinary Judaism than even the teaching of St. Paul. A Jew by birth the writer must have been, and a Jew not unacquainted with Palestine : but a rabbi he was not, and had never been. The Judaism which for him had been transformed into Christianity was not the rabbinic Judaism of Jerusalem, but rather the Judaism of the Hellenized and philosophical type which is best known to us in the form which it assumes in the writings of Philo and the school of Alexandria.^ His Christianity was that of one who had been in much closer and more direct contact than St. Paul, not perhaps directly with Greek philosophy, but with an intellectual atmosphere to which Greek philosophy had contributed as much as the law and the prophets. ^ What were the effects of this atmosphere upon the writer's attitude towards the Christian doctrine of salvation .'' In the Johannine writings there is a strong under- lying sense of some profound necessity for Christ's death, and occasional suggestions of some mysterious influence exercised by it. In part, here as everywhere, the necessity is at bottom the necessity that prophecy should be fulfilled. The prophecies of Christ's death are much 1 Professor Percy Gardner has recently (in The Ephesian Gospel) insisted that the philosophy presupposed by the Johannine writings is not so much the Alexandrian philosophy as another and similar philosophical school at Ephesus. This may be so, but when Philo supplies such an easily intelligible explanation of the Johannine philosophy, the assumption is hardly necessary. In any case, the supposed Ephesian School must have had much in common with the Alexandrian. 2 Many a modern religious teacher is profoundly impressed by the idea of " evolu- tion " who has not himself read a page of Darwin, of Herbert Spencer, or any of bis successors, and by the idea of development without having read Hegel or any Hegelian. Newman's book on the De-velopment of Doctrine (written ten years before the Origin of Species) shows how much an idea may be in the air and influence those who have read none of the sources with which the ideas are associated in the minds of students. in JOHANNINE GOSPEL & EPISTLES 179 insisted upon ; the writer sees in the details of the passion the fulfilment of predictions in the psalms and the prophets.^ One of the indications of the freedom with which he has departed from the synoptic tradition is to be found in the allusions to the death as the supreme purpose, or part of the supreme purpose, for which Christ came into the world, which are introduced in the earliest days of His ministry. He is pointed out by the Baptist to his disciples as the "Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world " ^ — the old image of Is. liii. which had passed into the traditional Church formula. To Nicodemus, quite early in His ministry, our Lord speaks of the necessity that " the Son of man must be lifted up, that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life." ^ Later on. He announces that He is the good shepherd, and lays down His life for the sheep.* Caiaphas is made prophetically to declare that it was expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.^ In the last great discourse He tells His disciples that He would lay down His life for His friends.* In such passages there is a vague suggestion of some deep mystery connected with the death of ■ Christ ; but, so far as any actual explanation or formulated doctrine is concerned, there is not a word which necessarily implies a substitutionary sacrifice or, indeed, any literal sacrifice at all : nothing that implies that Christ died for man in any sense other than that which a supreme benefactor of humanity might be said to die for men — though of course He is for the writer much more than a supreme benefactor. And all that is said of the effects of that death may quite well be understood of its subjective effects upon the believer in Christ. In the first of the Johannine Epistles the references 1 John xix. 24. (Ps. xxii. i8) j six. 28 (Ps. Ixix. 21) ; xix. 31 sq. (Ex. xii. 46, Ps. xxxiv. 20, Zech. xii, lo). 2 John i. 29. ' John iii. 14 ; cf. viii. 28, xii. 32. * John X. 14., 1 5. It is significant that he does not say " will lay down." The laying down is not confined to the death. Doubtless the Evangelist had in mind the synoptic saying, " He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." 6 John xi. 50. ^ John xv. 13. i8o PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. to the Church's accepted formula are more frequent and explicit : 1 " The blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin." ^ Jesus is described as the " propitiation for our sins ; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world." 3 But even that phrase is little more than a variant^'of the traditional formula that Christ died in some sense as a sacrifice for sin ; the association of the word translated " propitiation " (tXao-/u.o?), or rather its derivative QXaa-Ttjpiov), with the " mercy-seat," if not too much to be insisted on, need not be forgotten in this connexion : and after all the " propitiation " is not explicitly connected with the death. Even if such a connexion is assumed, its use need not mean more than that the death of Jesus is the event by which most conspicuously God has revealed His merciful purpose of forgiveness. So again sins are forgiven " for His name's sake " * — which certainly suggests the idea that forgiveness was in some way earned by Christ's merits. But however much such phrases may be held prima facie to suggest some objective efficacy, the moment the writer, whether in the Gospel or the Epistles, leaves these traditional formulae and speaks in his own words, he immediately begins to think of some subjective effect, of a perfectly intelligible and ethical character, to be exercised on the soul of the believer. The Son of Man is to be lifted up — not to make a vicarious expiation and appease His Father's wrath, but " to draw all men unto " Himself,* to exercise a moral attractive force. It would be impossible to extract from the Johannine writings (if they are to be interpreted by themselves and not by reference to St. Paul or later theories) any other account of the purpose of Christ's dying than this — 1 A fact which suggests that the writer, though the discourses are mainly his com- position, was not entirely regardless of tradition or historical probability and propriety in putting words into our Lord's own mouth. 2 I John i. 7. ' I John ii. 2 (VXaffjuos) : so in iv. 10. The word for mercy-seat is \Xa.arT\fiov. (See above, p. 130.) Cf. the use of iXatrflip"' '" the parable of the Publican (lit. " be propitiated," and so " be favourable "), where any idea of actual propitiation or even of mediation is out of the question. * I John ii. 12. We may for ourselves explain such words as meaning " in virtue of that character of God which Christ reveals," and much in the Johannine writings would sanction such an interpretation. ^ John xii. 32. Ill JOHANNINE GOSPEL & EPISTLES i8i that He suffered (i) to reveal His own and the Father's love, (2) as an example to encourage His followers to lives of self-sacrifice, (3) as a necessary presupposition of the resurrection. " God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son " ^ to be incarnate and (no doubt) to die. " Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." ^ " Hereby know we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us : and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." ^ " I lay down my life that I may take it again."* Outside the traditional formulae there is not a word to suggest any substitution, any vicarious efficacy, or even any objective efficacy. Nothing is said about the saving effect of Christ's work which may not be understood of the moral influence of His life and death. Indeed, most of what is said of the saving influence which proceeds from Christ, both in the Gospel and in the Epistles, may most naturally be understood of His teaching. The water which Christ will give to the believer, and which " shall become in him a well of life springing up unto eternal life," ^ is clearly His teaching, however much the imagery of the baptismal water may be in the background. What our Lord, in the view of the Evangelist, means by the necessity of eating His body and drinking His blood, appears unmistakably from the explanation which immediately follows : " The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit and are life." " He is thinking, no doubt, of the eucharistic rite, but of what it symbolized, the influence of Christ's words upon the heart and the life, rather than of the rite itself. Everywhere the Evangelist spiritualizes the traditional rites and the traditional formulae of the Church : to him they are essentially symbols. It is because Christ has the words of eternal life that His true disciples adhered '^ John iii. i6. 2 Jolin xv. 13. ' I John iii. 16. The words "of God " (omitted in R.V.) are probably a gloss, but they perhaps express the real thought of the passage. * John x'. 17. 5 John iv. 14. I do not deny that the symbolism of baptism may be in the back- ground, but- the saying is as little to be limited to baptism as is " the same is He that baptizeth with the Holy Spirit " (John i. 33). ^ John vi. 63. 1 82 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. to Him when others went away.^ To believe in Christ is primarily to believe His words : " If ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words ? " ^ It is because of the words which He has spoken unto them that the disciples are clean.* " If a man love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him." * A Christian is one who abides in Christ, and in whom His words abide.^ To abide in Christ is to have His words abiding in one. " He that rejecteth me and receiveth not my sayings, hath one that judgeth him : the word that I spake, the same shall judge him in the last day." ^ In what has some- times been called the great high-priestly prayer our Lord sets forth the very essence of His mission, as the Evangelist understood it. He has finished the work which the Father has given Him to do. And what is that work.'' " The words which thou gavest me, I have given unto them " ; "I have given them thy word " ; " I made known unto them thy name." ' It is true that He declares that for their sake He sanctifies or offers Himself, but only " that they also might be sanctified." The word used (aytafco) is sacrificial in its associations, but if a sacrifice is pointed to, it is a sacrifice which all Christians are called upon to offer.* The absence in this prayer of the smallest reference to any vicarious sacrifice which, according to the conventional theology, the Saviour was just about to offer by His death, and which He alone could offer, is as eloquent as any positive repudiation could be. And if we turn to the subjective conditions of salva- tion, what do we find ? Immense emphasis upon belief in Christ, in the Gospel and still more in the Epistles, but not specifically upon belief in the forgiveness of sins ^ John vi. 68. '^ John v. 47. ^ John XV. 3. •* John xiv. 23. ^ John XV. 7. ® John xii. 48. ' John xvii. 4, 8, 14, 26. * John xvii. 19. There is, as M. Loisy remarks, " a sort of play upon words " : the word " consecrate " will best bear the double sense. But we cannot suppose, as conventional interpreters hold, that the word is used in two quite distinct senses. The author is consciously spiritualizing a traditional phrase. The only difference between the two cases is that " Christ does for Himself that which is done for the disciples " (Westcott). Ill JOHANNINE GOSPEL & EPISTLES 183 through Christ's blood. Where the exact content of belief is formulated, it is the truth that Jesus is the Son of God or that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh.^ " Who- soever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him, and he in God." ^ More generally it is simply belief in Christ that gives eternal life. So far the Evangelist was no doubt repeating the common faith of the Church, as well as expressing his own deepest convictions. Belief in Christ was to him the one supreme source of spiritual life. But_ he by no means makes belief by itself the cause or supreme condition of salvation. On the contrary, what he always insists upon is the moral effects of belief — so much so that we may say he practic- ally interprets faith or belief in Christ as obedience to Christ's commandments, and especially to the supreme command of love towards the brethren. " He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life ; but he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." ^ " The sheep hear his voice." * When our Lord, according to the Evangelist, speaks of Himself as " the way, and the truth, and the life," ^ He could not have been referring to any result of His death ; for He expresses surprise that Philip had been so long time with Him, and yet asked to be shown the Father. According to a certain type of teaching, no knowledge of God has any value that is not based upon faith in Christ's death. " He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me " ^ — a sheer im- possibility, according to some, till after the Crucifixion. " Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you " "^ — through the words, not through the atoning sacrifice hereafter to be offered. "If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love " * — not " if ye have faith in my atoning blood." " To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." ' A very 1 2 John 7. 2 I John iv. 15. 3 John iii. 36. The R.V. has substituted " obeyeth not " for " believeth not." * John X. 3. 5 John xiv. 6. « John xiv. 21 ; cf. xiv. 15. ' John XV. 3. ' John xv. 10. ' John xviii. 37. 1 84 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. different purpose from that assigned to Christ's coming by those who teach that He came into the world only or chiefly to die ! " Every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God." ^ Spiritual union with Christ and imitation of Him as shown by love toward the brethren — that, according to the fourth Evangelist, is the one condition of salvation ; nay, it constitutes salvation. Doubtless he held that love of the Christian type could be produced only by the acceptance of the revelation of God in Christ, and in that revelation a death, the self-sacrificing death for humanity, had its place. But, profoundly as the writer was in- fluenced by the Pauline theology, there is hardly a page of the Johannine Gospels and first Epistle which does not contradict the letter of the Pauline theories : while the contradiction of later doctrines which have at times been supposed to be the very pith and marrow of the Christian religion is still more glaring and undeniable. If we think, not of the Pauline dialectic and the Pauline theories, but of the spirit of St. Paul's best teaching, doubtless the contradiction disappears. St. Paul's pane- gyric on charity might, in all but style, have been written by the fourth Evangelist : nor would the latter have scrupled to accept the modified theory of the Galatian Epistle about the justifying effects of a faith which works through love. But this last expression implies a very much liberalized interpretation of the formula which St. Paul developes in his more controversial passages. I must not stay now to ask how much of the language either of St. Paul or of St. John is susceptible of modern re-statement, and I will only throw out the suggestion that, if we put out of sight everything in St. Paul which finds no echo in St. John, we shall be on the way to an appropriation of that central core of eternal truth which underlies them both. After all, the fundamental idea both of St. John and of St. Paul is simply that the death of Christ, the culminating act in a life of self-sacrifice, is the supreme manifestation of Christ's love, and therefore of the love of the Father whom He reveals ; and that the ^ I John iv. 7, in JOHANNINE GOSPEL & EPISTLES 185 contemplation of that life and death gives other men the power, as nothing else has done, to overcome temptation and to lead lives of love like His. That simple thought is surrounded, at times perhaps contradicted and obscured, by an intellectual environment which cannot be ours : for the ideas of a modern man about God and the Universe can never be quite those of the first century : but in that simple idea lies the central truth which they have com- municated to the world. And St. John's expression of that idea can be appropriated by the modern mind with far less modification than is required by St. Paul's. There is, indeed, only one aspect in which St. John's doctrine of salvation requires much modernization to make it possible to the modern Christian. Gospel and Epistles alike are pervaded by a strong sense of a great gulf dividing the Church from the " world " : the world is thought of as evil. Though there is no explicit state- ment as to the ultimate destiny of virtuous pagans, the underlying assumption is that only Christians can be saved ;^ nor can any doctrine of degrees of salvation find explicit sanction from the teaching of these writings, though it would not be very difficult so to interpret them. Broadly speaking, the contrast between the moral condition of the Christian world and that of heathenism justifies the Johannine attitude. The Church was, indeed, the abode of spiritual light ; the heathen world was spiritually dark. But there was no doubt in the best pagan life of the time more light than the writer would have been prepared to recognize — at all events more than he actually does recognize : nor can we easily believe that the best heathen will hereafter meet with no more acceptance with God than St. John may possibly have expected for them. Nor again will the extreme bitterness with which he speaks of intellectual 1 There is, indeed, no explicit doctrine of everlasting punishment In the Johannine writings. There is a general assumption that those who have not believed in Christ will be condemned at the Messianic judgement j the exact results of that judgement are not defined. As to the backsliding Christian, the writer modified the stern doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews by distinguishing between sins " not unto death " and other sins ; " If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death : not concerning this do I say that he should make request " (i John v. 16). 1 86 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. disbelief in Jesus, the disbelief whether of the pagan or of the heretic, commend itself unreservedly to an age too well acquainted with the causes which prevent intellectual acceptance of new truth to suppose that such rejection is always due merely to moral depravity. The teaching of St. John requires widening before it can be pronounced to be perfectly in accordance either with the spirit of Jesus, or with what the Spirit has taught to the Church of later ages. But we may add that after all nothing definite is said as to the ultimate fate of either disbeliever or heretic : no teaching in the New Testarnent lends itself more readily to the expansion which we demand. This is naturally the case with the writer who more than any other has got rid of the narrow outlook associated with the expectation of an immediate Parousia and a literal reign of the saints on the earth ; and who more than any other taught the Christian Church to expect the continued guidance of the indwelling Spirit of God which should lead them progressively to new truth — truth latent but not expressly contained in the teaching of its Founder. "It is expedient for you that I go away : . . . I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth : ... he shall glorify me : for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you." ^ No doctrine lends itself more readily to the kind of develop- ment which all early Christian teaching requires than that of the writer who may be said to have first formulated for Christian readers the very idea of development. I have laid stress upon the prominence which the teaching of Christ occupies in the Johannine idea of salvation. Nothing can be further from my intention than to suggest that the writer thought of Jesus simply as a teacher or a prophet. He was the supreme Teacher, and He was so just because in a supreme degree the Logos — the Word of God — resided in Him : but it was primarily through His teaching that the incarnate Logos brought the supreme healing influence to bear upon ' John xvi. 7, 12-14, Ill JOHANNINE GOSPEL & EPISTLES 187 the world. And in his conception of the saving effect which Christ exercised over the world the thought of His actual present influence is as prominent as the thought of His past teaching. And this present influ- ence, whether on the individual soul or on the Christian community as a whole, is not distinguished from the work of the Holy Spirit — that other Comforter or Helper who, though another, is not another. For St. John the statement that the Comforter would be sent is the equivalent of the statement, " I will come to you." ^ In the Johannine writings the thought of atonement is merged in the higher and more comprehensive idea of revelation — a revelation begun by the historic Jesus, but continued in the Church both through the influence of the words once spoken in the past and through that abiding and present influence of God which may be equally spoken of as the work of the Father, of the Son, or of the Holy Spirit. It is not too much to say that the worst developments of the atonement doctrine arose from the conception of a sharp separation between the three manifestations of God (not in St. John spoken or thought of as three " Persons ") which would have been impossible to the author of the fourth Gospel. " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." ^ "I will not leave you desolate, I come unto you."* "I say not unto you that I will pray the Father for you, for the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came forth from the Father." * With such a conception of God, there could be no room for the doctrine that the Father could not forgive sinners unless He were propitiated or placated by the death and suffer- ings of an innocent Son. The dominant conception of the death of Christ in the Johannine writings is simply that it is the supreme act in that highest revelation of God's love which is constituted by the incarnation as a whole and by the continuing presence of the Spirit.^ ^ John xiv. 18. ^ John xiv. 9. ' John xiv. 18. * John xvi. 26, 27. 5 It is admitted even by Dr. Denney (The Death of Christ, p. 182) that " if we use the word redemption at all . . . we must say that redemption is conceived in the Gospel as taking place through revelation." PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. The Pastoral Epistles The Pastoral Epistles, which in their present form at least cannot, as I believe, with any probability be attri- buted to St. Paul, may be said to constitute the con- necting link between the New Testament and the sub-apostolic writings. They may, indeed, contain fragments of St. Paul's own letters, and they are much influenced by Pauline language. But in spirit they belong, pretty clearly, to a later age. They represent a period in which the teaching of the Church was assum- ing the form of a fixed tradition, claiming apostolic origin, and rapidly becoming stereotyped in simple phrases and formulae, largely designed to counteract the wild speculations of Gnosticism which were now rampant, if they had not yet attained their fullest and most systematic development. We hear of" the faith " or " the teaching " as well as of faith : faith is faith in Christ, but it is quite as much belief in the Church's very simple teaching about Him : and the emphasis on practical morality is greater than the emphasis upon faith. Faith and love are very closely associated together.^ In such writings we naturally find the traditional statements about the work of Christ, and sometimes about His death, but there is little of the Pauline emphasis upon the death. " Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." ^ " Great is the mystery of godliness ; He who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory." * It is remarkable that in this last early liturgical fragment — which may very well be spoken of as the first trace of a liturgical as distinct from a baptismal creed — there is no express mention of the death. The doctrine of the Church is identified with the actual sayings of Christ : " If any man teacheth a different doctrine, and consenteth 1 I Tim. i. 14, ii. 15, iv. iz. 2 I Tim. i. 15. ' I Tim. iii. 1 6. It is generally recognized that the true reading here is gs, not 9e6s. Ill THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS 189 not to sound words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 In the first Epistle to Timothy the only doctrinal reference to the death of Christ is the state- ment that there is " one mediator between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all." ^ In the second Epistle we have an echo of the Pauline doctrine of dying with Christ which seems to have passed into a Christian hymn : " If we died with him, we shall also live with him." * In the Epistle to Titus the writer speaks of Christ as having given " himself for us, that he might redeem us (Xvrpd)- a-TjTai) from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a people for his own possession," * and of God our Saviour as having saved us "not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but according to His mercy . . . through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost." ^ That there should be such scanty traces of any distinctly Pauline doctrine in Epistles which were put forward in his name is good testimony to the slight influence exercised by the distinctively Pauline theology even in Churches which greatly reverenced his name. Here we have just the traditional statements and metaphors accepted by the Church, and a few traces of distinctively Pauline language ; but there is no attempt to insist upon any distinctively Pauline theory or explanation of Christ's death, or to substitute any other for it. The Pauline theories have not yet become part of the Church's really operative theology. The Apostolic Fathers and Apologists What has been said about the attitude of the non- Pauline Epistles towards the death of Christ holds ' I Tim. vi. 3. 2 I Tim. ii. 5. The word is avrlXuTpov, not as in Matt.-Mk. XiTpoy. Hence the passage must be regarded as an independent reproduction of the traditional phrase rather than as a quotation. The substitution of " all " for " many " is noticeable : the origin of the phrase in Is. liii. has been forgotten. The historic fact of the death is mentioned in vi. 13. ' 2 Tim. ii. 11. * Titus ii. 14. It will be noticed that here, as elsewhere in early writings, the emphasis is rather on what Christians were redeemed or purchased /or than on what they were redeemed yrow. s Titus iii. 5. I90 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. equally of the Apostolic Fathers, and of Justin and other writers up to Irenaeus. In some of them, indeed, there is nothing to connect salvation with the death of Christ. That is so in the short writings known as the Didache and the 2nd Epistle of Clement, and in the much longer Shepherd of Hernias^ which is entirely occupied with repentance, forgiveness, and salvation. But in most of them we find the accustomed quotations from pro- phecy, and the traditional formulae which are based upon them. We are told by Ignatius, for instance, that "the Cross is salvation and life eternal";^ and by Clement of Rome that the spies promised to save Rahab and her family when they saw the scarlet wool in the window (observe how the authority for the atonement always comes from the Old Testament) " making it plain that it is through the blood of the Lord that there shall be redemption to all who believe and hope in the Lord." ' In Clement again we read : " On account of the love which he had for us Jesus Christ our Lord gave his blood on our behalf, and his flesh for our flesh, and his life for our life."* Ignatius tells us that even for the angels, " if they do not believe in the blood of Christ, for them also judgement is appointed." * The references to the blood of Christ are peculiarly frequent in this writer, and he is one of the very few at all early writers who ever define the belief which saves as belief in the blood or death of Christ.^ In most of these writers the traditional phrases about the sacrificial ^ " He has purified their sins at the cost of many labours and sufferings " (Sim. 5, vi. 2) — an echo of Hebrews — can hardly be regarded as an exception. ^ Tlepl^Tlfi,a t6 ifiAv Trvevixa rod a-ravpou, 8 i(TTLv aKdvSaXov roh a.TruTToDcnr', tj/uv S^ (r(i)r7}f}ia koX fw^ atdjvLos {Eph. xviii. i). ^ Jl.pbhf\Koy TTOtouvre^ Htl 8ta roO a'1/j.aTos rod Kvpiou \ijTpoi(7LS ^arai iraaiv tols Tn<7Tevov(nv Kol ^\irl^ov(7Lv iirl rbv Bebv (i Cor. xii. 7), * Aii TT)v 6,y6,Trr)v, fiv iaxev wpb^ •^/"Ss, rb alfia airoO 'iSoiKev virip i]/x.uiv Jijaovs Xpwrbs 6 KipLos ripiioi/ iv dekiiimn Qeov, Kal t^v trapKo. iiirkp t^s rrapKhs Tjfiwv Kdl T7]V \pvxn>' i'^^P '■">' i'vx^" V/J-Siv (i Cor. xlix. 6). In i Cor. ii. i the Traffrifnara. airoS refer, according to the common reading, to God (tou 9eou), but there is a variant XpiffToO. Lightfoot reads GeoO ; Loofs and others Xpio-roO. If 9eou be the right reading (as is probably the case), Clement uses language which would afterwards have been considered Sabellian. ^ M7;5els irXavdirdoi ■ Kal to, iirovpavia, Kal t) Sb^a tSiv dyyiXoiv Kal oi dpyovrei oparoi re Kal dbpaToi, idv pLij TntTTe{)ij3(jiv els rd alfia XptirroC [toO GeoiJ] KaKctvois KpltTLS itrrh (Smyrn. vi.). ' Tie Si' ■ii/j.as iirodavbvTa tva Tnareiaavres els rbv Bdnarov airov t6 diroBaveTv iK(j>iyriTe [Trail, ii.). Ill THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS 191 character of the death can be found. But as soon as they attempt to explain precisely how the death of Christ contributes to the forgiveness of sins, it is always some subjective, ethical, and quite intelligible effect upon the believer to which the saving efficacy is attributed. Here it will be as well to enumerate the different reasons which are given in these writings for the death of Christ. They have for the most part already been met with in the canonical writings which we have examined, but they are now more definitely formulated, so as to constitute some nearer approach to a theory on the subject. (i) The death of Christ is treated as a necessary element in the incarnation. Christ would not have been man, if He had not died. And particularly the death is appealed to as a refutation of that earliest of heresies, the Docetism which denied the reality of Christ's body, and consequently of His true humanity. "All these things," says Ignatius, " He suffered for our sakes ; and He truly suffered, as also He truly raised Himself." ^ Christ died, in the words of Justin, "showing by these things that he has become truly a man capable of suffering." ^ (2) In so far as any further a -priori necessity for Christ's death is recognized, it is, as a rule, simply the necessity that prophecy should be fulfilled. The argu- ment from the fulfilment of prophecy impressed Jew and Greek alike to an extent which is startling to those who are accustomed to read ancient writings with a critical eye.^ The exact fulfilment of the prophecies by the death of the Messiah was therefore to the ancient Church a particularly convincing proof that He was the Messiah or Son of God. Allusions to the detailed accompani- ments of His death were found in the most irrelevant expressions of psalmist or historian — such as the horns '^ TaOra 7ap -kLvto. Stradev 5t* ijfias \tva v dvop-iCiv rov 'KaoO dx^iiceTai els Bivarov Kal (iTi.fj.ui6ripbvTjpo(!ivri irapd 9e((j lirx^^h tI dydin] dyvti irapd tcJj Gey duvarai, iriis 6 06^os avToS Ka\6s Kal fi^yas Kal aui^av irdyras tous iv auri^ oirfws dvaaTpe(j>ofiivom iv Kaffap^ dMfoiq. (i Cor. xxi. 8). Ill THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS 197 Ignatius is the most dogmatic of this whole group of writers. He is therefore the most popular with many modern theologians. He insists strenuously on the necessity of orthodox belief, as he understood it : and more than any other of the Apostolic Fathers he em- phasizes the necessity of the belief in Christ's death. The death of Christ is with him one of the " three mysteries of a cry " ' — that is, mysteries which caused men to cry out, amazing mysteries — the other two being " the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing." He tells us that even for angels the law holds that, " if they do not believe in the blood of Christ, for them too judgement is appointed." ^ Yet even for Ignatius " Faith is your guide, love is the way that leads to the Father." * The most formal definition of the conditions of salvation which he reaches is that " faith is the beginning of life ; love is the end thereof."* Ignatius may certainly be cited in defence of the formula, often accepted by later Catholic orthodoxy, that salvation is by faith and works. So Theophilus speaks of him who is well-pleasing to God " through faith and righteousness and the doing of good works." ^ Some writers go further. Barnabas does not hesitate even to exhort his reader either to save his soul by preaching the word "or by labouring with thy hands thou shalt work unto the ransom of thy sins." ^ Even when salvation is attributed to faith, faith is (as already in Hebrews) practically identified with obedience to the commandments of God or of Christ. ' Kai IXaBey rbv Hpxavra tov alwvos Toirov tj irapdevla. Mapias, koX 6 xo/cfris a^TJs, dfwi(tJS Kai 6 ddvaros tov Kvpiov rpia iivarripia KpavyTJs, b.TLva. ev ri"7S Kai rkXos • dpxv fJ-^v TriaTis, rfkos Si dydirq {Efh. xiv. i). 5 Ad Autolycum ii. 38. There is absolutely no allusion to the atonement in this Apology of three books (c. a.d. 170), while there is a fairly full account of the doctrine of the Logos. ' Aii X670U KoinOiv Kai Tropevx&P^evos els t6 vapaKaXkaai. Kai fieXerQv els t6 uQixai. TT)v ^vxT]v T(^ \6yip ft 5ia tGiv x^i-P^^ '^°^ kpydaT} els Xijrpov dfiapTLWV aov {Barn. xix. 10). 198 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY lect. Thus according to Hermas, one of the seven women who surround the tower of the Church " is called Faith : it is through her that the elect of God are saved." ^ But this does not prevent his saying that the commandments are " good and strong and glad and glorious and able to save the soul of a man " 2 — ^very un-Pauline teaching. The idea that a man cannot keep all the commandments of God tends to prevent their being kept.* Of those who have suffered " for the name " he says that their sins were forgiven because they suffered on account of the name of the Son of God.* Still more un-Pauline, and here we must add unevangelical, is the doctrine that it is possible for a man to earn additional glory by doing more than is commanded.^ Works are insisted upon just as strenuously as faith : " Do thy work," he says, " and thou shalt be saved." ^ Elsewhere sal- vation is attributed to the fear of God which produces good works.' At times, in all these writers, the saving efficacy of Christ's work is made to consist mainly — sometimes wholly — in His teaching. Accord- ing to the author — probably a layman or possibly a Reader ^ — of the Homily misnamed the 2nd Epistle of Clement, " Christ willed to save those who were being lost, and He saved many," but He saved simply " by ^ 'H /xev TrptbrT] a(iru:v, i] Kparouaa riis x^ipas, Ilfcrris KaXelrai' Sta ratjnis ffib^ovrat ol iK\€KTol ToO QeoO [Vis. 3, viii. 3). Self-control {^yKpaTsia), is a daughter of faith : simplicity, knowledge, guilelessness, gravity, love (air\6Ti]s, iTnaT-fiii-q, d/ca/cia, (Te/j-vdrrj!, ayi.Tn)) are " daughters one of the other " {Vis. 3, viii.). ^ 'Zv'^rfrCiv irepl tCiv ifroXoiv, 6tl Ka\al Kal Svvaral /cat IKctpal Kal ^vdo^oi Kal dvvd^euai irwtrai i/'i'X^*' AvSpuiirou {Sim. 6, i. i). ^ NOi' 5^ aoL \4yoj ' iav raijras yU.^ ^u\d^j]s, dXXd irapevdvfiTjdTJs, oix ^^ets (roiT-fiptav^ oiire rd riicva v\6.' 6, 7). ^ MerA 77?^ kKt}(7iv iKeLvrfV {i.e, after the baptismal repentance) t^v /jLeyaXrjv Kal aep^v^v idv ns . , . a/Maprijajit /xiav fxerdvotav Ix^^ {Mand. 4, iii. 6). in SUMMARY 205 the moon : but if we do not the will of God, we shall belong to the Church of which the Scripture said : ' My house has become a den of thieves.' " ^ There must, of course, have been every degree of materialism and every degree of spiritualism in the way in which these things were understood in the primitive Church. Doubtless there were simple Christians who thought of the washing away of sins in baptism in almost as mechanical a fashion as that in which the pagan devotee thought of the Tauro- bolium or the Mithraic baptism, though no Christian would have denied that real repentance was necessary to give efficacy to the rite. On the other hand the theologians who have come down to us represent naturally the views which prevailed among the more intelligent Christians : and in them the tendency, without any actual denial of traditional beliefs, is always — in this early period — towards a moralizing and spiritualizing inter- pretation both of the atonement once for all effected through Christ and of the process by which its efficacy is brought to bear upon the individual soul. And now I will endeavour to sum up the results at which we have arrived : (i) We have seen that the way in which the atoning effects of the death of Christ are spoken of by the early Christian writers of the first century and a half of the Church's life strongly confirms our view that the doctrine originated in the language of prophecy, and was adopted on authority, not in the first instance as the result either of reflection or of any kind of religious experience, how- ever much reflection and experience may subsequently have been called In to interpret the accepted formula. (2) We have found that, in spite of the general acceptance from prophecy — and occasionally from St. Paul — of language which suggests some sort of vicarious punishment, sacrifice, or expiation, these writers and the Churches which they represented instinctively shrank from the substitutionary theory which St. Paul attempted ^ "iia-re, ideXcpol, toiovvtcs rb 8i\riiJ,a tov irarplis tjixuv 0eoO icrbixeda, iK rris iKKXtjaias ttjs -rrpdiTTjs, ttjs irpeu/iart/c^s, ttjs Trpb ijMov Kal treXrii'Tj^ iKTLafjL^vrjs * iav 5^ p,Tj Troiijfftjiixev r6 $e\7]/iia Kvplov, i(j6jj.€da iK ttJs ypatprjs ttjs \€yoTj(T'r}S, 'E-yev^BTi 6 oIk^s (HOU (riT'^Xoiov Xj\