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THE SOTEEIOLOGT OF THE
NE¥ TESTAMENT

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THE

SOTERIOLOGT OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT

BY

WILLIAM POECHEE DU BOSE, M.A., S.T.D.
••I
Pbopessob or Exeoesis in the University of the South

Wefa gorfe
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND LONDON
1892
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1892,
By MACMILLAN AND CO.

Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A
Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston, U.S.A.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE
I. Upon the Meaning of Salvation  1
II. Upon the Meaning of Salvation in the New
Testament  16
III. Of Jesus Christ as our Salvation  32
IV. Of Christ as our Reconciliation or Atonement. 47
V. Of Christ as our Redemption  62
VI. Of Christ both objectively and subjectively,
our Redemption and Righteousness  78
VII, Of Christ as our Resurrection  93
VIII. Of Christ as our Propitiation or Expiation  107
IX. Of the End or Final Cause of the Incarnation. 122
X. Of the Human Personality of Jesus Christ  138
XI. Of the Divine Sonship of our Lord  157
XII. Of the Human Birth and Sonship of Jesus
Christ  172
XIII. Of the Human Sinlessness of Jesus Christ  188
XIV. Of the Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. — Continued. 202
XV. Of the Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. — Continued. 216
XVI. Of the Human Nature of Jesus Christ  230
v

vi CONTENTS. i
CHAPTER PAGE
XVII. Of the Human Nature of Jesus Christ. — Con
tinued  245
XVIII. Of. the Flesh and the Spirit in Relation to our
Lord  261
XIX. Of the Work of Jesus Christ upon Earth  279
XX. Of Jesus Christ as the Way  297
XXI. Of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ  312
XXII. Of Jesus Christ as our High Priest  328
XXIII. Of Salvation in the Church  344
XXIV. Of Baptism  360
XXV. Of the Lord's Supper  377

The Soteriology of the New Testament.
CHAPTER FIRST.
UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION.
" For us men and for our Salvation," the Nicene
Creed informs us, our Lord came down from heaven
and was incarnate. What is meant by " our Salva
tion " f
What Salvation means and, specifically, what our
Salvation means, is a matter primarily determined
not by creeds, not by Scripture, not by divine reve
lation, but by the facts of our own nature and con
dition. All Salvation is deliverance from some form
of evil ; Salvation for man can only be deliverance
from the evil to which he is subject, and what that is
is matter of fact prior to any divine or other declara
tion of what it is. The good of any being is what
is necessary for its completion and satisfaction ; its
evil is whatsoever hinders, limits, or contradicts this.
As the former is wholly determined by the nature of
each being, so the latter is purely a fact of its con
dition. Even a divine revelation can only truly
declare what it is ; it cannot make it anything else.
The nature of a being is, of course, its whole nature,
not only what it is, but all that it is constituted

2 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
to become. Nature, then, includes destination ; it is
truly interpreted only in the light of its Te'A.09, or
end. Now if human nature and human destination
were wholly known, if the whole good of man were
clearly understood and his evil by consequence no
less clearly so, there would be no difficulty in defin
ing precisely what for him Salvation must mean.
His Salvation would be simply deliverance from that
evil and restoration to that good. Divine revelation,
therefore, the Scriptures, the creeds of the Church,
nowhere undertake or profess to make the meaning
of Salvation. That is done by the facts of the case,
and all that they claim to do is to interpret it truly
and deal with it rightly.
In order, therefore, to understand the Scriptures,
it is necessary first to understand something at least
of those facts of human nature and human condition
which the Scriptures presuppose and with which they
deal. We begin, then, with a brief discussion of
human good and evil.
1st. There is a natural good and evil appertaining
to all living and sentient beings which is practically
synonymous with well or ill being and its accom
panying pleasure or pain. Those beings in which
the nature is all, which are the mere results or prod
ucts of their nature and their environment — in a
word, which are devoid of personality — are capable
of no other good or evil than this. But of whatever
other or higher forms of good a being may be capa
ble, natural good remains always a part of his aggre
gate good, and so also with his evil. Eii8aip,ovia, or
rational Happiness, is the highest expression of natu
ral good.

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 3
2d. But where over and above the nature there
exists personality, where the being is the result not
merely of his nature, but of his own conscious and
free activity in the nature, then there exists neces
sarily for him moral good and evil. Even the same
law which, when naturally obeyed, constitutes a natu
ral good, — as e.g. the simplest law of health, — when
personally obeyed, becomes not only a natural but a
moral good. The element of morality lies in the
fact of its being an obedience, i.e. not an activity of
the nature blindly following its law, but an act of the
person in the nature freely choosing his law. Not
that obedience or moral good as such is not in itself
also the natural good of a person ; for all fulfilling
of a being's law is essentially its perfection and hap
piness. But the moral goodness lies in the fact of
its being a personal obedience, and the natural good
ness lies in the fact of its being a natural perfection
and happiness. And however coincident these two
things may be, they are not identical.
As there are beings which • are capable only of
natural and not of moral good, so it is conceivable
that there may be those whicli are capable only of
natural and moral, and of no higher or other form
of good or evil. Such would seem to be Kant's
conception of man — for whom, according to him,
there is no higher real relation than that to the
moral law, and no higher end of personal activity
than moral obedience.
3d. But Christianity — as all religions, in contra
distinction from mere moral systems — ¦ presupposes
in human nature the capacity for a yet higher kind

4 SOTERIOLOGY 6P THE NEW TESTAMENT.
of good and evil than these two. This, in the lan
guage of the New Testament, we shall call spiritual
good and evil. The capacity for such a good is
found in the possibility of a personal relationship
between man and God. I say a personal relation
ship in distinct contradistinction from natural rela
tionship. For while God bears a necessary natural
relation to all things, and while He bears necessarily
a yet closer and higher natural relation to all "persons,
yet this natural relation is not in itself religion, but
only the natural ground of the possibility of religion.
Man is by nature spiritual only in the sense in which
Aristotle would admit that he is, <f>vo-ei,, moral. That
is, only in the sense that he is constituted by his
nature to become so. He has in his reason and per
sonal freedom the capacity for moral obedience, but
it is not until in the right use of his reason and per
sonal freedom he has acquired the habit of moral
obedience that he is actually moral. So man is by
nature constituted for personal union with God, and
in that sense he is naturally spiritual, but he is not
actually spiritual until or unless he has actually
entered into the union with God for which his nature
has constituted him. Religion, which is the expres
sion of the spiritual in man, is a relation of persons,
not of natures. The capacity for the relationship
must exist as a fact of the natures, but the actuality
of the relationship awaits and is only constituted by
an act of the persons. However our nature may
predestine us to become, it is only by a personal act
on God's part and a corresponding personal act on
our part, — i.e. it is only by divine grace through our

UPON THE MEANING OP SALVATION. 5
faith, — that we do become sons of God. Spiritual
sonship is the fruit of a separate act of personal
union between the personal God and each individual
person. Now if it be a fact of human nature that it is con
stituted for such personal relationship with God, then
God and personal union with Him and all that results
to us from such union is a good for us. It will be our
highest natural good, since in it we shall find the
highest completion and satisfaction of our nature
and of ourselves. It will be our highest moral good,
since in it we shall be personally obeying and fulfill
ing our highest law. But inasmuch as both a natu
ral and a moral good might exist in beings incapable
of personal union with God, this last and highest
addition to the notion is best expressed by the term
spiritual good.
There are, then, three several and distinct goods for
man- — -spiritual good or personal union with God,
moral good or voluntary obedience to his law, and
natural good or the completion and satisfaction of his
nature and the realization and enjoyment of himself.
These three, as we have said, are coincident ; we might
even say that they are materially identical, but they
are not formally so. Each lower good is included in
each higher, and each higher in each lower, where they
all exist. That is to say, not only is my moral per
fection an integral part of my natural good as a moral
being, but my natural good, so far as it depends on
me, is an integral part of my duty or moral perfection.
And again, although natural and moral good might
both conceivably exist without religion or spiritual

6 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
relationship with God, yet where this latter is con
stituted by our nature to exist, the two former are
incomplete without it, and it includes them. So in
separable are the three in our own case that very fre
quently they coincide in an act which is materially
only one, and which yet is at once our happiness, our
duty, and the grace of God in us.
Now assuming for our present purpose, with not
only Christianity but all religion, that man is consti
tuted for good in all these three forms, the question
arises whether in his actual condition he is in full
possession and enjoyment of them all. I have again
and again to repeat that God Himself can reveal noth
ing to us which is not in itself true to us. He can
communicate no good for which there is no want in
our nature, and give deliverance from no evil which
does not exist in our condition. Christianity assumes
that we are constituted for the goods above described,
that God, duty, and happiness are our proper ends.
If it assumes falsely, if either of these has no exist
ence for us, then Christianity is not true. If, on the
contrary, it assumes rightly, if it addresses itself to
just the evils which exist in our condition and pro
vides just the goods which are necessary for our
spiritual completion, our moral perfection, and our
natural satisfaction, then it is true. If it is mostly
in the light and in the language of Christian thought
that we express the facts of human good and evil, yet
it is not wholly on the authority of Christianity that
we hold them. The ultimate authority in the matter
is in the facts of the case. We believe Christianity
to be true because it reveals these facts, and not that

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 7
they are true because Christianity reveals them. I
y ask, then, again whether man is in possession of his
whole good on this earth, or whether as matter of fact
he is free from either spiritual, moral, or natural evil ?
Is he in spiritual union with his God, in moral obedi
ence to his law, in possession and enjoyment of himself
and his happiness ? If not, then in all these forms
he is subject to and needs to be delivered from evil.
Is there for man here or hereafter to be any deliver
ance from his evils, any attainment of his goods ? Or
of union with God, of the fulfilment of his law, of the
satisfaction of his nature, is he to know this only, —
that they are never to be !
There is no truth more immediately intelligible and
expressive to the mind and heart of man than that
implicitly contained in the word Salvation. Because
there is no fact of which he is more immediately con
scious than that he needs to be saved. What the
Salvation is which he needs, and how it is to be
accomplished, can only be known, as we have seen,
by a full knowledge of his nature and his condition.
And such a knowledge of itself it is impossible for
human nature at this stage to acquire. Nothing can
be fully known save in the light of its end. To know
what we are, we need to know all that we shall be.
"Ouov e/cacrrov ean rrj<; yevecrems Te\ea6ei<rrp;, ravrvv
<f>ap,ev tt]V cj>vcri,v elvai sk&gtov, wcnrep avQpanvov,
etc., defines Aristotle. " What a thing is when its
becoming has been completed, that we call the nature
of the thing, as e.g. of man." Since, therefore, we
cannot now wholly know ourselves, the good for
which our nature designs nor the evil to which our

8 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
condition subjects us — it is impossible that we should
have framed for ourselves a perfect theory of what,
from the nature of the thing, human Salvation must
be. But for all that there is such a thing as human
Salvation, and what it is, is precisely determined. It
is deliverance from the actual evil or evils to which
we are subject and to the good or goods for which our
nature designs us. Moreover, the facts from which
it is to be determined, are all within ourselves, how
ever imperfectly we may be able to read them. And
though human nature or imagination can as yet form
no complete theory of Salvation, yet common sense
and experience, and such knowledge as through these
we have of ourselves, will enable us to sit in judg
ment upon such theories of it as are presented to us,
and in the end to accept what is true and reject
what is false in them. In the long, long run human
nature will discriminate between what is true and
what is false about itself. If there be offered to it a
Salvation which in very truth is its Salvation, it will
eventually know and accept it as such. If Christi
anity be that Salvation, it may be misunderstood ; it
may be perverted or obscured, and so discounted —
for a time. But it will not be lost in the world;
humanity will not let it go until it has cleared it up
and understood it — and been saved by it. If on the
other hand, Christianity be not human Salvation, no
authority of Creed or Scripture, no voice of God from
heaven, will make it so or impose it finally as such
upon the reason and the common sense of mankind.
There is but one possible final proof of Christianity,
and that is its own essential truth. If it is true, its

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 9
truth will prove it ; if it is not, no possible proof can
make it true. The one contribution that is most
needed now as always to the evidences for Christi
anity, is to let it so appear and speak for itself as that
men may recognize in its voice the unmistakable
accents of its own inherent authority over their minds
and hearts. They will set their seals to it as from
God when, and only when, they have found in it the
truth, and the whole truth, of themselves.
We shall therefore set ourselves dispassionately
and impartially to understand and test upon ourselves
the Christian doctrine of human Salvation as con
tained in the New Testament. But before doing so,
let us collect from what has been already said how
far we may go in determining a priori what elements
must enter into a true theory of Salvation.
Aristotle, in discussing the summum bonum, the
supreme good and final end of man, insists very much
that it shall be avOpoiirtvov ti, something human, some
thing attainable for man and not beyond human
reach. Any theory of human Salvation and destina
tion must present to us an ideal of man and man's
condition not yet indeed realized, but realizable.
Still what we are in search of — although it must be
an attainable ideal — is as yet an ideal. In Aristotle
himself the definition of a thing is not the ti e'cnv, but
the tL ?jv ehai of it — not " what it is," its actual —
but " what it were to be it," its ideal. Man, e.g. is to
be defined not by what he is, but by what he would be
if he fulfilled his conception — if he were all that it
were to be a man. To nothing less than this must a
true Salvation bring us, if it is to save us from all

10 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
our evil by bringing us to all our good. We seek in
man and man's condition not its ri eo-ri, but its ri r}\>
elvai — not what it ever is here or now, but what it
" were," or would be, if it fulfilled its true meaning
and law. To what extent we shall succeed in giving
its true meaning, or whether what we describe shall
be dvdpojTriPop Tt — true to and attainable by man —
we can only leave to the final verdict of the common
sense of humanity.
1st. Salvation for man must assuredly include in
the end deliverance from natural evil and the secur
ing of all his natural good ; that is to say, self-com
pletion and happiness. I say deliverance from evil and
the securing of good ; but these are not two separate
things, one of which might take place without the
other. On the contrary, they are identical ; there is
no deliverance from an evil but in the securing of its
opposite or corresponding good. Thus there is no
other possible Salvation from sickness but health, or
from sin but holiness. This seems simple enough,
but it is a principle much disregarded, and therefore
much to be insisted upon in the matters which we are
to discuss. I say that personal well-being and hap
piness, and therefore deliverance from all that hin
ders, limits, or contradicts this, must be an element in
any complete theory of Salvation. Certainly the full
action of Salvation would be unrealized so long as
there remains in man or man's condition anything to
be delivered from which would be a Salvation.
2d. But by how much moral good is a higher
good for man than natural good, by so much is
human Salvation a moral rather than a merely natural

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 11
Salvation. That which distinguishes man from all
other beings on this earth is selfhood, or personality.
Besides that in him which is merely of his nature,
there is that which is of himself. And that is the
distinctive and the highest part of him. That only is
personal in man into which his own self-determina
tion enters, which is the product and expression of
himself and not merely of his nature. And as it is
personality in man which is distinctive of him, so it is
the good of personality which distinctively concerns
him. Now what is the good of personality ? It is
freedom ; by which I do not mean potential or for
mal, but actual or real freedom. The former belongs
to all personalities, the latter to only those which
have achieved it, and only so far as they have
achieved it. Freedom is not immunity from law but
ability to obey, and obedience to, the true or the
right law. Every being has its law, which is only an
abstract expression of the proper mode of its being
. and acting. If anything would be itself it must be
and act in one certain way and no other, which is
distinctive and constitutive of it. The expression of
this way is the enunciation of its law. Now things
are determined according to their law, but persons are
left to determine themselves according to their law.
In either case the fulfilling of their law, inasmuch as
it is the realizing of themselves and the completion of
their several natures, is their natural good and their
only natural good. ' But in the case of persons over
and above the natural good of self-realization and
perfection which comes from their fulfilling, there
is the moral good of having obeyed, i.e. of having

12 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
themselves fulfilled, their law. This is freedom, the
power and the exercise of obedience or of personal
fulfilment of one's law. There is a natural good in
the law's being fulfilled, there is moral good in hav
ing one's self fulfilled it. The will that has not
power, that is not free, to obey its true law is in
bondage to some false law. Morality, virtue, right
eousness, moral obedience, by whatever name we call
it, is the only freedom. Anything else is slavery.
Moral good, then, we find to be identical with true
freedom, and this again with a right personal activity,
i.e. an activity of the person in accordance with his
law. Now moral good, however formally distin
guishable from it, is itself a natural good. The will
is most itself, or rather is only then itself, in the
exercise of a true freedom. If there is in us any loss
or limitation of freedom, there is just so much loss or
limitation of selfhood. It is not only that if one's
law is but the expression of one's own perfect being
and acting, then any hindrance or limitation of
one's fulfilling of his law is just so much limitation
of himself; but the fact of freedom in itself is the
highest form of personal being and acting, and, there
fore, the highest natural good of a person.
It was held by the ancients that virtue was the
highest fulfilment of man's nature, because it is a self-
fulfilment, i.e. not only a fulfilment of self but a ful
filment by one's self. Consequently vice is the worst
contradiction of nature, because it is double self-con
tradiction, a contradiction of one's self by one's self.
Now if there be in us any such self-contradiction,
any slavery of our will to that which is not ourself

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 13
and contrary to ourself, Salvation for us must in
volve or include emancipation from it. And from
slavery the only Salvation is freedom. The only
emancipation or deliverance from vice is virtue, from
unrighteousness is righteousness. As Salvation from
natural evil is to the natural good whose highest
expression is happiness, so Salvation from moral
evil is to that moral good whose highest designation
is righteousness. Happiness is the highest condition
of the nature ; righteousness is the highest activity
of the person, an activity in obedience to law. I re
peat that these two, while formally distinct, are mate
rially identical. Moral good is the natural good of a
moral being. In righteousness alone does the free
will realize itself and find its satisfaction and blessed
ness. 3d. If man is not only a natural and a moral, but
also, in the sense hitherto described, a spiritual being,
then Salvation for him must assume also a spiritual
form. We have defined the spiritual in man to be
the expression not of an immanent, natural, and neces
sary, but of a transcendent, personal, and free relation
ship between man and God. It is a relationship which
has to be personally entered into, and only exists where
it has been personally entered into from both sides.
Man, as has been said before, is naturally spiritual
only in the sense that he is constituted by nature to
become so ; he is actually spiritual only when and so
far as he has become so through that personal union
and relationship with God, for which his nature pre
destines him and which constitutes what we call re
ligion.

14 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
If God be God ; if man is made for God, i.e. for
not only natural and necessary dependence upon Him,
but personal, free, and reciprocal relationship and inter
course with Him ; if the fruit of this union of God
with him is, as a matter of spiritual fact, something
more in him than could come of himself ; if the effect
of it is to make him in some real sense Son of God,
other and higher than in the sense in which the poet
says truly that we are " all His offspring " — if all
these, I say, be facts in themselves to which our na
ture predestines us prior to all creeds, Scripture, or
revelation, then they are facts which it is impossible
to leave out of account or to put out of account in
any question of the nature, condition, or destination
of humanity. And if man be not in that relationship
of actual union with God for which his nature as a
spiritual being thus predestines him, in which he would
be if he were the spiritual man which is an integral
part in the true concept, the tl r^v elvai, of manhood ;
if in any way and for any reason he is not only not at
one but in separation from and at practical enmity
with God ; if instead of being evOeo? he is a6eo<; in the
world — if these be facts in his actual condition, then
is he in the very nature of the case in need of spirit
ual Salvation. He needs to be reconciled, reunited,
or made at one with God, who is his supreme good,
the condition of his highest not only spiritual but
moral and natural completion, perfection, and blessed
ness. And there is no other Salvation for disunion from
God but union with God. Wherein the disunion or
separation consists, and what is the union which ought

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 15
to exist, between God and us depends upon and is to
be determined from the nature of the thing. No mere
authority of creed, Scripture, or revelation can make
it if it is not or what it is not. But if they reveal it
as it is and speak truly to the truth that is in us, then
we will set our seal to them that they are true. This
is no appeal to the private judgment of every indi
vidual man, but to the right spiritual reason and the
universal common sense and spiritual experience of
humanity. It may be well to repeat, what has been more than
once implied, that if man be indeed spiritual or con
stituted for spirituality in the above sense, then that
act on his part by which he knows and is one with
God is not only a spiritual, but at the same time the
most moral and the most truly natural act of which
he is capable. Faith is the highest obedience and the
completest self-realization and satisfaction.
The threefold distinction not only underlying this
chapter but running through the whole book, might
be briefly restated as follows : Self-realization as it is
a realization of self is natural good. As it is a realiza
tion by self it is moral good. But as it is a self-real
ization in both senses only in God, out of whom neither
is possible, it is spiritual good. As our good the three
are one. But our one good is God, righteousness, and
life, which are three.

CHAPTER SECOND.
UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT.
I have taken the position that if the whole nature,
the proper destination and the actual condition of hu
manity were perfectly known to us, a perfect theory
of human salvation could be constructed by us a
priori. That is, we could precisely define beforehand
what it must be. Given what our evil is and what our
good would be, we could deduce what our Salvation
must be.
I say now that if Christianity be what it professes
to be, the divine, absolute, and final religion, the true,
real, and actual redemption and completion of human
ity, it must propose and accomplish just that Salva
tion which under the above supposition we should
have a priori determined and defined. We have not
the necessary knowledge and we cannot construct such
a complete a priori definition of Salvation. But that
there is such a thing as a true Salvation for humanity,
that there is a ri ?)v elvai, or true concept of it, we
can no more doubt than that there is such a thing as
a truth, a true constitution or law, of nature, although
our science or knowledge of it may fall very far short of

UPON THE MEANING OP SALVATION. 17
the truth : or that there is such a thing as right con
duct, although no ethical system may exactly express
what it is.
Again, if Christianity be true in the sense above
stated, then there is a true Christian doctrine of Sal
vation, however Christians may misinterpret and differ
about it, and even though there be not as yet any ade
quate understanding or statement of it. Perhaps no
two theologians would exactly agree in a theoretical
explanation of how Jesus Christ is our Salvation, or
even of what precisely Salvation is. Yet all would
agree that in itself Salvation is a definite thing, and
that not only is He our Salvation, but there is a true
explanation of how He is so. It is to be confessed
that there is just now dissatisfaction with existing
explanations. Who in these days will profess himself
quite satisfied with his own theory or statement of
the atonement, or will claim that there is any theory
or explanation which generally satisfies the mind of
sincere Christians, or of the Church, or of any consid
erable section of the Church? It is not that Chris
tians do not believe in the fact of Salvation in Christ,
but only that they are just now considerably at sea in
their speculative opinions of not only how it is but
precisely what it is. This is not quite so bad as it
may seem. Two men might differ never so widely in
their speculations as to what gravitation is, and yet
so long as they both practically respect the fact that,
no matter what it is, it nevertheless is, they may equally
live under it and equally enjoy the benefit of it. But
if either of them should not only reject all theory,
but undertake to practically ignore the fact of gravi-

18 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
tation, the consequences would be very different.
The illustration is only partially applicable, because
to be practically saved in Christ is not so indepen
dent of some knowledge of what and how Salvation
is in Him, as living under the law of gravitation
is of any theoretical knowledge of it. But it does
apply this far, that many men of many minds as to the
theory of Salvation do equally hold the fact of it and
do equally enjoy the benefit of it. And while I do not
at all mean to say that right speculative opinions are
not important or that an exactly true theory of Salva
tion would not materially help and heighten the fact of
it in us, yet I do hold that our speculative differences
and uncertainties as to the exact what aud how of
Christian Salvation are not quite so serious or fatal a
matter as they might seem to be. We are glad to be
all agreed in this : that many are saved practically who
theoretically know least how they are saved. And no
one of us, perhaps, professes to know so perfectly what
Salvation is that any other need perfectly agree with
him. Christianity, if it is divine, is wiser than any of
us understand even as it is mightier than any of us
experience. The fault is with us, but if we already
comprehended the full wisdom and felt the full power
of the grace of God in Jesus Christ there would be
nothing more for us to know or to be. As long as the
world lasts shall we, and ought we, to be knowing
more and more of what Salvation in Christ means.
Whither shall we go for a doctrine of Christian Sal
vation ? To the mind of the Church ? But the mind of
the Church, while it has been made up from the begin
ning and has undergone no change as to the fact of

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 19
Salvation in Christ and the essential contents of that
fact, has by no means been always one with itself in
its theoretical or speculative explanation of the fact.
Or rather we should say, perhaps, that the Church as
such has not and cannot have such an explanation.
The Church holds facts which never change ; it can
not hold opinions which must be and ought to be
always changing. The Church's theory, or rather the
prevalent theory in the Church, in what age would
it have been well to stereotype as authoritative for
ever ? As, e.g. the facts enumerated in the Apostle's
Creed have been. There is, then, no authoritative
statement or finally complete theory or philosophy of
Christian Salvation ; and there never will be or
ought to be. To be engaged forever upon such a
doctrine is the proper occupation of the human mind.
To comprehend the wisdom of God more and more,
that we may more and more know His love and ex
perience His grace and power — what can better
occupy all our powers of mind and heart ?
Shall we go then to the Scriptures ? The preced
ing remarks in one respect apply even more strongly
to the Scriptures. If the New Testament contained
an explicit, authoritative, and final doctrine of the
philosophy as well as the fact of Salvation, the pres
ent discussion would be impossible within the
Church. And eighteen hundred years of Chris
tian thought and discussion would be equally out of
place. The very word Atonement would not exist,
for it has no equivalent in the New Testament. The
New Testament no more gives us doctrine than
nature gives us science. It gives us the facts but

20 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
not the theory, the matter of all Christian doctrine,
but no finished doctrine or doctrines of the whole mat
ter of Christianity.
The Scriptures themselves (I am speaking now of
the New Testament) nowhere profess to be, or realize
that they are to become, a primary or original revela
tion of the facts and truth of Christianity, or a final
statement of Christian doctrine. They presuppose the
truth as having been revealed in Christ and already
existing in the mind of the Church. And they are
to us now the only existing witness and record of
how that truth was understood by those to whom
Christ immediately gave it. Our present purpose re
quires of us no higher claim for the Scriptures than
is involved in the following admissions and posi
tions : —
1st. We could not even understand, much less be
able to attach their peculiar value, to the Scriptures,
if we were not conscious of, and if they did not speak
to, those facts of universal human experience which
give all their truth and all their interest to the
Scriptures. 2d. The Scriptures are not Christianity, but them
selves a product of Christianity. They are a witness
to it, and a record of it, of peculiar value ; but Chris
tianity might have been, and may be, a divine fact
and factor in human history and human life upon any
tenable theory of what the Scriptures are ; and even
(conceivably) if there had been no Scriptures at all.
The New Testament assumes the truth of Christ and
of human Salvation in Christ ; it does not create or
originally communicate this truth.

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 21
3d. We cannot interpret the Scriptures apart from
that mind of the Church which originally produced
them, and whose subsequent historical understanding
of them, on the lowest grounds, we can even less
rationally ignore, than if, in studying nature, we
should despise all the already attained results of
natural science.
The mind of the Church seems just now, as to the
results of its past and the direction of its future,
thinking upon the subject of the Atonement, suffi
ciently divided, unsettled, and unsatisfied to justify
the demand of which we sometimes hear for a revi
sion and restatement of the doctrine. This demand,
so far from being directed against, may be made in
the interest of the divine element in the Person of
Christ and in the work of human Salvation. If it be
permissible to revise what it was permissible to
think, and what has been revised and thought over
again and again in the history of Christianity, we
must indeed carry back with us the experience of the
ages, but we must go back to the beginning and to
the sources of all our thought. I go back, then, to
the facts of human nature and to the original and
essential attitude and relation of Christianity to those
facts. And I go back to the New Testament simply
as a record of the mind of Christ, and of the first mind
of the Church upon the true nature and mode of
human Salvation in Christ.
Whatever may be our theory, or whatever may be
the truth, with regard to the New Testament Scrip
tures as to their more or less human or divine origin
and authority — as a matter of fact, I believe them

22 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
to contain a single, consistent, complete and true
soteriology, or doctrine of human Salvation. Of
course I mean that they contain this implicitly and
not explicitly, as nature contains the whole truth of
science, not wholly revealing but never contradicting
and always confirming it. The mind of the New
Testament is one mind. How this comes to be so ;
how so many and so different writers from so many
and different points of view and in such different
ways should be so of one mind as to the meaning of
Salvation and the fact and mode of its realization in
Jesus Christ is a question of the deepest interest.
But it does not belong to us here, and our discus
sion is quite independent of it. I have no theory
to present of the fact or mode or extent of the in
spiration or divine origin or authority of the New
Testament. I am to this extent indifferent — not,
indeed, to the value of it as our only report and
record of the origin of Christianity, but to the ques
tion of how far it is a divine record — that it seems
to me that the existence of Christianity as a divine
fact, a presence and power of God for Salvation in the
world, by no means necessarily stands or falls with
any theory of the inspiration of its record. Let it
be, and be treated, entirely as other books and it may,
and I believe will, still answer all the purpose of a
record of the truth of Christ, and its original ac
ceptance by the Church. If Christianity itself be
divine, it need not of necessity follow that its record
must be so.
Nevertheless, it takes something more than a
merely literary or scientific criticism to be able to

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 23
deal adequately with the claims that have been set
up for the Scriptures in the Church. Let any one
have to do with them habitually, not in the way of
outside criticism but of inward and spiritual under
standing, and he will find those claims growing
upon him too. I believe that the Scriptures are
Scripture because they are true, and not true
because they are Scripture. It was the selection
and acceptance of the Church that made them
Scripture, and the Church selected and accepted
them because they expressed its own true mind.
Without then at all entering into the question of
the inspiration or divine authority of the New Tes
tament Scriptures as such, I simply hold that as a
matter of fact they represent to us the mind of the
Church which originally received and accepted Jesus
Christ, and that that mind is one on the subject of
His divine Person and His divine Salvation.
What, then, to begin, is the meaning of Salvation
in the New Testament? The word itself assumes
the existence of an actual evil from which, and a
possible good to which, man needs to be saved. But
it does not state what either is. We may be a priori
assured, however, of one thing. A divine Salvation
is an absolute Salvation. Such a Salvation for man
must be not only from his evil to his good, but from
all his evil to all his good. It is natural enough
that in the New Testament the word should not be
used in every instance in the whole length and
breadth of its meaning. Any part of Salvation is
Salvation, and in this or that connection the word
may mean only one or other aspect of its whole sig-

24 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
nificance. For example, it may mean only a present
forgiveness of sin, or exemption from some conse
quence or consequences of sin. But Christian Salva
tion must mean all Salvation. It must be Salvation
from all sin, the fact of it, the imputation of it, the
consequences of it. If any part is not provided for
and included in it, it is not human or divine Sal
vation. We shall find that the New Testament con
ception of Salvation fully satisfies this demand, if in
constructing our definition from it we stop at no
partial generalization, but are careful to make our
induction from all the particulars.
The word Salvation comes over into the New Tes
tament from the Old, and it comes freighted with
many associations which invest it with something
of a figurative and poetical character. As, e.g. in
1 Cor. 15, where death is personified as the last of
a number of enemies to be overcome and destroyed
in the Messianic Salvation. The more external and
temporal Salvations of the Old Testament, which famil
iarized the mind to the great truth of God as Redeemer
and Saviour of His people, are generally from personal
enemies, as Pharaoh, the heathen, and especially the
great world powers which successively oppressed them.
The idea of Salvation had finally shaped itself into
the definite hope of the Messianic redemption, the
expectation of a divine deliverer who should save
them from all their enemies. But who and what were
these enemies ? We may be sure that when we have
passed beyond the mere outward figures and symbols
of things to the things themselves, when we come to
do with that which is Salvation indeed, it shall be

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 25
from those things which are enemies indeed. And
has not humanity its enemies ? And what are these
in the last analysis but ignorance, and sin, and death !
No merely outward enemies are in themselves ene
mies. Pharaoh was the helper of Israel's redemption
as Judas was of our Lord's exaltation. The devil
himself is to God's saints a ministering spirit sent
forth to minister to the heirs of Salvation. Naught
in this universe hurts or can hurt us but what we
ourselves are and do. All things work together for
our good, save as we ourselves defeat them and are
our own enemies. What we need to be saved from
is ourselves ; and our only Salvation is that death of
ourselves which is the life of ourselves. The cross
is the only instrument of human Salvation. In
1 Cor. 15, we are told in Messianic, Old Testa
ment language, that Christ must " reign until all ene
mies are put under His feet." The last enemy that
shall be abolished is Death. But death is the last
because sin must be the first. Jesus Christ could only
abolish death by first abolishing sin. When these are
abolished man is saved. But it must be an abolish
ing not only in Christ but in man. And it must be
a real and a full or complete abolishment.
I have said that the term Salvation itself gives no
hint of what it is, i.e. what it is from and what it is
to. This we have to gather from a number of other
terms by which, in its various aspects and parts, it is
habitually defined or described in the New Testament.
Of these I will specify the principal ones, at present
only briefly defining them and reserving a fuller dis
cussion of their meaning for subsequent chapters.

26 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
1st. KaraWayij, Reconciliation. This word is once
in the Authorized Version, Rom. 5 : 11, translated
Atonement, which does not otherwise occur in the
New Testament. In the Revised Version the proper
translation, reconciliation, is restored. Atonement
could not be properly used here in its modern acquired
sense, but only in the sense of At-one-ment. And
thus it expresses the great truth that in Jesus Christ
we have been made at one, and one, with God. This
implies a previous state of separation from God, but
that the separation has been in Christ abolished and
we restored to oneness with God.
Such terms as reconciliation presuppose the fact of
man's spiritual nature as defined in the first chapter.
The fact, that is, that we are constituted by nature
for personal and spiritual union and relationship with
God. This relationship is a real one and is the source
of a spiritual quality in man which St. Peter describes
as a partaking of the divine nature. The distinctive
quality of Christian character and life is holiness.
And what is distinctive in holiness is not only what
it is but whence it is; not only its essence but its
source. Holiness is the divine nature ; it means what
God is. And in any other being than God it means
a partaking of the divine nature. All holiness is of
the Holy Ghost. It is a spiritual quality imparted by
the divine Spirit. It is what God is in us, what we
are by the operation of the divine Spirit and through
participation in the divine nature. It is to be care
fully observed that it is not a natural quality, or the
fruit of a natural relationship with God. No man is
holy, (bvo-ei, by the mere fact of his nature ; he can

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 27
only become so by act and habit of his personal spirit,
by a personal relationship personally entered into be
tween him and God. To be at one with God, or at
peace with God, is no mere external relation, but an
internal relationship. It is to be of one spirit and one
nature with God. It is holiness.
As oneness with God is holiness, so a spiritual
and personal separation and difference from God is
sin. Sin is what we are when God is not in us ;
when instead of being evdeoi we are adeoi, in the world ;
when we are not what God is but what we and the
world are without God. So in his first Epistle, St.
John tests our being " of God," our alleged birth and
life " from God," by a comparison of what we are
with what God is. If then holiness is the divine
nature, sin is a nature or a condition of nature in us
not of God and not divine. It is the negation or con
tradiction of holiness. Disunion, separation, enmity
with God is thus an actual state of things. It is a
nature, or condition of nature, and a consequent mode
of personal life in our nature which makes us actually
separate and different from the divine nature and
life. " It is your sin that separates between you and
your God " — because sin is an actual separation
between us and God. The separation is a real one ;
there is an actual something, a wrong Spirit, a false
nature, that intervenes between God and us and sep
arates us from Him. Reunion, reconciliation with
God, therefore, can have but one meaning. The only
real reunion possible is the removal of that which
separates. And the only possible removal for us
must be — or must intend to be, must eventually

28 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
be — a removal in us. The only removal or doing
away of sin must be a removal of it from where it is,
viz. in us. If Jesus Christ is in a real and perfect or
complete sense our reconciliation, we must be able to
show that He is both for us and in us the actual aboli
tion of the whole fact of sin and all its consequences.
But the only abolishment of sin is holiness, just as
the removal of sickness is health or. of death is life.
There is no other real being at one with God than an
actual unity of Spirit and nature and life with Him.
A mere forgiveness of sin, e.g. in our human sense,
is no divine aOeTncri,? a/ia/aria?, or acpeafi a/ia/3Tt'a?, or
/caraWayy. God's doing or putting away is not as
man's. His real and whole abolishment of sin in
Christ is something more than the laying aside of His
displeasure or the remission of our punishment. It
is a blotting out of the whole fact and all the conse
quences of sin. I do not deny that the idea of
reconciliation is sometimes in the New Testament
restricted to the several steps or stages in the great
total act of human reconciliation. Thus it is said
that we were reconciled to God by the blood or death
of Jesus Christ. But while in the grace of God and
in our faith our reconciliation is viewed as completed in
Jesus Christ — in fact, it will only be completed when
in Christ we shall be dead to the sin that separates us
from God and alive in the holiness which is the only
real reconciliation with Him. And Christ is only our
reconciliation in faith because He is to be so in fact.
His death and resurrection could in no sense be
received as ours if they were not in very fact to be
ours. Reconciliation, however properly it is applied

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 29
to the great preliminary conditioning and producing
act of our reunion with God, yet in its totality must
include the culmination and end of that act in our
own actual oneness with God. And one falls very far
short of the full teaching of the New Testament who
does not see in it provision for such a real recon
ciliation, such a real reunion with God in Christ
through our own death in Him to sin, and our own
resurrection and new life in Him of holiness.
2d. ' Airo\vTpo3ai<;, Redemption. Redemption as
sumes a state or condition of bondage or slavery. And
bondage is the negation or absence of freedom or
liberty. Now freedom can have but one meaning. It
is for any being, as we have seen, ability and oppor
tunity to be or to become itself by fulfilling its law.
Whatever hinders, limits, or prevents this is bondage or
slavery. Whether man is free — or whether he needs
to be made free, or redeemed — is not mere matter of
opinion but, one way or the other, a fact of his condi
tion. The question is, are we in obedience to our
law, and in the way at least of the full realizing of
ourselves ? Or are we, on the contrary, in a state of
disobedience, and in habitual, both voluntary and
involuntary, violation of our law and contradiction
of ourselves? Man's law is distinctively not a
natural but a moral law, and obedience to it is not
only life but righteousness. His bondage conse
quently is moral bondage, and his redemption must
be a moral redemption. Nothing else would be
redemption for him but the removal from him of
moral weakness and inability by the restoration to
him of moral power — the power of obedience, the

30 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
power of righteousness. Here, again, as in the pre
vious definition and everywhere, I would apply
Aristotle's principle that a thing is always to be
defined by its end, by what it is when its becoming is
completed, and it has accomplished or become its
whole self. Neither human nor divine redemption,
redemption of man, nor redemption by God, can stop
short of or mean anything less than a real and a
whole redemption. It must be the actual emancipa
tion of humanity from all bondage, from all that
hinders, limits, or prevents its full freedom. And
since for us freedom is identical with righteousness,
Christ, our redemption, is Christ, our righteousness.
And Christ is objectively, in Himself, our redemp
tion and our righteousness — only as He is potentially
and is to be actually so subjectively. That is, only
as we are to be in Him made free from all bondage
by being brought into the actual freedom of a perfect
righteousness in ourselves.
We shall see that freedom or righteousness is
possible for us only in God ; that without the spirit
ual character of holiness we cannot have the moral
quality of righteousness ; that without reunion with
God we cannot be redeemed from transgression of
His law. We shall see, moreover, that redemption
from sin will be redemption from death ; that is, that
restoration to spiritual and moral good will be fol
lowed by restoration to natural good, and to be free
from spiritual and moral evil will be to be free from
all natural ills. The essence of consummated redemp
tion we shall find with St. Paul to be expressed in
these words : " The law of the Spirit of life which is

UPON THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 31
in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of
sin and death."
'Avao-TacLs, Resurrection. Resurrection presupposes
death which is, of course, the negation or absence of
life. The three goods for man as a spiritual, moral,
and natural being are holiness, righteousness, and
life — i.e. union with God, obedience to his law, and
realization of himself. These three, as has been said,
may be materially identical though they are formally
distinct. To be out of God if it is our nature to be
in Him — to be in disobedience to a law which it is our
nature to obey — are not only spiritual and moral,
but natural evils. That is, they are not only sin and
transgression, but death. The body is diseased and
dies in proportion as it fails to discharge its natural
functions and to supply its natural wants. Spiritual
and moral function and satisfaction are as necessary
to spiritual and moral life as physical, and are as
much a part of us and our nature. In this sense sin
and moral disobedience or unrighteousness are in the
New Testament synonymous with death. And not
only are they spiritual and moral death, but they are
the reason or cause of physical death, and the abolish
ment of them shall be the abolishment of it.
Each of the above definitions will be further ex
panded and justified at length in separate chapters.
But first, let us see how in the New Testament Jesus
Christ is made, in each of the above senses and in
the unity of them all, not only our Saviour but our
Salvation.

CHAPTER THIRD.
OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION.
In the New Testament conception of the matter
Jesus Christ not only bears a very near and neces
sary relation to our Salvation, but He is our Salva
tion. And He is so in no merely representative and
figurative, but in a very material and real way.
This can have but one meaning, viz. that our Lord
is in Himself, that He is to or for us, and that He is
to be in us — all that constitutes or would constitute
our Salvation. Thus, if our previous representations
of the facts of the case are correct, He is, first, our
reconciliation, or at-one-ment. He is that actual per
sonal oneness of God with man and man with God,
which is in itself our spiritual good, and our only
cure or Salvation from spiritual evil. He is holiness,
by which we mean the personal or spiritual quality,
character, or nature of God -communicated to and
realized in man. He is, secondly, our redemption.
He is that actual freedom of humanity from the bond
age of sin and death, and its obedience to its true law
of holiness and life, which is in itself man's moral
good, and his only Salvation or emancipation from
moral evil. He is righteousness, by which we mean

OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION. 33
the freedom of moral obedience and the obedience of
moral freedom. And, thirdly, He is our resurrection.
He is that actual raising or rising of humanity out of
all such limitation, contradiction, and destruction of
its true being and selfhood as is properly denominated
death, which is in itself man's natural good and his
only Salvation from natural evil. He is our life, by
which we mean self-completion, the perfection of
our being through the full realization of our whole
nature. In a word, Jesus Christ is our Salvation because
He is in Himself, and is or is to be in us, all that Sal
vation means and is. Because He is, both in Himself
and in us, a perfect actual human holiness, righteous
ness, and life ; and because these are for us what, all
of what, and what alone, Salvation is.
Although the above is the literal and consistent
position of the New Testament, it is not always so
understood. And as it is not at once apparent how
we can understand and receive the truth in so simple
and literal a sense, it is well to attend carefully to a
few preliminary considerations.
We have said practically that Jesus Christ is our
Salvation simply because He is so; i.e. because He
is in very actuality and reality just that, and all that,
which our Salvation must be defined to be. This
He is, first, objectively or in Himself, and, secondly,
subjectively or in us. Thus He is holiness and our
holiness; righteousness and our righteousness; life
and our life — and these three are the only real Sal
vation for us in the only three senses or respects in
which we need or are capable of Salvation. All that

34 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
He is for us He is first, in Himself, and all that He is
in Himself, He is, or is to be, in us. In what sense
is it correct to say that Jesus Christ, either in Him
self or in us, is holiness, righteousness, or life? In
the first place, these are properties or qualities only,
of any one of which it might seem more proper to
say that He possesses it, than that He is it. We
might say that He is holy or righteous, but why, or
how, that He is holiness or righteousness or life ?
1st. If our Lord were only an individual man
among men, — I do not mean if He were a mere man,
but if, being all that He is, He had become only an
individual man, related to other men only as any
other man to other men, — there would be less pro
priety, but even then there would be a very great
propriety and truth in the above mode of representa
tion. In the case supposed, Jesus Christ in the per
fection, or rather in the becoming or being made
perfect, of His individual humanity, of His personal
human holiness, righteousness, and life, would be to
us simply a revelation — but a divine revelation — of
what human Salvation is, or "were." The end or
purpose of the Incarnation might then be conceived
to be to reveal to us in that man the tL tfv elvai of
man, the divine idea or ideal of what he is and is to
be, and of how he is to be it ; the secret of his Salva
tion and destination. Christ would then be to us,
if no more, a divine objective revelation and decla
ration of what Salvation is; viz. that it is holiness,
righteousness, and life ; a perfect oneness with God,
a perfect fulfilling of our law and a perfect being, be
coming, or realizing of our whole selves. But qualities

OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION. 35
or character or life cannot exist or be manifested in
abstracto, and unlike man's, all God's revelations are
in concreto. He reveals Himself not in words, but in
things, events, or persons. In the Old Testament He
did not teach man faith by definition, but by Abra
ham ; and in the New, He teaches us holiness, right
eousness, and life, not by formula, but by Jesus Christ.
God's revelation of human Salvation is the manifesta
tion of the thing itself in the person of the man, Christ
Jesus. To be saved for any man means to be in that
personal and spiritual relationship with God, of per
fect faith, perfect grace, and consequently perfect
holiness, which we recognize as existing in the
one only perfect spiritual manhood of our Lord. It
means to be in that relation to the one law of God,
the universe, and ourselves — of perfect obedience and
righteousness — which we see existing in the one only
perfect ethical or moral manhood of our Lord. And
finally, it means that perfection of human being, act
ing, and self-realization, which we see to exist only in.
the one perfect life of our Lord. Jesus Christ is
equally the revelation to us of how and what God is
in man, and of how and what man is in God. We
see in Him "what it were " for us to be saved. In
the sense so far described, we might say that Jesus
Christ is our Salvation exemplarily. That is, He is
the perfect example to us of what we must be in order
to be saved.
2d. But we fall very far short of the New Testa
ment conception of Jesus Christ as our Salvation if
we stop at the above sense of it. It is certainly a
true and an important sense. Viewed only individ-

36 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
ually, as one man among men, and apart from any
further relation to other men than that of mere ex
ample, we see in Jesus Christ the reality of all that
human Salvation can or must be. He was Himself
the sanctification, the redemption, and the resurrec-'
tion — and so in the fullest sense the Salvation — of
that humanity which He assumed in His own person.
It is perfectly true, if it be rightly meant and rightly
understood, to speak of Jesus Christ as having been
Himself saved.. In Salvation, as predicated of Him,
He is both Salvum faciens and Salvus f actus — both
God saving and man saved. If we can say of Him
that He was sanctified, that He learned obedience
and was made perfect, that He was raised from the
dead, then we can say that He was saved — for they
mean the same thing. But He is more to us than
mere " sample or example " of human Salvation.
The humanity of our Lord — all that He was and
did in it — all that it has become or been made
.through His life, death, and resurrection in it — is
nearer to every man than the light of mere example
could bring it, and more influential in every man
than the power of mere example could make it;
even though the example be all that His was. With
out at present any further explanation or justifica
tion, we might simply state the New Testament
position in the matter as follows: Our Lord's holi
ness, righteousness, life (in a word, His Salvation)
are ours, not simply in the sense that they were, and
are, human — that they are like ours, or what ours
would be. They are ours, i.e. not exemplarily
merely, but causally. What He is, is not merely ex-

OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION. 37
ample of what we should be, but cause of what
through Him we become. Thus He Himself says :
"Ye shall be holy, for I am holy"; " Because I live
ye shall live." And these and many similar sayings
are only expressions of a general assumption on His
part, and in the mind of the Church after Him, that
what He did and became in His humanity, humanity
in Him did and became. That is, His own sanctifi
cation, perfection, and resurrection were potentially
those of all men, who were therefore all potentially
saved in him. The potentia, or power, intended in
this assumption, whatever it may be, certainly cannot,
as it is understood in the New Testament, be resolved
into what we know as the force of example or the
infection of enthusiasm.
3d. But again, we must not stop even here if we
are to go the full length of the New Testament con
ception of Salvation through Christ. According to
that conception He is not merely the causa, but the
res of our Salvation. We not only are holy because
He is holy or live because He lives, but He is our
holiness and our life. Which I would express by
saying that He is our holiness, our righteousness, and
our life not merely exemplarily, nor merely causally,
but really. The New Testament intends no mere
figure, but literal reality when it speaks of Jesus
Christ Himself in us as constituting and being our
spiritual life. " I live no longer ; Christ lives in me."
says St. Paul ; and he means no impersonal example
or influence of an absent Christ, but the personal
Christ Himself personally present in him. Thus
e.g. Christianity is for and in every man a resur-

38 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
rection and a life ; and we arise from death into life
not merely as Christ did so, nor by consequence merely
of His having done so, but because He Himself in us,
by His Divine Spirit, becomes our resurrection and
our life. We are so personally related to Him and
He to us, that in an effectual and real sense His death
becomes our death and His resurrection our resurrec
tion, and He Himself in us all that constitutes our
Salvation. The spirit of a man may continue after him, and
long after him, to live and operate in his disciples.
He being dead, may in a sense continue to live and
speak through them. But what is present in them
is not in reality he; it is only the memory, or at
best the impersonal spirit or influence of him. That
is not what we mean when we say that Christianity
is Christ in us. He does not live in us only as Soc
rates lived in Plato. He is personally present and
lives in the life of every one who lives in Him. " I
am the resurrection and the life " means not only
that he was His own, but that He is my and every
man's resurrection and life. His promise to His dis
ciples before His death to return to them and to be
with them to the end of the world, His true disciples
ever since have interpreted to mean that no less per
sonally and far more effectually is He now spiritually
present in them than once He was physically present
among them.
Whether all this can be so, and how it can be so,
depends of course upon who and what Christ is.
The assumption throughout the New Testament of
the relation of Jesus Christ to every man's Salvation,

OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION. 39
as Himself personally constituting and being it, car
ries with it the assumption of His deity. In Him is
fulfilled all the Old Testament anticipation or proph
ecy of the Lord our Salvation.
There is a New Testament, not figure but mode of
representation, which may bring out more fully the
truth under discussion. St. Paul says that " as in
Adam all die even so in Christ shall all be made
alive." Now if in Adam all die, all must in some
sense be in Adam. It is evident upon reflection that
the term Adam in the New Testament is used in two
senses, an individual and a generic sense. In the
passage just quoted, e.g., it is used in the latter. It
means " natural humanity," i.e. humanity in its actual
or what we improperly call its natural condition. I
say improperly, because properly the natural condition
of a thing is that in which it exists in its true nature ;
whereas in the improper sense (for which, however,
we have warrant in the popular language of Scrip
ture) nature implies that perversion of nature which
we call the Fall, and which is called nature not in
the sense of its being our true but of its being our
actual nature. We cannot avoid such ambiguities as
this of viewing sin and death as at once the natural
condition and the most unnatural condition of man ;
but we must keep in mind and make, as occasion
requires, the necessary distinction.
The New Testament affirms that in Adam, in our
humanity as we receive it from the race, we are all
subject to sin and death. This is the fact of the Fall,
a fact the truth of which it would seem wholly
unnecessary to discuss, because what Christianity

40 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
means by it is simply what it is impossible for any
man to deny. Any human being who knows himself
and knows his condition, knows that he is not by
nature and cannot become without Salvation himself,
according to the Aristotelian definition. That is,
himself as defined by his idea and end, his . complete
spiritual, moral, and natural self. Neither sin nor
death are any part of the proper definition and mean
ing, or of the true law, of manhood. They are the
denial, contradiction, and destruction of it. Yet both
sin and death are a universal and inevitable part of
man's actual or natural condition. Whether or not
a man Adam fell, unquestionably man has, because
he is, fallen. He is in a condition which is manifestly
a fall, and a deep fall, from his proper law and end ;
and he can be raised up to and made to attain his
perfection and destination only through what is for
him a Salvation.
But the point at present is what I have called the
generic meaning of the name Adam. The head of
the race, in whom it originated and of whom it is in
a sense the continuation and extension, has given his
name to the race. We are all thus in Adam, and are
all what Adam is. Every one that is born of Adam
is born into Adam's nature and condition ; which our
Lord Himself expressed in the saying, " That which
is born of the flesh is flesh."
There are in every human being two parts, the one
generic, the other individual and personal. Every
man is what he is partly by fact of his nature and
partly by act of himself. If there were no natural
part there would be no humanity ; if there were no

OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION. 41
personal part there would be no real manhood, for
the characteristic of man as man is personality.
What is natural in man is common to all men,
because it belongs to the common nature. What is
personal in him belongs to himself alone. It may be
impossible in much that we are and do to separate
between what is our nature and what is ourself, since
the nature acts largely through the person and the
person can only act within the nature ; but we would
not distinguish as we do, in consciousness and in our
consciences, between what is of necessity and what
is of freedom if both did not coexist in us. The
Fall, as it is a generic and universal fact, belongs to
the nature and not to the personality of man. The
weakness of the law to produce human obedience,
which means the weakness of human nature to render
an obedience to the law, St. Paul describes as a being
" weak through the flesh." It is not that the spirit
or personality in every man is not willing, but the
flesh or common nature is weak. What is called
" Original Sin " can only be such an inherited weak
ness for good or disposition to evil, not in ourselves
properly but in our nature, as renders it practically
impossible for us, in it as it is, to overcome evil or to
do good. The so-called sin of nature only becomes
properly ours, and, in fact, only becomes properly
sin, when we through the weakness of our nature
have yielded a personal obedience to it and have
transgressed our law. Before that it is only sin at
all as it is the sin of Adam, or the sin previously
committed by the race and transmitted to us through
the common nature as an inherited and irresistible
liability to sin.

42 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Now " as in Adam all die even so in Christ shall
all be made alive." No one can know his New Tes
tament without knowing how universally and con
sistently our relation to Christ is represented as a
being in Christ. The Incarnation is not an indi
vidual fact limited to our Lord as a man ; it is a gen
eric fact including, or intended to include, in Him
the whole race of man. I hope to prove and illustrate
at length elsewhere the important truth that all that
He was and did in the body of His particular incar
nation He is and does, or is to be and do, in the
greater body of His general or generic incarnation ;
that as He has glorified humanity in His own individ
ual body, so is He to glorify it in the great body of
His saints, who are only such as they are in Him and
He in them. This mode of representation so per
vades the New Testament that we need only to allude
to the numerous descriptions of the Church as the
Body of Christ — described also as His •jrXrjpcop.a, or
fulness, " that which is filled with His presence, power,
agency, and riches." Under the influence of this con
ception of the relation of Christians to Christ, St.
Paul utters the prayer : " That the God of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you
a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge
of Him (Christ) ; having the eyes of your heart
enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of
His calling, what the riches of the glory of His inher
itance in the Saints, and what the exceeding great
ness of His power to usward who believe according
to the working of the strength of His might which
he wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the

OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION. 43
dead and made Him to sit at His right hand . . . and
put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave
Him to be head over all things to the Church, which
is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in
all." Which means this : That in Jesus Christ we
are all in the Incarnation — that is to say, in that
system of divine and saving powers and operations
which as they wrought mightily in Christ will work
mightily in us in Christ, raising us up from the
dead, making us victorious over all our spiritual
enemies, and seating us at the right hand of God in
eternal participation in His holiness and glory.
The point at which we have arrived is this, that
as Adam in the New Testament frequently means
humanity in Adam or the race, so Christ frequently
means humanity in Christ or the Church. There is
thus an analogy between our relation to Adam as
head of the race and to Christ as head of the Church.
But there is also a contrast which it is all-important
clearly to understand. Our relation to Adam is a
natural one ; our relation to Christ is a personal one.
We are one with Adam by fact of our nature ; we
are one with Christ only by act of our persons or of
ourselves. Adam is thus the unity of human nature ;
Christ is a union of human persons. In Adam we
are subject to our nature ; in Christ our nature is
made subject to us ; that is, freedom and personality
are brought to their proper dominion over natural
impulse and sensibility. In the language of the New
Testament, Adam is that condition in which the trap!;,
the flesh or fallen nature, is dominant over the irvevp.a,
the spirit or personal will of the man. It is a con-

44 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
dition consequently of bondage or slavery. Christ
is that condition in which the spirit has been enabled
to subdue the flesh and so to attain to the freedom
and life of holiness and righteousness. And so St.
Paul defines Christ as follows : " But ye did not so
learn Christ ; if so be that ye heard Him and were
taught in Him even as the truth is in Jesus." And
then he goes on to tell what is true (i.e. what has
taken place and takes place) in Jesus Christ ; viz.
" your putting off, or away, the old man which is cor
rupt, etc. (i.e. the o-dp% or fallen nature), and putting
on the new man (i.e. your own emancipated and risen
spiritual or personal selfhood in Christ), who after
God is created in righteousness and holiness." Thus,
I repeat, the sarkical, fleshly, or natural man is what
he is through unity of nature with Adam ; the pneu-
matical or spiritual man is what he is through per
sonal union with Christ, who is in him that divine
not only potentiality but actuality of holiness, right
eousness, and eternal life in which alone the spirit
or personality of man asserts itself over his flesh
or fallen nature. But the personal union of Chris
tians with Christ, and with one another in Christ,
which is the true notion of the Church, constitutes
a unity as real as that of our nature with Adam and
with all men in Adam. In fact, it becomes itself
a unity and community, not only of persons but
of nature ; only, if I may use the expression, not of
natural, involuntary, or necessary nature, but spir
itual, personal, and acquired nature. As St. John
represents us as brought in Christ into a Koivwvia,
or participation, in the personal life of God, so St.

OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR SALVATION. 45
Peter represents us in the same terms as participating
in the divine <f>vcn.s, or nature. Here, again, the word
nature has to be guarded against more than one am
biguity. We are not of course in Christ partakers of
the nature of God in the sense in which we are in
ourselves partakers of the nature of Adam. If we
were, we should become what God is in His nature,
i.e. divine. What St. Peter means by the divine
nature is not, so to speak, the physical or metaphys
ical nature of God, but the moral, spiritual, or per
sonal nature of God — not what He is, e.g. in the
categories of substance, cause, etc., but what he is as
holiness, love, etc. In the proper sense of the divine
nature we are, of course, incapable of sharing it with
God. As designating His personal disposition and
character, His mind and spirit and will and purpose,
we are capable of being taken into and made subjects
of it. In Jesus Christ God took our nature in the
proper or natural sense in order that in Him we
might be brought into participation with His nature
in the secondary or spiritual sense above distin
guished — that in it He might become our holiness,
our righteousness, and our life, and so make us of one
spiritual, moral, and personal nature, disposition, or
character with Himself. All this He was in Himself,
objectively to our faith ; all this He becomes in us,
subjectively through our faith.
But when we say that Christianity is a community
not only of persons but of nature with Christ, it is
meant not only that we are made partakers of the
divine nature in the above sense, but of a new human
nature through that participation. Through spirit-

46 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
ual and personal union with God our nature too is
recreated or renewed. So completely so, that in the
end, even our natural body is changed into a spirit
ual body, and physical mortality is swallowed up in
a higher and eternal physical life. But while in
Adam it is the natural that involves and brings
down the spiritual and personal, in Christ it is the
spiritual and personal that raises up and restores
the natural. "If Christ is in you, the body is dead
because of sin ; but the spirit is life because of right
eousness. But if the spirit of Him that raised up
Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, He that raised
up Christ Jesus from the dead shall also quicken
your mortal bodies through His spirit that dwelleth
in you."

CHAPTER FOURTH.
OF CHRIST AS OUR RECONCILIATION OR ATONEMENT.
I USE the word Atonement in this chapter, not in
the fulness of its modern meaning, but in the sense
of its solitary occurrence in the English New Testa
ment (Rom. 5 : 11), as translation for /caraWayi], recon
ciliation or at-one-ment.
Does reconciliation designate only a change in
man to Godward, or does it involve a change in God
to man ward ? Does it mean the removal of an dpyrj
deov, a wrath of God, which is not a mere anthropo
morphism, but represents something real in the nature
and disposition of God towards man in his natural
condition ? Are we in fact " by nature the children
of wrath," and does that attitude or disposition of
wrath need in God to be converted into one of grace?
I lay down as a position which is capable of being
sustained — and which ought never, for one moment,
to be abandoned — the following : That Christianity
involves essentially no affirmation with regard to God
which is not as true in re, in the fact and actuality
of things, as it is in the word or declaration of revela
tion. In other words, there is nothing revealed as a
necessary part of Christianity which is not, as far as

48 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
we can see, corroborated as truth in the reality of
things, which is what I mean by in re. So when St.
Paul says that " the wrath of God is revealed from
heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness,"
the revelation he speaks of is one not in word only,
but in fact, in re. We cannot separate God from the
nature and working of things. Things and their
working are God, save in the case of the working
of that one only thing which God has endowed with
the awful power of separating itself from Him in
thought, will, and deed; viz. personality. The only
thing in the universe capable of being outside of God,
is personal consciousness and will; the only thing
that is actually outside of Him is sin, which is per
sonal separation from and enmity to Him. And
even sin is outside of God only in the " form," and
not in the " matter " of it. In the sinful act, the sin
is outside of Him, but the act is taken up by Him
into that " working of things," which is the working
of His determinate counsel and foreknowledge, and
in which all things work together for good. Thus,
in the acts of Pharaoh and Judas the sin as such was
theirs, but the acts were made God's, and so were
made good. And thus the wicked are God's instru
ments and the wrath of man is made to praise Him.
But more than this. Not only all the effects and
consequences of sin, but particularly the reflex action
of sin upon the sinner himself, is part of that work
ing of things which is God Himself. Thus it is true
that God hardened Pharaoh's heart. Pharaoh's sin
was his own, but its hardening effect upon himself
was the working of a natural law, which was not his

CHRIST AS OUR ATONEMENT. 49
doing but God's. And these natural results of sin in
the sinner are judicial; they are God's judgments
.upon sin, God's punishment for sin. Let any one
read carefully St. Paul's description in Rom. 1, of
how the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against
all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, and he
will see God's wrath revealed in re. He will see how
by natural consequence, i.e. by the necessary working
of a law, unbelief becomes disobedience or unrighteous
ness ; and then how disobedience becomes death ; i.e.
how transgression against God becomes, or rather is
in itself, the violation of man's own nature and law,
and so the dissolution, corruption, and death of him
self. And in all this we shall see the judicial and
punitive consequence of sin. " Because they would
not have God in their knowledge; because they
changed the truth of God into a lie ; because, think
ing themselves wise, they became fools — therefore
God gave them over unto unclean and shameful lusts,
unto all manner of sins against nature, and so they
received in themselves that recompense of their error
which was due."
" The soul that sinneth it shall die " is no mere
word of revelation. It is no arbitrary declaration
which has no counterpart in the working of things.
It is as true a fact or law of nature as gravitation it
self. There are several things to reflect upon in this
real way of looking at the matter. And first, the rela
tion or connection between sin, the divine displeas
ure and punishment. The connection is a real and
an indissoluble one. We might affirm a priori with
an absolute conviction that any provisibn for doing

50 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
away with the divine wrath and punishment for sin in
cludes as a pre-condition the doing away of sin. Bishop
Butler should have taught us how God is angry and
punishes. With man there is no necessary connection
in re between these things. Human punishments are
always more or less arbitrary and frequently have no
natural connection, — I mean in the mode not the fact
of their following — whatsoever with the offences for
which they are inflicted. But with God sin carries
its wrath and its penalty in itself and the three how
ever separable in thought are inseparable in fact. It
is impossible in the nature of the thing that God
should put away one without putting away all ; im
possible that His a^eo-t? ap.apria<; should be anything
less than a real and a whole putting away of sin ; i.e.
should be only a remission of the penalty or laying
aside of the anger and not an actual removal of the
sin itself. Of course I am speaking of the order of
things iii themselves or in God. We may or may not
apprehend them in a different order. But the great
truth of my Salvation in Jesus Christ is this : He has
abolished sin; He has abolished my sin, therefore
there is nothing between me and God, and nothing
between me and Eternal Life. He is therefore my
KaraWayi], my reconciliation or at-one-ment.
A little reflection will show us how impossible it is
in the nature of the thing that sin should not involve
inherently and essentially just what revelation calls
divine wrath and penalty. If holiness carries with it
in its very nature the divine approbation and blessed
ness, how shall not its contradictory be in itself the
opposite of 'these? If holiness, righteousness, and

CHRIST AS OUR ATONEMENT. 51
life are in themselves supreme rewards and blessings,
how can sin, disobedience, and death be anything else
than a corresponding penalty and curse ?
The wrath of God properly understood, so far from
being in conflict with the love of God, is the highest
expression of it. How can God love my good with
out hating my evil ? " Our God is a consuming fire "
— but the fire of the furnace which is hatred to the
dross is love to the gold. And God's wrath against
sin is not only love, but the only love to the sinner.
Suppose that spiritual and moral evil were not fol
lowed by the natural evil of God's displeasure and
punishment. It is not supposable — because, being
spiritual and moral beings, spiritual and moral evil
are contradictions of ourselves and of our proper good,
and consequently are in themselves also natural evils
to us. But supposing it supposable, if God could and
should remove from sin and disobedience their natural
and penal consequences, would it be an act of love
on His part to do so? Would goodness continue to
be blessedness if badness ceased to be accursedness ?
" Our God is a consuming fire," and He is never so
much " our God " as when He is consuming us. The
cross is the only true revelation and adequate expres
sion of the love of God, the cross by which He im
parts life by inflicting death upon us. For it is only
in God's wrath to our sin that we know God's love to
ourselves. If, then, God's " working of things " is in
itself Divine Love, He cannot change it because we
refuse to see it so. It must needs be and continue to
be that it is only to those who love Him and are called
according to His purpose, i.e. who enter into the true

52 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
meaning and purpose of His calling, that all things
work together for good !
There is, therefore, a true sense in which we are by
nature " the children of wrath." Every man born of
Adam inherits a aap^ ap,apria<; — a nature in which
he is subject to sin and death. I repeat that this
is true in re, and not merely by revelation. In fact,
revelation makes nothing true ; it only reveals what
is true. When the Scriptures speak as they do of
our being by nature enemies of God, we may be dis
posed to deny, and that with an element of justice,
that our consciousness sustains the charge. St. Paul
himself is the first to affirm that the earn avdpa>Tro<;,
the inner spiritual man that is in every man, the man
in himself or in his personality, is on the side of God
and of God's and his own law. But the t%a> avOpa-
7ro5, the outer and fleshly man that is also a part of
every man, the man as he is under the dominion of
his crapl; apapTias, is not subject to the law of God
and cannot be. Whether the man himself knows
it or means it or not, his life is at enmity with God
and His law. The e%#/3a, or enmity, is therefore es
sentially a fact of his nature rather than of himself.
If it were not so he would not be in the New Testa
ment sense a subject for redemption ; because the
New Testament redemption is essentially the eman
cipation of the man from the bondage of his nature.
And what man needs not to be redeemed ? Who is
there in the flesh that is not under the dominion of
sin and death? This, it may be contended, is our
enmity against God, not God's against us. So it
is, but the %.%Qpa of man involves of necessity the

CHRIST AS OUR ATONEMENT. 53
opyij of God. The ex®Pa °^ sm brings in it and
with it the opy-q of death. The power, not ourselves,
that reveals itself in the working of things, whether
we call it nature or God, makes sin a terrible thing
to the sinner. " The soul that sinneth it shall die."
" He that will not live by the law shall die by the
law." " To them that are contentious and obey not
the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation, and
wrath, tribulation and anguish — upon every soul of
man that worketh evil." That may be revelation,
but it is the way God reveals Himself in the working
of things as well as in the letter of Scripture.
But man's enmity is the ground and cause of God's
wrath, and not vice versa. " Your sin hath separated
between you and your God." As naught else in
the universe, possible or conceivable, could have pro
duced or constituted a separation between God and
man save only sin, so naught else but the doing
away of sin can reconcile or make them one. Noth
ing less or else than that will make the reconciliation
as real a thing as the separation was.
Now Jesus Christ is our reconciliation or at-one-
ment, because in Him sin is abolished and the sepa
ration done away. And this in a twofold sense —
first, in Himself, and second, in us. First, sin is abol
ished in Christ Himself, in the simple fact that in Him
in our nature there is no sin. And there is no sin
in Him in our nature because, by His victorious and
entire sinlessness in it, He has destroyed sin in it in
Himself. He has slain the enmity in oar nature, so
that in Him we see God and man reconciled and at
one. He has accomplished the ri ?)v elvai of human

54 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Salvation. He has defined Salvation by His own act
and exhibited in it His own person. When we say
that Jesus Christ as man, as well as for man, destroyed
sin by His own sinlessness, we do not mean that He
did do so by His negative sinlessness but by His
positive holiness. There is no sinlessness but in the
most active and positive holiness. "Walk in the
Spirit and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh."
It was true of our Lord Himself, as author of our
Salvation, that His death in the flesh was in reality
His life in the spirit. It was the perfection of His
living in God and the spirit that excluded, con
demned, and destroyed-all possibility of imperfect
life in the flesh. Jesus Christ is thus, in Himself,
representatively and exemplarily our reconciliation,
because He is our not only sinlessness but holiness:
because in Him as man all separation between God
and man has been taken away, and God and man are
one. But secondly, sin is abolished not only in Christ
Himself, but in us in Christ. And that because, as
we have seen, He is not exemplarily only, but both
causally and really our holiness. " Ye know," says
St. John, " that He was manifested to take away sin ;
and in Him is no sin. He that abideth in Him sin
neth not." Our Lord's " taking away " sin involves
in the Apostle's mind two things : 1st, in Him is no
sin, and 2d, in us in Him (in so far as we are and
continue in Him) is no sin. Jesus Christ is a real
Salvation from sin to all who are really in Him.
" Who," says St. Peter, " His own self bare our sins in
His own body on the tree, that we being dead to sin

CHRIST AS OUR ATONEMENT. 55
should live to righteousness." Our Lord crucified
and destroyed sin in His own flesh that we in Him
might die in the flesh of sin and live in the spirit of
holiness and true righteousness.
"He is our peace," says St. Paul. ?And He ex
plains it to be because He has broken down the
middle wall of partition (not only between Jew and
Gentile, but) between us and God. He has in His
flesh, which is ours, abolished the enmity in our flesh.
So Jesus Christ is the door of entrance into God.
He is the way by which alone we come to the Father.
He is the rending of the veil of separation between
God and us. And that because, by His abolishment
of sin He has actually brought humanity, both in
His body natural and in His body mystical, into a
real oneness with God.
Real, for us as well as in Himself, as is the recon
ciliation which our Lord has wrought by the aboli
tion of sin, we have yet to distinguish between the
several stages of its application or applicability to our
selves. In the first place, Jesus Christ was our peace and
oneness with God, not only before He becomes sub
jectively our death to sin and life in holiness, but
long before even He objectively reconciled us by His
own death and resurrection. "Because God hath
from the beginning chosen us to Salvation through
sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth,"
— " according to His purpose and grace, which was
given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, but is
now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour
Jesus Christ who hath abolished death and brought

56 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
life and immortality to light." Most assuredly what
was prepared and intended for us from the beginning
was that death, and before death sin, was to be
abolished not only for us but in us in Christ. In the
mind and grace of God we were reconciled and Christ
was our reconciliation before the world began.
In the second place, the reconciliation thus eter
nally ours in the gracious purpose of God, was actual
ized and revealed in the world when Jesus Christ, by
His crucifixion and death in the flesh and His resurrec
tion and life in the spirit, sanctified humanity in His
own person and became the author of human holiness.
Inasmuch as holiness is the only real reconciliation
He thus became our reconciliation — but only as yet
in an objective sense ; for us but not yet in us. By
our Lord's act in the world and among men, He be
came no longer in God's grace only but in men's faith
also, their holiness. They were enabled to see in His,
their own death to sin and life to God. If Christ
were not thus first objectively our Salvation, He
could never become subjectively our Salvation. The
objective divine gift must precede the subjective
human reception of it. If Salvation is through sanc
tification of the spirit and belief of the truth, there
must be a truth of our Salvation revealed to us which
by believing we are saved. The more we study how
Jesus Christ becomes or is made our holiness, the more
clearly shall we see that He must have been so to us in
Himself before He could become so in us in ourselves.
We anticipate a great truth when we affirm that all
God's operations in us- as spiritual beings are by the
word through the spirit. But assuredly again, Jesus

CHRIST AS OUR ATONEMENT. 57
Christ is objectively our holiness — or our Salvation
in any respect — only as by His spirit and our faith
in Him as such, He is to become so subjectively and
actually. We were sanctified, or reconciled, in Christ Jesus
prior to any faith or even knowledge of it on our part.
Again, we are sanctified in Christ Jesus in our faith
prior to being so in fact ; we see ourselves complete
in Him in faith while yet we are conscious of being
very incomplete in ourselves in fact. But certainly
both God's grace and our faith look forward to fact,
and they would have no meaning in themselves apart
from that fact. But the important question of the
relation between objective and subjective Salvation
in Christ must be discussed in a chapter to itself.
In the third place, and finally, Christ is our recon
ciliation and at-one-ment with God in the sense and
to the extent that in Him we are more or less actually
sanctified, and God and we are actually at one, by
our own participation in Christ's death and resurrec
tion, i.e. by the death in us of all that separates us,
and the life of all that unites us with God. The
rationale of this process by which Christ becomes our
subjective holiness and real reconciliation with God
I also reserve for separate treatment.
The place of baptism, as of the Church in general,
in its relation to both our objective and subjective
Salvation in Christ, I prefer to pass over until we
come, at the close, to discuss the nature and function
of Church and Sacraments.
From an exegetical point of view, objection might
be made to the practical identification of reconcilia-

58 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
tion with sanctification or holiness, which is made in
this chapter — upon the theory that reconciliation
cannot stop short of what I have called a real recon
ciliation, a bringing of man into real oneness with
God. It might be said that in the New Testament,
while holiness always means a subjective nature,
quality, or character, reconciliation is an objective
relation between God and man, brought about once
for all and independently of us by the fact of Christ's
death. For example, in Rom. 5 : 10, etc., the
Apostle says : " For if, while we were enemies,
we were reconciled to God through the death
of His Son; much more, being or having been
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 atonement, or reconciliation." But not to go at
present into a detailed exegesis of the passage, I
think that what is in the mind of St. Paul might be
paraphased thus : If when we were yet enemies God
objectively saved us in Christ, by abolishing in Him
the enmity, why should we doubt that He will sub
jectively save us in Christ by abolishing in us the
enmity? What has been done for us, why shall it
'not be done in us ? If God, while we were yet in
enmity, prepared for us in Christ, in His crucifixion
of the flesh and abolishment of the enmity, an objec
tive reconciliation or at-one-ment, how can we doubt
that, through our union with Christ and by the grace
of Christ through our faith, God working in us with
the selfsame power with which He wrought in
Christ will make that objective subjective and do in

CHRIST AS OUR ATONEMENT. 59
us ourselves that which for the very purpose He has
done for us in Christ ! The reconciliation for us is
only a means and a step to the reconciliation in us, a
presentation to our faith as having taken place in
Christ of that which through our faith is to take
place in ourselves.
Again, in 2 Cor. 5 : 17, etc., St. Paul cries : " If any
man is in Christ Jesus he is a new creation ; the old
things have passed away, and behold, new things
have come to pass (in him). And it is all of God
who reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ." Here,
as throughout the passage, the reconciliation which
took place in Christ is represented as taking place in
us by the death in us as in Him of the enmity in our
flesh. By a real participation in His death the old
things of the flesh have passed away ; by participa
tion in His life the new things of the spirit have
come to pass in us.
" God," the Apostle goes on to say, " was in Christ
reconciling the world unto Himself." This means first,
of course, that God was in Jesus Christ personally,
by his own act upon the cross, reconciling the world.
Potentially and in the intention of the divine grace,
every man on that cross died to sin and was reconciled
to God. But that the reconciliation thus effected in
Christ was to be also effected in us is proved by the
Apostle's going on to say, further, " And hath com
mitted unto us the ministry or ministering of the
reconciliation." In the prosecution of which, He
says, " As ambassadors for Christ and as though God
was beseeching you by us, we entreat you for Christ's
sake be ye reconciled to God." Now this, our being

60 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
reconciled to God, no doubt means that we are to
accept in faith the fact of an objective reconciliation
in Christ. But it does not mean that only ; it means
that we are to receive through faith the fact of a
subjective reconciliation also, so as not only to have
been made one but to be one with God in Christ. I
say that this must be so because just above the Apos
tle, as we have seen, has described the effect of the
reconciliation to be a change, a new creation, the
passing away of old things, and the coming about of
new things in us.
It is a mistake to think that sanctification means
only something subjective, and reconciliation only
something objective in the New Testament. Jesus
Christ was in Himself, and before we ever knew Him
so, as much our sanctification as He was our recon
ciliation. "He became wisdom to us from God,
both righteousness and sanctification and redemp
tion," long before any baptism into Him, or faith in
Him, or reception of any spiritual quality or char
acter from Him on our part. We were rjyiaap,evoi iv
Xpio-rS, sanctified in Christ, prior to any actual
sanctity in ourselves. He was thus objectively, and
in Himself, our sanctification before, through His
grace and our faith, He became so subjectively in us.
And as sanctification is not subjective only, so as
we have seen reconciliation is not objective only.
In fact we may say, that while there are some
things which Jesus Christ is represented predomi
nantly as having done objectively for us — as e.g.
justification, redemption, reconciliation, etc. — and
other things which He is represented as doing sub-

CHRIST AS OUR ATONEMENT. 61
jectively in us — as sanctification — yet it is true
that He was or did nothing for us which He was not
to be or do in us, and He is or does nothing in us
which He was not or did not first for us.

CHAPTER FIFTH.
OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION.
Redemption bears the same relation to righteous
ness which, we have seen in the previous chapter,
reconciliation bears to holiness. There is no real
reconciliation but holiness, for the reason that as sin
is the only separation from God and enmity with
Him, so holiness is the only union and oneness with
Him of which we are capable. And in the same way
there is no redemption but righteousness, because
righteousness is the only freedom of a moral being,
and all unrighteousness is bondage or slavery ; and
redemption means deliverance from bondage or bring
ing into freedom.
As reconciliation and holiness have to do with the
spiritual nature of God, so redemption and righteous
ness have to do with the moral law of God. Recon
ciliation or at-one-ment brings us into that personal
and spiritual oneness of nature with God which we
call holiness. Redemption brings us into that free
dom of obedience to God's law which we call right
eousness. The principle of holiness is faith, which is
that human correspondence with and susceptibility
of the divine through which we become partakers of

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 63
the divine spirit and nature ; the principle of right
eousness is obedience, which is that human activity
in the divine whereLiy we realize the divine will or
law. Human holiness and righteousness may not be
separable in fact : in fact they are one, as soul and
body are one. For it is at once man's highest law,
obedience, and righteousness to be one with God, and
his highest oneness with God or holiness to fulfil
God's mind or will or law. But the two things are
separable in thought and the distinction we have
made between them has at least this use, that it
enables us better to understand human Salvation by
considering it from different points of view and as it
is expressed in different sets of terms. So, as we have
considered Salvation as a restoration to oneness of
spiritual nature with God, we are now to study it as
deliverance from a condition of bondage and restora
tion to the liberty of obedience to God's law.
I have already defined liberty to be the freedom of
a person, not from law, but to obey his law. Every
thing that is or lives has its law — which is at once
God's law, nature's law, and its own law. There is
no schism or difference among these. To obey or to
transgress one is to obey or transgress all, for they
are all one. God or nature demands nothing more
or less of any being than to fulfil itself. And this
it can do only by obeying its law, for the law
of any being is nothing but the expression of its
own proper and perfect acting and being, and so
self-realization. I can only be, act, and become my
self in obedience to my own law. To obey any
other law is to depart from and so deny, contradict,

64 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and cease to be myself. To do which is to contra
dict not only God's, nature's, and one's own law, but
the good of all these. It is at once unholiness,
unrighteousness, and death. Obedience to one's own
law, therefore, is holiness, righteousness, and life, and
disobedience is the opposite of all these.
Now as matter of fact, disobedience is a universal
condition of the human race. I say condition, because
in every man in this world disobedience, or trans
gression of law, has its origin and cause not in
himself but in his nature. Its very universality and
inevitableness is proof that it is in us by consequence
and necessity of our fallen nature. As St. Paul
says : " It is not I but sin that dwelleth in me," i.e.
in my o-dpf;, or fallen nature. As for the "I," by
which he means the earn avdpwTro<;, the personal self
hood, that is in, and is, every man — St. Paul affirms
that that recognizes, acknowledges, approves, desires,
and wills the law. Nevertheless " I," who know and
will the law, do not obey it. Why ? Because I am
in bondage to my o-ap%, or fallen nature. The higher
will of spiritual and moral reason is subject to the
lower will of carnal inclination, and the law is tram
pled under foot of our lusts. Who is free from this
bondage, or who is able of himself to emancipate
himself from it ? Alas ! He who thinks that he can
knows neither the whence nor the whereunto of his
Salvation; he knows neither the height from which,
nor the depth to which he is fallen. Who can ascend
into heaven and raise himself thither ; who can
descend into hell and raise himself thence? The
more a man is saved the more he knows the depths

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 65
from which and the heights to which man needs to be
saved, and the more he discovers that for him Salva
tion is of God and not of himself.
There is, of course, a paradox in the position that
man ought to render an obedience which he cannot.
But both the ought and the cannot- express facts of
moral experience which are not to be gainsaid, whether
or not we are able to reconcile or explain them. The
scriptural account assumes that the cannot ought not
to exist. Its existence is the result of sin, and con
stitutes that bondage to sin which the race has en
tailed upon itself. If there were no sin, man would
still not in himself be able to fulfil his law, for his law
is to fulfil himself not in himself but in God. But if
there were no sin, man would be in God and so would
be able to fulfil himself. When or how the human
race fell under the bondage of sin, as an historical
question, need not enter into our present discussion.
As matter of fact, is it under the bondage of sin?
That Adam fell need for our present purpose mean
only that man is fallen. And that means nothing
more than this, that in our present state or condition
no man fulfils or is able to fulfil his law. That surely
is not a normal condition of things, but it is the actual
condition of things. And if freedom or liberty means
ability to obey and actual obedience to, one's law,
then man is in a state of bondage or slavery, for he
has not that ability and is not in that obedience.
The New Testament position that in every man the
personal will, which is the person himself, is in bond
age under the adpf;, or fallen nature, is a truth which
has been abundantly recognized outside of Christianity.

66 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Perhaps it might be better expressed by saying that
the person, or man, finds himself the subject of two
wills, one of his moral reason or true law, and the
other of his carnal or sensuous nature. Kant holds
that since the higher ought to control the lower will,
therefore it can ("I ought, therefore I can"). How
can a person recognize as his law that which he can
not obey, know that he ought to do what he cannot
do? But what, according to Kant himself, is the
moral law ? It is as high and limitless as the " starry
heavens." There is no height beyond which there
are not higher heights of moral obedience. The only
limit to it has been fixed by Him who alone has
voiced the possibilities and the aspirations of hu
manity, the full hungering and thirsting of the
human will after righteousness: "Be ye perfect as
your Father in heaven is perfect." And indeed for
the spiritual and moral activity of man there is no
limit in the constitution of human personality short
of God Himself. Was ever man so wise and so good
that he ought not to and could not be wiser and bet
ter, or shall there ever be, short of the divine wisdom
and goodness ! Truly the Apostle may well pray
" that the eyes of our understanding may be enlight
ened, that we may know the hope of our calling and
the riches of the glory of our inheritance" — for what
is man's subjection to so infinite, divine, and perfect a
law but a promise and a prophecy to him of his own
divine and infinite perfection ?
But if the moral law means so much, we need to
examine well into the ground of Kant's faith that
" we ought and therefore we can." In the first

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 67
place, assuming the " can,w that the fact of the law
proves the possibility of the obedience — may it not
mean, not according to "Kant, man's infinite perfec
tibility in and of himself, but, according to St. Paul
and our Lord, man's infinite perfectibility in and of
God ? When we say, as we do, that man can realize
his moral only as he has realized his spiritual nature ;
that without holiness there can be for us no right
eousness ; without God in us there can be no true and
perfect obedience to God: from us or by us — we are
saying nothing that contradicts the nature of obe
dience or righteousness. On the contrary, the claim
that man can realize an infinite and eternal divine
law is only rendered credible by the fact that he may
be in union with and a partaker of the spirit and
power of the infinite and eternal Divine Personality.
In the second place, may we not reconcile Kant's
"can" and St. Paul's "cannot," by saying that
ideally we can, but actually we cannot render a real
obedience to the law. If man were according to his
idea he could obey ; that is, if he were in perfect cor
respondence with God, which means, if he were in
perfect faith and in perfect grace — he could be and
would be in perfect obedience or righteousness. But
the relation between God and man is impaired ; and
as a fact of his actual condition he feels both that
he ought to, and ought to be able to, obey — ¦ and that
he does not, and is not able to, obey. This inability
is our bondage, and it is that from which we need to
be redeemed. But there cannot be moral redemption
or righteousness without spiritual reconciliation or
holiness.

68 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
It is a vital position in the New Testament doc
trine that while the law of any being is the expres
sion of its perfection — while, therefore, it is only
perfect as it fulfils its law — yet " the law makes
nothing perfect." That is, though the law perfects
formally, it cannot do so causally or even instru
mentally. Man can never be made perfect by mere
command to be, or knowledge that he ought to be,
perfect. And that is as far as mere law can go.
The meaning and reason of this it is well to reflect
upon, even at the risk of the repetition of points
already insisted upon.
In the first place, however it may be with other
beings, so far as man is concerned, the principle that
he cannot be perfected by the operation upon him of
mere law is an essential and not an accidental one. It
is not the result of the fact of the fall and the conse
quent do-deveia, or weakness of his nature. Admitting
that men might conceivably have been so constituted
as to be subject to an abstract formal law whose cate
gorical imperative and their own sense of obligation
to it could and would be sufficient to produce their
obedience to it — in which case, of course, their per
fection as moral beings would have consisted in this
mere formal obedience : admitting, I say, that men
might have been so constituted, as matter of fact
they have not been and they are not so constituted.
Man's law is God's law, and man by the actual con
stitution of his nature is, or is to be, related to God,
not by the external bond of a formal obedience to
His law, but by the internal bond of a real and
persoilal union with Himself. This I have endeav-

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 69
ored to express by saying that man is not merely a
moral but primarily a spiritual being; that he can
fulfil his law only in personal and spiritual union
with God. He is essentially not a servant but a son
of God, called to share His nature as well as obey
His law, and only able to obey His law as he first
shares His nature. As our Lord in the revelation to
us in Himself of a true human sonship, says of
Himself, "I and my Father are one," and then
adds, as a necessary consequence : " what the Father
doeth the Son doeth likewise" — so is it true of us,
that it is only as God and we are one, that we work
the works of God. We must, by a birth from above,
be what God is before we can do what God does.
It is true that, if we wish to speak (pva-iKtorepov,
to go more into the root of things, man being con
stituted as we have described, his law is to be a son
and not a servant, and to render a filial and real and
not a servile and formal obedience, and therefore it is
still by obedience to his law that he is to be per
fected. But it makes a great difference whether we
make our obedience the cause or the consequence of
what we are: even all the difference of whether
what we are to be is to be of ourselves or of God.
If we are to be perfect by our obedience, then we shall
have produced our perfection ; we " by our works "
shall have earned both it and its recognition and
reward from God. If, on the contrary, we can only
obey because we are perfect, i.e. out of the divine
perfection in Jesus Christ into which we are taken,
and which is made ours in Him ; and because we are
and act of and in God in Christ, i.e. obey because

70 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
we are sons — then our obedience or righteousness is
not our own, but God's in us, and it becomes an
obedience not of the law but of grace. It is to be
admitted again that this is possible only upon condi
tion that God's being and acting in us is consistent
with, and in no sense or degree contradictory or de
structive of, our own personal being or acting. For
it is true that only my obedience is in me obedience
at all. An obedience only of God in me, and not
of me, is no obedience. But why may not my obe
dience be both of God and of me? If it is my
spiritual and personal constitution and nature to
become and be my conscious, free, spiritual, and
moral self only in God, i.e. in the relationship of
grace and faith, then it is impossible for me to be
come or be so out of Him. And when I am so in
and of Him, I am not contradicting but fulfilling my
proper and true selfhood. For while we cannot be
ourselves without God, yet we can not be ourselves in
Him. While we have no positive power of obedience
save as He is and acts in us ; yet we have the nega
tive power of non-obedience, i.e. of not being and
acting in Him. So that even God cannot save us, or
be our obedience and righteousness, without us : be
cause whatever He might be in us, without us, would
not be our obedience or righteousness.
It follows from the above that the inability of mere
formal law to perfect us is independent of the fact of
the Fall. Only God Himself can perfect us, although
He perfects us only as He fulfils His law in us and
we fulfil our law in Him. But in the second place,
the position that the law cannot perfect us becomes

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 71
doubly true when we take into account that fact of our
nature as it is, which we call the Fall.
If we were only incomplete, or not yet perfect, we
should yet have to find our reXeiwo-i<;, or completion,
in God. But because we have not only not yet ful
filled the law of perfection, but are subject to a law
of imperfection, we need to find in God not only
completion but redemption — not only reXeiwa-ii but
diroXvTpeoa-L^. In proportion as man knows his own, which is
God's, law ; knows what it requires of him and what
he is as compared with and judged by it, in that
proportion does he recognize in the law the ministra
tion to him not of life but of death. Instead of pro
ducing in him righteousness, it can only convict and
convince him of unrighteousness. At the best, as we
have seen, the law, while it exacts righteousness, is
unable to impart that grace, that divine nature, that
holiness without which all so-called righteousness is
a body without a soul. But here it exacts righteous
ness not only without itself supplying the necessary
holiness, but of those who are already in themselves
unholy. Its only possible effect is to reveal the con
dition of things without in any way bettering it.
" By the law is the knowledge of sin " ; but if the
knowledge of sin means the knowledge of our help
lessness and hopelessness under the power and law
of sin, then instead of making things better it can only
make them worse. The revelation to the sinner of
his sin, if it cannot cure, will only aggravate and
intensify his sinfulness. Simply to make sin more
conscious is to make it more sinful and malignant,

72 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
more desperately active and wicked. To preach only
the law to fallen man, then, inasmuch as it is only to
increase his guilt and condemnation, is but a ministry
of wrath.
Thus is the gospel the diametrically opposite pro
cedure from the law. It cannot require anything
less of us than a perfect obedience or righteousness,
because nothing less would be for us real redemption
and moral freedom. But it does not undertake to
produce righteousness by requiring or demanding it.
It comes to us not law foremost, but God foremost,
making not obedience the condition of God in us,
but God in us the condition and cause of obedience.
It says : Believe, and let God be in you, and then obey
or let God act or work in you ; or rather, then will
God act in you and you in God ; your holiness will
become righteousness.
It is unnecessary to dwell upon certain narrower
senses in which the law is spoken of occasionally in
the New Testament. It sometimes means the law in
the letter, as it is formulated in a moral code or a
system of outward precepts. Sometimes again, the
ceremonial law, — the law as it had been embodied in
the symbolism of rites and ceremonies. Of course in
neither of these senses can the law make any man
•perfect. No formal observance of moral precepts or
ritual acts can cleanse his conscience or conscious
ness of sin or guilt, or impart to him that holiness
and righteousness which as his only spiritual and
moral perfection can alone constitute for him Sal
vation. Before passing away from the subject we may lay

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 73
down another ground of the impossibility of a right
eousness through the law, which seems in one or
more passages to be in the mind of St. Paul. It may
be expressed in the paradox that a righteousness, if it
could be and were attained though the law, would in
the most essential respect of all, not be a righteous
ness. That is, it would lack the distinctive element
of Christian righteousness at least, of which the
essential element is humility. ' St. Paul, after de
scribing the righteousness which is of God in Christ,
in contrast with that which is of the law, seems to
make the specific glory of it to consist in the fact that
all boasting is excluded from it. It is true that in
the moral axiom, " He who exalts himself abases
himself," the meaning must be not he who exalts
himself in fact, but in thought or feeling. For there
is no real spiritual or moral exaltation which is not
in a true and proper sense a seZf-exaltation. Though
it be God who exalts us, yet as we have seen He can-.
not exalt us without ourselves, or except as we exalt
ourselves. But in any exaltation which is purely of
oneself, may we not affirm that the fact of self-exalta
tion is inseparable from the sense or feeling of self-ex
altation? Can there be a purely self-made virtue, or
self-righteousness which is not only free from moral
or spiritual pride, but possesses the opposite charm
and glory of a true modesty and humility? What
St. Paul seems to value so highly in the righteous
ness of Christ, is that while it is a most real righteous
ness, an actual fulfilment by ourselves of our law,
yet the fact that it is at the same time not of our
selves, but of God in us, excludes from it all that

74 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
element of boasting, of self-conceit and pride which
would contradict its chief virtue and beauty; viz.
its selflessness, its modesty and humility. Assuredly
to be all that righteousness is and to do all that it
requires, and yet to take none of the merit or glory of
it to ourselves, makes righteousness a vastly better
and greater thing than if it were otherwise. What
else could combine such lofty assurance, such divine
confidence of being able to be all things and to do
all things, with such meekness and lowliness, such
humility and modesty, as we see originally in our
Lord Himself, as we see derivatively in St. Paul and
in all true Christians !
Returning now to the facts of the case, we find
that man is not in obedience to the true law which
personally he himself recognizes and wills and in
which he would find the freedom of righteousness and
life, but that, on the contrary, he is subject to a
false counter-law, whose seat is in his flesh and which
the Apostle calls " the law of sin and death." Of
course this law of sin in the flesh is no proper law.
In one sense, indeed, it is a law and a divine law,
inasmuch as even sin, though as such originating and
existing only outside of God, yet when it does exist,
is subject in its workings and consequences to a law
imposed upon it by God. For example, the connec
tion expressed in the very words " sin and death "
reveals a law of things, and therefore of God ; the law,
namely, that the cause sin, and the effect death, are
indissolubly connected or united in one. Thus every
sinner is inextricably involved in a train of natural
and necessary consequences which operate as a law

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 75
to which he is subject and from which he needs to be
redeemed. And this law, in so far as it is natural
and judicial, is divine ; it is the working of the opyrj
deov, the wrath of God. But properly, a law is the
true law of a thing, and the only law for man is the
law of righteousness. The law of sin and death is a
false law, contradicting in him the true law of holi
ness, righteousness, and life, and constituting for him
a slavery or bondage in the fact that it contradicts
what is alone and essentially his freedom.
Knowing, then, what man's bondage is and what his
freedom would be, we are prepared to anticipate
what his redemption must be. It would be impossi
ble, however, to express this more exactly than St.
Paul has done in the beginning of the eighth chapter
of Romans. " There is, therefore, now," says he,
" no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus,
for the law of the Spirit of life hath in Christ Jesus
set me free from the law of sin and death." The
law of sin and death includes two things. 1st, the
fact that every man who is in the flesh sins and is the
slave of sin ; that, however in the spirit he may
know, desire, and will otherwise, in the flesh he obeys
and does it. 2d, the fact that in sin we are brought
under a train of natural, penal, or judicial conse
quences which works with the necessity, certainty,
and regularity of a law, which consequently is called
the law of sin and death and which constitutes that
KaraKpipia, or " condemnation," which is the working
in re of the opyr) deov.
Now in " Christ Jesus " the condemnation is abol
ished because the law of the spirit of life which is in

76 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Him sets us free from this counter-law of sin and
death. The " spirit of life " is the spirit of holiness
and righteousness which is, in itself, emancipation
from sin and unrighteousness and by consequence
from death. It is not a mere human spirit of natural
obedience to the higher law of righteousness mani
fested in Jesus Christ. It is the personal, divine
spirit which wrought in Christ Himself without meas
ure ; and which, if we be in Christ, works in us to
make us spiritual, i.e. to enable us in the spirit to
overcome the flesh of sin that is in us. "If the
spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwell
in us, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will
quicken us also by His spirit that dwelleth in us."
The law of the spirit of life in us in Christ can only
mean the spirit of God in Christ making Christ's
holiness, righteousness, and life ours, and so effecting
in us a real and the only real emancipation or
redemption from the law of sin and death, the natural
operation in us of which is God's Kard/cpip,a, or con
demnation. " For," the Apostle goes on to say,
" what was impossible for the law to do, God, sending
His Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin, and for sin,
condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the right
eous requirement of the law (or that righteousness
which the law requires of us) might be fulfilled in
us who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit."
The law requires righteousness of us ; but to require
of is the opposite of giving to. It implies that right
eousness is to be of our obedience and not of God's
spirit and gift, i.e. a merely moral and not an essen
tially spiritual righteousness. It implies, further,

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 77
not only that we could if unfallen acquire, but that
we can, though fallen, recover righteousness; that
not only righteousness but redemption from unright
eousness is to be our own act in or upon ourselves.
This is a double impossibility ; not only could not the
law if we were upright, but it doubly cannot because
we are fallen, produce in us its own righteous require
ment. It can only work in us, not Sucaicopa but
/caTa/cpipa. •
But what the law in our flesh and especially in our
sinful flesh could not accomplish, God, sending His
own Son in our flesh, did and does accomplish. He
did accomplish it when Jesus Christ by that sole in
strument of human Salvation, the Cross, i.e. by His
perfect crucifixion of the flesh of sin, condemned sin
in the flesh, broke the power, abolished the sway,
abrogated the law, and did away with all the con
sequences of sin in the flesh.
He does accomplish it when in us in Christ, with
the self-same spirit and power and effect with which
He wrought in Christ Himself, He enables our spirit
to subdue and mortify our flesh, and substitutes in us
the law of the spirit of life for that of sin and death ;
and so fulfils in us that righteousness which the law
requires, but was unable to produce in us.

CHAPTER SIXTH.
OF CHRIST BOTH OBJECTIVELY AND SUBJECTIVELY,
OUR REDEMPTION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
The word BiKaiow, after the analogy of verbs of its
form — as SovXoco, to enslave, TvcpXoco, to blind — means
properly to make righteous. A number of these verbs,
however, when applied to human, or any short of crea
tive, agency, cannot have this directly causative force.
Thus opoiou), to liken, means ordinarily not to make
but to pronounce like ; and a^iooo, not to make, but
to hold, or regard as, worthy. The reason of which
is that the words in their proper force would desig
nate a causative agency of which we are incapable.
So, as applied to us, BiKaioco cannot mean to make
Blicatos. It can only mean either to recognize as, or
to pronounce righteous one who is so; or else to
treat as righteous one who is not so. In the latter
sense, e.g. one possessing the authority and power to
do so might, upon certain objective grounds, remit
the guilt and penalty of an offence and so, as we say,
do away with the offence, and make the offender no
longer such. But this is only making the offence
and the offender as though they were not, it is not
really making them not, what they are. That is as

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 79
far as our making, or causative agency, can go. So
when God, on the objective ground of what Jesus
Christ has done and is, is represented as Biicai&v tov
aBiKov — if the expression is to be interpreted as it
would have to be if applied to human agency, it must
mean only that He judicially puts away his unright
eousness and treats him as though he were righteous.
I do not mean to say that there is nothing like this
in God's treatment of us in Jesus Christ. But I do
think that it is well to remember that in passing from
speaking of ourselves to speaking of God, we pass
into the consideration of a very different sort of causa
tive agency. And when we are endeavoring to pen
etrate beneath the anthropomorphisms of mere pop
ular speech, and look at the divine working as it is, it
is still more important that we should remember it.
When, therefore, we say that God views us and treats
us in Jesus Christ as though we were what Christ is,
and that, prior to our being in any sense what
Christ is, that expresses, of course, a very great,
gracious, and precious truth. And it is, moreover, I
admit, on God's part treating our unrighteousness as
though it were not, and us as though we were right
eous when we are not. And yet the essential truth of
God's Biicaiovv tov aSiicov, justifying the unrighteous,
in Christ is not merely a pronouncing but a making
righteous. God in Christ only calls, and treats us as
righteous, because in Christ He makes us righteous,
and He only treats our unrighteousness as though
it were not, because as we shall see He causes it not
to be.
The order and relation of the successive steps by

80 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
which God in Christ becomes our redemption and
righteousness is all-important, and it is necessary for
us here to treat it with the greatest care.
In the first place, Jesus Christ is Himself 6 Blicat,o<;,
the righteous one. " He became, or was made, to
us from God righteousness." He is God's revelation
to us of human righteousness ; He illustrates in His
person " what it were " for man to be righteous. He
is, then, first, I repeat, objectively to us and in Him
self what righteousness is — the incarnate expression
of it. If our Lord were no more He would still be
thus to us our divine and, at the same time, our most
truly human model or exemplar. He would be, in
the highest sense, a law to us, the perfect expression
of what we ourselves ought to be and do. I have
said before that Jesus Christ is so true to us because
He is so perfectly the truth of us. We recognize by the
instinct of a true humanity that He is the very truth
of humanity. But in all this our Lord would be
only a law to us ; the object of our obedience, imi
tation, aspiration, but in no real sense the object
of our faith ; unless by faith we mean faith in our
selves, the confidence and assurance that we not
only ought to be, but can make ourselves what He
is. But even our Lord Himself was what He was, as
man, by faith not in Himself but in God. His own
righteousness was one not of law or of works or of
Himself, but of God through faith. And so our
righteousness is not to be made by us through obe
dience, but to be received by us through faith. And
faith must have an object, an assurance from without,
which it responds to and which makes it or consti-

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 81
tutes it faith. Moreover, the object of our faith must
be something which we ourselves are to attain or to
become through faith. Otherwise it may be an object
of knowledge, of contemplation, of desire, of any
thing else, but not of faith. Faith is in something
we are to have or to be. The proper and only ground
of the assurance of faith, that upon which alone it
can rest immutably and in which alone it can trust
infallibly — because it is itself alone essential truth
and faithfulness and certainty — is the Word of God.
In Old and New Testament, as in the nature of things,
the correlative of man's faith is God's Word. In
how many ways soever the Word of God is revealed
to us, pre-eminently and perfectly is it so in Him who
is its incarnation. Jesus Christ is God's revelation
to us of ourselves ; and of ourselves not merely as
we are, but as we ought and are to be ; i.e. of his
disposition, purpose, and predestination of us, and
of what in these we are to become. Thus is He the
divine not only revelation but promise to us of our
selves. And it is this last which constitutes Him the
proper object of our faith.
But the New Testament exhorts us to see in Christ
not merely the revelation and promise of what we
are to be in Christ, but a direct and visible exhibi
tion, iv ivepyela, or in operation, of the divine grace
and power by which we are to be it. Thus St. Paul
prays that we may be enlightened to know not
only what is the hope of our calling and the riches
of the glory of our inheritance in Christ, but also
what the exceeding greatness of His power to usward
who believe according to that working of the strength

82 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
of His might which He wrought in Christ when He
raised Him from the dead.
If, then, the human righteousness of Christ is God's
Word, God's revelation and promise, to us of our own
righteousness; if it is God's proof, assurance, and
pledge of the grace and operation by which, as Christ
Himself was righteous, so we by the faith of Him
objectively and the spirit' of Him subjectively, shall
in Him be righteous also; then assuredly we have
in Jesus Christ ground for the fullest assurance and
certainty of faith.
Thus is Christ's righteousness not only the object
of our obedience, but the object of our faith. And
the essence of our faith in it is this : that we look
upon it as, in the divine purpose, promise, and grace,
ours. Jesus Christ is so the very divine grace
itself in operation, that in Him — who is God's not
only holiness but sanctification, not only righteous
ness but righteousing or making righteous, not only
life but regeneration and resurrection — we see our
selves sanctified and redeemed and risen and saved.
But the order or sequence of things in our making
righteous is this : It is first in the divine mind and
purpose, and that from the beginning. The force of
this position, so insisted upon in the New Testament,
is that the fact and character of man's Salvation has
its root and ground primarily in the very nature
and character of God Himself. The definition of
God involves the destiny of man. That in Him
self God is Holiness, Righteousness, and Life, and
that to us He is Love, Wisdom, and Power, con
tains within itself the whole story of Incarnation

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 83
and Redemption. We may say reverently that if
human Salvation were not what it is it would make
or prove God different from Himself. We are saved
as we are, because God is what He is. And so our
destination in Christ has been determined from the
beginning. Then, secondly, in the actual process of our making
righteous, there are two parts. 1st, God's giving or
grace ; and 2d, our receiving or faith. The full
meaning of grace and faith, and their correlation,
require a fuller separate treatment. But the essence
of these two might be thus stated : Grace is the mode
of the divine operation upon persons, as distinguished
from things ; and faith is the condition in persons of
the divine operation in or upon them. Grace differs
from other forms of power, in that it is an operation
upon persons, not things ; and that therefore it must
be an operation upon them through themselves, i.e.
through their consciousness, their will, their own free
activity. Grace is therefore not, like other power,
necessary in its effects, but contingent upon the con
scious will and the willing obedience, that is, upon
the faith, of its subject or recipient. While faith is
the condition and sine qua non of any actual opera
tion in us of grace, grace, on the other hand, is the
ground or cause and presupposition of faith. Grace
is therefore the prius of faith; that which is to be
believed must be before it can be believed; the gift
and the giving must precede the receiving and the
reception. On the other hand, from the very mean
ing and nature of grace, the giving can only be
through, and the receiving by, that faith which is the

84 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
conscious, voluntary, personal act and activity of the
recipient. But all such operation upon persons, i.e.
all grace working through faith, must of course be
ab extra ad intra. That which is to be wrought
through the consciousness or intelligence, and the will,
and the free being and doing, or personal spiritual
activity of the subject, must first in some way be
presented to all these. How, in the true sense of grace
and faith, could God's righteousness become ours
through these, except as, first, an objective righteous
ness given, and then, secondly, a subjective right
eousness received?
Returning, then, to the order of our divine " right-
eousing," or making righteous ; as it originates first in
the eternal character and intention of God, so the
second stage in the process of it must be the objective
presentation to our faith of the Bucaiascrvvr) deov, which
is to be made ours through faith. This has been
done for us in the person of Jesus Christ, who is
not only God's redemption and righteousness for us,
but God Himself, our redemption and righteousness.
When we say that in Jesus Christ a divine redemp
tion and righteousness is given to us and is ours,
we must discriminate between a sense in which this
is true and another sense in which it is not true. It is
in one sense already given to us, and already ours ; and
it is in another sense not yet given to us, nor ours.
Objectively, it is given, and therefore truly ours ;
subjectively, it is not yet received, and therefore not
yet truly ours. There is no difficulty or paradox in
this, but only what must necessarily be in the order
and sequence of things. What I have called a real

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 85
Bi/caiovv, or making righteous of us, must from the
very nature of us be a gradual and slow process. The
idea and ideal of a divine righteousness can only by
degrees elevate and educate our moral and spiritual
faculties and understanding to apprehend it; the
beauty and attractiveness of such a moral and spirit
ual ideal can only gradually draw out and almost
itself create the higher affections and desires which it
is to fill and satisfy; the control and regulation of
the will, the slow formation of habits and building
up of character require time. In a word, if the
being made, or becoming, righteous is to be in accord
ance with the nature and laws of the human intelli
gence, will, and faculties in general, instantaneous
righteousness is an impossibility. God Himself can
not, bjr power working necessarily and immediately,
work a righteousness in us, for then it would be no
more a righteousness than the straightness of a stick
or the movement of a falling body is a righteousness.
A righteousness is the rectitude or the right move
ment or action of a personality acting personally;
i.e. in accordance with the law of intelligence, free
dom, and free obedience. If righteousness, then, is
God working with us by grace, and not upon us by
mere power, God will work in us in it only as we
can and do work, and that will be by a process of
gradual becoming.
" But meanwhile how does God so work upon and in
us ? How indeed but by His Word and through our
faith ? It is the objective Word of us and Word to '
us which God holds up to us in Jesus Christ, which
is the ground and cause and object of our faith and

86 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
so the instrument of God's grace. It is my faith in
what Christ is that will make me what Christ is.
" His name, through faith in His name, hath made this
man every whit whole." But the name is but the desig
nation of what one is, and so I paraphrase the passage
in its higher spiritual meaning thus : " What Jesus
Christ is through our faith in what He is will make
ms what He is." The theory of the New Testament
is that we cannot obey unto righteousness, but can
only believe unto righteousness. Through obedience
we make ourselves righteous, through faith God
makes us righteous. The essence and content of my
faith is that accepting Christ for what He divinely
and infallibly means to me, I see myself made and
become righteous in him. I take Him as God's reve
lation, assurance, and pledge of what I am to be
through faith in Him. This leads necessarily to a
twofold relation on our part to the righteousness of
Christ — a relation in faith and a relation in fact.
And no one can have at all entered into, especially
St. Paul's point of view, without being familiar with
it. Side by side with him is the truth that in Jesus
Christ we are dead, risen, ascended, and perfected, in
a word, in full possession of a finished Salvation ; and
the other, no less truth, that we are yet, daily, and
more and more every day, to be dying, rising, ascend
ing, and being perfected; in a word, that we are in a
stat&of incomplete and progressive Salvation. Virtu
ally, potentially, in the infallible grace, and most
sure Word of God, which is Jesus Christ, all this has
taken place for us. To faith (as e.g. to Abraham's
faith in God's promise of a seed, Rom. 4.) God's

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 87
Word is the so sure warrant and assurance of its ful
filment that what He says is ; it is the substance of
things hoped for. And so in faith and in its language
all that is true of Christ is said of us ; we are all that
he has become, risen, ascended, complete, blessed
with all spiritual blessing in heavenly places. But it
is only in faith that this is- wholly already true ; in
fact, it is not yet so ; it is only wholly to be true.
The word airoXinpooai^, redemption, thus, while
always meaning the same thing, yet in different con
nections so expresses this from different points of view
as to seem to have different meanings. Thus "the
redemption of the body " (Rom. 8 : 23) can only
mean the actual deliverance of the body from its pres
ent bondage of corruption. "The day of redemp
tion " (Eph. 4 : 30) must mean the last day, as that
on which the redeeming work of our Lord will be
completed in the actual deliverance of us from all sin
and death. And so in general in this sense redemp
tion means what I have called real or actual redemp
tion from the fact of sin and death ; that is, it means
holiness, righteousness, and life. And yet, more
commonly in the New Testament our redemption is
represented as something which has been accom
plished for us prior to and independently of any-
thing's being thus accomplished in us. In the objec
tive fact of Christ's death and resurrection we are
said to have been and to be redeemed long before
any real or subjective redemption could have begun
in ourselves. But what is that objective fact of
Christ's death and resurrection ? And how or in what
sense is it our redemption ? Is not Jesus Christ the

88 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
objective revelation to us of the redeeming grace of
God, iv ivepyeia, at work or in operation ? Is not the
end and result of this redeeming grace manifested in
what humanity has become, or been made, in the per
son of Christ, viz. freed from all bondage of sin and
death and in the liberty of a divine holiness, right
eousness, and life ? Do we not see first in Him who
is the first-born from the dead, the Captain of Salva
tion, the perfecter of faith and obedience, the Lord
of life ; do we not see first in His humanity the mani
fested meaning, the realized idea of human redemp
tion ; is He not man 0avaTa>6el<; p,ev crapicl £&>07roM7#ei?
Be irvevpan ; in other words, that death in the flesh
and life in the spirit, which is human redemption ;
and is He not the revelation to us both in its divine
cause and in its human effect of a divine power, oper
ation, and process begun in Him only to be carried
on and completed in us in Him ? As the Epistle to
the Hebrews expresses it : " We see not yet ourselves,
but we see him " complete in all that constitutes a
real human Salvation and redemption. But His com
pletion means, and it has no meaning unless it means
ours. He is what we shall be. Jesus Christ is thus
in the divine idea and intention, He is in our faith,
and He is in these because He is in Himself our
redemption. We were as really spiritually -in the
redemption wrought by Him as we were physically or
naturally in the loins of Adam. We as really died
and rose in Him potentia as, actu, we are to die and
rise in Him. All that took place for us in Him is
to take place in us in Him, and all that is to take
place in us took place for us in Him. So when it is

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 89
said that prior to and independently of anything in
us we were redeemed in Jesus Christ, that is not a
different redemption from what we mean when from
a different point of view we say with equal truth
that we are only redeemed in Christ as in Him we
are actually delivered from the bondage of sin and
death into the only liberty and freedom of holiness,
righteousness, and eternal life.
It is precisely so with the word Bi/caiucrvvv, or
righteousness. Whether it is our righteousness as
first in Christ and not yet in ourselves, or our right
eousness as afterwards in ourselves in Christ, it is
one and the same righteousness ; which exists, first, in
God, secondly, in God in Christ, and finally, in God in
us through Christ. The fact that on God's part it is
given first objectively in Christ, and then subjectively
in us in Christ, that as Christ's righteousness it is
imputed before it is imparted as our own to us ; the
fact that on our part it is first appropriated by us in
'faith, and so, by consequence only and afterwards,
made our own in fact — this does not make it two
different righteousnesses, but only one, which is ours
in two different ways, i.e. first in faith only and then
through this faith in fact also.
It is said frequently by St. Paul that we cannot
BiKaiwOrivai, be justified, by the law through obedi
ence, but only by Jesus Christ through faith. Now
taking " justified " in the extremest sense of not being
made but accepted as righteous in Christ and for
what Christ has done, still on what ground is it
that we cannot be acceptable and accepted with God
through obedience of the law, but only through faith

90 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
of Christ? Is it not this : That the law cannot make
us accepted as righteous simply because it cannot
make us righteous ? And that Jesus Christ makes us
accepted as righteous because He is the power and
grace of God to make us righteous ! It has been
mentioned as a principle, and perhaps the most dis
tinctive principle of the New Testament, that we can
not obey unto righteousness, i.e. make ourselves
righteous by obedience, but we can believe unto
righteousness, i.e. be made righteous through faith.
What is impossible for us by the doing of obedi
ence is possible for us through the receiving of faith ;
and what we receive through faith is Jesus Christ as
our righteousness, as the power of God unto Salva
tion, because He is God Himself the power of our Sal
vation. And it is only as we believe in Jesus Christ
without us that we can receive Him within us ; it is
only as we know Him objectively to be our righteous
ness that He becomes subjectively our righteousness.
In other words, it is Jesus Christ our righteousness
in faith, that makes Jesus Christ to become our right
eousness in fact.
The double sense of these two words, redemption
and righteousness, as the truth expressed in them is
viewed as having been objectively realized for our
faith in Christ, or as subjectively realized through
our faith in us, is confirmed by the fact that every
other word describing the work of Christ can be used
in the same double way. We are not in the New
Testament sense "justified" (Bi/caiwOevTe?') in Christ
only, and "sanctified" (dyiao-6evTe<s or r/yiao-pevoi) in
ourselves only, but we are both justified and sane-

OF CHRIST AS OUR REDEMPTION. 91
tified, both objectively in Christ and subjectively in
ourselves. Thus in Heb. 10 : 10, we are told that
we were " sanctified once for all by the offering up of
the body of Jesus Christ." And in 1 Cor. 1 : 2, the
Church is described as oi r)yiao-p.evot, iv XpiaTa, those
who have been objectively and completely in Christ
made holy. The fact that in Christ we were, and the
fact that in Christ we are to be made holy are not two
contradictory facts, but one and the same fact viewed
first in the cause and then in the effect ; realized first
in the objective truth of the divine word to us, and
secondly in the subjective fulfilment of the divine
word in us.
The practical working and religious value of this
order and sequence in our Salvation, is that the sin
ner, who on his part only truly and rightly believes,
sees himself in Christ already in a perfect relation
with God and in the possession of a finished Salva
tion. In Jesus Christ, he is shown at once, his own
perfect death under the law, and his own perfect life
through the Gospel. Whatever he was under the
law, and as judged by the law, he is no longer, be
cause he is dead to the law : in Christ he is crucified,
dead, and buried in all wherein he was subject to the
law; and there is no longer any condemnation for
him, for he lives no longer in that in which he was
to be condemned. It is true that this is so with him
in faith only and not in fact, but faith is assurance of
fact, not only in the sense that it is assured of the
fact, but that it assures the fact. And meantime he
lives, by the grace of God, not in fact but in faith —
not in the consciousness and condemnation of what

92 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
he is in himself, but in the assurance and acceptance
of what he is in Christ.
And the sinner's present relation to God and en
joyment of a finished Salvation in Christ is indepen
dent not only of what he was under the law to which
he is dead, but of what he is in the Gospel in which
he is alive. How little is he in fact in the Gospel,
and how much of being does the Gospel involve !
We are not to imagine that Jesus Christ was, did, and
suffered all that He did for us in any sense in which
He is not to be, do, and suffer it all in us and we
in Him. Is our Salvation, then, contingent still, and
contingent upon our undergoing all that Christ under
went for us ? In fact — yes. We shall be saved in
Christ only as all that took place in Him shall take
place in us. But in faith — no. He who is truly in
faith and truly in Christ by faith, in his Salvation
there is no contingency. He will, indeed, suffer what
Christ suffered and do what Christ did and become
what Christ is, but he will do and be all because
through his faith Christ will do and be all in him.
For the putting on of the new man, as for the putting
off of the old, he so trusts to God in Christ, that how
ever far off it be in fact it is already accomplished for
him in faith, and he comes to God, as God receives
him — as one already complete in Christ.

CHAPTER SEVENTH.
OF CHRIST AS OUR RESURRECTION.
If sin is our spiritual separation from God, then
our spiritual reunion or reconciliation with God is
holiness. If obedience to our law or righteousness
is our only freedom, then there is no other redemp
tion or enfranchisement for us than righteousness.
As thus reconciliation is unto holiness and redemp
tion is unto righteousness, so, of course, resurrection
is unto life. I make use of this threefold aspect of
Salvation as holiness, righteousness, and life, not
because these are three distinct and separable things,
but because one and the same Salvation brings us into
union with God, into the fulfilment of the divine
law, and into the full realization and satisfaction of
our own nature and selves. As beings possessing a
nature, a moral nature, a spiritual and moral nature,
our end must be not only a natural good, or fulfil
ment and satisfaction of our nature as the condition
of our own perfection and blessedness ; it must be a
moral good, or the fulfilment of an objective law of
obligation and duty ; and it must also be a spiritual
good, or the finding our moral and natural perfection,
our duty and our happiness, not in ourselves but in
God.

94 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
As we have called the being in God holiness, and
the obedience to law or fulfilment of duty righteous
ness, so the best term by which we can designate
our natural good or self-realization, completion, and
satisfaction is the word life. Our Lord came " that
we might have life and have it more abundantly."
He came, that is, to bring us to the fullest, com-
pletest self-realization, being, or life of which we are
capable. Aristotle defines man's final end and supreme
good to be the ivepyeia, the actualization and activity,
of himself and of his whole self as man. We are not
rational beings, or moral beings, or spiritual beings, or
anything else, as we are so potentially but only as we
are so actually. It is not the having but the using
reason that makes us in the proper sense rational, and
so with all our other faculties and capacities. What
we are Bvvdpei or potentid is nature or God. What
we are ivepyeia, or actu is ourselves. The epyov or
task of man is to bring himself and his whole self
into ivepyeia or actuality. Now what we recognize
in Jesus Christ is manhood in the completion and
perfection of its ivepyeia or actualization, the whole
spiritual, moral, and natural man realized and revealed.
We shall see fully, hereafter, how important it is to
conceive and construe aright our Lord's humanity as
the true realization and revelation to us of ourselves,
of what human holiness, righteousness, and life are.
At present we are concerned with the preliminary
question of what we mean by life — what life is.
Human life is not only an activity or actuality, but
a particular or specific activity or actuality, which I
do not know that we can better define than with

OF CHRIST AS OUR RESURRECTION. 95
Aristotle as f\ ivepyeia tov dvOpmirov, y av0po)7ro<;,
the activity proper to man as man. Man's life is to
be not something more or less or other than, but to be
— himself, i.e. man. If, e.g. it enters into the true
and full concept and nature of man to be, as we have
seen, not only a natural, not only a natural and
moral, but a natural, moral, and spiritual being — a
being dwelt in by and dwelling in God and finding
only in personal union with God the power to obey
his law and to realize himself — then outside of God
and this personal union with Him man is less than
and therefore not truly or wholly himself.
Now, if life is not merely being but being oneself,
and the abundance or fulness of life is being more
and more or wholly, oneself, then, of course, all
that limits, hinders, prevents, or contradicts this is of
the nature of death. We know what physical death
is, and we know that any imperfection in any organ
or any defect in any function of physical life differs
only in degree and not in kind from death itself.
There is not one of us in whom physical death is
not already somewhere at work. How long it will be
resisted, how long it will take to conquer and lay low
the life that is now so vigorous and victorious, is
only a question of time. Not only shall we all die
— we are all dying. Our bodies are under the bond
age of corruption, and physical death is not a future
but a present fact with us.
No less is moral death present with us all. Moral
life is the ivepyeia of the free will in accordance with
its true law of righteousness. Any weakness, de
fect, or disorder in our moral constitution or func-

96 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
tioning is of the nature of moral death. The
Scriptures of both Testaments make obedience to the
law synonymous with life. "The righteous shall
live," because righteousness is life. It is the right
constitution and right functioning of the moral man,
as moral, which is as much his moral life, his moral
self-being, and self-activity, or ivepyeia, as the right
condition and right acting of the physical man is
physical life. And, I repeat, who of us is in him
self free from those moral limitations, perversions,
and contradictions which not only lead to but are
in themselves the beginnings, the progress, and the
fact of moral death ?
But the righteous shall live — " by faith." The
life of righteousness is inseparable from the life of
God in us. The only true righteousness in man is a
righteousness of God. The Gospel is not the law in
that it is a righteousness and a life not of us, but
of God in us. No righteousness without holiness, no
moral life without spiritual life, no obedience with
out faith. And we are all in physical and moral, be
cause we are all in spiritual, death. " God in us " can
only mean God in us in the sense in which alone God
can be in us. If we mean, as we do here, us in the
sense of our personal selves, activities, and lives, then
we do not mean by God in us the merely natural and
necessary being in us according to which He is
equally in all things. God can only be in us' per
sonally, spiritually, as we are also personalty and
spiritually, i.e. consciously, freely, lovingly, actively,
in Him. In this sense He is the life — the activity, the
ivepyeia — of our spiritual nature, or of ourselves as

OF CHRIST AS OUR RESURRECTION. 97
spiritual. We are only ourselves, as spiritual, as He
is in us ; we shall be only wholly our spiritual selves
when He is wholly in us. In proportion, therefore,
as God is in us and we in Him, we spiritually live :
in proportion as we are not in Him or He in us, we
are, by no mere figure but in very fact, spiritually
dead. Now what we see first in the resurrection of Jesus
Christ is what really comes last and is but a conse
quence of what has preceded it. We see in Him
certainly the visible fact of a physical resurrection
— a fact which ceases to be incredible or even sur
prising when taken in connection with the full spirit
ual import that lies behind it. When it is said that
Jesus Christ brought life and immortality to light, it
means that it is revealed to us in Him that we are to
continue to live after death in a risen and glorified
life which is not only the continuation, but the com
pletion and perfection of our natural life here. " We
believe in the Resurrection of the Body," in which
all that is essential to our present purpose is this :
that in Christ we are, or are to be, redeemed, raised,
and exalted not only spiritually and morally, but
physically also — that not only death spiritual and
death moral, but no less death physical is abolished
and that there shall be not only no more sin but no
more sickness.
But if we need thus to vindicate and assert the
resurrection of even the body as at least included
in the resurrection, it is because we feel that it is
not all, nor the first or main thing in it. And in
reality the- resurrection of Jesus Christ is a spirit-

98 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
ual and a moral before and more than it is a physical
fact or truth. If He raised humanity physically, it
is only because and by consequence of the fact that
He had raised it morally and spiritually.
It is throughout the consistent scriptural account of
the matter that death is the result and consequence
of sin. Certainly it is true for us men that either
there would be no evil or evil would be no longer
evil, if there were no spiritual or moral evil in the
world. Abolish sin and unrighteousness and for us
whatever evil remains will be only good or the means
of good. For the sinless and righteous one Himself, in
the light of His eternal destiny and good as man, the
betrayal of Judas and the Cross of Calvary were no
evil ; and nothing can be evil to any man who is not
himself evil. Without stopping now to adequately
discuss so deep a question as the evil of merely
natural evil apart from spiritual and moral evil, I
here only affirm that under the scriptural represen
tation that "through sin death entered into the
world," meaning not only that sin is spiritual death,
but that it brings moral and natural, or physical, death
— there is at least a very deep truth in fact or in re.
" There is no evil but the evil will," says Kant. In
reality, in the nature of things, there can be no evil
but personal evil; because only personality can de
termine itself, i.e. can be or act, outside of nature,
which is God. All evil is, therefore, primarily spirit
ual and moral — spiritual, which means ^m/h? ®eov ;
and moral, which means irapd vop,ov. But spiritual
and moral evil in any person will act and react upon
the nature or <pvo-L<s of the person, and so result in

OF CHRIST AS OUR RESURRECTION. 99
what we call physical or natural evil. And so sin
produces death — meaning, inclusively, even natural
or physical death. Not that there would be nothing
for us corresponding to death if there were no sin,
but death apart from sin would be so little what it
is through sin that it might well be said that it would
cease to be death. So true is it that the sting of
death is sin, that it would be no evil apart from the
spiritual and moral evil which work their effects in
and through it and make it what it is to us. I would
repeat that I undertake here no theodicy. I do not
attempt to explain or justify the existence of natural
evils throughout the whole kingdom of nature. But
it is one step towards a valid theodicy that we may
begin to see, in the light which Christianity throws
upon human life and destiny, that at least in their
application to ourselves, natural death and all that we
designate natural evils, are not evils but only the
necessary condition and means of our real life and of
our true destiny. Apart from sin what is death for us
but " a birth and a becoming " ? Speaking in terms
of things, and not of revelation in the technical sense,
I say that if there were no sin and its consequences
in the world, that which we call, that which is now,
death would be only birth. There would still be a
change and a becoming, the transition from stage to
stage, the ceasing of things that had been and the
beginning of things that were to be. The natural
man would still need to become the spiritual man,
and the earthly the heavenly. But that which had
been would be so in harmony with — so naturally
the prius and preparation of — that which was to be

100 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and which becomes, that it would pass on into it by
not only a painless, but a blissful change. This would
be birth not death. But because, through sin and
transgression and their inherited effects upon our
nature, that which has been in us has been " the or
ganizing and consolidating" in our very nature of
that which perverts and contradicts and prevents
what we were to be — and are to be, if we become
ourselves — therefore, in the change the old does not
pass naturally and willingly into the new, but strives
against and has to be overcome and destroyed by it.
Thus whereas it ought to be that the becoming of
the new, or the fact of birth, is the real matter
of the change, it has come to be that the painful
and shameful ceasing of the old is the prominent
matter of it. And so what ought to be only birth
has become death. Now, even in Jesus Christ we
can pass from the natural into the spiritual, from the
earthly to the heavenly, only through the mortifica
tion of an old man, or flesh of sin, whose death is
the condition of our resurrection to the higher life.
Of that other death which, as out of God in Christ,.
is but passing to deeper depths of death, I have
no occasion here to speak. For us there is no higher
life but through death, i.e. -but by resurrection.
As palpably the new body that shall be must be pre
ceded by the dissolution and death of the old, so the
new moral man arises into the life of righteousness
and acceptance out of a previous death of unright
eousness and condemnation, and the new spiritual
man is raised from the death of separation from God,
which we call sin, into the life of union with God,
which we call holiness.

OP CHRIST AS OUR RESURRECTION. 101
We may see here the identity for us of resurrection
with regeneration. I say for us, for it is our fallen
condition that causes or necessitates this identity. If
we were not fallen we should still be incomplete and
deficient in ourselves, and need through faith and
obedience to become something more than ourselves ;
we should still have through faith to become holy and
through the obedience of faith to become righteous.
And the consummation of holiness and righteousness
would still be that completed oneness with God which
we see in Jesus Christ. And still, spiritual and
moral exaltation or glorification would, as in Christ,
be followed by natural or physical. And so the
whole man would pass on and up from the natural
into the spiritual, from the first to the second Adam,
from man prior to faith, obedience, and life in God,
to man as he becomes in and through these. But all
this would be pure regeneration, or birth and life
from above, without any element in it of resurrection.
It would be the life of God in man without the neces
sity of any death on man's part as the condition of it.
Because if there were no sin or transgression, or any
consequence of these in man, then all in him, being
of God and therefore good, and being, as I have said,
the natural prius and preparation of what he was to
become, all the natural in him, I repeat, would be
taken up into the spiritual and it would be all birth
and no death. Change alone is not death, and birth
does not necessarily involve death. It only does so
when there is a positive opposition between that
which has been and that which is to be, and when the
becoming of the latter necessitates the un-becoming,

102 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
undoing, or destruction of the former. Such is the
case with us. Our life in God is no simple, natural,
and painless birth out of the natural into the spiritual,
out of ourselves not yet in God into ourselves in God ;
it is a life out of ourselves in separation from, and at
enmity, with God into ourselves at one, in union and
unity, with God. It is a life out of ourselves living
under the false law of sin, disobedience, and death
into ourselves, living in the true law of the spirit of
holiness, righteousness, and the life of God. It is a
life out of ourselves subject, as to our very bodies,
to corruption, dishonor, and weakness to ourselves
raised up even in our bodies into incorruption, glory,
and power. Here there is something to die as well
as something to be made alive, an old man to put off
as well as a new man to put on. And therefore our
regeneration is of necessity a resurrection; it is a
life ix veicp&v, out of physical because out of moral
and spiritual death. Life for us is a resurrection for
the same reason that for us holiness is no simple sanc
tification, making, or becoming holy, but a reconcilia
tion or at-one-ment, a bringing back from unholiness
into holiness. And again for the same reason that
righteousness is for us no more Bt,icaia>o-i<;, but an
d-7roXvrpo}o-i<; ; no mere making and becoming (God's
making and our becoming) righteous ; but a redemp
tion, a setting free from the bondage and slavery of
unrighteousness into the freedom of righteousness.
But to come back to a point from which we have
for some time departed. In the resurrection of Jesus
Christ, the palpable and visible thing is a physical
thing. We say that our Lord was crucified, dead,

OF CHRIST AS OUR RESURRECTION. 103
and buried, and that on the third day He rose again
from the dead. And we are thinking in all this of
bodily death and resurrection. We speculate (after
the fifteenth chapter of first Corinthians) upon the
physical change He has undergone, the difference
between the natural body in which He died and the
spiritual body in which He now lives. Certainly St.
Paul abundantly justifies us in all this. He tells us
that if Christ be in us He who raised Him ix veicp&v
will not only raise us, but quicken also our mortal
bodies by the operation of His spirit in us, i.e. will
change these natural, fallen, and dying into spiritual,
risen, and living bodies. I have no desire, therefore,
to leave out of account the fact and truth of the
physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. But assuredly
it is only a secondary, or even a tertiary, element in the
whole truth of the resurrection. Behind the visible
physical fact is there not a greater, and greatest,
moral and spiritual fact? That conqueror of the
visible physical evil, death, is only so because He was
first conqueror of the invisible spiritual evil, sin !
" The last enemy that is destroyed is death." Yes,
the last and the least and the weakest ! The first,
the real, and the really powerful enemy that was
destroyed was sin. Sin destroyed is death destroyed.
He who had broken the bands of the former could not
be holden of the latter.
When our Lord said, " I am the Resurrection and
the Life," so far as that meant that He was the physi
cal resurrection and life of humanity the meaning
might be interpreted thus. As He was first in His
own body so in the bodies of those who are in Him

104 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
He is the conqueror and destroyer of physical death.
"As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all
be made alive." Adam himself died and became the
death of all in him ; Jesus Christ arose and became
the resurrection and life of all in Him. But it is mani
fest that the physical change wrought by our Lord in
humanity was but the outward and visible sign and
effect of an inward and invisible spiritual change
which He had wrought. The resurrection of His
body from the dead was but the outward consequence
of His having raised humanity in His own person
out of spiritual and moral death. In Himself as in
us He glorifies humanity physically only as He has
first redeemed it morally and sanctified it spiritually.
" If," says St. Paul, " Christ is in you, the body is
dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of
righteousness." In this present stage in the process
of our Salvation it is with us as, indeed, it was with
our Lord Himself prior to His physical death and
resurrection. He was still in that body which because
of sin was subject to death and needed to die. But
although the change from the natural and corruptible
to the spiritual and incorruptible body had not yet
taken place in Him, another change had been wrought
of which that was the necessary consequence and
which, therefore, it would assuredly follow. The
spirit in Him was life because of righteousness,
although the body was still dead because of sin. He
had already destroyed the spiritual cause, sin, although
not yet the physical consequence, death. Through
out, as we shall see, from beginning to end, our
Lord's human life was one long and perfect sacrifice

OF CHRIST AS OUR RESURRECTION. 105
of the flesh to the spirit, of which His cross is the
only perfect symbol and instrument; which is the
sole principle of all human holiness, righteousness,
and divine life, and which in us or in our nature is
sanctification, redemption, and already spiritual and
moral although not yet physical resurrection.
So St. Peter describes our Lord as 6avaTcode\<; pev
crap/cl ^oooiroindel'; Be irvevpaTi, meaning, certainly,
not to describe the mere physical fact of his resurrec
tion, but the greater spiritual and moral fact that
Jesus Christ was, Himself, that death of humanity in
the flesh and resurrection of it in the spirit which
constitutes its irpoo-aywyq, or bringing to God.
Most certainly "the cross," in the experience as
in the mouth of Jesus Christ, means not merely the
material instrument of His physical death. Rather
was it that by which His whole life was one great
sacrifice to God of a perfect human faith and obe
dience; the one only full, perfect, and sufficient
offering up of a life in which the flesh which is the
source and instrument of sin was wholly subdued to
the spirit which is the organ of the divine holiness,
righteousness, and life. So when our Lord enjoins
upon us the daily use of His cross as the sole instru
ment of His life in us, the cross He speaks of is not that
upon which His body was crucified, but that of which
this was but the symbol, whereby all His life through
from beginning to end He had crucified in Himself
all sin; and so had made humanity in the spirit
alive from the death and free from the bondage of
the flesh. When, therefore, to return, St. Paul says
that " if Christ be in us, the body is dead because of

106 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness," he
means that although the natural consequences of sin,
as summed up in physical death, are not yet abolished in
our bodies, yet the cause of death, or sin, is destroyed
in our spirits if the spirit of Christ be in us and if we
in Christ are walking no longer KaTa adpica but KaTa
¦jrvevpa. And by implication back he means that
our Lord's own physical resurrection from death was
but the necessary natural consequence of a precedent
spiritual and moral cause ; that His resurrection was
primarily a spiritual and moral and only secondarily
and by consequence a physical one.

CHAPTER EIGHTH.
OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION OR EXPIATION.
I DO not know that the word lXao-p,6s expresses
any material truth outside of that already discussed
under the term KaTaXXayij; or enough to justify a
separate treatment. But it might be thought that
the element of satisfaction, expiation, or atonement
in its modern sense, has not been done justice to ! And
although these are not strictly New Testament words
and have no exact equivalents there, yet so far as they
express New Testament ideas they need to be care
fully considered. 'lXao-p,6s is the nearest equivalent
for them. The word as well as the idea is associated
in the Scriptures with the sacrificial system of the
Jews, and means an appeasing, propitiating, or render
ing favorable or gracious. So God has been made
favorable or gracious to us by what Christ has done
in our behalf.
To say that our Lord by His death and resurrection,
performed once for all an act which satisfied God
for man ; which did away with all that lay between
or separated, and admitted man unconditionally into
the divine favor and grace, so that there is now no
sinner so sinful that there is not for him in Christ

108 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
immediate and unqualified access to the Father and
a full right by free grace to all that Christ is to us
from God — I do not know that all this is to say
more than we have said, in saying that God in Christ
reconciled us to Himself. But it emphasizes a side
of the truth that is important. Present Peace, the
feeling that there is now nothing between us and
God ; the possession already of a finished Salvation ;
the privilege and power of divesting our conscious
ness of every thought or feeling, but that " my God,
Thou art good ; my soul, thou art happy " ; the im-
mediateness and absoluteness or unqualifiedness of
the new relation of oneness established between us
and God, by the sole act of Jesus Christ and inde
pendent of anything in us, save only our faith or
personal acceptance and appropriation of it — how
essential a spiritual attitude is this in the Christian
life ! To disturb it by exacting any condition what
soever of ourselves, what is it but just so much to
limit the freeness and fulness of the divine grace !
No ; I am disturbed by no sense of guilt for the past,
by no consciousness of sin in the present, by no fear
of unfaithfulness or failure in the future. Any
doubt or apprehension upon any one of these scores
is to limit my Salvation and dishonor my Saviour.
Since nothing but the limitation of our faith can
limit God's grace, it is impossible to believe too much.
It is, in some sort, a coming down from this spir
itual altitude to call upon ourselves to render a
reason for the faith that is in us, or to analyze its
operations and examine into its foundations. Never
theless, that is now our business, and in the prose-

OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION. 109
cution of it we must ask ourselves what constitutes
the present and perfect peace of a Christian man. It
is certainly not that real peace of which I have spoken
as being the ultimate end and aim of all religion —
which will be perfect only in that future when we
ourselves shall be actually and wholly one in spiritual
nature, and one in the divine life with God Himself.
Essentially our present peace is the presence in faith
of that which is future in fact. Faith is the substance
of things hoped for. But it is the substance of them;
through faith " things hoped for are now " in the real
ization and experience of the believer. We shall
never get fully into the mind and point of view of
the New Testament until we understand the func
tion assigned in it to faith. The correlative of
human faith is the divine Word, and the former is
only perfect when it is as assured as the latter is true
and certain. As surely as in Jesus Christ, who is
God's Word to us of us, we are saved, so surely in
our faith, if our faith fully accepts and reflects God's
Word, we are saved. As surely as in Jesus Christ,
who is the divine grace, so surely in us in Christ our
faith sees no sin, no condemnation, no death, for it
sees all these abolished in us in Christ. As in God
who sees us, so in us who see ourselves, not in our
selves but in Jesus Christ, our Salvation is not a
thing to be accomplished, but a thing accomplished,
not future, but present. Thus the perfect assurance
through faith of a future peace constitutes for us a
present peace. It would be unworthy of ourselves as
well as of God, to find peace in anjr consciousness
short of the assurance of a real peace, or a real one-

110 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
ness in ourselves with God in Christ. The holiness
or obedience of another for me can give me no peace
save through the conviction of such a relation be
tween that other and me, that his holiness and rights
eousness are or are to be mine. And such is our
relation to Jesus Christ that all that He is for us we
are so certainly to be in fact, that we are it in faith.
My peace with God, therefore, is not to be satisfied or
contented with another's holiness instead of my own,
but it is through faith to appropriate and realize an
other's holiness as my own ; it is to see myself in
Christ at one with God, because Christ is potentially
and shall be actually, shall be in fact and is in faith,
my at-one-ment with God, which is my only peace.
"Jesus Christ has satisfied God for me." Most
certainly He has, but how? Because God sees in
Christ (as my faith sees in Christ) the actual doing
away of all in me that stands in the way of His
satisfaction or pleasure. It is a dishonor to God to
suppose that He could be satisfied with anything
less for, or in, man than the actual doing away of all
spiritual, moral, and natural evil in him; with any
thing less than his actual perfect restoration to holi
ness, righteousness, and life. To recognize in Jesus
Christ the power of God unto all this, and the promise
of God of all this, and, therefore, the certainty in our
selves of all this, which is Salvation, is, according to
St. Paul, to know the Gospel.
That which satisfies God for us, which opens the
way into His favor, in the atoning work of Christ is
this, that God sees in Christ the taking away or put
ting away from us of all that prevented or rendered

OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION. Ill
impossible His satisfaction or favor towards us. Of
IXdo-Keo-Oai, the word which most nearly expresses
this idea of propitiation, expiation, or satisfaction,
Bishop Westcott (upon Heb. 2 : 17) says : " The
essential conception is that of altering that, in the
character of an object, which necessarily excludes
the action of the grace of God, so that God, being
what He is, cannot (as we speak) look on it with
favor. The 'propitiation' acts on that which alien
ates God, and not on God, whose love is unchanged
throughout." If Christ's death "propitiated" God,
it is because Christ's death was in itself potentially
and in us actually the extinction of that which, in
the nature of things, renders it impossible for God
to be propitious or favorable towards us.
That anything whatsoever that Jesus Christ was
or did was for us could only mean that it was to be
in us. If holiness is my only spiritual Salvation, then
I can only be saved by becoming and being holy.
No holiness of another for me can save me, except
as it is capable of becoming and does become, or at
least is to become, my own actual holiness. If right
eousness or moral obedience is, in the nature of the
thing, my only moral Salvation, no one can save me
by being righteous instead of me, but only by becom
ing my righteousness in the sense of making me
righteous. Equally another's death, instead of my
own, cannot save me, but only my own ; and another's
only as it is capable of being made my own, and
is made my own. As well may we say that Christ's
life is instead of ours, and not to be really and actually
ours, as to say that His death is instead of, and not

112 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
to be, ours. The Scriptures insist upon the necessity
of our actual participation in the death just as much
as in the life. The fact is, for us death and life are
not only correlative, but in a sense identical, i.e. only
the negative and positive of one and the same process
or change. For us, "in Adam," subject to death
spiritual, moral, and natural, life is necessarily a
resurrection. It is only as the flesh in us dies that
the spirit lives ; it is only as the old man is crucified
that the new man is raised. A resurrection life is a
life through death, and a death into life ; it is a life
which is death, and a death which is life. In it, I
repeat, death and life are the negative and positive
of the same act or change ; there is no death in the
flesh, but life in the spirit ; and life in the spirit is
in itself death in the flesh. Now certainly the life
of Christ cannot be viewed as a life merely for us
in the sense of instead of our own life, but only for
us as it is to be our own. Our Lord calls Himself
"the resurrection and the life," and says that He
came that we "might have life and have it more
abundantly." St. John declares to us the life mani
fested in Christ, " in order that we may have Koivcovia,
or participation, in it " ; and again he says, that God
has given us life ; that this life is in His Son, Jesus
Christ, and that he who has the Son has the life.
St. Paul reminds us that we are risen with Christ,
who is now our life. But every one of them teaches us
that Jesus Christ is our life only as He is our death ;
that He is our death identically as He is our life;
and that His death is for us just as, and not otherwise
than as, His life is for us.

OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION. 113
Perhaps the best way to establish and illustrate
this position is by an examination of those passages
in the New Testament which seem most to attach a
merely substitutionarily or vicariously expiatory, or
propitiatory, or atoning value to the death of Christ.
See then, first, Thayer's Lexicon of the New Testament,
under ®dvaTo$, the passages adduced to illustrate
" ©dvaTO';, used of the punishment of Christ," viz.
Rom. 5 : 10 ; 6:3-5; 1 Cor. 11 : 26 ; Phil. 3 : 10 ; Col.
1 : 22 ; Heb. 2 : 9, 14. These, I repeat, are the pas
sages adduced to prove that by the penal death of
our Lord, a death inflicted on Him instead of on us,
and because inflicted on Him not to be suffered by
us, something has been done, a satisfaction rendered
to God's nature, or to God's law, or to the divine
administration of the world, an expiation or atone
ment made for our sins, which enables God to be
gracious or favorable, and so makes our Salvation
possible. My purpose is not so much to find error in all this,
or to bring out the truth that is in it, as simply to
restate quite independently of it what I conceive to
be the New Testament way of viewing and express
ing the matter. I will take the passages one by
one. In Rom. 5 : 10 the appeal is made to our faith that
" if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God
by the death of His Son, much more (might we feel
assured that) having been reconciled we shall be
saved in His life." I have shown, and I hope yet
more clearly to show, in how real a sense the death
of our Lord was our reconciliation with God; how in

114 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
its not merely physical but spiritual and moral import
it was the death for us and (potentially, as it shall be
actually) in us of all that separates us from, and the
life for and in us of all that unites us with God ; the
crucifixion and death of the flesh and the resurrection
and life of the spirit; the OavaTmdrjvai crapKi Kal
^a>oTroirj6rjvai trvevpaTi, which is the very res of recon
ciliation and at-one-ment. I have shown, also, how in
the very nature of the case it had to be objectively
for us in Christ before it could be subjectively in us
in Christ. But so only in the sense that — as when
I say I have something for you, I mean I have some
thing which I am going to make yours — the " for
us " intends and means the " in us." Now the appeal
which St. Paul makes to our faith is this : If God
first, prior to anything on our part, even faith, gave
Christ to become our objective reconciliation, He
will not now, in our faith, fail us in our task of
becoming subjectively reconciled, or sanctified, in
Christ. The Christians to whom St. Paul is writing
already know Christ ; they have been baptized into
Him. He argues with them thus : As we have been
taken into the grace of God, let us now rejoice in
hope of His glory. We ought as much to trust God
in Christ for what He is to become in us as we have
accepted Him for what He became for us. If His
death and resurrection were objectively and imputa-
tively ours, let us accept them as to be subjectively
and impartatively ours. See the whole sixth chapter
of Romans as illustrative of this. Jesus Christ did
by His own act satisfy, or render a satisfaction to,
God's nature and God's law, and the governmental

OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION. 115
necessities of God's righteous administration of the
world. But He did so by then and there, potentid if
not yet actu, in Himself though not yet in us, destroy
ing that sin in the flesh or flesh of sin which is the
obstacle to God's being in us, and that bondage to the
counter or false law of sin which prevents the fulfil
ment in us of God's law. It is the nature of God as
love to communicate Himself, to impart His spirit
to those capable of sharing it, and to fulfil His law
in those capable of obeying it; and all removal of
the obstacles to this is a satisfaction to Himself.
Jesus Christ did, indeed, expiate our sins, but it was
because His death was in a real and in no merely
representative or imputative or substitutionary way,
our .death for sin and our life out of sin.
This will be much clearer yet from the passages
which remain. In Rom. 6 : 3-5 St. Paul is answer
ing an objection which might be, probably had been,
made to his especial presentation of the Gospel. If
we are saved by grace alone, i.e. by what Christ has
done and is objectively for us, may not we go on in
our sin and be satisfied with Him as our Salvation ?
To which the Apostle, ignoring the possibility of an
objective Salvation which remains objective, answers
as follows : How can we who are (in Christ) dead to
sin go on sinning? Are you so ignorant of our real
relation to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?
Do you not know that to be baptized into Jesus Christ
is to be baptized into so true a participation in
Christ's death, to be buried with Him by baptism into
death in so true a sense, that as surely and really
as Christ was Himself raised from the dead by the

116 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
glory of the Father, we also in Christ (if by faith
we realize, or make real, our baptism) shall walk in
newness of life? '•'•If we have become united (by bap
tism) with ihe likeness of His death (which likeness
consists in the fact that in the death of Christ, our
former corruption and wickedness has been slain and
been buried in Christ's tomb), i.e. if it is part and
parcel of the very nature of a genuine Christian to
be utterly dead to sin, we shall be united also with the
likeness of His resurrection, i.e. our intimate fellow
ship with His return to life will show itself in a new
life consecrated to God" (Thayer's Lexicon of the
New Testament, under o-vp.<pvTo<;^). In the whole
passage, St. Paul represents the death as for us only
in the sense in which the life is, in the sense, i.e. that
it is to be in us and ours as a spiritual and moral sub
jective change from a condition of sin and death into
one of holiness and life. What follows, is yet
stronger if possible. Christ's crucifixion was the
crucifixion of our old man and the doing away of the
body of sin, the purpose and effect of which was and
is that we should no longer serve sin. It is true that
in" Christ objectively the death is emphasized and in
us subjectively the life is emphasized, but the Apostle
does not neglect to tell us that we can only share the
life as we have also and just as really shared the
death. In 1 Cor. 11 : 26 St. Paul tells us that " as often as
(in the Eucharist) we eat the bread and drink the cup
we do set forth the Lord's death until He come."
There is no new light thrown here upon the question
before us except what comes to us from the sugges-

OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION. 117
tion that as baptism is our admission into, so the
Eucharist is our continued participation in the power
and fact of • Christ's death and resurrection ; the
means by which they become, or are made, truly ours.
The next passage, Phil. 3 : 10, speaks for itself,
with need of but little additional comment. In the
preceding verse St. Paul describes himself as having
renounced everything else in order to win Christ and
be found in Him, " not having my own righteousness
which is of the law, but that which is through faith
of Christ, even the righteousness of God by faith."
Even if we should admit that the righteousness here
spoken of cannot mean a righteousness in ourselves
derived from Christ through faith, as distinguished
from one acquired by obedience to the law, but that
it must mean the righteousness of Christ as the objec
tive ground of our gracious acceptance and favor
with God, our justification or being received and
treated as righteous for Christ's sake, still the ques
tion recurs whether the righteousness of Christ does
not avail as such ground of our present acceptance
and peace not because it is an equivalent instead of,
but because it is a guarantee for, our own personal
righteousness in Christ. And the death, which the
Apostle goes on to speak of in verse 10, is not merely
a condition precedent unto, but an inherent and essen
tial element in the righteousness itself. "That I
may know Him (Christ) and the power of His resur
rection and the fellowship of His sufferings being
conformed to His death; if I may attain unto the
resurrection from the dead." That is to say, his con
ception of being in Christ and knowing Christ, and

118 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
having the righteousness of God in Christ, is that of
being in such a real and vital relation to Christ by
God's grace through his own faith that Christ's death
becomes effectually and actually his own death to
sin and all its consequences, and Christ's life his own
life to holiness and all its rewards. The death of
Christ is the life of Christ, and vice versa. This is
true even of the physical death, in which in Christ
the element of death is destroyed and that of birth
restored; so that in Him to die in the natural is but
to be born into the spiritual. How much truer is it
in the sphere of the spiritual and moral, wherein to
die to that wherein we are subject to sin and death is
to be alive in that wherein the law of the spirit of
life makes us free.
( Col. 1 : 22.) " Yet now hath He reconciled you in
the body of His flesh through death to present you
holy and without blemish and unreprovable before
him, if so be that ye continue in the faith." Here
the end and effect of our reconciliation in Christ by
His death is that we thereby shall be presented, not
imputatively merely but actually, holy, etc. His
death is to be effectually and really our death to all
unholiness, and so our holiness.
(Heb. 2 : 9.) Our Lord is described as having been,
" through and on account of His suffering of death,
crowned with glory and honor, that He by the grace
of God might taste death for every man." The
exaltation of humanity in Christ through death was,
before and more than a physical, a spiritual, and
moral one. It was the spiritual exaltation, in Him
and potentially in every man, of humanity through

OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION. 119
the conquest and annihilation of sin and its conse
quent restoration to oneness with God. It was its
moral exaltation through the breaking of all bonds
and the establishment of the freedom of a perfect
obedience or righteousness. He tasted death for
every man, because His death was by the grace of
God through faith to become that death of every man
through which alone he can attain to honor and
glory. Further on (5 : 14), our Lord is said to have
" by death brought to naught him that had the power
of death, i.e. the Devil, and to have liberated those
who through fear of death were all their lifetime
subject to bondage." His death converts death itself
from a bondage into a deliverance, from being death
into becoming life. His death is life ; and so is ours
in Him.
I have commented briefly upon these passages as
being those adduced in proof or illustration of the
expiating or atoning effect of Christ's death. Of the
similar ones in which the expiatory effect is ascribed
to the blood of Christ, I will select only one as a type
of them all.
In Heb. 9 : 12, etc., our Lord is said to have,
"through His own blood, entered in, once for all,
into the Holy Place, having obtained eternal redemp
tion." The Holy Place, or Holy of Holies, is not so
much a place as it symbolizes a relation. It stands
for not merely the immediate presence, but the favor
and grace of God — nor merely that, but actual one
ness with God and participation in His divine spirit,
nature, and life. Into this as man, as the representa
tive and High Priest and forerunner of humanity,

120 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Jesus Christ has entered by His blood. It was not
primarily, I have said, a physical, but a spiritual and
moral entrance. It was an entrance into spiritual
and moral oneness with God, " through the putting
away of sin by the sacrifice of Himself." That is to
say, Jesus Christ, in our nature, so crucified the adp^
dpapTias, so destroyed the separation, as to become our
at-one-ment or oneness with God, thus " making peace
by His blood." And so the death of Jesus Christ
through faith cleanses our conscience from dead
works to serve the living God. He is the death of
our dead selves and the life of the living God in us.
In the Oxford Index to the Holy Scriptures, under
"Death of Christ, its object," there are a number of
references from which I will select the chief, for brief
comment. St. Matt. 20 : 28 has been termed the locus
classicus upon the subject before us. " Our Lord says
of Himself : The Son of man came not to be minis
tered unto but to minister, and give his life Xinpov
uvtI ttoXXwv, a ransom for many." The verb Xveiv
means to loose, liberate, or set free ; Xinpov is an in
strument or means by which the Xveiv is accomplished,
and so comes to mean the ransom by which the lib
eration of a captive is effected. The Scriptures
simply mean to declare the death of Jesus Christ to
be the price or cost of human redemption, and the
instrument or means of its accomplishment. In
reality we are redeemed only in the act and fact of
our own death to sin. Only he who is dead to the
old man is freed from his law of sin and death ; or
who is dead in the flesh is delivered from the bond
age of the flesh (Rom. 6:7; 1 Pet. 4:1). But we

OF CHRIST AS OUR PROPITIATION. 121
can die this death to sin only by participation, by
grace through faith, in Christ's death to sin. We
are saved, not by our ability to die in the flesh and
raise ourselves to life in the spirit, but only by the
imparted grace and power of Christ's death and resur
rection, which, however, when imparted, become our
own actual death and resurrection. Thus the death
of Christ is the effectual Xvrpov or instrument of our
redemption, because it effectuates that death in us
which is our only freedom from the bondage of sin.
" He who is dead is free from sin." So the giving of
His life by our Lord was the Xinpov, the cost to Him,
the price He paid, the sacrifice by means of which He
became the death and the resurrection, the holiness,
righteousness, and life of many. It is not that we
have not to die His death any more than that we have
not to live His life, but He has by His own made
both death and resurrection possible for us, and will
make them actual in us.

CHAPTER NINTH.
OF THE END OR FINAL CAUSE OF THE
INCARNATION.
That Christianity is an Incarnation in the fullest
possible sense of the term is so indubitably the mind
of the New Testament, as of the Church, that the
only question before us is to define the meaning of
that assertion. In doing so let us remember again
the principle that a thing is to be defined by its
reXo? or final cause. If we pass by the cosmical
and limit ourselves to the human import of the In
carnation, I should define it to be that divine-human
process by or in which God realizes Himself in man
and man realizes himself in God. In its larger cos
mical import it is the process by which God fulfils
Himself in the Kdo-^os or ktio-i,?, and fulfils it in
Himself. That the destiny of the cosmos is that of
man who is its head and in whom and in whose
destination it attains its end or final cause, is a
distinct scriptural conception. There man in Adam
is the natural, and man in Christ is the spiritual
KXnpov6po<; irdvTtov, heir of creation.
Mr. John Fiske has recently, in a little volume,
The Destiny of Man, expressed this truth in terms of

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 123
science. He shows that man's loss of place in the
universe through the discoveries of astronomy has
been very far more than compensated by the fuller
discoveries of the modern science of evolution. If
he had been dethroned from the material centre of
things, he- has been re-enthroned at the teleological
head of things. If evolution be true it is cosmical ;
it includes in its sweep and sway the whole move
ment of the universe. The very order and progress
of the sciences embraced in the one science of evo
lution illustrates how the cosmical movement has
been thus far up to man as he is, and how its further
progress can only be upon the line of his further
evolution or destination. Man as he is, Adam, has
been the goal of the natural creation — man as he is
to be, Christ, is the goal of the spiritual creation.
The spiritual destination, then, of man, which is also
the natural destination of the Koapo*; — the end and
final cause of the whole creation — is the full signifi
cance of the Incarnation. I have said that this
means not only the fulfilment of all things in God,
but the fulfilment of God in all things. And that,
not only in the sense that God is the reason and wis
dom as well as the energy or power of things, but
from the point of view of the spiritual and moral
definition of God as Love. If God is love, He is
such and must realize Himself as such in His rela
tion with all that proceeds from Him. The universe
must be not only the effect of His power and the
expression of His wisdom, but the perfect manifes
tation of His love. Love gives, and gives itself ; and
perfect love gives nothing less than its whole self.

124 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
It is involved in the very nature of God as love that
He wholly gives Himself to his creation, in doing
which He wholly fulfils Himself as well as it. Thus
God is by His nature predestined for perfect union
with man as head of the creation, as man is by his
nature predestined for perfect union with God. The
result of this union is of course determined by the
natures of the beings united — their heterogeneity as
well as their homogeneity. Thus while God can
become all that man is, man cannot become all that
God is ; that is, he cannot become God. But he can
become all of God that his nature is susceptible of,
and at least he can exclude all from himself which
would separate him from God, which would hinder
or prevent the self-realization of God in him. That
is to say, man is capable of, and God realizes Himself
in man in, a spiritual, moral, and natural union which
is the source and cause of all human holiness, right
eousness, and eternal life.
The destination of man in God, through the Incar
nation, may be represented, as 1st, his reXeiWt?, and
2d, his diroXvTp<oo-i<;. The first means simply his
completion or attainment of his TeXos, without ref
erence to the existence or the removal of any obstacle
thereto ; i.e. without any reference to the fact of sin.
The latter expresses and emphasizes the fact of the
existence, and the removal, of that obstacle to human
completion, which we call the Fall. It is the attain
ing of his end through the being set free from the
bondage of all that stands in the way of it, viz. from
sin, disobedience, and death. Even if man, I will
not say had not, but if he were not, fallen, the Incar-

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 125
nation would have for him an infinite and necessary
significance and reality. We should need God for
the completion, even though we did not for the
redemption of our being. The predestination of
humanity to the attainment of its end through, and
only through, personal union with God, such a union
with God as is realized only in the Incarnation, is an
eternal and essential fact, and not one conditioned
upon or necessitated by the Fall. If we take the
supra-lapsarian view, and hold that what we call the
Fall was a necessary incident or moment in the spir
itual evolution of humanity, that it was only through
evil that it could know good, then, of course, we
reduce TeXeiaais and diroXvTpa>cri<; to one and the
same : completion could not be without, and could
only be through, redemption. If, however, we hold
the snblapsarian position, that the Fall was an acci
dent and not a necessity of the spiritual evolution of
humanity ; that freedom necessitated the possibility,
and so explains or accounts for, but that it did not
necessitate the existence, of sin and death, then we
affirm that TeXeia>o-i<; would be in the nature of things
possible, and might actually have been, without
diroXvTpooo-K;. Let us see what in that case it would
have been or would be.
The Incarnation, as we know it, is both a generic
and a particular fact. Generically it is the Incarnation
of God in man, in humanity ; and is still in process,
not to be completed until Christ is glorified in His
mystical body, the Church. Particularly it was com
pleted in the ascension of our Lord Himself, and is
the Incarnation of God in the man Christ Jesus.

126 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
I have before shown that in the New Testament
Jesus Christ means both the one man and humanity
in Him, just as Adam means the one man or humanity
in him. Suppose we call the Incarnation, as already
realized for us in Christ, the objective Incarnation,
and the Incarnation as it is being, or to be, realized in
us in Christ the subjective Incarnation. Then I say
that of these two the second is the end, and the first
is but the means and instrument of it. God incar
nated Himself for us in Christ in order that He
might incarnate Himself in us in Christ; all that
Christ was for us was but the divine means to what
we are to be in Christ. As the Epistle to the Hebrews
expresses it: "We see not yet man . . . but (as the
first step and means thereto) we see Jesus crowned
with glory and honor. . . . For it behooved God, in
bringing many sons to glory [that is the end of the
whole divine purpose and process] (first and as the
necessary condition and means thereto) to perfect
the captain or leader of their Salvation through
suffering." The divine end, which God is so often
represented as having had in view from eternity,
because it is inherent in His very nature, is the real
ization of Himself, not only as wisdom and power,
nor even as mere goodness, but as Love, in the exal
tation of man as head of the creation into Himself
in Jesus Christ. I say not merely as goodness, but
as love, because God might have manifested Himself
as goodness in a merely immanental relation to the
universe of which there was no consciousness in the
latter ; but He could only manifest Himself as love
through a transcendental and personal relation to

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 127
beings who could know Him as such and love Him
in return. Love is reciprocal affection and action,
or can exist only where there is at least a possibility
of reciprocity. We may be good to things ; we prop
erly love only persons.- The love through which
God incarnates Himself in, and so exalts us, is not
only His love for us, but our love in return for
Him. The divine love which transforms and glori
fies and, so far as we are capable of it, deifies us, is a
love of which we are not only the objects but the
subjects. The first question which here presents itself to us is,
why the generic or subjective Incarnation in humanity
should have necessitated as its precondition and means
the objective and particular Incarnation in Christ.
Why was it necessary for God to incarnate Himself
in Christ in order to incarnate Himself in us? I
think that we can at least catch glimpses into the
reason or necessity for this. The spiritual creation of
God is not a physical but (XoyUv') a log-ic&l or rational
one. God realizes Himself in us as spiritual beings,
and spiritually, not <pvo-ei but Xoya>, not through our
nature but through our reason or our rational and
personal self-activity. There is no other reason,
ground, cause, or law of things but the Eternal divine
personal Aoyos — %&>/W ov iyeveTo ovBe ev o yeyovev.
But the thought or word of God fulfils itself in dif
ferent ways when it does so in purely physical, and
when it does so in spiritual causation and creation.
Physical or natural causation is always through the
<f>vo-is, or nature of things, and independent of any
principle of self-determination or causation in the

128 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
things themselves, which, therefore, are simply caused
and in no sense causes, or co-causes, of themselves.
Spiritual causation seeks not merely physical but
spiritual effects, because it operates upon subjects
which are not merely physical but spiritual and per
sonal, i.e. which are to a certain extent causce sui, and
not merely caused by or through their nature. God
cannot be the author of holiness or righteousness in
persons in the same way in which He is the author of
motion in things or of instincts in animals. Things
are caused immediately and without themselves;
persons are caused (personally or spiritually) only
through themselves, through their own self-causation.
God can only cause my holiness so as that I also shall
be the cause of it. Otherwise it is not holiness, for
holiness is a personal quality or character, i.e. one
which is self-caused.
That holiness, while it is God in us, is God so in
us that it is also ourselves; that not He, but He
through us, is the source and cause of it is sufficiently
evident from the difference in the workings of a phys
ical cause like gravitation, and the spiritual causa
tion we call sanctification. If one worked like the
other, spiritual obedience would be as necessary and
universal a law as physical. That it does not is
because one is God and the other is God and we.
In spiritual creation, therefore, the thing created is
holiness, righteousness, spiritual life. God is as much
the author of these in us as He is the author of any
thing in nature; but He is the author of them in
us, and He cannot create in us as He creates in
nature. The Divine Logos, the thought and Word of

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 129
God, which is the principle and cause of all creation
physical and spiritual, can fulfil itself in us only as
it utters itself to us and quickens and enables us
through ourselves, i.e. through our own knowledge,
will, and obedience ; from which, also, we may exclude
it. Whatever, therefore, God is to be in us spiritually
— our holiness, our righteousness, our life — He must
be objectively to us before He can be subjectively in
us. He can only enter into us — the us not of our
(pvcis or nature merely, but of our personal ivepyeia
or conscious and free being and doing — through our
reason and understanding, our affections and desires,
our spiritual susceptibilities and receptivity ; in a
word, our faith and obedience. He must, however
physically we live and move and have our being in
Him, stand spiritually outside of us until we through all
these receive Him in ; and He must be outside before we
can, and in order that we may, take Him in, and make
Him our life. God can make Himself our holiness,
our righteousness, and our life only as we know, accept,
and receive Him as such ; and unless He objectively
reveals and gives Himself, how can we subjectively
appropriate Him as such? If I believe in Jesus
Christ, the righteous ; if I believe in Christ, my right
eousness ; then through faith Christ will be my right
eousness, and I shall be righteous. Thus what I
become in Christ is conditioned, 1st, upon Christ's
being that in Himself, and 2d, upon His being pre
sented to my faith as being that for me.
He is the Eternal Logos in that He is the eternal
both thought and expression to God of Himself and
of His creation both natural and spiritual. He is the

130 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Incarnate Logos in that, in our nature, He is the per
fect expression of the divine thought and word of us
to us. We see in Him what from God we are to
believe, and through believing are to be; what we
are to be through believing, and to believe in order
to be. Now in what do we believe in believing in
Christ ? Why, 1st, in the divine grace, power, and
operation which has made humanity what it is in
Christ, and 2d, in the operation and power of that
same grace in us to make us what Christ is.- The
essence of faith is to believe all for ourselves that we
believe of Christ, because recognizing in Him God's
Word and promise of us. He is the Personal God
become our holiness, our righteousness, our life ; our
sanctification, redemption, and resurrection; our d-iro-
XvTpeoo-i<; and TeXeiWi?. All this is involved in the
Incarnation, and I repeat that I do not see how God
could thus incarnate Himself in us without first in
carnating Himself to us — how our subjective realiza
tion of Him could have been without His objective
revelation to us of Himself.
The more we reflect upon it, the more we shall see
that if God was to reveal Himself to us objectively
as our holiness, etc., in order to our receiving Him
subjectively as such, He could not do so after any
merely human fashion, as by word or speech or letter.
Jesus Christ was Himself God's perfect Word, God's
perfect revelation to us of Himself as our holiness,
our righteousness, and our life. He is Himself the
Personal God manifesting Himself objectively that
He might communicate Himself subjectively to us as
our holiness, our righteousness, and our life.

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 131
We very properly repudiate the idea that Jesus
Christ is a mere example or a mere objective stand
ard or law to us. But that does not mean that He
is not an example and law to us, however much more
He may be. The spiritual is not the unnatural or
contra-natural, but only the higher natural. And
God's working in spiritual creation is as natural, i.e.
as much in accordance with the nature and laws of
the spiritual, as all His operations in natural crea
tion are natural, or in accordance with the laws of
nature. God never acts outside of the nature and
laws of things, and so is never unnatural. Now the
very and sole principle of all acting upon the spirit
ual is through example, or objective standards. How
can it be otherwise? If one is through his own
understanding, will, and free activity, i.e. though
himself, to be made other than he is, he must be
shown that other which he is to become. It must be
made to him an object and end of obligation, aspi
ration, imitation. It must appeal to, and move, in
fluence, and transform him through, his reason, his
affections, his conscience, his will. Why or how other
wise shall he set himself to become, or how can he
be made, what it is ? The thing which lifts man above
all other beings of our experience, which makes him
a rational being — attaining his end Xoyw, and not
merely <pvcrei — is that he is a being capable of con
ceiving and being wrought upon by ideals; he is
capable of knowing his ends and determining him
self towards them. Now the Incarnate Logos is to
him the revelation of the divine idea, predestination,
and truth of himself — of God in him, it is true, but

132 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
no less of himself in God. Jesus Christ is the reve
lation to us of God, but of God in the flesh, or in us ;
as He has become Himself in our nature what we
are to become in Him. Far be it from me to bring
Jesus Christ down to one of us ! But let us remem
ber that He brought Himself down to become one,
and as one of us — and if we are unwilling to receive
it, and would stand in the way of His self-humiliation
with our, " Far be it from Thee, Lord ! " He may
say to us what He said to St. Peter under a like prov
ocation. I say, then, that Jesus Christ is Himself
as man what God would be in all men and would
have all men be in Him. He is God's revelation to
us of Himself in us and us in Himself. He is God,
our holiness, our righteousness, our life. He was (as
man) holy with the same holiness, and made holy by
the same means, with us. Otherwise He would not
have been any example or revelation to us of what it
is for us to be, or how it is that we must be made
holy. What we mean by saying that Jesus Christ
is not, and does not influence us with only the power
of, a mere example is this : that He is a divine and,
therefore, a potential and effectual example, with
power, that is, to conform us, through our conform
ing ourselves, to Him. " As many as believe in Him,
to them giveth He power to become sons of God."
Indeed we see in Him, as the divine revelation of
ourselves, the manifestation iv ivepyeia, in actual
operation, of that same divine grace which through
our faith in it in Him will produce the same result in
ourselves. So St. Paul says that we are raised with
Christ through faith in the ivepyeia, or working of

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 133
God, who raised Him from the dead. Jesus Christ is
not only our example, but through His example He
causes and becomes, in us, that of which He is the
example. In the case of the man healed at the Beau
tiful Gate of the Temple, St. Peter, in ascribing his
healing to the virtue of the risen Saviour, says : " His
name through faith in His name hath made this man
strong." The name in Hebrew usage is what it
designates or expresses ; it means what the thing is.
So by a true paraphrase we might, applying the words
to ourselves, say that, " What Christ is, through our
faith in what Christ is, will make us all that Christ
is." It is not our faith, but what we have faith in,
through our faith in it, that saves us. And what we
have faith in is the Word of God to us of us in Jesus
Christ; that Word of God, through our faith, i.e.
through our spiritual understanding, affections, will,
and self-realization, realizing itself in us.
That same Word of God without which nothing
came or continues in being, that is, the Word which
as Logos spake into existence the natural creation,
as Logos Incarnate or Christ speaks into existence
the spiritual creation. But that was a (pvaUn, this
is a XoyUv ktio-i<; ; the Word there spake what it
created, and created by its mere speaking; here it
speaks to, and creates only through the hearing of,
that which it creates. " In the Logos was life, and
the life was the light of men." Naturally the Logos
is the life of all things ; spiritually, i.e. of spiritual
beings, as men, He is the life only as He is the light.
He is natural life whether we will or no, whether
even we know or not. He is our spiritual life only

134 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
as we know and will. He is our life only as, through
our spiritual reason and free will and personal recep
tion of Him, He is our light.
The objective Incarnation, then, the Incarnation to
us in Christ, was a necessary means to the subjective
Incarnation, or the Incarnation in us in Christ. God's
eternal thought of us could only realize itself in us,
spiritually, as it first came as an objective Word to
us. It could only creatively fulfil itself, as a spirit
ual creation, through the spiritual powers and self-
activities of those in whom it was to do so. It must
enter ab extra ad intra through the spiritual intelli
gence and free receptivity of its subjects, and fulfil
itself in them through their knowing, willing, and ful
filling it.
If man were not fallen — i.e. if he were not in
that indubitable actual condition which rightly or
wrongly we call fallen — if he were simply incom
plete or not yet himself, and so in need of reXet-
ojo-i<; only and not of aTroXvTpaais, still the objective
Incarnation would be necessary for him. He must
know what he is to become in order to spiritually
become it. He cannot believe, he cannot love and
desire, he cannot will, and do, and personally conform
himself to and become what does not present itself
to him as the object of all these capacities, faculties,
and activities. Even if, by the definition or in the
nature of the thing, it were possible that he should
be created not through himself, i.e. not mediately
through his own faith, obedience, etc., but immedi
ately and without himself, into the likeness of Jesus
Christ, into the perfect holiness, righteousness, and life

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 135
of Christ, that would not be to attain the real end
either of God or of man. But we cannot make the
supposition without contradicting the very notion of
the spiritual, without relegating the spiritual and
moral back into mere physical and necessary creation.
When I define Jesus Christ in His objective Incar
nation to be the divine thought and word of us and to
us, there is intended to be involved in the definition
the important truth that God's thought or Word is
never like man's, an abstract or impersonal thing.
His thought or Word, Unlike ours, never ceases to be
His personal thinking and speaking, i.e. Himself.
It never becomes detached from Himself, but He is
always in it and it is always He. Thus that Jesus
Christ is our divine Salvation means, not that He is
something from God in us, but that He is God per
sonally in us as our Salvation. God is in us, as we
shall see more clearly hereafter, in His personal Word
as the principle of His objective revelation and self-
communication to us, and in His personal Spirit as
the principle of our subjective appropriation, and so
of His indwelling in us. So that He is not only by
His Word all that He is to usward, but by His spirit
all that we are to Himward. He is not only what we
know, will, and become, but our knowing, willing, and
becoming Him — and all, not to the destruction but to
the heightening, enabling, and fulfilling of ourselves
in the process.
We might by any one of a number of passages
illustrate the order of thought followed in this chap
ter. Let us take that one (Rom. 7 : 29, etc.) in
which St. Paul most fully unfolds for us the ¦jrp60eo-i<;

136 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
or purpose of God with respect to man. In the
eternal divine foreknowledge God predestined man to
become conformed to the image of His Son. It was
the destination of man from the beginning to become
what has been revealed to us in the person of the
man Christ Jesus, i.e. Son of God. There are two
truths contained in this : 1st, Jesus Christ was and is
what man was eternally destined to be ; 2d, man is
destined to be what Jesus Christ in His humanity
is. 1st, He was God's revelation of us to us ; and 2d,
He will by His spirit through our faith become the
realization in us of that revelation. The Apostle
continues : to the end that He ( Christ) should be the
first-born among many brethren. The end or final
cause in the matter is the TeXeiondrjvai, of the many,
the bringing man to his reXo? or destination. But man
can only seek or reach his end by its becoming an end
to him. He can only be conformed to the true image
of Sonship for which he is predestined by conforming
himself to an objective image of that Sonship. He
can be created into the true idea of himself only
through faith in an objective ideal of himself. Whom
He predestinated them He also called : Jesus Christ,
Himself objectively presented and offered to our
faith and to our reception through faith, is our divine
invitation or call to our divine predestination or end.
He is not only what we are called to be, but our call
and our effectual call to be it. And so the Apostle
elsewhere (Eph. 1 : 18) prays that we " may know
the hope of His calling, the riches of His inheritance,
and the exceeding greatness of His power to usward
who believe " — that is, that we may know to what

FINAL CAUSE OF THE INCARNATION. 137
a destination we are called in Christ Jesus, and how
mightily the objective call will through faith subjec
tively transform us into that to which we are called.
For Jesus Christ is Himself, and will Himself be in
us, the holiness, the righteousness, and the life to
which He calls us. So, whom God calls He Himself
in Christ both justifies and glorifies.

CHAPTER TENTH.
OF THE HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST.
That Jesus Christ is the Incarnation of a Divine
Person ; that He is not the union of a Divine Person
with a human person, i.e. with a particular or indi
vidual man with whom He united Himself after or
in the womb of the Virgin, — in a word, that the
Church's doctrine of the Unity and the Deity of the
Person of Jesus Christ is not only the doctrine of the
New Testament and of Christianity, but is fully recog
nized and integrally and necessarily involved in the
truth of Christ as I am endeavoring to present it, I
hope is sufficiently apparent to all. But it is one thing
to say that the Divine Logos united Himself with a
human person whom He made to manifest Him, and
it is another thing to say that He became and mani
fested Himself as a human person. If He, being a
person, in any real and perfect sense became human,
then He became a human person. We say that He
was One Person in two natures. But the nature of
a person is only the mode of his personality, or of his
personal being and acting. Our Lord in His divine
nature, prior to His Incarnation, subsisted and acted
ev poptpy ®eov, after the mode of the divine being

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 139
and activity. He was of one knowledge, power, and
majesty with the Father, and, in a word, was a
Divine Person. Our Lord in His human nature was
and acted as a man, after the human mode of acting
and being. He was not omniscient; He was not
omnipotent ; He thought and knew and willed as a
man, and was a man in all those human activities
which, as we shall see, constitute human personality.
In our Lord as He is now, in His exaltation ;
where the Incarnation in Him is wholly completed ;
where the divine is wholly communicated, and the
human wholly assumed, i.e. taken up into and glori
fied and deified by the divine ; in other words, where
the two natures, without being changed into each
other, are become One, we can only describe the per
sonality as a divine-human one.
But we are studying our Lord's humanity now not
as it has become one, and the co-equal partner, with
His divinity, but, as we may say, in the process of
its becoming or being made so. He was as truly or
really God Incarnate in the Virgin's womb as He is
now on the Throne of Heaven ; but surely He was
not God as fully or wholly incarnate, unless we
are prepared to say that His human nature, or that
He in His human nature, was as much then as He is
now. The Incarnation was not as completed and
complete in the foetus as in the man, or in the man
natural as in the man spiritual and glorified. It was
the eternal purpose, the end and final cause of the
creation, that the Divine Logos should incarnate
Himself as man and in man. This, in fact, is an
identical proposition : the Logos is the end and final

140 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
cause, as of all creation, so especially of humanity.
He is that conception and purpose of it in the begin
ning which it is to realize and fulfil in the end. The
whole natural and spiritual creation is not only Bi
avTov, but ek avTov. He is both efficient and final
cause of all, and the efficient because the final : as is
the case in all teleological and purposeful activity, it
was the Divine Conception of the end that caused the
beginning of the creation: all final cause in God is
efficient, or effects itself.
The Incarnation of the Logos as man was the
elKwv, or image, of the Incarnation of the Logos in
man. If we are predestinated to be conformed to
the image of the Son, it is because He became the
image of the Sonship, to which, through Him, we
are to be conformed, or transformed. To change the
word, but hardly at all the figure, our Lord is the
tu7to?, or pattern, shown us in the Mount. " For see,
saith He, that thou make all things according to the
pattern showed thee in the Mount." If the material
tabernacle and temple needed a heavenly pattern to
be built after, assuredly the " tabernacling in us," the
true Temple of the Incarnation of the Logos of God
in humanity, and in each individual man, needed
such an objective, revealed pattern. And Jesus
Christ is such a pattern, 97 elKwv tov ¦wpdyp.aTO';, the
very image of the thing. " We all," says the Apos
tle (2 Cor. 3 : 18), " with unveiled face reflecting as
a mirror the glory of Jesus Christ, are transformed
into the same image \_ttjv avTrjv eiKova] from glory
to glory." " JLIkoov tov vioi) tov ®eov : the image of
the Son of God into which true Christians are trans-

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 141
formed is likeness, not only to the heavenly body
(as in 1 Cor. 15 : 49 ; Phil. 3 : 21), but also to the
most holy and blessed state of mind which Christ
possesses (Rom. 8 : 29 ; 2 Cor. 3 : 18)." (Thayer's
Lexicon of the New Testament under eiKcov.) But we
could not subjectively be changed into the image of
the Son of God if there were not the objective image
into which we are to be changed. And Jesus Christ
is that objective el/cwv or tvttos, image or pattern,
after which, through our own faith, love, and obedi
ence, God spiritually creates us.
The point here is that Jesus Christ is the very
image of the thing, which, through Him, we are to
become ; the exact heavenly pattern, after which we
are to be in Him spiritually created. The truth of
His divinity is manifested and proved in the perfec
tion of His humanity. Because He is a man fulfill
ing the definition and realizing perfectly all that
belongs to the conception of manhood; because the
whole divine meaning of man, the whole thought
and will and purpose of God concerning man, is ful
filled and expressed in Him, therefore He is the
Incarnation of the Logos. We are not to find the
divinity of Christ in anything outside of His human
ity, but in the divine perfection of His humanity.
I do not say that there was not a divinity and
a divine personality apart from, and prior to, the
humanity, but to us this is revealed only in the hu
manity and in the divine perfection of the humanity ;
i.e. in the perfect human holiness, righteousness, and
life of the man, Christ Jesus. If it be said that
our Lord possessed divine knowledge and power, I

142 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
say that as man He possessed these only as man;
through the Holy Ghost, and not as the Eternal Logos.
He knew the mind and worked the works of God
through His human, spiritual and moral,, oneness with
the Father, through His knowledge as man by the
Holy Ghost of the mind and will of God. This is
only to accept seriously and really the fact that the
Logos became man and was man. That as man He
should have possessed a non-human knowledge and
power would have made Him in those respects not
man. The Incarnation is not the Logos playing or
acting man, or acting through an outward semblance
of manhood, but the Logos as man in all the truth
and reality of manhood — in a manhood which incar
nates Him because it incarnates that eternal divine
idea and truth of humanity which He is. " No man
hath seen God at any time," i.e. God as God. There
is no divinity visible in Jesus Christ beside or out
side of the divinity of His divinely perfect humanity.
In that He incarnates and reveals and is the Logos.
It would not heighten but lower the Incarnation to
have it otherwise — to have the Logos manifesting
Himself partly as man and partly as God by the side
of or from behind the man. That might be a The-
ophany or a Logophany, but assuredly no true and
perfect Incarnation. Everything in the man Christ
Jesus is properly and truly human. His knowledge
is a wholly human knowledge ; His power a human
power; His whole personal life as man a human life.
That is not to say that He was not God, but that He
did become man, and that as man He had the facul
ties and capacities, and exercised the functions and

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 143
was subject to the laws not of Godhead, but of man-.
hood. If in Him we see humanity lifted infinitely
above itself as it is in us ; if we see it with its grow
ing capacities growing into the consciousness of the
divine in it, and entering more and more into the
possession of divine knowledge and the exercise of
divine powers, until in His exaltation the human
becomes wholly equal and coterminous with the
divine — in all this there is nothing that contradicts
the nature or laws of the human. For this it was
constituted, and to this it was predestinated from the
beginning. But at no stage in the process by which
our Lord in His humanity became what He is now,
could any law of human growth and becoming have
been violated or transcended in Him, for then He
would have ceased to be man. If at any point, or in
any way, His knowledge or power as man ceased to
be after that mode which we call human, and became
what we call divine, then, and in that respect, His
humanity was changed into divinity. But man as
man is capable of communications of divine knowl
edge and power, and there is no limit to his capacity
for them ; and no amount of communication, though
it be " without measure," makes him less but more,
and more truly, man. Whatever of divine there was
or is then in the knowledge, power, or any other
function of Jesus Christ as man, it is the communi
cated divinity pf the Third Person of the Trinity,
and not the original or underived divinity of the
Second Person. So we see in Jesus Christ the
TeXeiaxris of humanity — that human holiness which
is man's oneness with God, that human righteousness

144 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
which is man's fulfilment of his law, that perfection
of human life which is man's perfect self-realization
and satisfaction. There is absolutely no difference
between Jesus Christ as man and us as men, as we
are to be in Him, so far as the manhood is concerned.
It is true that He is the Divine Logos realized in
humanity, — and we shall be humanity realized in
the Logos, — and between the He and the we there
is all the difference between God and man. But the
humanity is the same in Him and us ; there is no
difference between His human holiness, righteous
ness, or personal human life in and of God, and
ours. It may be thought that even if what is intended
in the subject of this chapter be true, it is a need
less confusion of traditional and accepted Christian
thought and language to speak of a human personality
in our Lord. It remains to be seen whether it is not
necessary to do so in order to clear our current think
ing from a more serious confusion. It may relieve
us, however, of some difficulty to attend to the follow
ing distinction. When the Church insists upon the
" One Person in two natures," by one person it means
one personal subject. The avTo? or He in Him was
one, and that one, divine ; Jesus Christ was not the
Logos in a man, which would be a union of two
persons ; but the Logos as a man, or as man, one
person in two natures. On the other hand the
Logos "become man," or as a man, must mean a
human person — for that is what man means. Cer
tainly it cannot be meant that the Logos assumed
only so much of humanity as is impersonal ; that He

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 145
did not possess a human self-consciousness, free will,
and all that constitutes in us our human personality.
If, then, by personality we mean the subject of a
personal mode of being and acting, our Lord had no
human personality; the avTos, or He, was divine
and not human. But if we mean the mode of being
and acting of a personal subject, then he had a human
personality ; because as man He was and acted per
sonally in that mode which we call human. In this
latter sense He was, as man, a human person ; and
it is essential to the nature and true meaning and
efficacy of Christianity that we should know Him as
such. For it is only as we do so that we make His
holiness, His righteousness, and His life in any true
and real sense our own, or see in Him the image and
pattern of our own spiritual new creation in Him.
At the risk of repetition, therefore, we must go a
little more into detail in this matter. When we
speak of our Lord's humanity, we certainly do not
mean that He is human only in those parts and func
tions of human nature which are impersonal. For
example, the body and all its involuntary or automatic
functions are natural, and not personal. They are not
we in that proper sense in which what we are and do
of ourselves, of our own consciousness, free will, and
self-determination, is we. There is a great deal in us
and in our actions which is wholly cbvcrei and imper
sonal; which originates not only not from us, but
without us; i.e. without any agency or instrumen
tality of that personality which, properly speakingt is
alone we. Even of sin, in so far as it is natural and
not personal, of our nature and not of ourselves,

146 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
St. Paul says, " It is not I that do it." On the other
hand, the spiritual man, the moral man, and, so far
as the natural is the result of these, the natural man
in us, are personal. They are what we are in the use
of our reason and our will; i.e. of ourselves. In
many ways even a personal being may be imperson
ally determined by nature, by circumstance, or by
God. But to be spiritual or moral we must be
personally, and not impersonally, determined; it is
something which we must ourselves be, if not wholly
of, yet not at all without ourselves.
Now do we ascribe to our Lord only a physical or
natural or also a personal humanity? Of course,
both; and it is the latter which I wish to construe
and describe. The personal manhood of Jesus Christ
may be considered 1st, as spiritual ; 2d, as ethical or
moral ; and 3d, as natural in so far as the spiritual
and moral affect the natural.
If the spiritual manhood of Jesus Christ was a real
spiritual manhood, then, like ours, it was of divine
grace through a real human faith. The essence of
the spiritual in man is the knowledge of God — that
real knowledge which is not the image merely of the
thing in the mind, but the very truth and presence
of the thing in ourselves. Now our Lord's knowl
edge of the Father, was it a human knowledge ? In
fact, His knowledge altogether, was it divine or
human ? If He was a man ; if the Incarnation is
to be taken in earnest; if humanity includes not
merely bodily or physical but intellectual, moral,
and spiritual manhood; then assuredly the knowl
edge, the free will and personal activity, the faith

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 147
and religious life of Jesus Christ must have been
as human as His flesh and bones and blood were.
And it is a matter of a thousandfold more con
sequence to us that our Lord's personal faith, obe
dience, and life should have been just what ours
are than that His natural and impersonal flesh and
blood should have been. He came to be in Himself
first, that He might become in us secondarily and
derivatively, our holiness, righteousness, and life ; and
He is ours, either for or in us, only as He is human.
Jesus was God, but for us He became man, and to
us He manifested Himself as man only and wholly.
In the very truth and perfection of His manhood
only is His Godhead made visible to us. If He was
man, then He not only ate and drank, and walked
and talked, but He knew and thought, and felt and
willed, and believed and prayed, and needed and
received grace, and grew in knowledge of the Father
and in consciousness of Himself, and realized His
divine Sonship, and incarnated spiritually and morally
as well as physically the Eternal Logos — all as man,
and just as all men are called to do the same in Him.
The fact is, the whole truth of Jesus Christ is just as
much man realizing and fulfilling himself in God as
God realizing and revealing Himself in man. If in
any one thing the man Christ Jesus knew as God,
knew because He was God, knew after the p,op<pi] or
mode of the divine and not human knowledge — in
that thing His humanity was violated, ceased to be
humanity, and became or was changed into divinity.
A human mind can only know in accordance with
the conditions and laws of the human mind and of

148 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
human knowledge. When it knows outside of these,
it is not a human mind. Not that it cannot know
God and divine things; on the contrary, it is its
highest nature, as spiritual, to know them. It was
made to know God, and there is no natural limit to
its capacity for divine knowledge short of God Him
self ; i.e. short of the infinite. There is nothing that
contradicts the nature and law of the human mind in
our belief that our Lord's human mind now shares
the omniscience of His divinity. But even all His
present divine knowledge must, as man, have been
received by Him humanly. His human knowledge
of the Father, His human knowledge of Himself as
the Son, and as the Incarnation of the Logos, in no
wise differed in kind from our knowledge in Him of
the Father, and of ourselves as sons, and as incarnat
ing the eternal thought and word of God. As God,
as the divine Sonship incarnating itself in Him and in
us, He is, of course, as far above us as God is above
man; but as man, as human sonship, through faith
and prayer and obedience, by the grace of the Holy
Ghost, realizing the divine in itself and itself in the
divine, there is no difference in kind between Him
and us.
It is hard to define that faith through which we
know God, just as through our natural organs we know
nature. It is true that all men know nature and all
do not know God ; from which it might seem natural
to infer that we have not as truly an organon of
spiritual as of natural knowledge. But the very fact
that natural knowledge is natural, and therefore as
such necessary, and that spiritual knowledge is spirit-

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 149
ual, and therefore personal or waiting and depending
upon ourselves, entirely accounts for that difference.
All men know more or less of natural things because
all men are, independently of themselves, natural :
they are in a relation with things which is prior to
and independent of themselves, which they do not
make and which exists to a large extent without
themselves or their personal agency. But all men
do not know spiritual things, because all are not
spiritual. And they are not all spiritual because
only those are so who of God and of themselves
become so; because the knowledge of spiritual things
depends upon a relation to them which cannot origi
nate or continue without themselves, and which conse
quently often does not originate or continue at all.
This rapport or relation we call faith, and faith is
the condition and human principle of the spiritual,
i.e. of all divine knowledge and life in us. Now
Jesus Christ is, first of all, the realization in Himself
and the revelation to us of faith; of the perfect
human relation of humanity to God ; of that spiritual
manhood which is the result of the perfect union and
oneness of man with God ; of that sonship which is
born of knowing the Father. He is God wholly in
man by grace or the divine self-communication, be
cause man wholly receptive of God through faith or
human spiritual susceptibility. Thus Jesus Christ
is " the author and finisher of our faith." He is the
perfecter in Himself, as He will be in us, of that
principle in humanity and in human life through
which God makes Himself one with us and us one
with Him.

150 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Between that knowledge which the man Christ
Jesus had, or did not have, in the womb of His
mother or as an infant at her breast, and that omni
scient divine knowledge which as man He now pos
sesses, there was an infinite process and progress of
growth in knowledge which, we may feel very sure,
violated in no degree or respect the nature and laws
of the human mind. Otherwise, there would have
been, as I have said, a breach and infraction of the
humanity of our Lord, and so of the Incarnation. I
may or may not, within the limits of this present
work, be able to touch upon the possible theories as
to how the Divine Logos could contract Himself to
the beginning and growth of an actual human knowl
edge. But if He became man He certainly did so ;
and if He did not, then not only is the Incarnation
emptied of all meaning, purpose, and value for us,
but it ceases to be an Incarnation.
My object has been thus, first, to vindicate the
very humanity and humanness of our Lord's personal
holiness, as the objective realization and revelation
to us of spiritual manhood; of what man is consti
tuted and destinated to become through personal
union with God by faith ; of that Sonship which is
wrought in us through knowledge of the Father.
If, secondly, our Lord's faith or personal spiritual
knowledge and life was a human one, so no less was
His obedience or personal moral life or righteousness.
He is as truly the embodiment of ethical as of spiritual
manhood. If the obedience of Jesus Christ was a real
human obedience, then it must have involved that
which is the very first element and condition of such

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 151
an obedience ; viz. the possession on His part of what
is called formal freedom; i.e. not a necessity of obeying,
but a possibility of obeying or not obeying. To say that
our Lord's was a human obedience and righteousness
is to say that He had this possibility and the conscious
ness of it, and a free choice- between obeying or dis
obeying. This is necessary to the conception of obedi
ence ; and if our Lord was incapable of it because He
was God, then as God He was incapable of being man
and rendering a human obedience. I know that in
that real freedom which is the end and perfection of
freedom ; which consists or, for us, is to consist in
freedom even from the possibility of disobedience,
we have, or shall have, an obedience in the truest
and highest sense, and yet one in which there is no
possibility of non-obedience. But even that is only
obedience because it began as formal freedom and has
emerged out of it ; because, so to speak, it has obeyed
away the possibility of disobedience, just as we may
disobey away our power of obedience. Obedience
continued and confirmed becomes an impossibility of
disobedience ; and the very essence of a perfected
obedience is the loss of formal in real freedom.
So if our Lord's personal obedience and righteous
ness was a human one, then we must ascribe to Him
the human possibilitas peccandi. We are confronted
here with a question which must make us pause and
define our position in a very vital respect. This per
son with whom we are dealing is the Eternal Logos,
who is God; to ascribe to whom the possibility of
sin is a metaphysical absurdity as well as moral
blasphemy. But then, on the other hand, He is the

152 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Logos Incarnate, become man for the very purpose of
realizing and revealing the true idea of manhood ;
i.e. of realizing in humanity its true spiritual, moral,
and natural actuality or fulfilment of its law, from
which the notion of freedom is inseparable. We may
add to the first point that it is not only inconceivable
and impossible that the Divine Person incarnate in
our Lord should sin, but it is equally so that the
eternal design of God in the Incarnation should
thereby have miscarried. We cannot imagine the
possibility of God's having failed in the revelation
and communication made to us in the person and per
sonal human life of Jesus Christ. The gist of that
revelation was our Lord's human personal conquest
and destruction of sin, disobedience, and death, by His
own human personal holiness, righteousness, and life ;
and to admit the possibility of His having sinned,
supposing it otherwise possible, would be to admit the
possibility of the revelation having failed.
What position, then, shall we take in the matter?
If to admit the possibilitas contradicts the divinity,
and to deny the possibilitas contradicts the humanity,
shall we make our choice of one and let the other go ?
We cannot do this ; in terms, at least, we are com
pelled in Christianity to hold both, although in fact
there are very few of us who do not practically sur
render one or the other ; and in Orthodox Christianity
it is the humanity that suffers. For my own part I
hold that the following position is the only true one.
If we are construing the Incarnation from the side of
the divine ; if we are speaking of our Lord in terms
of the Logos, and of His human life work as a reve-

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 153
lation from God, we exclude necessarily from our
minds any idea of the possibility of spiritual or moral
miscarriage, i.e. of sin. But if we are studying the
Incarnation from the side of the human; if we are
speaking of our Lord in terms of a man and viewing
His life and work as a revelation to us of humanity
as it has existed from eternity in the mind and pur
pose of God, and has manifested itself in time in the
person of Jesus Christ; if we think of Him as hu
manity realizing itself in God by faith as God real
ized Himself in it by grace, then we ascribe to Him
without qualification that formal freedom, that power
of obedience or disobedience, which is inseparable in
our minds, and in fact, from the notion of man or of
human obedience.
If it be said that a metaphysical impossibility on
the divine side and practical possibility on the human
side cannot be reconciled, I freely admit that I am
unable to reconcile them. But can we study the
natural or spiritual universe in any direction with
out, if we go far or deep enough, being ultimately
brought face to face with antinomies? We have
already expressed one when we say that Jesus Christ
is both God and man. We hold it already implicitly,
and we do not hold it one whit more after we have
unfolded and acknowledged it explicitly. But we
need not disturb ourselves here ; the very existence
at all of both the divine and the human, of the in
finite and the finite, if thought out thoroughly, would
involve for us insoluble contradictions and impossi
bilities. The. matter of practical importance to us is
to know how to act in the presence of such a diffi-

154 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
culty. And the true principle upon which to act is
this: In such a question as, for example, that be
tween the divine foreknowledge and sovereignty and
our own human free will, not to bold either at the
expense or sacrifice of the other, but fearlessly and
unqualifiedly to hold both. So I say I hold without
qualification the formal freedom and the veritable
humanity of the personal human obedience of our
Lord Jesus Christ. When He Himself says, " Father,
not my will, but Thine be done ! " I accept the fact
that He was conscious in Himself of two wills, of
the necessity of choice between them, and of the
possibility of obedience to either. When He Him
self accounts for the inability of men to believe, on
the ground of their seeking honor one of another,
instead of the honor which comes .from God only ;
and attributes His own faith, spiritual knowledge,
and right judgment to the fact of His seeking not
His own will but the will of the Father who had
sent Him, I take Him at His word and draw two
inferences from His own language. First, I infer
that our Lord would not so have spoken here and.
elsewhere of seeking or doing not His own but God's
will, if He had not felt that to obey His own and
not God's will was a possibility, and under many
circumstances a natural temptation to Him. And
secondly, I infer that the perfection of our Lord's
faith, obedience, and life in God was not a necessary
consequence of the fact of His being God only, but
had a free human ground and reason for it, which
He Himself loves best to state in the words : " be
cause I seek not mine own." It is our own which ob-

HUMAN PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 155
scures and prevents all human faith, knowledge, love,
obedience, and life in God, and because His own had
no place, therefore the Prince of this world found
nothing of his own, in Him.
Our Lord's obedience, then, His righteousness, His
fulfilment unto death of the one only true divine
and human law of love, which comprehends and in
cludes all virtue, morality, or duty, however it may
differ in degree, is identical in kind with all human
obedience or righteousness. It behooved God as the
means to our perfection in righteousness, first to per
fect the great captain, example and author of our
righteousness, by those iradripaTa, or human experi
ences, temptations, and sufferings, which are the
conditions and natural instruments of all human
perfection. He learned obedience by the things which
He suffered, that we might learn in Him and be
enabled by Him to learn obedience by the things we
suffer. Thus we vindicate not merely the reality of
our Lord's physical manhood, but equally and as of
more importance the humanness of His spiritual and
moral manhood. He was holy through a human
faith and righteous through a human obedience ; and
so was God's revelation to us of what and how spir
itual and moral manhood are and come to be.
So we may go on to show that what our Lord
becomes in Himself as, we may say, the physical,
necessary, or natural consequence of His human
faith and obedience ; that is to say, the self-realiza
tion or natural perfection which was the result of
His spiritual and moral perfection, was human also.
His own natural exaltation is everywhere described

156 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
as the human natural effect of human spiritual and
moral causes. He humbled Himself, He sought not
His own, He was obedient unto death, therefore He
was highly exalted. There is a natural exaltation
springing out of spiritual and moral dispositions and
acts which is none the less a natural effect because
it is a divine reward. He that humbleth himself
shall be exalted ; he that loseth his life shall find it :
these are expressions of a natural as well as a spiritual
law of necessary cause and effect. Our Lord is none
the less human, but more so that He is exalted. And
if we are of the same spirit with Him, we shall share
His natural exaltation also, even to participation in
the likeness of His glorified and spiritual body.
This is what I mean by claiming for Jesus Christ
a human personality. He was not human in the
merely impersonal parts, functions, and acts only of
human nature. His whole personal life as man in
all its spiritual, moral, and natural dispositions, char
acter, and actions was equally essentially human.
He was so man that as such He exercised no imme
diately or directly divine powers or activities. If
He had divine knowledge, if He exercised divine
power, it was not as the Second, but by the Third
Person of the Trinity. It was through the perfec
tion of His faith, obedience, and life, through His
spiritual and moral oneness as man with God, that
He thought and knew and willed and acted with
divine wisdom, knowledge, and power. If He knew
Himself to be the Incarnate Divine Logos, it was not
the direct divine self-consciousness of the Logos but
the human consciousness of the man so incarnating
as to be made conscious of being the Logos.

CHAPTER ELEVENTH.
OF THE DIVINE SONSHXP OF OUR LORD.
There are two terms generally conceded to be
applied in the New Testament to the pre-incarnate
personality of Our Lord. These are A0705 and 'Tto?,
Word and Son. There is a question with regard to
both of them, whether they designate relations within
the Godhead itself or relations of the Godhead to
the kosmos, and especially to humanity. We believe
that both terms express both relations. The Logos
is the eternal expression of the eternal thought of
God; and since it expresses the whole thought, it
must be God's thought of Himself as well as His
thought of all things. The Logos is thus God's eter
nal thought of Himself, of the world, and of man.
The Logos is also Son, and so the Son may mean the
eternal personal Word as the Son of God, or the
whole creation as Son of God, or humanity as Son
of God. But since it is only in the Sonship of man
as its head that the creation becomes properly Son of
God, and since it is only through the incarnation in
it of the eternal personal Son that humanity becomes
Son of God, these three are all one and the same
Sonship.

158 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
We, however, have mainly to do, and I hold that
the New Testament mainly deals, with the Logos as
God's eternal thought and expression to Himself of
us. And we have mainly to do with the Son as He
embodies to us the conception of our own eternally
predestinated divine Sonship.
I hold then that the term Son as applied in the
New Testament to Jesus Christ has reference to that
Sonship of humanity which objectively it has attained
and subjectively it is to attain in Jesus Christ. But
it means this, 1st, as the Eternal Logos, or thought,
purpose, and predestination, of this in the divine
mind ; 2d, as this realized in time in the man Christ
Jesus ; and 3d, as this to be realized in the future in
humanity in Christ Jesus.
Neither as pre-incarnate, nor as incarnate, nor as to
be in us incarnated, is the Son of God to be viewed
as a mere impersonal sonship or abstract idea of son-
ship. God does not, like us, think or utter abstrac
tions. His thought of Himself is Himself thought,
and not an impersonal image of Himself. His thought
of the creation is Himself thinking the creation, which
cannot be thought apart from Himself. And so His
eternal thought of us is not an abstract or impersonal
image or idea of us lying in His mind and waiting to
realize itself in time. It is He as He is to realize or
reproduce Himself in us. Just as in Himself, God,
as He eternally generates or begets, the Logos of
Himself, is Father, and as He is the Logos eternally
generated He is Son : so in us as He is to generate
or reproduce Himself He is Father, and as He is to
be reproduced in human sonship He is Son. God is

OF THE DIVINE SONSHD? OF OUR LORD. 159
always and everywhere Himself, and not anywhere,
or ever, a mere thought or word or influence or effect
detached from Himself and become impersonal. So
that, I repeat, Jesus Christ as Son is God, 1st, as eter
nally to become, 2d, objectively become, and 3d, sub
jectively becoming us; that is, generating, begetting,
or reproducing Himself in us, and so becoming our
Father and making us His sons.
The difference between Logos and Son, when ap
plied to Jesus Christ as the predestination in eter
nity and the realization in time of humanity, is this :
Logos views man as predestined to express the divine
reason, purpose, and meaning of him, whatever that
may be ; but it does not express what it is. T/d?
defines it to be such a personal self-reproduction of
God in man as constitutes man in a real sense son of
God. Thus if it were only said that we were eter
nally predestinated to incarnate the Divine Logos or
intention, it would mean, of course, that we were to
incarnate not an impersonal idea, but the personal
God realizing in us the idea; but it would still
remain unsaid what that divine idea or intention is.
When, however, the revelation is made definite, and
we learn that the eternal predestination of humanity
in Jesus Christ is ek vlo0eo-iav, unto the relation of
sons to God ; that we are predestined to be conformed
to that image of sonship which is revealed as having
been realized to and for us, and as to be realized in
us, in Jesus Christ, then I say a content is given to
the word, and we understand not only that we are to
incarnate a divine intention, but what the intention
is which we are to incarnate.

160 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
We might conceive a universe of things only. We
might conceive a universe which rises up to and
includes persons, but where the highest ideal or pos
sibility of personal activity is that of obedience, an
ethical or moral activity. Such a world would be to
God one of servants only ; there would be personal
consciousness, free will, and selfhood, but the highest
exercise of it could not bring its subjects any nearer
to God than an external conformity to the divine
will or law. There would be between such subjects
and God an eternal and necessary duality.
But God as love can never be content to remain
forever apart from a universe of which love is both
the final and first cause, which has been created by
love for love. It came into existence Bi' avrov ek
avTov, and it is as much to return into as it came
forth from Him. The natural creation is for the
spiritual ; the world is for Adam, and Adam is for
Christ, and Christ is God ; and so the kosmos flows
back into its source. We are called, then, to sonship ;
not to a formal conformity to God's law, but to a
real relation to God's person, and a reproductive
connection with His spiritual nature. That is, the
destination of man is attained only by a birth from
above which makes him partaker of the divine nature,
and so Son of God.
There may be several different and true senses
of the term Son as used in the New Testament. I
am concerned with that sense of it which, whether
applied to Jesus Christ or to us in Him, is always the
same, and expresses the very gist of the Christian reve
lation. It is not a physical or metaphysical or natural

OF THE DIVINE SONSHIP OP OUR LORD. 161
sonship. It is natural, in the sense that nature in
cludes destinature, and inasmuch as in this sonship
man attains the spiritual, moral, and natural end for
which his nature predestines him. But it is not a
natural sonship, in the sense that it does not result
from the mere fact of his nature, but is contingent
and resultant upon an act of himself : it is not <pvo-ei,
but Bi Tjpav. Consequently in this sense not all men
are sons of God, but only those who become so by a
personal act of divine grace through a personal act
of human faith. The accurate distinction of Aris
totle applies not only to the moral, but a fortiori to
the spiritual man. Virtue, according to him, is the
most truly natural thing in the world; in fact, he
practically defines virtue to be the following of
nature. Yet virtue is not natural in the sense that
a man is virtuous by nature, for he can only become
virtuous by himself, or by his own self-determina
tion. We are not, he says, virtuous (pvaei, but only
KaTa <picnv, i.e. not by the fact of our nature, but
only by self-conformity to the law of our nature.
Nature does not constitute us virtuous, but consti
tutes us to ourselves become virtuous. And however
we may be and are constituted for virtue, we are not
virtuous until we have become so. For virtue is a
personal and not a natural character, — something
which nature cannot make us, but only we can make
ourselves. So, I say, we could never become sons of God if
it were not our nature to become so. And in that
sense we may perhaps be truly said to be by nature
sons of God. Nor do I deny the truth and the impor-
M

162 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
tance, in its place, of realizing and insisting upon the
natural divine sonship of every man. But in the New
Testament conception our natural sonship is only a
natural destination to sonship; and sonship proper
or actual is that personal relation between the per
sonal God and our personal selves which has got to
become or take place for every man, and which does
not exist for him until it has so taken place. It
is not until God has personally been born and lives
in us — that is, until He has reproduced Himself in
our personal faith, obedience, and life — that we are
properly and actually sons of God. This sonship in
the totality of its conception has been actualized
within our experience only in the human personality
of Jesus Christ, who has become thus the personal
actual in time of that of which He was in eternity
the personal ideal. But such is He, and such is His
relation to us and ours to Him, that we say that
humanity has in Him been constituted, or become,
son of God ; not only in Him as the eternal ideal or
predestination, but in Him as the realized actual or
fulfilment of humanity. And so He is the regenera
tion of humanity, or what it becomes by birth dvcodev,
from above, by the personal self-reproduction in it of
the eternal Divine Logos. Jesus Christ is thus the
second Adam. He is the second or spiritual birth
of humanity, as Adam stands for its first or natural
birth. He is the birth of God not into the impersonal
nature, but into the personal life of man, and there
fore necessarily not into humanity as a lump, but into
individual men one by one, by grace through faith.
When we say with St. Peter that we are, in Christ

OF THE DIVINE SONSHIP OF OUR LORD. 163
Jesus; partakers of the divine nature, we mean not
the physical or metaphysical, but the spiritual nature
of God. We mean that God is born or reproduced
not in our natural, but in our personal and spiritual
being, i.e. in our personal holiness, righteousness, and
life. Holiness is the divine being in us ; righteous
ness is the divine acting in us ; and life is that true
self-realization or realized selfhood which is to be
attained by us only in the being and acting of God
in us.
It will be seen that in the New Testament sense
sonship and spirituality are synonymous. True son-
ship is realized spiritually : it is the form which God
and the divine nature assume in us ; i.e. in which
God reproduces Himself in what we through Him
become spiritually. The son is one in whom the
father repeats or reproduces himself, so that what
the father is the son is.
The charge has been brought against Christianity
that in its distinction between the natural and the
spiritual or the unregenerate and the regenerate
man, a difference is set up in kind, which is not sus
tained by the facts of observation and experience.
It is claimed by Christianity — the charge is — that
there is a gulf between the natural and the spiritual
equal to that between any two kingdoms or orders
in nature ; as e.g. the inorganic and the organic, or
the vegetable and the animal. Whereas we can see,
and there is, no such difference in kind between men
calling themselves regenerate and spiritual and those
who do not. I myself make no such exclusive claim
for Christianity, and therefore I am not called upon

164 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
to defend it or to notice the charge. But I do hold
the distinction between natural and spiritual human
ity, between the unregenerate and the regenerate ;
and I hold that it involves a difference in kind and a
separation in fact as wide as heaven and hell. Only
we must not look for the Kpio-is, or division, too much
now or here. Perhaps there is no living human being
who is totally and finally a0eos, or unspiritual ; and
there is certainly not one who is wholly and com
pletely ev6eo<s, or spiritual. There may be, for aught
we know, many a so-called unconverted and unbap
tized unbeliever in whom there is more actual spirit
uality, i.e. more of God and of the divine nature,
than in many a baptized and even really converted
believer. Christianity does not mean that Christians
are different and rigidly divided in kind from non-
Christians. It means that there is a principle of
difference and division in kind, a divine self-im-
partation or grace which works through our faith and
transforms us from what we are into what God is and
would become in us. It believes that this principle
is at work in many who have no conscious or con
fessed faith in it, and does not work, or works very
little, in many who do professedly believe in it ; that
God is in many a man who may even in terms deny
His existence, that He is wholly and finally with
drawn perhaps from no man, and that He is far too
little in those of us who the most fully believe in
Him. But Christianity, I repeat, does believe in the
principle and fact of regeneration and spirituality,
and it believes in making full use of it, and of all
the means of it, and helps to it.

OF THE DIVINE SONSHIP OF OUR LORD. 165
Let me use an illustration at which we might well
hesitate if we had not such abundant warrant for it in
both volumes of Holy Scripture. The spiritual affinity
between God and man is there likened to the natural
affinity and relation between the sexes. I presume
that there is no human being who does not in some
way or other, and in some degree or other, feel the
workings in him of the principle of sexual affinity.
Now the end and final cause, or meaning, of all such
natural impulses and feelings is reproductive marriage,
along with all the social, moral, and spiritual functions
which accompany that relation. And whatever the
possible and actual abuses of the sexual relation, no
one questions the fact that when it realizes its true
conception and fulfils its true end in lawful marriage,
it subserves a very high and a very essential purpose
in human life. But it is one thing to have the nature
and the impulses and the powers necessary for the
realization of an end, and it is another thing to truly
realize the end which is the final cause or meaning
or purpose of all these. Certainly not all sexual
affinity and attraction does so ; in fact, how little of
it realizes its divine meaning and intention !
And so I repeat that I make no such actual and rigid
difference as was above alluded to between regenerate
and non-regenerate, spiritual and non-spiritual, men.
I deny the feelings and workings of a spiritual nature
to no man ; I believe that the powers that regenerate
are more or less at work in every man. But just as
I hold that the sexual motions and emotions only
come to their true meaning and fulfilment in a real
marriage, which unites the sexes as their nature pre-

166 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
destines them to be united, so I hold that all spiritual
instincts, experiences, and emotions are intended for
an end ; and that they contradict their meaning and
fail of their fulfilment if they do not end eventually
in that spiritual union with God, for which God and
our spiritual natures predestinate us. What that
union is is definitely revealed to us in Jesus Christ :
as it has been realized to and for our faith in Him,
so only in Him through our faith can it be realized
in us. Of course, if we are made to become spiritual,
there will be natural impulses and movements in us
to become so ; if we are made for union with God,
our hearts, as St. Augustine says, will find no rest
until they rest in Him. But thoughts of God, and
feelings after God, and all the spiritual dispositions and
aspirations of one out of Christ, are as much only the
preconditions of that real union with God which Christ
is, as the natural affinities and attractions between the
sexes are the preconditions of the actual union be
tween them which marriage is. And in both cases
the impulses to, and the thoughts and feelings about,
are meaningless and unproductive until they lead, or
unless they lead, to the thing itself, which is their
end and final cause. So I deny to no man any natu
ral spirituality he may possess, but I say that it is
meaningless and useless unless it leads him to Christ
and to the truth and life expressed and conveyed in
Christian ordinances.
There is something more than is expressed above
in what might be called our natural spirituality.
Those impulses are not merely the Teachings of our
own spiritual nature after ends which are its natural

OF THE DIVINE SONSHIP OF OUR LORD. 167
destination ; they are the prevenient or " preventing "
influences of God Himself drawing us to Him ; divine
attractions which, however little they may actuate,
act upon every man. Actual, as distinguished from
potential or natural, spirituality is the result of a per
sonal relation between the personal God and our
personal selves, and is consummated only in that per
sonal union in which we become one with God as
well as God with us. But there may be a personal
and spiritual ivepyeia, or action, of God upon us long
before any spiritual recognition or response upon our
part. We may be subject to, and we may feel, the
motions of God's Spirit long before our own spirits
become obedient to them. I will not say when the
Divine Spirit begins to operate upon and within the
spirit of every man. It is true that we actually begin
to become spiritual only from the point when God's
Spirit begins to work with ours through the working
of ours with His ; but before that He is moving
though we be not moved. And so I say that over
and above a natural disposition of all men to God, a
prevenient grace of God is at work upon all men,
which imparts to them, or constitutes for them, a
potential spirituality. But if there is any real prin
ciple and power and truth of spirituality in man it
means, and points to, and is predestined to end in some
definite relationship between God and man, in which
God realizes Himself in man and man is realized in
God. Just as all the sexual impulses terminate in a
definite sexual relation of marriage, so all our spirit
ual movements and impulses terminate in a definite
spiritual relation between God and us, failing of

168 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
which they are not only useless, but are subject to
that abuse which attaches to every principle of hu
man nature when perverted from its use or diverted
from its proper end.
That definite form which we seek for our spiritual
manhood, the exact relationship which is to subsist
between God and ourselves, and the precise what we
are to become through it, is objectively constituted
for and revealed to us in the human personality of
Jesus Christ. And what it is is expressed in the
term son, or sonship. According to St. Paul we were
eternally predestinated unto sonship in Jesus Christ ;
we were made sons by Christ's resurrection ; we were
taken up into Christ's sonship by our baptism ; we
shall enter upon the full inheritance of sons in Christ
in our own final resurrection. St. John exclaims:
Behold what manner of love the Father hath be
stowed upon us that we should be called, and should
be, sons of God, i.e. in Jesus Christ. And he goes
on to add that we know not yet what, through this
relationship to God, we shall be; but that we do
know that we shall be like Christ, or what Christ is,
and that all that sonship is in Him shall be realized
in us.
I assume, then, that Jesus Christ as man realized
in His humanity — by which I understand not merely
the human impersonal nature which He received
from His mother, but the human person that He
became and was through His own human experi
ences and acts — that human sonship of which from
eternity He was the divine predestination, of which
in His personal Incarnation He was the objective

OF THE DIVINE SONSHIP OF OUR LORD. 169
realization to and for us, and of which in us He is
the subjective power and is to be the fulfilment.
I have said that while not questioning, on the con
trary fully conceding, the propriety of the applica
tion of the term Son to the Second Person of the
Trinity independently of His relation to the kosmos,
or man, I yet hold that it has a propriety when used
to express that relation. The Eternal Son at least
includes in its meaning the sonship of the whole crea
tion in man as its head and heir. And I hold that
this is the predominant and distinctive use of the
term son in the New Testament. Even the Eternal
pre-incarnate Son stands there for the eternal idea
and predestination of the sonship of the creation in
man and of man in Christ. That, as has been said,
does not mean an abstract predestination of an im
personal sonship ; it is the personal thought and will
and purpose, or Logos, of God as eternally purposing
to incarnate Himself in the personal life of man, and
so constitute him son of God. Thus in the Epistle
to the Hebrews God is said to speak to us now no
longer in the prophets, but iv vim — in a Son whom
He has appointed heir of all things. That is, Jesus
Christ is there viewed, as He in whom the whole
kosmos, or natural, moral, and spiritual order of
things in the universe, is to come to its end and des
tination as Son of God ; as He in whom, as the head
and reason and purpose and personality of all things,
the Divine Logos is so to realize and fulfil Himself,
as that the whole creation is in Him to become
Son of God. And everywhere this high destination
of the KTto-t? is represented as to be attained in man,

170 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and as man in Christ. Adam as the head and end of
the natural creation inherited the earth. In him and
his possession of and dominion over it, it came to its
natural end and destination. But the natural end is
not the t&Xos TeXeiov, the final cause for which God
creates. The end of the natural is but the starting-
point of the spiritual. Already in the Old Testa
ment a further and higher inheritance begins to be
spoken of and promised — a promise interpreted in
the Epistle to the Hebrews as transcending the nat
ural and the temporal. And the promise is still to
man. To Abraham and to his seed the promise is
made that he shall inherit, or be heir of, the earth.
But the promise is not to the natural, but to the
spiritual, man ; the seed which is to inherit is child
of his faith, and not merely of his blood. It is a
promise made to, and to be realized through, faith,
which is the organ and faculty of the spiritual and
not of the natural man. The promise of natural in
heritance was to Adam; the promise of spiritual
inheritance is to Christ. But Adam was not a nat
ural man only, but natural humanity ; and Christ is
not the spiritual man only, but spiritual humanity.
" Not unto angels hath God subjected — or given the
inheritance or possession or dominion of — the world
that is to come. But one testified, saying : What is
man that Thou regardest him, or the son of man
that Thou visitest him ! Thou madest him a little
while lower than the angels, Thou crownedst him
with glory and honour, and didst set him over the
works of Thy hands; thou didst put all things in
subjection under his feet. Now we see not yet all

OF THE DIVINE SONSHIP OF OUR LORD. 171
things put under him, but we see Jesus through and
for His suffering of death crowned with glory and
honour." And His exaltation through death is and .
means man's exaltation. But all this is the spiritual
creation; it is what man, and the kosmos through
him who is its head, is to become by grace through
faith. But what God gives and what we receive by
grace through faith is not something from God ; it is
God Himself personally reproducing Himself in us,
and so constituting and making us His sons.
I have before remarked that however much of
truth or of error there is in the modern kosmical phi
losophy of evolution (upon which I presume not to
speak: science is judge in its sphere, and can, or
ought to, be judged of no man without), it certainly
seems to have made this evident: That the end to
which all things have worked has been the produc
tion of the natural man ; and that the end to which
all things are working is the production of the spirit
ual man. Who and what the spiritual man is we may
not all agree ; but I believe him to be the man in
whom God has personally reproduced Himself, and
who is therefore God's son; and I believe Jesus
Christ to be that man. And I believe Jesus Christ
to be the revelation of the true meaning, and the
realization of the true destination of every man ; and
that in Him as the personal incarnation and repro
duction of the personal God in our personal selves
we and the whole creation shall come into our divine
inheritance.

CHAPTER TWELFTH.
OF THE HUMAN BIRTH AND SONSHIP OF JESUS
CHRIST.
The human birth of Jesus Christ was not merely
a natural but a spiritual and moral event. He was
born not merely out of the womb, but of the faith
and obedience of His Virgin Mother. Inasmuch as
on the human side — as son of Mary, of David, and
of Abraham — He was the product of a long process
of spiritual, moral, and natural preparation, we might
say that He was born out of the spiritual, moral, and
natural womb of humanity. He was born " in the ful
ness of time," — i.e. at the completion of a necessary
period of preparation and of hidden coming.
There are two conditions of vegetable birth — the
seed and the soil. There are two conditions of ani
mal birth — the sperma and the womb; and these
two, prepared and ready for each other and acting
together under the proper conditions. Jesus Christ
was the product of a divine seed in a human soil, of
the sperma of God in the womb of humanity. The
soil had to be prepared, the womb to be made ready.
The womb in this case was man's natural capacity for
God, his receptivity or susceptibility for the ivepyeia,

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OP JESUS CHRIST. 173
or in-working, of the Divine Logos, his power to con
ceive and bear the personal truth and personal life
of God. That this spiritual capacity on the human
side needed long and gradual cultivation and educa
tion is only in keeping with what is true of the whole
development and evolution of humanity.
The first element in a true spiritual susceptibility
for God is a sense of incompleteness, and that impulse
to what is necessary for its completion, which every
living thing feels. Why does the empty stomach
hunger and thirst for what will fill and satisfy it?
Why does sex desire sex to complement and com
plete it ? Our Lord uttered the first and deepest of
spiritual truths in that first word of His great ser
mon, " Blessed are the poor ! " A being is only poor
in the non-possession of that which it is capable of
possessing. An animal is not poor because it has not
what a man is poor for not having. One's possible
poverty is measured by his capacity for possible pos
session. Again, a being who is not inherently and
essentially poor must have in himself all that he is
capable of having. He is incapable, therefore, of any
increase from without, and can never be more than
he is. The glory and fundamental blessedness of
man lie in the depth and extent of his poverty. He
is infinitely poor, because he has a capacity for in
finite riches; and because he is capable of being
infinitely enriched and increased from without him
self, and so of becoming infinitely more and greater
than himself. I say again that man's first and funda
mental blessedness is his capacity for being blessed.
And he who, though least in himself, has neverthe-

174 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
less in himself a capacity for God, is at once infinitely
poor, and yet in that very fact infinitely rich. In this
poverty there is an infinite desire, a hungering and
thirsting for God, for eternal, divine, and perfect
holiness, righteousness, and life. Here is infinite am
bition with infinite modesty, infinite humility and
infinite assurance, infinite self-renunciation and infi
nite self-realization. What a thing it is to be able to
say at once and with equal sincerity and truth, I am
nothing, and yet I am and can do all things, for God
is incarnate in me ! And what less than this, if we
will but understand it aright, is the truth of Jesus
Christ for us and in us ? It is the peculiar beauty
and glory of a real Christianity that it is an infinite
selfhood that is infinitely selfless, an infinite righteous
ness in which is no self-righteousness, an infinite
virtue in which there is no place for pride or self-
conceit. The first element, then, in a true spiritual suscepti
bility is the sense of poverty. That is inherent in
man as man ; but in man as fallen man there is a yet
deeper sense, the sense of sin. That the spiritual
preparation under the Old Covenant for the New, by
the law for the Gospel, of Adam for Christ, con
sisted mainly in the bringing out into human con
sciousness of the universal facts of sin, transgression,
and death, is clear enough. By the law was, and is,
the knowledge of sin. But what we need to under
stand more clearly is this: that under the divine
tutelage and spiritual preparation of the world under
the law, the sense of sin is so developed as (what it
is) a consciousness of personal separation from the

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST. 175
personal God, that there is developed along with it a
sense or consciousness of the need of at-one-ment, or
personal reconciliation, or reunion, or bringing into
a real spiritual oneness with God. The sense of
transgression is so taught as a slavery or bondage to
a false law, — i.e. a false or perverted mode of per
sonal being and acting, — that there is developed with
it a corresponding sense of the need of redemption —
i.e. of being freed with and into the freedom of obe
dience to that only true law which is righteousness.
And moreover, the truth is taught by experience that
a merely formal obedience is impossible for man ; that
obedience to God's law is only truly such when it is
informed by God's spirit ; that righteousness without
holiness is a body without a soul, and therefore dead ;
and that therefore we need to be redeemed from dead
as well as from wicked works.
Finally, spiritual evil or sin and moral evil or dis
obedience are so revealed as involving natural evil or
death, as contradicting and destructive of all self-
realization and life, as to develop in man the con
sciousness that, outside of God and His law, he is
dead in himself, and that only by dying in and to
himself can he live again in God.
And so I repeat the second element in that human
susceptibility in which alone God can incarnate or
reproduce Himself is the consciousness that we need
Him not only as our holiness, but as our cleansing
or sanctification from unholiness or sin ; not only as
our righteousness, but as our redemption from un
righteousness ; not only as our life, but as our resur
rection from the dead — in a word, that not only

176 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
without God are we poor and infinitely in need of
completion, but in our actual separation from Him
we are sinners, transgressors, and dead, and so in
finitely in need of Salvation.
The Virgin Mary represents the highest reach, the
focusing upward, as it were, of the world's suscepti
bility for God. She was the truest humility, the
truest desire, the truest faith, the truest impotency
in herself, the truest preparedness for the ivepyeia,
or working in her, of the divine omnipotency — the
truest readiness and receptivity, therefore, for the
coming to her of God as Saviour and Salvation, as
completer and completion. Of her was born the
world's Salvation, because she best represented the
world's need of Salvation. Virginity represents
the fact of an impotency whose potency must come
from without itself. In a spiritual sense it stands
for human need of divine impregnation, man's need
of God as the author and father of his spiritual life.
Through the Virgin as the faith and susceptibility of
humanity, the Word is born by the Spirit, and man
becomes Son of God.
To go beyond this, and to ascribe to the Virgin
Mother or to the humanity or human nature which
our Lord received from her, prior to His own sancti
fying, redeeming, and resurrecting self-activity in it,
that spiritual, moral, and natural quality"and charac
ter which His own human holiness, obedience, and
life originated or produced, and which makes Him
the author and finisher of human Salvation and com
pletion, contradicts the order of things and assumes
a Salvation before it existed. But the Virgin Mother

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST. 177
represents all that humanity could be in preparation
for its espousal with God, and for the conception in
it and birth of it of the Son of God. She represents,
1st, all of humanity's natural affinity for God, and
capability of union with and productiveness from
Him ; and 2d, all that sense of sin, bondage, and
death, and need and longing for atonement, redemp
tion, and resurrection which the law in both its manda
tory or legal and its promissory or evangelical element
was calculated and intended to develop. In both
these, moreover, she represents all that prevenient
grace of the Holy Ghost which is the divinity in us
that prepares us for the divinity without and for us.
According to Christianity, as the Divine Word is
the principle of objective revelation and communica
tion from God to man, so the Holy Ghost is the
principle of subjective reception and appropriation
on the part of man from God. Spiritual things are
only for spiritual men, the word for us only by the
spirit in us. We need a spiritual womb as well as
the divine sperma or seed, for the conception and
birth in us of the Son of God. Now as in each in
dividual experience, so in the spiritual history of the
race there is a prevenient as well as a consequent
grace of the Holy Ghost, who prepares us for as well
as enables us to receive and appropriate the incarnat
ing Word. * His prevenient grace is parare spiritalem
hominem, to prepare man for God. But this is not
in itself to make him holy, but only to elicit and
develop in him the sense and need and longing for
holiness. It is not to redeem him, but to bring him
to the knowledge of his bondage and to the cry for

178 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
deliverance. It is not to raise him from the dead,
but to give him ears even in his grave for Him who
is the resurrection and the life. The whole preve
nient and subsequent function of the Holy Ghost is
subjective. In itself it reveals nothing and commu
nicates nothing: it only prepares us for what shall
be or has been revealed and communicated. The
revealer and communicator is the Word. It is true,
our Lord says that the Holy Ghost shall take the
things of Him and declare them unto us, but that
only means that He will enable us to see and know
the things of God as they are revealed and given to
us in Himself.
There is a deep principle in all this. No natural
affinity on our part for God ; no natural divinity that
there is in us; no even personal presence and per
sonal influence in us of the Holy Ghost, inasmuch as
it is only subjective and so only moves us towards
God, will suffice for either our redemption or our
completion. All this is only the preparation of the
bride for the bridegroom. No mere desire of the
woman for the man, but only the coming of the man
to the woman, will avail for human procreation.
And no drawing of man to God, but only the coming
of God to man will avail for that divine procreation
which is the human conception and birth of the Son
of God. We see thus why it is that everywhere, in
the conception and birth of our Lord Himself, in the
spiritual birth of baptism, in the spiritual life of the
Eucharist, it is always the Word by the Spirit. The
eternal Logos, or Son, became, and becomes, incarnate
by the Holy Ghost ; that is what constitutes spiritual

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST. 179
as distinguished from natural creation. It is not the
immediate and necessary creation of the Word alone,
but the creation of the Word mediated through the
Spirit, i.e. through a subjective influence upon the
mind, the will, the desires, and the free choice and
activity of the subjects of the creation. The Spirit,
and consequently also the Word through the Spirit,
working always in and upon free subjects, never
operates irresistibly or necessarily ; it works through
the consent and choice, and so the personal self-
working, of its subjects, and its working is always
theirs also. So our Lord, speaking from His human
consciousness and of His human activity, says, " My
Father worketh and I work." God's working was
His and His was God's. It was God incarnate not
only in His impersonal human body, but in His per
sonal human will and obedience. In Him as in us
the Logos was incarnate by the Holy Ghost.
In the birth of the Son of God the male element is
the Word; "the Word is the seed." The female
element, the womb or soil, is the natural capacity
or susceptibility of humanity for God, prepared by a
long course of divine training and by the prevenient
subjective influences of the Holy Ghost. Or, to
change the figure, the bridegroom or husband is the
Divine Logos ; the bride or wife is humanity. John
the Baptist, in whom the whole preparatory dispensa
tion was summed up and represented, describes him
self as the friend of the bridegroom, whose function
it has been to prepare and bring the bride to him.
" No man cometh unto me," says our Lord, " except
the Father draw him." We can only come to the

180 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
objective truth and life, to God as He objectively
reveals and gives Himself to us,- as God subjectively
prepares and enables us to do so. " If the eye were
not sunny, it could not see the sun." If God be not
in us, He does not exist for us and cannot reveal or
communicate Himself to us. If there is no Spirit of
God within, there is for us no Word of God without.
God in Christ is, quoad sufficientiam, for all ; He is,
quoad efficientiam, only for those who by the Holy
Ghost will see and know and receive Him.
The birth of our Lord of human mother but not
of human father expresses the truth already involved
in what has gone before, that the Son of God is born
passively but not actively of humanity, of the capac
ities but not the faculties of human nature. He is
conceived in its womb, but not begotten from its
loins. It is the truth prefigured and illustrated in
the Old Testament by the distinction between Isaac
and Ishmael, the latter the son born to his parents
through their natural powers, the former, in the im
potency of those powers, by the power of God in them
— the one the child of nature and law, the other of
grace and faith.
As Adam stands for the natural birth of humanity,
its birth of nature, so in Jesus Christ humanity is
born dvm0ev, from above, of God ; He is its spiritual
birth. But it is all-important to observe that the
birth of humanity in Christ into its full relationship
of Son to God is not viewed in the New Testament
as completed in His natural or physical birth of His
mother, but only in the spiritual new birth of His
death and resurrection. In the "Thou art my son;

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST. 181
this day have I begotten Thee," the day referred to is
not that of His physical conception or birth, but that
of His resurrection. It was i£ dvao~Tdo-ea)<; veKpcov,
out of and by His resurrection from the dead, that
He was constituted and became Son of God (Rom.
1:4). I invite very special attention to the truth
involved in this. The incarnation of the eternal
Logos and Son was, as I have before insisted, not into
the merely impersonal but into the whole personal
humanity of our Lord. The true and full expression
of the divine idea and sonship is to be found not in
His merely natural but in His moral and spiritual
manhood. Much as we are interested in the very
reality of His human body, we are much more so in
that of His human faith and obedience, of His human
holiness and righteousness and life in and of God.
It is in Him as the spiritual man, as incarnating the
personal life of God in the personal life of man, and
so making humanity Son of God — not a thing from
His hand merely but a self born of His selfhood and
reproducing Him in a spiritual and moral personal
life of its own like unto His.
We are not, then, to view the Incarnation as com
pleted on the mere physical birth of Jesus. The In
carnation was an entrance into humanity, and the
humanity of our Lord Himself was not complete, it
was not all there, in that which He received of His
mother. In the moment of birth the physical
humanity itself was there only inchoately, and a
moral or spiritual humanity was there, as yet, not
at all. It is in the whole Christ, in our Lord in the
plenitude and perfection of His spiritual, moral, and

182 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
natural manhood, as fully expressing the divine mind
and meaning, as fully realizing the divine love, or
self-communication and self-reproduction in human
ity, that we see the Incarnation. And such an Incar
nation must have been a progressive and not an
instantaneous one, a process which was complete only
in the resurrection and in the spiritual manhood of
our Lord as the second Adam. It was not the fact
that He was born into humanity merely, but the fur
ther fact that in Him humanity was born into God,
that made Him, and made man in Him, Son of God.
Assuming, then, that the Incarnation and the human
sonship of our Lord was not a merely physical, but a
spiritual and moral fact, let us proceed to inquire into
the grounds in human nature of its possibility and
necessity. This will involve a restatement in part
of facts already discussed. We hold against Pan
theism that the universe is not the extension of
the divine substance, but an expression of the divine
thought and will. It is not a mode of His nature,
but an act of His personality. This is what is meant
by attributing the work of creation to the personal
Logos of God. On the side of the creare and the
creator the whole creation, as the product and ex
pression of the divine reason, is rational. On the
side of the creari or the creature we distinguish be
tween the irrational, the rational, and the spiritual
creations. The irrational creation is simply the world of
things, which obey, without possessing, reason. The
rational creation is a world of persons, i.e. of beings -
possessing self-conscious intelligence and self-deter-

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST. 183
mining will. It is rational (-n XoyiKr) ktio-k;') because
it has not only, in the divine thought or word, a
logos or rational principle and law, but its logos
or law is a law to itself. This is what I believe
St. John means when he says that the Divine Logos,
which is the life of all things, is the light of men.
He is the principle and law of the being of all things,
but of rational beings He is not only the life but the
conscious life, i.e. the light. The rational creation is
moral since its law is a law to itself and its obedience
is its own. But merely as rational it is incapable of
being anything more than moral. It may through
right reason and right will rightly conceive and
rightly fulfil its logos or law. And since the only
reason or law of things or of persons in the universe
is the personal Divine Logos, we may say that when
the reason and will of the creature conceives and
obeys its logos it is the Divine Logos who fulfils
Himself through the reason and will of the creature.
But on the side of the creature all that is taken into
account is its own right knowing and right willing
and fulfilling. Its logos is an ideal and a law to which
it conforms itself.
The spiritual creation does not exclude, it includes,
the rational ; but it introduces an element which in
a certain sense reverses its action. It makes God
and the Divine Logos not the object but the subject
of our knowledge and obedience. God is not the
true whom we are to attain by knowing, or the right
or good whom we are to attain by being and doing.
It is not we who are to fulfil Him, but He who fulfils
us in Himself by fulfilling Himself in us. Our

184 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
knowledge and obedience are not unto but from
Him ; we know Him only as we are known of Him
and do Him only as He first is and does in us. It
is only as God is love that He is to us either truth
or righteousness. We cannot know Him except as
He has Himself entered into our knowledge, or do
Him except as He is Himself in our will and our
work. The noble but merely rational idea that we
may by knowledge and virtue attain unto God must
be reversed into the truth that God in Christ incar
nates Himself in, and becomes, our knowledge and
virtue. Our knowledge and virtue are not means to
Him, He is the means and cause of them. It is not
that we are not to have these, or that they are not
to be our own, but they are not from us to Him but
from Him in us. It seems to result inevitably from
our creature nature that he who exalts himself in
even the best and noblest sense, where it is only a
self-exaltation, ends by abasing himself. What we
might say of the greatest of the Stoics who sought
the noblest moral conquests by their own knowledge
and virtue, and ended in the most ignoble self-con
ceit and pride, St. Paul says of the best of the
Jews who sought to please and satisfy God by their
own righteousness, and ended in a Pharisaical self-
righteousness which is of all things the least pleasing
and satisfying to God. " I bear them witness," he
says, " that they have a zeal for God, but not accord
ing to knowledge. For being ignorant of the right
eousness of God and seeking to establish their own,
they have not submitted themselves to God's right
eousness." We are not to think lightly or con-

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST. 185
temptuously of the genuine Pharisee. He was to the
moral law as known to the Jews what the Stoics
were to the same law differently revealed to the
Greeks and Romans. He was a zealot for the great
est thing in the world, whether you call it virtue or
righteousness. But man was not made to exalt him
self, and all, even the noblest, self-exaltation ends
eventually in self-abasement. The movement among
the angels which ended in pride and constituted their
fall may have begun in zeal for what was good in
itself, and only became evil because sought in them
selves and not in God. The temptation to eat of the
tree of knowledge which was the cause of man's fall
was desire after a wisdom which was not of God
and in which God was not. It was what St. Paul
calls refusing to have God in their knowledge and
so ceasing to have Him in their affections and wills
and lives ; in professing themselves to be wise, or
seeking to be wise of themselves, becoming fools,
exchanging the truth of God for a lie and worship
ping and serving the creature instead of the creator ;
and as a consequence sinking down themselves from
the likeness of the incorruptible God into that of
corruptible things. All sin, transgression, and death
begins in dirio-Tia and aireideia, in the separation of
the consciousness and the will from God, who alone
is knowledge and virtue.
The principle of the spiritual in us is grace; its
mean or condition is faith, by which we mean that
affinity, congruity, or susceptibility on our part
through which God enters into our minds and wills
and becomes our knowledge and righteousness and

186 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
life. But I repeat that the spiritual includes and is
the rational. It is only through my reason, through
my rational consciousness and will and self-activity,
that God can spiritually be or will or act in me. That
is to say, a spiritual and moral incarnation, the self-
reproduction of God in myself, by which I become
son of God, must be through my personal reason and
free-will and consent.
We have now what is necessary to construct a
definition of that not merely physical but spiritual
and moral birth of God into humanity, which con
stitutes man son of God, and which is the Incarna
tion. Not merely into the material or physical womb,
but into the rational consciousness, into the moral
and free will, into the spiritual personality of hu
manity, the Eternal Logos enters as its Lord and
Master, as its divine reason and final cause and law.
Into this He enters, and in this He incarnates Him
self ; but how ? He enters into and becomes it, only
as it receives, conceives, and incarnates Him. The
consent of the wife is necessary to the act of the
husband. That union of God and man from which
incarnation and sonship result is a personal and free
one on both sides.
Let us apply this to the person of our Lord Him
self. If He is the Incarnation, He is it on both its
sides — ex parte Dei and ex parte hominis. He is
not only God incarnating Himself in man, but man
incarnating God in himself. He is not only the
Eternal Personal Logos incarnating Himself in hu
manity, but humanity personally incarnating the
Eternal Logos. He is not only the grace that im-

OF THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST. 187
parts itself, but the faith which receives. What is
all this but to say, with all the creeds, that He is
both God and man in the Incarnation ? To say any
thing less is to say that He is less man than He is
God. We see in Jesus Christ not only a divine
person who has become man, but equally a human
person in whose human holiness, righteousness, and
life — i.e. in whose spiritual and moral personal or
self -activity — God has become man. Not that there
are in Him two persons or personal subjects, a divine
and a human ; but the One Person as divine is a
divine person, and as human is a human person, and
in the complete spiritual, moral, and natural union and
unity in Himself of Himself as divine and of Him
self as human has become a divine-human person.
On His divine side our Lord is the eternal idea in
God as it has expressed itself in man ; on His human
side He is man who has expressed in Himself the
eternal idea of God. But when we are studying
Him on His human side as the divine revelation to
us, not of what God is in man, but what man is in
God, we are not honoring our Lord by limiting His
divine condescension of love and trying to make Him
more God by making Him less man. The divinest
thing in God is His love, and the love of God is
best measured by the depth to which He Himself
descended in order thence to raise and exalt us.

CHAPTER THIRTEENTH.
OF THE HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST.
It is, of course, evident from any point of view
that the sinlessness of Jesus Christ is the first and
most vital postulate of Christianity. It constitutes
in a peculiar degree the gist and essence of that
theory of Salvation which I have been advocating,
because, according to it, our Lord's human sinlessness
was in itself the atonement, redemption, and resurrec
tion of humanity in which human Salvation consists.
A great deal depends, however, upon a proper
understanding of the nature of this sinlessness. In
the first place it was essentially a human and not a
divine sinlessness, the sinlessness of a human and
not a divine person. Our Lord was sinless not by
mere fact or necessary consequence of being God, but
in the freedom of His personal faith and obedience
as man. We might say that it was not the necessary
sinlessness of His divine self as Second Person of the
Trinity, but the voluntary sinlessness of His human
self by the Third Person of the Trinity.
Sinlessness, however, is a negative term which very
inadequately expresses that in our Lord which we
designate by it. An absolute negative sinlessness is

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 189
possible only through the possession of a positive
perfect holiness and righteousness. Now human
holiness is a very definite and definable thing. It
is the divine nature or character in a human person ;
it is what a man is through faith in God, or what
God is in a man by grace through faith. When it
has attained its true norm or type and perfect image,
it is the reproduction of the personal God in the per
sonal man, by which man becomes partaker of the
divine nature, and is made son of God. The human
principle of holiness is faith, which we may also here
define anew. The possibility of faith lies in a natural
affinity or susceptibility for God which predestinates
and predisposes us to that knowledge of and union
with Him which we see completed and manifested in
the perfect human sonship of Jesus Christ. To say
that man is spiritual is simply to say of him with
respect to God and the life of God what we say of
him with respect to nature and the life of nature
when we say that he is natural. As natural, or
through his natural side, he is related to and one
with nature, lives the life of nature, and is what
nature is in him or makes him. As spiritual, or
through his spiritual side, he is related to and made
to be one with God, receives and lives the life of
God, and becomes what God is in him and makes
him. The difference being that nature makes him
impersonally or necessarily, i.e. without himself or
his own. conscious and free co-operation in the matter;
while God makes him personally and voluntarily,
through the conscious and free receptivity of his
own faith and co-operation. That faith should not

190 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
remain a mere blind spiritual instinct or impulse
(which is contrary to its nature), but attain its
rational, free, and conscious end, there must be an
objective revelation and communication to it of that
end. There must be not only the pre- and post-ve-
nient action of the Divine Spirit in us, but the com
munication of the Divine Word to us. Faith for the
full realization of itself requires not only the subjec
tive impulse 7r/>o? ti, but the objective goal irpb<; 6.
The condition and sine qua non of its perfect activity
is the objective Xdyo? and the subjective irvevp,a, " the
Word by the Spirit."
Now if the holiness of Jesus Christ was a human
holiness, it was a holiness of faith. And if the faith
of Jesus Christ was a human faith, then subjectively
it was of the Holy Ghost, and objectively it was of
the Logos or Divine Word.
When we say, as I do, that the Divine Logos
incarnated Himself in Jesus Christ not merely phys
ically, but spiritually and morally; not merely in
His material or physical flesh, nor merely in His im
personal nature as man, but through and in His per
sonal human faith and obedience, we raise several
questions. The Logos, who is the object of our faith
and obedience and subjective incarnation, is objec
tively incarnated and presented to our faith, etc., in
our Lord's human person. But how was He pre
sented to Him, i.e. to Himself as man, for His personal
incarnation through faith? How could He- as man
incarnate Himself as the Divine Word? Before
endeavoring to answer these questions, let us ex
pand the position to be explained a little more. I

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 191
affirm that Jesus Christ freely and humanly — through
His personal human faith and obedience, through
and in His personal human holiness and righteousness
— personally realized in His humanity the eternal
divine idea and predestination of human sonship, and
so (I will not say was the Divine Xo'yo? and vio<;, for He
was these before and independently of what He was
or did in His humanity, but so) was or became the
Divine Word and Son incarnate, or as man. This
He could only do by the Holy Ghost within Him
and the Logos without Him. That is, if it was
through His human knowledge and free will, through
His personal holiness and righteousness, that He as
man incarnated the Logos, then in some way the
Logos was objective to His consciousness and will
before He was incarnated in them.
Ab initio, from the moment of His human concep
tion, prior to any human consciousness and will, phys
ically Jesus Christ was the Incarnate Word. But
He was not so and could not be so spiritually and
morally prior to human consciousness and will. He
was only so spiritually through His human faith
and morally through His human obedience ; and the
Logos could incarnate Himself in Him spiritually
only through His faith in Him and morally only
through His obedience to Him. Otherwise it is not
an incarnation, but a logophany, — the Logos not as
man in reality, but as man only in semblance.
The above position is of sufficient delicacy, diffi
culty, and importance to justify a somewhat extended
attempt at explanation and justification.
I have taken the ground that not only did the

192 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Logos personally incarnate Himself in the man Christ
Jesus, but that the man Christ Jesus personally in
carnated the Logos ; that it was a free act on both
sides, to deny or limit which, on the human side, is
to impair if not destroy the humanity, is to make the
incarnation on the human side a mechanical, physi
cal, and necessary, and in no sense a spiritual and
moral fact. That is, it would take away all human,
spiritual, and moral activity in the matter, and reduce
the Incarnation to a mere logophany. The position
here taken raises serious difficulties, but not insu
perable ones ; and, in fact, it creates no difficulties,
but only raises such as are implicitly involved in any
real view of the Incarnation. We say that from the
moment of conception in the womb of the Virgin the
Logos became man ; but in a sense which is incontro
vertible, it would be equally correct to say that from
that moment He began to become man. For assuredly
no one would affirm that He was at that moment the
whole man He was to be and did eventually become,
or that He is now. There was then and until con
scious life began only physical and no spiritual or
moral manhood in Him. Even physically He was
not then the man He afterwards became before His
death ; and still less the man He is since His resur
rection and ascension. What He is physically now
is the result not merely of His having as Logos as
sumed the physical nature of man, but of what per
sonally as man He was and did in that nature. If
He had not sanctified and redeemed it by His per
sonal human holiness and righteousness, He would
not have quickened it with His divine life or exalted

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 193
it to His divine glory. But if physically even, Jesus
Christ was not by the mere conception and birth of
the Virgin a completed incarnation, still less so was
He spiritually and morally. He became so in these
respects only when through His personal faith He
had perfectly spiritually, and when through His per
sonal obedience He had perfectly morally incarnated
the Logos. It will be said, this means that our Lord
then was not the Logos from the beginning of His
human life, but only progressively became so as 'He,
through His human faith and obedience, subjectively
realized and fulfilled, i.e. incarnated Him. Let us
see how true this is, and first let us look at it from
the human side.
I am not I in all the completeness of my idea and
meaning from the moment of my conception or my
birth. I may be potentially, but I certainly am not
actually so. There is only the germ or beginning of
my physical and none whatever of my spiritual or
moral selfhood there. Now if in me the nature were
all, and there was no personality, the evolution of the
potential into the actual would proceed of itself, and
I would become myself without any part in it of my
own. But if I am a person I have something to do
in the matter, and it cannot proceed without me. It
is only as I, consciously and freely, spiritually and
morally, realize and fulfil myself that I can or will
ever become myself. It is the characteristic of a per
son that he has first to know himself before he can
become himself ; and not only know, but will himself
and fulfil himself. The idea of himself has to be
objectively present to him before in act and fact he

194 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
can subjectively realize and become himself. Now
when I say that Jesus Christ as man was the Logos
incarnate only as He Himself as man personally in
carnated the Logos, I mean it only in the sense in
which I say that I am I, in the totality of the mean
ing and truth of me, only as I myself become I; only
as I through knowledge and consciousness of myself,
through purposing, willing, and fulfilling of myself,
become myself. If the Logos were merely as Logos
to become man, without as man having anything to
do with the becoming — without His human con
sciousness, will, and choice having any part in it, or
independently of His human faith and obedience —
why did He undergo such a semblance of not merely
physical, but spiritual and moral human growth and
becoming ? Why did He — so humanly that we can
see no difference between Him and us, save only in
degree — not only increase in stature, but grow in
grace and faith, and learn obedience by all the ex
periences of His natural life ? It no more militates
against our Lord's having been the Eternal Logos
and Son from the beginning of His human life to
say that as man He only gradually knew Himself
and willed Himself and realized or became Himself
as Logos or Son, than it does against my having been
myself in the womb to say that I did not then know
myself, or that I do not yet know and certainly have
not yet realized or fulfilled or become my whole self.
One thing is perfectly certain : if the Logos became
man at all in any real sense, He became so only as a
man can become himself, — viz. through and in the
growing consciousness, free will, and self-becoming

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 195
of the man He became. The reality of the Incarna
tion does not consist half so much in the reality of
our Lord's human flesh, as it does in the reality of
His human experiences and life and of that spiritual
and moral character which was the result of His
human faith and obedience.
If now again it be asked, how the Logos incarnate,
or as man, knew Himself as Logos so as through this
knowledge of Himself to realize or become Himself
in His humanity, I answer as follows. We are able
to say that if the Divine Logos incarnates Himself
at all, i.e. if He appears in a humanity which is
such in its totality, in its personal as well as its im
personal elements, in its spiritual and moral as well
as in its merely physical aspects and activities — He
must do so through and in the spiritual knowledge
of Him and the moral obedience and conformity to
Him of the humanity in which He is incarnate. If,
then, we are asked how this spiritual consciousness
and knowledge are to be accounted for, how the
Logos as God is known to Himself as man so that
as man He may realize and become Himself as God,
or may humanly incarnate Himself as Divine Xo'yos
or w'd?, — all that we can say is that He has done so,
and it is not necessary that we should be able to
account for how He could do so. The difference
between our Lord as man and us as men is that He
is not a man who incarnates the Logos, but the Logos
who incarnates Himself as, or becomes, a man. But
the man whom He becomes as humanly incarnates
Him as He incarnates Himself in Him. We do not
make it less a self-incarnation of the Logos by mak-

196 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
ing it an incarnation of Himself into spiritual and
moral as well as into physical humanity, — an incar
nation, i.e. into the spiritual consciousness and free
will and self-activity of the personal human life, as
well as into the impersonal human nature into which
He entered. The Divine Logos could become humanly
known to Himself as His human consciousness was
more and more capacitated to receive Him, and could
humanly manifest Himself as His own human will
and personal activity were more and more able to
enact and express Him. He could thus incarnate
Himself in the incarnating faith and obedience and
personally, freely, becoming-Him of His humanity,
just as truly as He could have done so in the imper
sonal and non-co-operating physical nature merely of
humanity. Only in this last case He would not truly
have become man, and man would not truly, because
not freely and personally, have become, or incarnated,
the Logos. It is infinitely interesting to us that God
should have become man. It is infinitely more inter
esting to us that He should have become so, not by
a necessary and mechanical assumption of an im
personal human nature, but through the conscious,
rational, voluntary, and loving incarnating Him of
a personal humanity. For in this last view of the
Incarnation we see not only God becoming man in
the very truest and fullest sense of a real spiritual,
moral, and natural manhood, but we see man, in an
equally true, full, and real sense, freely fulfilling
himself by freely incarnating in himself the eternal
Word and realizing in himself the eternal divine
sonship.

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OP JESUS CHRIST. 197
It is very true that we have no sooner, by the
above view, asserted for our Lord's humanity a
human freedom in His self-incarnation of the Logos,
than we proceed to take it away by making the In
carnation so a divine act of the Logos as to leave no
place for the freedom of the humanity in incarnating
Him. I have before said that just here is the true
locus of the antinomy inseparable from the union of
the divine and the human in one person. Construed
from the divine side, I confess I see no place for any
human formal freedom (possibilitas peccandi) in our
Lord. The Logos incarnate in Him was, even as
man, still the Divine Logos, and could neither have
personally erred nor have miscarried or failed in car
rying out the divine work of human redemption and
salvation. The whole work of Jesus Christ was as
really and as much an act of God spiritually creating
man as that first act or process was by which man
was naturally created. On the other hand, constru
ing our Lord's humanity from the human side, we
see in Him just as certainly and truly the act or
process by which man by his faith and obedience
incarnates God, as from the other side we saw that
by which God incarnates Himself in man. And we
must affirm the humanity as unequivocally as we do
the deity. Our Lord's growth in the consciousness
of Himself; the reality of His temptations, and the
freedom of His choice, under all circumstances, of
His Father's will as against a possible choice of
His own will ; His use and need of faith and prayer,
and His sole dependence upon the Holy Ghost
and divine grace ; His learning obedience — not

198 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
merely proving Himself obedient, but becoming
more and more obedient — by the providential expe
riences, trials, sufferings, and temptations of human
life, so divinely adapted to be the opportunities
and conditions of human obedience; His human
doubts and fears, and sense of weakness, and evXd-
Beia or laying hold upon Him who was alone able
to save Him (we must believe spiritually and morally
as well as physically), — all these are unworthy sem
blances and make-believes of a personal humanity
which He did not really assume unless we take them
in earnest and see in Him an actual and real hu
manity, different from ours only in the fact of its
being sinless.
Seeing all this, we are able to see in Him what
God purposed that we should — a revelation to us
not only of Him but of ourselves; of Him in our
selves, and therefore of ourselves in Him. We can
see in Him the type and image of that human divine
sonship for which we are predestined, and to which
we are to be conformed by the power of the objective
Word transforming us through the subjective Spirit
into personal likeness to Himself. We can see in
Him the way, the truth, and the life for all human
ity — man's way, through faith, suffering, and obedi
ence into God in whom alone he comes to the truth
of himself through participation in the divine and
eternal life of God. I repeat, that for the Divine
Word to incarnate Himself thus in the perfection and
perfect realization of a personal human life makes it
not less an incarnation, nor less a self-incarnating act
of the Logos, than if it had been an incarnation into

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 199
only an impersonal human nature. And when it is
said : " You make our Lord a man humanly incarnat
ing God, or the word and spirit of God, just as any
man and every man might and should incarnate
Him," my answer is: "Yes, I do. Sin being ex
cepted, what right have we to make any other excep
tion to the identity of our Lord's humanity with our
own ? He is unlike us in the fact alone of His sin
lessness, not so in the mode of it. For He was sinless
only in the way in which alone we could become sin
less — viz. through faith, obedience, and self -cruci
fixion — by the spiritual, moral, and real incarnating
in Himself of the divine nature, law, and life. Only
no mere man could so have incarnated God, no one
could have been such a man, so incarnating the
Divine Word and Spirit, but He in whom the Divine
Word and Spirit had so incarnated themselves as to
enable him to be and to do so. And, moreover, any
man and every man could not now similarly incarnate
the Divine Word and Spirit if God had not revealed
and given to us such an objective incarnation in Him.
For Jesus Christ is not only the revelation of such
an incarnation as we could never without Him have
known, or in our wildest presumption have dreamed
of or aspired to ; but he is the gift and communica
tion to us of an incarnation which only through the
knowledge of Him, and personal union and commun
ion with Him, and by the spirit and power of Him,
could ever be realized in us. Man cannot incarnate
God except as God enables him to do so by incarnat
ing Himself in him. Jesus Christ Himself, as man,
could only incarnate the Divine Word and Spirit as

200 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
He was these incarnate. And we can neither know,J
nor have, nor incarnate, God's Word or Spirit save as
these have incarnated themselves in humanity in
Jesus Christ and incarnate themselves in us as incor
porate in the humanity, or members of the body, of
Jesus Christ.
That our Lord as man was not the mere necessary
incarnation of the Logos, but Himself freely incar-.
nated the Logos, by his own personal human faith
and obedience, is, I think, taught by Himself in that
one of the Gospels which most clearly reveals His
divine, pre-incarnate personality as the Logos. " I
do nothing of Myself," says He ; " but as My Father
taught me I speak these things." And this, not once
or twice, but consistently and always. " I speak
and act," He says, " only as I see and hear of My
Father." And this seeing and hearing He interprets
to be a wholly human disposition and action, by at
tributing it to a wholly human condition — viz. to
His wholly seeking His Father's and not His own
will. Contrasting Himself in this respect with the
Pharisees who could not believe because they sought
and received glory from themselves and not the glory
that comes from God alone. " I have spoken, not
from Myself, but the Father which sent Me He hath
given Me a commandment what I should say and
what I should speak. And I know that His com
mandment is life eternal. The things, therefore,
which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto me
so I speak." I repeat that there can be no doubt that
according to the Gospel of St. John, Jesus Christ is
the incarnation of a pre-incarnate Divine Person. Yet

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 201
the representation is not that of a merely physical
and necessary incarnation — the manifestation of the
Logos in an impersonal human nature. On the con
trary, as ex parte Dei we see the Divine Person incar
nating Himself in humanity, so ex parte hominis we
see no less the human person He became, by a human
faith, obedience, and self-surrender, by an eye to see
and an ear to hear and a will to receive and to fulfil,
freely and humanly incarnating the divine. The
Logos, as Logos, would not need to be taught: He
would have spoken of Himself. But the Logos as
man — if he was man indeed and not in semblance —
could know only through the eyes and ears of a hu
man faith, and act only through the obedience of a
human will. He must, moreover, grow in knowledge,
and begin and finish the great lesson of faith, and
learn obedience ; and he could be the completed incar
nation of the Logos only in the final exaltation of
His human powers to the full capacity for receiving
and the perfect faculty of enacting the Divine Person
incarnate in them.
If all this was so positively, then I say with respect
to the negative fact of ,our Lord's sinlessness that it
was human and not divine — in this sense, that it was
not the sinlessness of His divine self as Logos (that
was necessary, and would go without saying), but the
sinlessness of His human self by the Holy Ghost. It
was, positively, the holiness of a human faith, and
the righteousness of a human obedience.

CHAPTER FOURTEENTH.
of the sinlessness OF jesus Christ. — Continued.
There is another, even more important, difficult
and delicate, question with. regard to the nature of
our Lord's human sinlessness. And that is, whether
and to what extent it was due to the mere fact of
His assuming a so-called sinless nature, or a nature
made sinless for His assumption ; or whether, on the
other hand, He Himself was (of course, by the Holy
Ghost) the author of His sinlessness in the nature.
That is to say, whether, and how much, His sinless
ness was fact of His nature, or act of Himself. I
hold that our Lord's sinlessness was wholly personal,
and not natural; and this, for several reasons which
seem to me conclusive. Let us remember that we
are not now speaking of the divine, either nature or
personality, but the human. Assuming that our
Lord's sinlessness is, in the sense above argued, a
human one, the question next arises, how much, if at
all, it was due to His having a human nature, not,
like ours, fallen and enfeebled and enslaved by sin,
but unfallen and unimpaired by sin ; or, how much it
was due, not to any advantage of His nature as man,
but to His own personal human action and life in

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 203
the nature, so that He Himself, and not any pre
viously prepared sinlessness of His nature, was the
ground and cause of His sinlessness in it. It will be
observed that in either case our Lord's sinlessness as
man is held as essential, and the only question is
how much it is to be ascribed to His nature and how
much to Himself.
There are several sufficient reasons for holding
that the sinlessness or holiness of Jesus Christ, while
extending, of course, through His whole spiritual,
moral, and natural humanity, was yet, as regards its
source or origin in Him, wholly personal or of Him
self, and not natural or through His nature.
In the first place, from the nature of the thing
itself. Properly speaking, there is, or can be, no
such thing as a sinful or sinless nature. Sinfulness
or sinlessness is a personal and not a natural quality.
It may be true enough to say that men, and all men,
are sinful by nature, but it is they who are sinful,
and not the nature. Our nature may be such or in
such condition that we cannot be sinless in it, and
so may be viewed as the source of sin in us, and itself
sinful ; but in reality the sin and the sinfulness is in
us as persons, and all that there is in the nature is
an do-0iveia, which manifests itself as a natural ina
bility in us for sinlessness; i.e. for holiness, right
eousness, and life. This weakness of the nature may
be such that only by a redemption or salvation from
it can we be restored to the power of holiness, etc.,
but a mere natural condition prior to all personal
consciousness, will, or self-determination, is not in
itself in any proper sense sinful. There is nothing
sinful but the sinful will.

204 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Every man born of Adam inherits certain conse
quences of sin. The infant just born inherits already
its natural consequences in the liability to disease and
death. He does not inherit yet the actual spiritual
and moral consequences, because He is not yet Him
self a spiritual and moral subject. We do not properly
call him, as yet, a sinner ; for where there is not yet
a law and a transgression of a law, there is not yet
sin. But the child does inherit sin and transgression
in the, sense that he inherits a nature, unless he is
redeemed from, or raised above, the inherited weak
ness or incapacity of which, he will inevitably sin and
transgress his law. Whether the child lives or dies
to his earthly environment, he carries in his nature
an impotency from which he needs to be delivered,
and unless he is delivered from which he is incapable
of a free and full spiritual and moral, and therefore,
also, natural, life. In one sense we may say that
men are sinful by the fact of their nature, because
actually all men who are of the nature of Adam sin.
But suppose that one man who was of the nature of
Adam did not sin : we should not then say that he
was sinful by fact of his nature, if by act of himself,
and in spite of his nature, he was actually sinless.
The mere fact of the nature does not, then, properly
speaking, constitute sinfulness, but only the per
sonal sinning in the nature. St. Paul considers the
o-dp%, or our nature in its fallen state, a slavery
or bondage, because in it we are unable not to sin.
And so, not only by him, but in the New Testament
generally, the o-dp^ is treated as, and called, sinful,
but not because it is so in itself, for a thing cannot

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 205
be sinful ; St. Paul himself lays down the principle
that nothing but the personal transgression of a law
is sin, and St. John defines sin to be transgression of
law ; but because the flesh lived in and personally
yielded to and obeyed is sin ; and because there is no
holiness, or righteousness, or life, i.e. there is no sin
lessness, which is not a victory over the flesh, and a
redemption from the flesh, and a crucifixion of the
flesh ; in a word, which is not a triumph of ourselves
over our nature, or a deliverance of ourselves from
the bondage of our nature. When, therefore, St.
Paul speaks exactly as in Rom. 7, he does not call
the flesh itself> or the natural condition, even, of the
flesh, sinful, but speaks of sin in the flesh, i.e. of
the flesh as the locus or place of sin, as that through
which sin finds its opportunity and exercises its power
over us. The true essence of sin is not natural but
spiritual and ethical; it is not in the flesh as a
nature and our nature, but the flesh as it affects the
spirit, as it obscures the reason, darkens the under
standing, perverts the will, and corrupts the life. In
all of us it does this, and so is sin ; the flesh becomes
fleshly or carnal mindedness, and fleshly mindedness
is sin ; not the flesh as nature, or even fallen nature,
prior to its effect upon the mind or the spiritual
person. For suppose, as I have said, that in the
case of any person the flesh were not yielded to nor
obeyed ; suppose it were personally triumphed over,
and trampled under foot, and wholly overcome, then,
surely, he who had done so would not be called sinful
by the mere fact of having had the <rdp%, when, so
far from being overcome by and yielding to the possi-

206 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
bilities and temptations of sin in it, he had resisted
and overcome and destroyed all these by a trium
phant and complete personal sinlessness. In the
case of such a person as I have just described, even
though the -flesh be called in itself sinful, and the
mere being in it be considered a taking or having sin,
yet assuredly the sin thus assumed is not the sin of
the person, who according to the supposition is him
self sinless. A person who is actually sinless in a
so-called sinful nature, in spite of, and in triumph
over, the natural impossibilities of sinlessness in it,
is not less sinless than if he were so in a sinless
nature. If, in receiving or assuming, as the case
might be, the nature, he received or took the sin, it
was in no sense sin in him, unless he was in some
way overcome by it. If, on the contrary, he over
came and destroyed it in himself, in what way can it
be said that he was personally compromised by his
relation to, or contact with, sin ? Such a person
coming in our nature, and in our nature in its actual
condition as the consequence of sin in the past, may
be said to have taken, with our nature, our sin, but
certainly no sin of his own, save, as through sym
pathy with us, he may be said to have taken our sin
upon him, and made it his own, in order to remove it
from us.
While practically and actually all men have sinned
and do sin in the flesh or in the nature of Adam, and
as long as we are in the flesh there is for us a non
possibilitas non peccandi, an inability or impossibility
of sinlessness, yet, in the very nature of God and of
us and of our spiritual relationship with Him, there

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 207
is for us in the spirit a possibilitas non peccandi, or
possibility of sinlessness. A man cannot in his nature
and of his nature free himself from the weakness of
his nature, but in God and of God in him he can be
freed from it. He that lives in the spirit will no
longer be dead in the flesh; he that is free in the
spirit will be no longer under the slavery or bondage
of the flesh ; he that walks in the spirit will not ful
fil the lusts of the flesh. But so to be in the spirit
is a spiritual act or activity, and cannot be a mere
natural fact on our part. It is the power and activ
ity of the Holy Ghost in us, through our own faith,
obedience, and personal, spiritual and moral, activity.
As in Adam we see the natural man, — or, since
the Fall, man in bondage to his nature, the fleshly or
carnal man, — so in Jesus Christ we recognize the
perfect spiritual -man. In Him the Holy Ghost was
without measure, because His own faith and obedi
ence were without measure. We might equally, of
course, say that His faith and obedience were so
because the Holy Ghost was given to Him without
measure. Each is cause and each is effect of the
other; or, if more exactly, we say that the Holy
Ghost was cause, and His faith and self-surrender
only the condition of our Lord's spiritual manhood,
it comes to the same thing. The Holy Ghost was
in Him without measure as the spirit and power and
life of His spiritual manhood, of His personal human
holiness and righteousness, only through His own
human faith and perfect human self-surrender to it.
His sinlessness, therefore, was not a mere fact and
necessary consequence of a sinless flesh, but an act

208 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
of His free spirit. It was not the result of a mechani
cal acting of the Holy Ghost upon His impersonal
human nature, making it sinless for Him, but the
result of the spiritual acting of the Holy Ghost upon
Him, making Him sinless in it. It did not make
Him sinless, but He it; in a word, as I have said
before, our Lord's sinlessness or holiness was not
effect of His nature, but act of Himself. He was d
ayio?, the holy one of humanity, because, as regards
His own humanity or human nature, He was 6 dyid-
£av, the sanctifier, or He who made humanity holy.
He was in His own human life the TeXei(OTi)<s, or fin
isher, perfecter, of human faith and obedience, and
so of human holiness, righteousness, and life. It was
He who, by His personal life in humanity, brought it
into oneness with God, redeemed it from the power
and bondage of sin, and raised it out of its death and
corruption. Further reasons will be given further on for the
above position ; I want here to call attention to the
following point. It is quite beside the proper func
tion of the Holy Ghost to ascribe to Him a merely
mechanical effect upon the impersonal nature, or
flesh, of Jesus Christ prior to any personal life of His
own in it. The function of the Holy Ghost is influ
ence and never mere power ; it is the action of spirit
upon spirit, and therefore is always upon persons and
not things. Mere physical creation is never by the
Holy Ghost ; only spiritual creation is by Him. The
essential distinction between natural and spiritual crea
tion is this : that one is by the Word, the other is by
the Word and the Spirit, or the Word through the

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 209
Spirit. Where the creation is merely upon and with
out (i.e. without the consciousness, will, and co-op
eration of) the subject, and is thus an exertion of
mere power, it is by the Word : " By the Word of God
were the heavens made." But where it is a creation
in and with (i.e. involving and conditioned upon the
consciousness, will, and co-operation of) the subject,
and is therefore the effect not of mere power but of
spiritual influence, it is still by the Word (for without
the Word of God nothing is that is, except sin), but
it is the Word by or through the Spirit. The work
ing of the Spirit is always and only manifested in
the subjective disposition and activity, in the free
self-surrender, receptivity, and co-working of that in
and with which it works. The Spirit, I repeat, does
not work in or upon matter; it works in spirit, and
reveals itself in the spirit of that in which it works.
It was the Logos who incarnated Himself, or took
flesh. If the flesh which He took was only imper
sonal human nature, He, as Logos, discharging all
the personal functions in it, this might be correctly
expressed by saying that He took flesh or became
incarnate. When, however, it is said that He was
incarnate by the Holy Ghost, it is asserted that it was
not merely a physical but a spiritual and moral in
carnation ; i.e. an incarnation not only into the physi
cal nature, but into the spiritual and moral functions
and activities of a truly human personal life. Be
cause, as has been said, the Holy Ghost acts upon
and fashions only that in man which is spiritual,
moral, and personal.
The prime error lies in supposing that when it is
p

210 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
said that the Eternal Logos and Son was incarnate
(as, e.g., in the Nicene Creed, " Who for us men and
for our Salvation came down from heaven and was
incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary "),
the expression was incarnate refers only to the initial
act of assuming the nature. The consequence is that
when it is added that He was incarnate by the Holy
Ghost, it is then assumed that the part of the Holy
Ghost was only to prepare the nature to be entered
into, or assumed by, the Logos or Son. If this prepa
ration were taken to mean the really spiritual prepa
ration, by which, through many generations, the faith
and personal receptivity of the Virgin Mother was
made possible and was actually produced, there would
be valuable truth in it. But mostly it is taken to
mean a mechanical or material miracle, by which
either all or some of the effects of the Fall are sepa
rated from the nature, and so the latter made ready
and worthy for the use of the Incarnate Person.
Thus our Lord is not Himself the sanctifier of the
human nature He assumes, but assumes it sanctified
for Him by a miracle in the moment either of His
own conception, or, as it is now held by many, of the
immaculate conception of His mother. When, how
ever, we say that He who from eternity was God of
God, light of light, very God of very God ; begotten,
not made ; being of one substance with the Father ;
by Whom all things were made ; that He the Divine
Logos and Son, for us men and for our Salvation came
down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy
Ghost ; although we say that this was of the Virgin
Mary from whom immediately He took His human-

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 211
ity, yet the words " was incarnate " do not mean the
isolated initial act only of His physical conception
and birth, but the whole process of His so entering
into humanity as to be its incarnation of the Divine
Logos as well as the Divine Logos so incarnate in it.
And that He was incarnate by the Holy Ghost refers
to the part which the Third Person of the Trinity
took in the completed Incarnation. Which was, as
was anciently expressed, aptare hominem Deo, or pa-
rare spiritalem hominem. That is, not by a physical
miracle to prepare the flesh, or the impersonal human
nature, which was to be assumed in the act of concep
tion ; for, for that, the Divine Word would have suf
ficed without the Divine Spirit, but it was to prepare
the spirit, the will, the personal self-activity of the
humanity assumed ; to fit to and blend with the God
in our Lord the man who was also in Him. For, as
I have said, without in any sense being two persons,
a divine and a human, our Lord had a two-fold per
sonality ; and He as much, as a human person, became
one with and incarnated the divine, as, as a divine
person, He incarnated Himself in the human.
If it be suggested that, supposing the Nicene Creed
to be susceptible of this interpretation, the Apostles'
Creed is not, where it is distinctly said that Jesus
Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary, etc., I answer as follows : We may
readily see here how what may be shown to be a
false interpretation of the creed has been one of the
causes of the practical confining of the part of the
Holy Ghost in the act of the Incarnation to the mere
physical preparation of the flesh for His conception

212 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
into it. In the first place, "the Holy Ghost" in
this place in the Apostles' Creed must be interpreted
in accordance with St. Matt. 1 : 20 and St. Luke
1 : 35, with which two passages the section in the
creed is inseparably connected. Now in both these
passages " Holy Ghost " (in both cases irevpa ayiov
and not rd irv. ay.) is not the Holy Ghost in the
exactness of later Trinitarian language. It means the
whole divine part and agency in the act of the Incar
nation, including therefore that of the Logos as well
as that of the Holy Ghost. It covers all that is more
fully expressed in the Nicene Creed, where it is said
that the only begotten Son was incarnate by the Holy
Ghost of the Virgin Mary. Unless we interpret
these passages in this way, in which it can be proved
that the Church of the age which produced the Apos
tles' Creed did interpret them, there is no recogni
tion in them of the part of the Logos Himself in the
act of His assuming human nature ; and the " Holy
Thing" which was born of the Virgin is made the
incarnation only of the Holy Ghost. As indeed has
been asserted by certain modern theologians in oppo
sition to the existence from the beginning of Trini
tarian doctrine in Christianity.
Of course from the beginning both Divine Word
and Divine Spirit are always present and always
engaged in the process or act of incarnation; the
Word as not merely physically but spiritually incar
nating Himself in humanity ; and the Spirit as aptans
hominem Deo, as the principle in the humanity of that
spiritual faith and obedience in and through which
the Word is incarnated; in other words, as spiritu-

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 213
ally preparing and enabling the humanity to incar
nate, or be the incarnation of, the Divine Word.
As I have said before, the Logos was conceived and
born in and of not merely the physical but the spirit
ual womb of the Virgin, and of the race. The true
seed of Abraham was the fruit not so much of his
flesh as of his faith. Throughout the whole process
of the coming of the Son of God into our nature
and into ourselves ; in the preparation of the world
for His coming ; in His actual coming and manifes
tation of Himself in our flesh ; and in the extension
of His incarnation and impartation of Himself to us
through the Church as His body, the Holy Ghost is
the principle and agent of the subjective preparation
and enabling of humanity for the not merely phys
ical but spiritual conception and birth in it of the
objective Word of God. He prepared the Virgin's
faith as well as her womb ; and her womb only
through her faith, for His operation or ivepyeia is
primarily and essentially spiritual and not physical,
and only secondarily physical as personality affects
nature, and spirit matter. In that which was born
then of the Word and the world, of the Logos and
man, viz. in Jesus Christ Himself, the Holy Ghost
is manifested as the principle of His perfect spirit
ual manhood, i.e. as has been so often said, of that
perfect human faith and human obedience through
and in which He personally and freely as man in
carnated the Divine Word and sonship. And still
with ms, in the Church through which as His body
our Lord incarnates Himself in all who are in Him,
as the Word is the principle of the objective revela-

214 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT,
tion of God to us, so the Holy Ghost is the prin
ciple of our subjective appropriation of Him or of our
incarnating Him in ourselves.
In the divine human personality of our Lord we
have, of course, to guard against lowering the great
truth of the hypostatic union to the level of that
mystical union in which even we are one with God,
and God may truly be said to incarnate Himself in
us. Our oneness with the Divine Logos is not a
unity of person, but a union of persons. We are one
with Him only in the spiritual union of faith and
the moral union of obedience, and so by consequence
in the union of a common life. This is what we call
the mystical, or spiritual and moral, union. Jesus
Christ is not two persons, a divine and a human,
united into one in the perfection of a spiritual or
mystical union. He is essentially one person uniting
in Himself two natures, and this is what we call the
hypostatic union.
But the two natures in our Lord are at least two
modes of personality, the one person as God and as
man ; and as man just as much a human person as,
as God, a divine person. As man He as truly rep
resents men in their relation to God, as truly is
man in the perfection of his relation to God, as, as
God, He is God in the perfection of His relation to
man. We cannot deny to our Lord, then, under the
hypostatic, the reality also of the mystical union.
Was He not as man in a perfect spiritual and moral
union, in the union of a perfect human faith and
obedience, with God; and is not this the mystical
union ? And does it deny or impair the doctrine of

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 215
the hypostatic union, or the doctrine of the unity of
the person of our Lord, to hold and assert, as I now
do, that if God became man He became perfect man,
i.e. man perfectly as man realizing and fulfilling the
true concept and predestination of manhood ? Which
is, by a perfect spiritual faith, by a perfect moral
obedience, and in a perfect human life, so to realize
the divine mind and will and purpose as at once to
fulfil God in himself and himself in God.
But let us return in closing to the true point of
the present chapter, which is this : If the Incarna
tion was truly by the Holy Ghost, was a spiritual
and not a mere physical one, then the holiness of
Jesus Christ was of the Holy Ghost in Him, and not
merely in His nature. The nature was not holy
in Him, He was holy in it ; it was not the cause of
His holiness, but He was the cause of its holiness.
This does not make our Lord one whit less, or less
truly, sinless ; but it does make His sinlessness His
own, in the sense of its being not a mere fact of His
human nature miraculously wrought for Him prior
to His entering into it, but an act wrought by Him
self in the nature. It makes Him in His personal
human holiness, righteousness and life, the sanctifier,
redeemer, and regenerator of human nature and
humanity. The above view of the matter is, as we shall see,
in accordance with the New Testament representa
tion of the matter. It is in harmony with a true
understanding of the proper function of the Holy
Ghost as spiritual and not physical. It is in accord
with spiritual science in general, and in particular
with a correct science of human Salvation.

CHAPTER FIFTEENTH.
of the sinlessness of jesus Christ. — Continued.
But what seems to me to be the conclusive reason
why we must hold that our Lord's sinlessness is per
sonal and not natural — not of a sinless nature, but
of His own sinlessness in the nature — is the fol
lowing. It would not, of course, militate against the verity
of His humanity if the Word had assumed a human
nature in no way affected or impaired by the Fall.
The fact of having, or being, fallen is in no degree —
at least, from a sublapsarian standpoint — an essen
tial element in the conception or constitution of
humanity. It is indeed essential to it that it should
have had the possibility and opportunity of standing
or falling, but to say that it must necessarily have
fallen would be to make the Fall a merely natural
and necessary, and not a spiritual and moral fact.
But to have passed successfully through the possi
bility and opportunity — i.e.. through the probation,
prior to and without which a spiritual and moral
personality is not possible — without falling, would
not make humanity less human, but more so, than if
it had and were fallen. Neither would a holiness

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 217
acquired, or an obedience rendered, in an unfallen
human nature be on that account not a human holi
ness or obedience. It does not, therefore, militate
against the very humanity of Jesus Christ if we
should say that the human nature which He assumed
was so much an unfallen nature that it had in it
none whatsoever of the consequences of the fall of
the race.
But the point I make is this : Not that the human
holiness, righteousness, and life of Jesus Christ, if
they had taken place in an unfallen nature, would
not have been very real and very human, but that
they would not have been Salvation. Holiness in a
nature which simply passes from not-yet-holy into
holy, from the as-yet-natural into the spiritual, from
incompleteness in itself into completeness in God, —
such a holiness is holiness, but it is not Salvation. The
transition from one stage to the other would still be
necessary. For if man is made to incarnate the per
sonal God and to be a partaker of the divine nature
and life, he must needs do this. And after by grace
through faith he has done so, or to the extent that
he has done so, he is different in nature and life from
what he was before. This difference we call holi
ness ; and the man before we call the natural man,
and the man after it the spiritual man. But if it is
the divine order of things that there should be first
the natural and then the spiritual, and both are good
and neither evil, there is no Salvation involved in the
transition or translation from one to the other. So
it is with an obedience rendered in an unfallen
nature. Just as one is not by his nature, but has by

218 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
a personal act — or act of his own — of faith to be
come holy, so one has, even in an unfallen nature,
to become righteous through his own conscious and
free, or personal, obedience. Innocence is not right
eousness ; but neither is it unrighteousness, but only
not-yet-righteousness. It is not yet either righteous
ness or unrighteousness, because it has not yet had
the probation, the power and opportunity of personal
choice and decision, which is necessary not merely to
prove, but to make it, one or the other. But when
innocence has through trial passed into and become
obedience or righteousness, it is certainly righteous
ness and human righteousness, but it is not in any
sense Salvation. For Salvation does not mean a
normal transition or translation from a lower into a
higher good, but a deliverance from an evil into a
good. So yet once more is it with life in an unfallen
nature. The life of and in nature may need to pass
or be taken up into the life of and in God. So with
us regeneration, or the birth of God and the life of
God into and in our life, is a necessity for our com
plete self-realization and perfection. But the regen
eration of an unfallen being involves no possible idea
or element of Salvation.
What does involve and constitute Salvation in each
of the above points of view is this : that in the act
ual condition of the nature which we all inherit,
holiness, righteousness, and life do come to us as
deliverance from a natural state of separation from
God, transgression of our law, and death of ourselves
which we call the Fall.
1st. The nature of Salvation requires, then, that

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 219
the holiness involved should be one into which we
come, or are brought, out of a condition in which we
were actually unholy, or at least subject to an in
herited necessity of unholiness, through inherited
weakness of spiritual nature. It is not a being
brought into union and oneness with God only, but
a being brought into it out of a state of natural sepa
ration, or spiritual and moral difference, from Him.
It is a reunion, reconciliation, or at-one-ment with
Him. 2d. It requires that the obedience should be one
into which we are brought out of a condition of dis
obedience. Obedience is freedom, but freedom is
only Salvation, when it is a being set free, a deliver
ance, emancipation, or redemption, from unfreedom
— i.e. from bondage or slavery.
3d. That life should be Salvation requires that it
should be life out of death — i.e. out of a condition
in which it is subject to that which hinders, contra
dicts, or destroys it. In a word, a life which is a
Salvation must be, not merely a regeneration, but a
resurrection. Now I hold that in a very real sense Jesus Christ
saved us ; and that He was Himself, and is, our Sal
vation. That is, that He was, and is, not only our
holiness, but our sanctification, or making holy from
unholy ; not only our righteousness, but our redemp
tion, or making free from unrighteousness ; not only
our life, but our resurrection from death.
Salvation as a mere notion might be abstractly ex
pressed or defined. Salvation in itself, or in fact,
is a concrete act or process, and cannot take place or

220 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
be outside of or apart from that which is saved or be
ing saved. God has no more given us an abstract
Salvation than He has revealed to us an abstract or
impersonal faith or righteousness. Jesus Christ is
His revelation and gift to us of righteousness and
Salvation. And Jesus Christ is Salvation, because in
Him — i.e. in His personal human holiness, righteous
ness, and life — humanity is saved. In Him, in the
nature He assumed, we see the thing to be saved. In
His holiness, righteousness, and life in that nature we
see the atonement, redemption, and resurrection of
the thing — i.e. its Salvation. And in Him sanctified,
perfected, and glorified in the nature He had assumed
we see the thing saved. And that is Salvation, not
in the mere idea or formal definition of it, but in the
realized idea or reality of it.
The difficulty here is, of course, that it seems to
represent our Lord as having been Himself saved
from sin, and therefore as having Himself assumed
or been made sin in a sense which might compromise
His essential deity. But let us carefully consider
these points.
In every man there is something impersonal and
common to all men ; and there is something personal
which constitutes himself. The first we call human
nature, and in the New Testament it is called o-dp!j
(sarx). It is this which Jesus Christ shared with all
men, and which constituted Him man. I use the
term sarx, or flesh, as synonymous with the nature of
man. I shall not undertake to give a scientific defi
nition of nature in general, or of human nature. It
is sufficient for our purpose to say that it is that

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 221
which is universal, or generic, in man, not merely as
contradistinguished from what is individual and par
ticular, but from what is personal. The personal in
one is the self, and all that originates from the self
as an dpxrj, or source, of conscious and free origina
tion, or self-determination. By the sarx, or flesh, is
meant, of course, not only the bodily nature, but the
whole nature. Thus it is the seat and source not
only of possible and actual lust, but of such less ma
terial passions as pride, envy, hatred, etc. From the
New Testament and Christian point of view the flesh,
even unfallen, is the ground of the possibility of sin
ning ; fallen, it is the ground of the impossibility of
not sinning, which is the specific mark of our present
condition. According to Kant, the possibility of moral evil
lies in the fact that we are tempted by the natural
will of sensibility or inclination to depart from and
transgress the true law of the reason, or personal
and moral will. Bishop Butler shows that even an
unfallen being naturally constituted like man must,
from the very nature of propension, be not only
capable of falling, but tempted to fall, and in danger
of falling. There must come a time when the will of
the reason and the attraction of the sensibility, i.e.
the will of the person and the inclination of the
nature, will not coincide, and one or the other must
yield. Herein lies the possibility, in a moral being,
of transgression or departure from the moral law, the
law of reason and the free will ; and, in a spiritual
being, of separation from God, or sin. Where there
is no formal freedom or power of choice, and so at

222 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
least possibility of moral wrong or spiritual evil,
there is also no possibility of moral right or spiritual
good. Holiness, for an unfallen being, would consist
in the choosing God against the opposite possibility
of choosing self apart from or outside of God. But
the self out of God can only be the self of natural
inclination ; i.e. the self inclined in the direction of
some one of the natural propensions, or the propen
sions of the flesh. It thus becomes a question be
tween the person as Xo'ytKo? and Trvevp,a,TiKO$, in his
relation and allegiance to God, his reason and his
law, and the person as aapKiKos, in his nature, and
as liable to be led astray by its inclinations and pro-
pensions. And this latter, even though the natural
propensions are as yet normal and ordinate ; i.e. not
inordinately strengthened by indulgence, but only
capable of being indulged and of being tempted to
indulgence against reason and the free will. The
question lies, I say, between that true selfhood, whose
nature is holiness and whose law is righteousness,
which realizes itself in God by faith and in His law
by obedience, and that other and false selfhood
which is separated from God and alienated from His
law by subjection to the sensibilities and inclinations
of the flesh.
Do we not see that there are these two, and only
these two, things in man, — his spiritual and moral
personality and his sarkical or fleshly nature : and
that the only possibility of sin and transgression for
him lies in his sacrificing the personal, i.e. the spiritual
and moral, in him to the merely natural or fleshly ?
He is good and right as he subjects and controls his

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 223
nature; he is necessarily evil and wrong as he is
subject to and controlled by his nature. For if that
is not controlled by the personal will, there is nothing
else to make and keep it at one with God and His
law. Now suppose our Lord to nave assumed a hu
man nature, unfallen and in nowise affected or im
paired by the Fall, and in it to have been holy and
righteous. If it was in reality a human holiness and
righteousness, we can define precisely how and what
it must have been. It would have been a free per
sonal, spiritual, and moral choice of God and God's
will, against an opposite possible choice of some form
or sort of self willing and acting. It would have
been a Not my will but Thine, Not I but Thou, against
not only the temptation to, but the possibility of, a
Not Thine but mine, Not Thou but I. Nothing other
than this would be a human obedience. A perfected
and completed human holiness and righteousness
might be defined to be a possibilitas peccandi con
verted by personal faith and obedience into a non pos
sibilitas peccandi, formal freedom lost in real freedom.
Though the formal freedom, or power of choice of
good or evil, ought no longer to exist, yet it must
have existed and been personally overcome and sur
rendered, to constitute any obedience a human obe
dience, if not, indeed, to constitute it an obedience at
all. If, then, our Lord took a wholly unimpaired
human nature, still His holiness and righteousness in
it must have been such as we have defined a human
holiness and righteousness to be. If, in predicating
this of Him, we necessarily attribute to Him in His

224 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
human nature, and as the condition of His human
obedience, the possibilitas peccandi, we are not re
sponsible for that. It cannot possibly be avoided,
because it is contained and expressed in the incon
testable assertion that He became man. I do not
deny that to speak thus involves us in metaphysical
and logical difficulties and seeming contradictions,
but no more and no greater than are already involved
in the fact of a real incarnation. All we need say
is this : Of course our Lord was sinless in His human
nature ; but if He chose, for the purposes of human
Salvation, to be sinless not by annihilating its possi
bility of sin as God, but by overcoming and destroy
ing it as man, shall we deny Him the power to do so
because we are unable to understand it ?
We therefore are forced, looking at Him from the
human side, to predicate of Jesus Christ the possi
bility of sin ; and to say that this was overcome and
destroyed in Him, not by the fact of His Godhead,
but by the act of His manhood. That is, that it
was His own triumphant holiness, righteousness, and
life as man that overcame in Him the possibility
and possible consequences of sin. It is impossible to
read the New Testament and not to recognize the
fact that the personal human holiness, righteousness,
and life of Christ are essential factors in His work
of human Salvation. When He is said to be our
holiness, our righteousness, and our life, we know
that He could only be so as He was in Himself the
realization and the reality of the human holiness,
righteousness, and life which He is to be in us.
Now the point which I wish to make in this chapter

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OP JESUS CHRIST. 225
is this : That Jesus Christ — in the same reai way in
which we say that He is, in Himself and in us, our
holiness, righteousness, and life — is our Salvation, or
our sanctification, redemption, and resurrection from
all unholiness, disobedience, and death, as these are
inherent in our flesh or fallen nature. To have been
our holiness, etc., if we had been unfallen, would have
required only that the Lord, our holiness, should
have been Himself holy in an unfallen nature. For
we have seen that, even if there were no Fall, we
should still have needed the objective incarnation for
us as well as the subjective incarnation in us of the
Lord, our holiness, our righteousness, and our life.
But seeing that we are fallen, and that our Lord
must be our Saviour before He can be our Finisher
or Completer, the work to be done by Him has to
be done not in an unfallen but in a fallen nature.
For in the same real way in which, even though
we were not fallen, the Lord, in order to be our
life, — i.e. our life from above, our regenerate or
spiritual or divine life, — would have needed Himself
first to be the regenerate, spiritual, divine man, the
first begotten from the natural into the spiritual, the
beginner of the new order, — just so, now that we
are fallen, the Lord, in order to be our life, has first
Himself to be our resurrection, the raised, redeemed,
and sanctified man, the first begotten from the dead.
He is the resurrection and the life, and the resur
rection as truly as the life.
What our Lord was and what He did as our
Saviour, He was and did, therefore, in our nature, as
it is. If in assuming the nature He assumed its sin,

226 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
it was our sin He took in order by His sinlessness to
overcome and destroy it. And are we not told that
He came in order that by taking He might take
away our sin ? Did not God send Him in the flesh
of sin that He might destroy sin in the flesh, i.e. in
our fallen nature? He took sin, in so far as sin was
a fact of the nature, in order that by His act in the
nature sin might be destroyed.
When it is said in the Epistle to the Galatians that
Jesus Christ was made of a woman, made under the
law, it is meant that He took our nature in that con
dition in which we say that it is under the condem
nation and curse of the law. The fact that in our
flesh, as it is, we are naturally subject to sin and
death constitutes in itself a natural condemnation
and curse. The fact that our Lord in our flesh was
subject to natural death in it, and was only not sub
ject to spiritual and moral death because He Himself
destroyed sin and transgression in it, proves that, so
far as the flesh or nature He assumed was concerned,
He put Himself under its condemnation and curse,
and that thus by His personal act He overcame and
destroyed the condemnation and curse of it. " God
sent forth His Son made of a woman, made under the
law, that He might redeem those who were under the
law." And just as His being our righteousness pre
supposes His Himself being the righteous one (Jesus
Christ, d BiKaio';), the personal author in Himself of
the human righteousness which He makes ours ; just
as His being our life implies that in Him first as man
humanity has come into the life which in Him is life
for all men, so that because He lives, we shall live, just

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 227
so He is the redemption of all who are under the law,
because He is Himself humanity, or man made free
from the bondage of the law. As to His nature as
man, or His flesh, He was under the law, its condem
nation and its curse ; He " was made or became a
curse for us " ; by His crucifixion of the flesh of sin,
and abolishment of sin in the flesh, He became the
redemption of humanity from the bondage of the
flesh, the remover of its condemnation and destroyer
of its curse.
We saw above that if Jesus Christ, even in an
unfallen nature, for unfallen man, was to be human
righteousness, He must be what alone a human right
eousness is. That is, out of an actual formal free
dom, or freedom either to subject the flesh to the
spirit, or the spirit to the flesh, He must personally
and freely have chosen and accomplished the former.
Having done so, He would be d ¦irvevp,dTiK0<;, the
spiritual man, which it is the calling and predestina
tion of every man to become through Him.
Now in the same way if, we being fallen, Jesus
Christ is to be human, not righteousness merely,
but redemption (just as also He is not life only, but
resurrection), then He must be what alone human
redemption is. He must become, first, the thing to be
redeemed; He must, secondly, be the redemption of
that thing ; and thirdly, He must be in His own per
son that thing redeemed. The thing to be redeemed
is man under the bondage of his nature or flesh.
Our Lord must therefore have become man in that
condition. Observe, however, that He is under the
flesh or fallen nature of man only in so far as it is

228 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
His assumed nature prior to or outside of what He
personally is and does in it ; i.e. so far as the fact of
the nature prior to His act in the nature. For if He
personally had, in any way, as we all do, yielded to
or been overcome by the flesh or nature, or fallen
under its power and bondage, He would not have
been redemption or emancipation from it. He was
redemption because in the nature He broke its bond
age ; and He did this by being personally sinless in
a nature whose hitherto unbroken law was sin. How
this could be done, and was done, by Him only upon
that cross to which He nailed the flesh of sin ; upon
which He crucified not only all proclivity, but all
possibility of sin, and so entered upon the real free
dom of a human non possibilitas peccandi, we shall
see more clearly hereafter. Now we see in our cruci
fied, risen, and ascended Lord the thing redeemed; i.e.
man, humanity, in His person made free from the
law of sin and death, and restored to the freedom of
obedience, to the true law of the spirit of life. And
He is our redemption ; it is only as we see redemp
tion objectively realized in Him that we can subjec
tively realize it in ourselves ; if we believe in it in
Him, He will be it in us. "We are partakers of
Christ and with Christ if we hold fast the beginning
of our confidence steadfast unto the end."
Do we sacrifice or imperil anything of what a truly
catholic theology has labored through all the ages
to protect and defend, in the above analysis and de
scription of the human sinlessness of our Lord? It
may seem to, or may in fact, sometimes differ from
the traditional methods and language of defence,

HUMAN SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST. 229
but does it lay an unbelieving or irreverent finger
upon the thing defended and to be forever defended ?
Then let it all go ; for to impugn or impair by
remotest corollary or consequence the Christian pre
supposition of the essential human sinlessness and
the very personal deity of the incarnate Son of God
is to lay an impious finger upon the spiritual, moral,
and natural order of the universe, and to err against
the true nature, dignity, and destination of man.
What, in the views above expressed, may seem to
savor of Nestorianism, or of the later Adoptionism,
let it be asked, in all fairness and love of and desire
for truth, whether it is not the truth which these
systems sought and not the error into which they
fell. With regard to them both it cannot be denied
that the Church has so violently reacted from their
error that it has yet to do justice to their truth. It
is the truth and not the error in them which is here
sought, and if with the former any of the latter has
entered in unawares, let it be exposed in order that
it may be expelled. Upon the more serious point of
the assertion that, in a more real sense than has
hitherto been generally accepted, our Lord in the
flesh He assumed took our sin and was made a curse
for us, enough has been said, I trust, upon which
to request a somewhat further suspension of judg
ment; and much more will be said in explanation
and justification.

CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.
OF THE HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST.
But now let us appeal to the New Testament itself.
There is no question, of course, as to the reality or
verity of the human nature, or flesh, which our Lord
assumed. It is as to the condition of the nature;
whether it had in it as he took it all the natural con
sequences of the Fall, i.e. all the consequences of the
Fall so far as these extend to and affect the mere
nature of every man prior to any personal activity or
life in it. Every man inherits in his flesh not only
such physical consequences of the Fall as bodily dis
ease and death, but such, what might be improperly
called, moral or spiritual consequences as are, also
improperly, expressed by the term Original Sin. I
say improperly, because what is moral or spiritual,
as sin or holiness, can properly be predicated only
of persons and personal acts, and not of the mere
nature prior to personality. As a matter of fact all
men (save One) are through the inherited weakness
of their nature actually involved in moral and spirit
ual consequences of the Fall and subject to sin ; but
it is not inconceivable that one should, or should

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 231
have, though subject to all the natural consequences,
overcome so as not to be subject to the spiritual and
moral or personal consequences of the Fall. The
da0eveia, or weakness, of the flesh as an organ of
the spirit amounts to a natural inability of the spirit
in the flesh to obey its law, and this constitutes our
bondage and our need of redemption. But though
the spirit is unable, it is not inconceivable or impos
sible that it should be enabled to put off the corrup
tion and bondage and death of the flesh and be raised
to its proper power, freedom, and life. As the Fall
constituted Adam the fleshly or carnal man, so His
reversal of the Fall constituted Jesus Christ the
pneumatical or spiritual man. That is, as Adam was
he in whom the spirit fell under the bondage of the
flesh, so Jesus Christ is He in whom the flesh thus
become dominant was subdued to the spirit, and the
spirit which had become subject was delivered out of
its bondage and raised out of its subjection to the
flesh. The Divine Logos in becoming incarnate
in one who was to be our not only completion but
Salvation — i.e. our at-one-ment, or bringing into one
with God; our redemption, or being set free from
the power of sin ; our resurrection, or raising up out
of the death of our natural condition — took our
nature and entered into our condition as it is, and
did that and became that which was necessary for
the spirit in Him, and through Him in us, not merely
to be naturally dominant over an unfallen flesh, but
victorious over and resurgent from a fallen flesh.
He, in our nature as it is, subdued the enthroned flesh
to the dethroned spirit, and so became the reverser

232 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
of what had taken place in Adam and the restorer
of our lost liberty and life.
So far as my own view of the exact propriety of
the terms goes, it would not have occurred to me to
say that our Lord, in assuming our fallen nature,
took sin. Not that in the light of the New Testa
ment and of the Christian consciousness from the
beginning I think there ought to be any danger of
misapprehending what is intended by the expression,
nor that, properly understood, I should feel any meta
physical or moral hesitation in using it. For, as I
have said before, it cannot mean that He did, or
could, take sin to Himself as God, or to Himself as
manj but only that He took it in so far as it is (or
may be said to be) in the nature ; which He took for
the express purpose of destroying sin in it, and so
purging it from sin, by His own sinlessness or holi
ness in it. So taking sin, it would not be His sin,
but ours, which he took, and took in order to take
away. There should be no shock to our spiritual or
religious feelings, to our reverence for God and His
divine Incarnation, in so speaking. On the contrary,
it should deepen our sense of the divine love and
condescension which is God's chiefest and divinest
glory. It gives reality to the thought that God has
indeed descended to us tp raise us up to Himself, to
feel that He has not only taken our nature to unite
it to His own, that He has not only entered into our
impotency to raise it up to his omnipotency, but
that He has taken upon Him all that belongs to our
fallen nature and condition — yea, even our sin, that
He might wash it out in His blood and cleanse us

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 233
from it in His own divine purity and holiness. Still,
I should not myself have coupled sin in even this, or
in any, way with God or with our incarnate Lord.
For I should not have held that the so-called sin of
nature is sin at all. It might be a natural bias or
inclination or proclivity to sin ; it might constitute
in us a natural impossibility of not sinning, as St.
Paul says that the law cannot produce righteous
ness in us on account of the weakness of our flesh.
But whatever be the fault or corruption of the nature
of every man who is born of Adam, it is not in itself ,
properly sin, but only becomes so in the will and per
sonal activity of the man himself. When the man
does sin, as every man sins, we may then trace it
back — not, as I was about to say, to its origination
in the nature, for sin cannot originate in the imper
sonal nature, but only in a person, but — to the temp
tation or the weakness in the nature which made it
impossible for him not to sin; and in this way we
may attribute the sin to a so-called sinful nature, or
flesh. But if one in the setfsame nature personally
does not sin, so resists, overcomes, subdues, and de
stroys the sin of the nature as to be Himself abso
lutely sinless in it, how can we in any way predicate
sin of Him ? I find myself still speaking of the sin
of the nature when I mean only the temptation to
sin in the nature, or the weakness of the nature for
sinlessness or holiness. But call it sin and, so ex
plained and so understood, does it in any way com
promise either our Lord's divinity or His holy
humanity to have taken it ? I believe that our Lord
felt all the temptation and all the weakness which is

234 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
inherent in the nature we have inherited from Adam.
He was only not tempted as we are in so far as our
temptations come, as they mainly do, from previously
entertained and indulged sin on our own part, i.e.
from previous actual or personal sin. He could not
be so tempted, because in Him there was no such
sin. To say that He felt all the temptation and the
weakness, and in this sense took the so-called sin of
the nature, is only imputing sin to Him on the sup
position that in His personal consciousness and will
He to any extent took it to Himself and made it His
own. On the supposition that He did not, then, how
ever He bore or felt all the consequences of Adam's
sin or man's sin through His nature or sarx, He in
no other sense took sin.
I will go further right here and say that if our
Lord was the one exception above described, if He
alone in our flesh was sinless, it is not because He
was in our flesh, unlike us, able of Himself to be
sinless. He has revealed to us in His human per
son and in His human sinlessness how in the ina
bility of the flesh man may be enabled to be sinless.
As Abraham begat Isaac not by his natural powers
of reproduction, but by the Word of God through
his faith, so Jesus Christ overcame the weakness and
the temptations of His flesh not by His human ability
to do so, but by the power of the Divine Word in
carnating Himself through His human faith in His
human sinlessness or holiness. His sinlessness was
indeed that of the Logos, but the Logos by the Holy
Ghost fulfilling Himself in the personal faith, obe
dience, and life of the man.

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 235
But to come back to the point now before us. I
should, I repeat once more, have hesitated to predi
cate sin not only, of course, of our Lord Himself in
His human nature, but of the human nature itself of
our Lord. But the Scriptures feel no such hesitation
or reluctance. They do not hesitate, as we shall see
— as we should long ago have seen but for our un
worthy fears of compromising our Lord's true divin
ity and our unworthy desire like Peter to save Him
from the extent and consequences of His own utter
and (as we think) self-compromising love, forgetting
that God, like us, can only be compromised by any
limitation of His love, i.e. of His self-emptying and
self-imparting condescension — the Scriptures, I say,
do not hesitate to say that our Lord in some very
true and real way, the meaning of which I have
endeavored and shall further endeavor to explain,
took sin. That He did so in any merely imputative,
or otherwise fictitious or make-believe sense it is
impossible to suspect, much less to derive, from the
New Testament. He took our adp% with those con
sequences in it of our sin which become in us in turn
causes of sin, and which, therefore, the Scriptures in
their fearlessness do not hesitate to call sin. Inas
much as they did not cause sin in Him, but were in
him extinguished by His own personal sinlessness,
they were not properly sin in Him. But inasmuch
as they are in all save Him not only inherited effects,
but effectual causes or occasions of sin, they are
themselves, improperly, called sin. I mean improp
erly not in the sense of wrongly or incorrectly, but
in the sense of popularly or loosely, and not with

236 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
logical or scientific exactness. The Scriptures are
more popular and practical than scientific and exact,
and it can easily be proved from themselves that they
use language with no intention of logical precision,
but in its popular and common sense. The matter
is of such delicacy and importance, however, that I
must here repeat that, even supposing it were prop
erly sin which He took in His assumed nature, so far
from this compromising Him in His personality, either
as human or divine, it would only add lustre to the
stupendous condescension of His love in becoming sin
for us that we might become the righteousness of God
in Him. This makes Him indeed the author and per
fecter in Himself of our sinlessness, as the Scriptures
consistently represent Him to be. It makes Him
literally and actually our holiness, our righteousness,
and our life. That He who knew no sin (i.e. who
personally, whether as God or man, was incapable of
sinning) was made sin for us that we might in Him
(i.e. first in His person and secondly in ourselves in
union with His person) become the righteousness
of God (2 Cor. 5 : 21), means, if it means anything,
that He became just what we are in the fallen condi
tion of our nature in order that by His destruction of
sin in our nature, by His crucifixion in His own body
of the sinful in our nature, He might be our redemp
tion from the sin of our nature, and our restoration
to the freedom and life of God's own holiness and
righteousness. But let us in a more orderly manner
analyze the teaching of the New Testament, coming
gradually to those passages in which the above posi
tion is most distinctly affirmed.

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 237
To begin with, what is the meaning of the Cross
of Christ P That cross apart from which and what
it symbolizes Jesus Christ cannot be thought at all !
For it expresses the very principle and essence of all
that He was and did in our nature. He Himself has
taught us under His figure of the daily cross to see
in it not merely the instrument of His one final
physical death, but that of His lifelong daily spirit
ual and moral self-crucifixion. We have only any
where and everywhere to see how all the New
Testament writers interpret the Cross of Christ to
see clearly enough what it means. It nowhere is
merely the badge of martyrdom, the symbol of the
spirit with which Christ bore it, and in which we
ought not to hesitate "cheerfully and manfully to
bear persecutions, troubles, distresses." No, the Cross
of Christ is that invisible instrument of self-denial,
self-mortification, self-crucifixion, by means of which
in the human life and by the human faith, obedience
and self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the o-dp%, or flesh
of sin, was subdued to the -irvevpa, or spirit of holiness
and life. And so the second Adam diametrically re
verses the act of the first, and the rising again of the
one obliterates and effaces the fall of the other.
Thus, according to St. Paul, " our old man was cru
cified with Christ." His death was the extinction of
what is known in the New Testament as the old man,
the flesh or body of sin, etc. In the sense of cruci
fixion in which our Lord is said, in many passages, to
have in His body crucified the flesh with all those
affections in it that are the causes in us of sin, it is
very certain that He Himself crucified something, or

238 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
that something in Him was crucified. We have seen
from Kant, Bishop Butler, and others, that in a na
ture like ours, even where it is unfallen, there is
always a possibility or liability of falling, arising
from the very fact of natural propension. That is,
there is danger that sensibility shall prevail over rea
son, the flesh shall conquer the spirit, and the will of
the person fall under the dominance of the propen
sions and inclinations of the nature. Which possi
bilitas cadendi would need to be overcome by the
continued right use of reason and free will, by the
constant practice and exercise of faith, obedience,
etc., until these are confirmed and strengthened into
a non possibilitas cadendi. The principle of the
cross might thus be said to find a place in the faith
and obedience of one in even an unfallen nature, in
asmuch as there is there the denial and overcoming of
at least the possibility of sin and of real opportunities
and temptations to sin. But it is apparent at once
that cross and crucifixion are too strong terms for
the expression of only that amount of self-sacrifice or
self-denial. They imply not only the prevention but
the cure. They imply, that is, not the painless exclu
sion of something that might enter into us, but the
painful extinction of something which has entered into
us. One who is unfallen may not yet be what, or all
that, he is to be. He may have yet a very great deal to
become ; but he certainly has not in him anything to
un-be and undo which requires such an instrument as
the cross and such a process as crucifixion. We can
perfectly well understand how an original act, and
long-continued and repeated acts, of sin might entail

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 239
upon humanity what may be called a nature of sin —
i.e. a nature in which sinlessness has become, humanly
speaking, impossible. Nature and personality mar
vellously act and react upon each other ; and while
we say that what is personal in one is never purely
§vaei, is never merely the effect of the nature, but
always the act of the person, yet we do not hold that
the person can act independently of the nature, or
that the freedom and power of personal action may
not be impaired and lost by abnormal conditions of
the nature. In this way the person, and every per
son, who inherits such a nature may become the slave
of a perverted nature, and unable, without redemption
from its bondage, to be himself, or to attain his per
sonal freedom and life. That" such is our condition
according to the New Testament I do not think can
be denied. And here I wish to make an assertion
upon the truth of which depends that of the present
theory or view of human Salvation.
Salvation is never, in the New Testament, repre
sented as a mere release from condemnation, or ac
quittal from the guilt of past sins. We might say
that there is no such thing as a past sin. Sins are
never past; they are forever present in us in what
we are by consequence of them, in our own further
separation from God, and our increased inability to
obey His law and realize His righteousness. We do
need to be saved from all our past sins and from the
sins of our fathers, the consequences of which we
inherit and the burden of which we still bear. But
our Salvation consists not in some one's performing a
vicarious act or enduring a vicarious penalty which

240 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
has the effect of a formal and objective satisfaction
to the nature, the justice, or the divine government
of God for their moral or abstract guilt; but it con
sists in some one's doing, or having done, for us and
in us that which will break the power over us of the
inherited nature, of the accumulated and consolidated
consequences in our nature, which those sins have
entailed upon us. Who shall deliver me from the
slavery of this adp%, from the power and bondage of
this flesh of sin, from this impotency of my irvevp-a,
of my personal, spiritual, moral selfhood, to assert
itself against the tyrannous power over it of the
nature which ought to be its obedient servant, and is
the only organ and instrument of its own activity !
That is the cry for Salvation, and the cry to which
the Salvation of the New Testament responds. "I
thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord," through
Jesus Christ in whom the o-dpl; of humanity is cruci
fied, dead, and buried, and the irvevpa raised up:
that is, brought back into oneness with the spirit of
God, restored to obedience to His law, and filled
with the perfection and blessedness of His divine
life. As the judicial, penal, or punitive justice of
God, what the Scriptures call His condemnation,
anger, or wrath, all comes and is revealed only in
the natural consequences of sin and transgression;
i.e. in the effect of these upon our nature and upon
us through our nature (as St. Paul teaches in the
latter half of Rom. 1), so Salvation is our liberation
or redemption from these consequences, from that con
dition of our nature or that false acquired nature
which separates us from God, from righteousness, and

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 241
from our own real life and blessedness. " The soul
that sinneth it shall die " expresses as natural and
necessary a sequence of cause and effect as any other
in nature. It means that the loss of faith and obedi
ence (i.e. of God in our consciousness and our will,
in our knowledge and our life) is followed by certain
effects in us which are not the less judicial and puni
tive because they are strictly natural and necessary.
The punishment for sin is the habit of sin, the bond
age to sin, and that death, spiritual, moral, and natu
ral, which is the wages of sin simply because it is the
recompense or return which it reaps from its own
natural increase. Salvation is emancipation from all
this : it is the breaking off from us of the false nature
or condition of nature thus formed, and our restora
tion to the . freedom of holiness, righteousness, and
life. This is what Jesus Christ accomplished : in our
nature, the nature of the first Adam from which
every man needs redemption, He burst its bonds and
set us free. He destroyed in it that whicli needs to
be destroyed, and restores in it that which needs to
be restored. He brought down the flesh and raised
and restored the spirit to its lost ascendancy. In a
word, Jesus Christ was in Himself human Salvation :
He was and did precisely and perfectly what in any
and every man is necessary to constitute his Salva
tion. He was the death of all man's evil, and the
resurrection of all his good. What confuses our con
ception of the person and work of our Lord is the
difficulty, and yet the necessity, of recognizing in
Him both God and man in the process of human
Salvation. He is both God salvum faciens and man

242 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
salvus f actus, both the Logos by the Holy Ghost sav
ing and man by the Word through the Spirit saved.
Just as I have before shown that He is both the
Logos incarnating Himself in the man Christ Jesus,
and the man Christ Jesus freely and personally and
humanly incarnating in Himself the Divine Logos.
So in the crucifixion and self-crucifixion of Jesus
Christ the old man or flesh of sin, the false nature
entailed upon humanity by and in Adam, was broken
and destroyed, crucified, dead, and buried; and hu
manity arose out of its long bondage to sin and death.
As St. Paul represents it, when we were dead in
Adam, i.e. dead irvevp,aTi and alive a-apxl, God quick
ened and raised us up in Christ, in whom we are dead
aapKi and made alive irvevpaTi — crucified in the
flesh and made alive in the spirit. What was the
meaning and the effect of the death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ he tells us precisely in these words
(Eph. 4 : 20, etc.) : " But ye did not so learn Christ,
if indeed ye heard Him and were taught in Him, as
truth is [or as is true] in Jesus." The Apostle is
endeavoring to turn those to whom he is writing
from the vanity, darkness, and uncleanness of their
natural minds and life to the life indeed which is real
ized for us in Jesus. And what is this truth of life,
or this true life, which has been objectively actualized
for us as it is to be subjectively actualized in us in
Jesus Christ ? That which is true in Jesus he goes
on to define as " the putting off our old man of the
corrupt and deceitful crap!;, and the being renewed
in the spirit of our mind and putting on the new man
which has been created after God in righteousness

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 243
and holiness." Has been created — when and how?
In Jesus Christ, who is the new creation, and in whom
we have all been potentially and shall by grace
through faith be actually new created. In Him " the
old things" (the old man and all that belongs to
him) have passed or been taken away; and new
things (the new man with what pertains- to him)
have become or come to pass (2 Cor. 5 : 17). He is
in Himself that which we are to become — which
already in grace and in anticipating faith, though
not yet in accomplished fact, we have become — in
Him. So again (in Col. 3 : 9, etc.) we are said to
have " put off the old man with his doings, and put
on the new man who is being renewed in us unto
knowledge after the image of Him who created him."
In such passages Jesus Christ is both new creator
and new creation, God creating and man .created,
God in us and we in God.
With regard to the above interpretation of d\r\0eia
(in Eph. 4 : 21), we have a parallel in 1 John 2 : 8,
where " the old commandment " of love is represented
as become " new " in Jesus Christ and in us in Him.
" Again I write unto you a new commandment, o \cttiv
dXnde<; iv avTa> Kal ev vplv." As in Adam the divine
law and life of love was lost in humanity, so in Christ
it is restored, it becomes again dXnOes, a living and
operative reality and fact in Him and in us. So here
(Eph. 4 : 21) what is dXrjdeia ev to} 'Inaov, what is
realized or become fact in Him for all humanity, is
the putting off forever of the old man or nature
of sin, and the putting on of the new man of the
supremacy of the spirit over the flesh.

244 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Again (Col. 2 : 10) we are said to have been " in
Him circumcised with a circumcision made without
hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in
the circumcision of Christ ; having been buried with
Him in baptism, wherein we were raised also with
Him, through faith in the operation of God who
raised Him from the dead." That is, we have in
Christ put off the flesh of sin, and we are in Christ
raised from the death of the flesh into the life of the
spirit, provided that we through faith are in that
ivepyeia ®eov, that gracious working in us of God,
wherein and whereby He died in the flesh and arose
in the spirit. The meaning of circumcision and bap
tism in their application to our Lord Himself I hope
later to discuss more fully. But why are we so every
where represented as having been circumcised in
Christ's circumcision, and baptized with His baptism,
and dead in His death, and raised by His resurrection,
if He did not as man, in our nature, perform some act
and accomplish some change in which was fulfilled
all that is meant by circumcision and baptism and
death and resurrection? In other words, if He was
not the true putting off of all the sin of the flesh,
because of the whole flesh of sin ; if He was not the
excision of all that false nature or false condition of
our nature which was our inheritance of the natural
consequences of Adam's, or the race's sin ; if in Him
our humanity did not actually die in all in which
it needed to die in itself in order to live in God !

CHAPTER SEVENTEENTH.
OF THE HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. —
Continued.
But now let us come to those passages which
bring us most directly to the point, and place us
face to face with the fact we are discussing; pas
sages which, as I think, distinctly affirm. the position
herein taken. And I first ask careful attention to
the opening verses of the eighth chapter of the Epis
tle to the Romans.
To the close of chapter seventh St. Paul has been
describing the hopelessness of our bondage to sin and
death so long as we are in the flesh ; our do-0dveia or
incapacity for holiness, righteousness, and life with
out a redemption from the inherited weakness of the
flesh (the flesh in this whole connection being human
nature in its actual condition of disadvantage from
the fact of the Fall). The seventh chapter ends with
the cry of the human spirit for redemption from the
bondage in the flesh, and with an outburst of joy and
thanks that this redemption has been accomplished
in Jesus Christ our Lord. And the eighth chapter
then goes on to define and develop the truth or fact
of our redemption.

246 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
" There is, therefore, now no condemnation to them
that are in Christ Jesus," means when sifted to the
bottom that we are no longer (in Christ) subject to
any of those consequences of sin in our flesh which
constitute the divine condemnation of sin. But we
are free in Christ from all the penal consequences
of sin because we are freed in Him from sin itself.
" There is no condemnation to them that are in
Christ Jesus, because the law of the spirit of life has
in Christ Jesus set us free from the law of sin and
death." " Hath set me free," the Apostle says ; the
emancipation of the person from the bondage of the
nature, of the spirit from the flesh. " For," he con
tinues, " whereas the law had been impotent to fulfil
itself in us, not through its own weakness but
through our weakness in the flesh to obey it, God
having sent His own Son in the likeness of the flesh
of sin, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, in
order that the righteous requirement of the law might
be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but
after the spirit." Here Christ is represented as, in
the likeness of the flesh of sin, having accomplished
an act in the flesh, the effect of which is that we are
no longer subject to sin but are free to follow the
spirit, fulfil the law, and live the life of holiness and
righteousness. What was this act ? Was it not an
actual putting away from the nature He had assumed
of all those natural consequences which it had in
herited from the sin and transgression of the race,
and which stood between us and our holiness, right
eousness, and life in God — a putting away first in
Himself and then in us? For observe that every-

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 247
where our ability to be saved, i.e. to die in the flesh
and live in the spirit, is conditioned upon our faitii
in the ivepyeia ®eov which wrought in the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The exceeding great
ness of the power of God working in us through our
faith is identical with the working of the strength of
His might which He wrought in Christ when He
raised Him from the dead (Eph. 1 : 19, 20). Which
must mean at the very least this: that the divine
operation or inworking of God by which humanity
is raised up through the death in it of what needs
to be- put to death, and the life in it of that which
needs to be made alive, was in some way first enacted
in Jesus Christ Himself, and is now enacted in us
through our faith in the ivepyeia, or enacting, of it
in Him. That is, that we see in Him first the self
same inworking of God and raising from the dead
which in us, through our faith in the operation of it
in Him, will constitute our Salvation.
But let us consider in detail Rom. 8 : 3, etc. " God
having sent His own Son in the likeness of the flesh
of sin" (iv 6p.oioop.aTi trapKosapapTias). But for
the notion that these words if taken in what, if there
were no such doctrinal or practical difficulty, would
be their palpable meaning, would compromise the
Church's doctrine of the human sinlessness and the
deity of our Lord, I do not think it would have been
thought possible to interpret them otherwise than
that He assumed the aap% dpapTias. When, for
example (Phil. 2:6, etc.), He is said to have, in His
Keva3cri<;, laid aside the form of God and taken that
of a servant, iv opoioopaTi c\v0punrcov yevopevos, com-

248 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
ing in the likeness of men, "the likeness of men"
can mean nothing less than the very reality of man
hood. When He is said (Heb. 2 : 17) in all respects
to have been made like unto (opuoiwdrjvai) His breth
ren, we do not interpret the likeness to be anything
less than an identity of nature. When He is said
(Heb. 4 : 15) to have shared our weaknesses and
been tempted KaTa irdvTa Ka0' 6p,oi6TnTa, in all re
spects after the likeness of our temptation, sin only
excepted (i.e. with the sole exception " that He did
not commit sin " — Thayer's Lexicon of the New Tes
tament), we are expressly forbidden to make any
other qualification of His essential oneness with us
in our nature and our temptations than the one of
His having overcome our temptations, and so been
sinless in our nature.
In a word, it is not too much to say, that if the
words ev 6p,otd>paTi are interpreted consistently, not
only with the above passages, but with their use
anywhere in the New Testament, St. Paul's language
in Rom. 8 : 3 will affirm nothing less than this : that
the nature which our Lord took in the womb of the
Virgin was that selfsame nature which in all of us is
subject, and the cause of our subjection, to sin ; and
which is, therefore, in the New Testament unhesi
tatingly called " the flesh of Sin," even when assumed
by Him.
I do not assert that opoio? and opolcopa are not
capable of meaning mere semblance without identity.
The words are used very much as we use like and
likeness. But if I should say, "lama man of like
passions with you," no one would think of seeing in

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 249
the form of expression the suggestion of a difference
as well as a resemblance between your and my
passions. He would simply understand me to mean
that they were the same. When it is said that the
Son of God came in the likeness of man, was made
like unto us, was tempted in all points like as we are,
etc., we resent the thought that the word like was
intended to suggest any difference. There was a
difference, but that was otherwise expressed ; and it
was a difference not in the nature, but in His personal
action in the nature. It consisted in the fact that
He alone so overcame and destroyed the sin of the
nature as to be sinless in it.
I repeat, then, that in the words, " God sent His
Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin," it ought never
to have occurred to any one to find, beside the state
ment of the resemblance, any suggestion of a dif
ference. The true explanation of the use of opoimpa,
in connection with our Lord's manhood, is to be
found in the fact of His two natures or modes of
personal subsistence. He who in eternity was God,
in time became man, or came in the likeness of man.
By which we do not mean that He was not very
man, or intend by the use of the word likeness to
suggest that there was any difference between His
manhood and other men's, but only that He was
more than very man, and that he had a personal
existence before He came as man, or in the likeness
of man.
God then "sent his Son in the likeness of the
flesh of sin." Of any of us it would be equally
true to predicate the flesh of sin and the sin of the

250 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
flesh. Of Him to predicate the sin of the flesh would
be not only blasphemy against His deity, but the
contradiction of the very meaning and end of His
humanity. For if His whole personal human life was
a condemnation, crucifixion, and destruction of sin
in the flesh, how can that sin be predicated of Him ?
But in some sense it must have been in His flesh, for
how otherwise could He have condemned, crucified,
and destroyed it there ? And that is just precisely
what this passage affirms that He did. " God send
ing His Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and
for sin (i.e. " to break the power of sin " — Thayer's
Lexicon of the New Testament, under dpapTia) con
demned sin in the flesh (" brake its power in human
nature " — Thayer).
Then the Apostle does not hesitate here — nor else
where, as we shall see — to say that our Lord had
something to crucify, and crucified something, not in
Himself personally, but in • His flesh or assumed na
ture. If any part of that which He crucified, or
which was crucified in Him, was of Himself, i.e. was
the effect of any sin or transgression on His part,
then He was not the perfect conqueror and crucifier
of the flesh of sin, but was in that respect, or to that
extent, conquered by it. But if what He crucified
was wholly not of Him, but the effect and conse
quence of Adam's or man's sin taken and borne by
Him in order to be taken away by Him through His
crucifixion and extinction of it, then I say that He
was verily and indeed the condemner and destroyer
of sin in the flesh in the only way in which He could
in any real sense have been so. For how could He

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 251
have destroyed that in His flesh which was not there
to destroy ?
We might repeat the query through the whole
round of expressions by which the New Testament
describes our Lord's work of human Salvation. In
what sense was He the sanctifier, 6 dyid^av, and not
merely d ayto?, not merely the holy in, but the maker-
holy of, human nature ? Is it not that He was only
holy in it by making it holy in Himself; that He
was holy not by the mere fact of a holy nature, but
by an act of His own in it making it holy, i.e. by
the act of a perfect personal holiness, righteousness,
and life, or of a perfect faith, obedience, and self-
activity in it? But if He was thus the sanctifier,
then that which He assumed must have been to be
sanctified ; for otherwise He could not have sanctified
it. Where is the difficulty of saying that He took
humanity unholy, in order to make it holy? That
He became the holiness, the righteousness, of our
nature, by Himself being holy and righteous in our
nature? In doing which He, by the very fact of
His perfect holiness, condemned and destroyed sin
in the flesh.
There is a figure running all through both Old and
New Testaments which, more effectively and affect-
ingly than any other possibly could, reveals in all its
height and depth the inconceivable love and conde
scension of God in the Salvation of man — so incon
ceivable that for the most part we refuse to accept
it in its full meaning and extent. The extremest
application of the figure is found in Jer. 3:1:
" They say, if a man put away his wife [for unfaith-

252 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
fulness and impurity on her part], and she go from
him and become another man's, shall he return to her
again? Shall not that land be greatly polluted?
But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers,
yet return again to me, saith the Lord." Let us not
be jealous for the purity of God, or fear that it shall
be defiled by any depths of love to which He will
descend ! Love is the only thing that cannot be de
filed by what it touches, and though in the person of
our Lord it has taken into union with itself our sin-
stained and sin-staining nature, we may be sure that
in cleansing from all, it will itself receive no, stain.
The Divine Husband of humanity — defiled, unfaith
ful, adulterous, though she be — has said to her in the
incarnating love of our Lord, Yet return unto Me !
He has taken her to Himself, and saved her by His
love. He has sanctified her and cleansed her, and
presented her to Himself without spot or wrinkle or
any such thing.
I have here adapted to our Lord's natural body
words spoken of His body mystical, the Church.
But throughout the whole analogy and comparison
between these, is it not implied that as He has taken
one so has He taken the other, and that as He is sanc
tifier and Saviour of the one, so is He of the other?
Why otherwise is the Church, the humanity of His
larger incarnation, called His body, but that He has
united it to Himself in order that in Him it might be
sanctified and saved, just as He has destroyed sin
and been the author of holiness in His natural body,
the body of His lesser and more limited incarnation ?
What has been said of Jesus Christ as sanctifier

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 253
is equally applicable to Him as redeemer. How
was He the redemption and redeemer of the hu
manity He assumed except as in it He broke the
bands that bound it ? When St. Paul says that " the
law of the spirit of life hath in Christ Jesus set me
free from the law of sin and death," he speaks of a
redemption which takes place in me in Christ only as
it first took place in me in Christ. He was Himself
the redemption which He is in me ; that was enacted
in His body natural which is daily being re-enacted in
His body mystical and in the individual members of
it. Jesus Christ was objectively and is subjectively our
redemption, and our subjective or actual redemption
consists in our being, in Him through faith, subjects
of the self-same evepyeia, or divine inworking, which
wrought in Him to the breaking the bands of a sinful
nature. And so we might go through the whole list
of expressions by which human Salvation is defined,
and prove that the whole of Salvation was accom
plished by our Lord in the change wrought by Him
in the human nature which He assumed, and which
in His own human person He sanctified, redeemed,
and saved. God in and through Him condemned and
destroys sin in the flesh that we in and through Him
might be made free from the power, condemnation,
and death of sin in the flesh.
Rom. 8 : 3 suggests a kindred passage, 2 Cor. 5 :
21, "Him who knew no sin He made sin for us,
that we may become the righteousness of God in
Him." The p,rj yvovTa dpapTiav, not knowing sin, if
meant to apply to our Lord's divine self-consciousness
and personality, can only mean incapable of knowing

254 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
sin. If it is intended, as it must be, to describe Him
in His human self-consciousness and personal life, it
brings out more clearly than any other words could
a truth which I have already endeavored to state.
But let us interpret the passage in each of these
two senses. The word yivdto-Keiv has, in the New
Testament, a peculiarly personal and subjective force.
We only truly know that which enters into our own
personality, or into which our own personality enters.
If anything is outside of that we may know about it,
but we do not essentially know it. Thus St. John
knows nothing of any knowing God which is not
essentially a being in God and God in us. To say
that we know God, and to show by what we are and
do that God is not in us — i.e. in our personal being
and acting — is to him a self-contradiction. And, in
the same sense of knowing, St. Paul (Rom. 7 : 15),
speaking of the sin in his flesh as a bondage of his
nature and something outside of his self or inmost
personality, says : " For what I do i" know not "; " It
is not /that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me — that
is, in my cdp%, or nature." The sin under the bond
age of which he felt himself, and of which he ac
knowledged himself guilty, was nevertheless some
thing external to himself, and which, therefore, he did
not know. One only knows what is of himself and
part of his own conscious self-activity ; even what we
do, if we do it under compulsion of causes or condi
tions outside of ourselves, we know not, for in reality
we do it not. This applies, of course, only to those
in whom the personal will is really opposed to the
sin, which nevertheless it cannot conquer or destroy.

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 255
If it could, there would be no need of redemption.
But no son of Adam will be finally condemned for
being a sinner, but only for not being redeemed from
sin. We shall be judged at the last day, not for be
ing what Adam made us, but only for not being what
Christ would make us. Interpreting, then, the "not
knowing sin" of the pre-incarnate, divine, conscious
ness and personality of our Lord, we say that He who
was, of course, incapable of knowing sin was in some
sense made sin for us. Does this mean that He was
sent in a body, or in a human flesh which was made
to represent sin, and which was then treated and cru
cified as though it were the body or flesh of sin ? Un
less it means something more and more real than
this, it must mean this. For is it not expressly said
that His crucifixion was the crucifying of our old
man and the destroying of the body of sin (Rom. 6 :
6) ; the crucifixion of the flesh with its affections and
lusts (Gal. 5 : 24) ; the putting off of the old man
with his doings (Col. 3:9)? And if it was not this
in some real sense, then it was so in a representative
or fictitious sense — i.e. our Lord's body, or flesh, is
called and treated as though it were that which in
all men needs to be condemned and destroyed. I
prefer the real sense, according to which our Lord
was made sin, in that He took upon Him the flesh of
sin. He took our nature with all those consequences
in it of the Fall, which make us sinners. He was
sinless in it, not by the fact of its being sinless, but
by the act of His condemning and destroying sin in
it. By taking upon Him our sin and abolishing it,
He became our righteousness, and enables us to be
come the righteousness of God in Him.

256 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
I believe, however, that the "not knowing sin" of
the passage under consideration refers to the human
consciousness and personality of our Lord. It is not
the Divine Logos incapable of knowing sin, but the
man Christ Jesus who, though in the flesh of sin,
knew nothing of the sin of the flesh; i.e. who was
personally sinless in a nature, in which all other men
are sinful, and who thus destroyed sin in the nature.
I cannot, therefore (with Thayer's Lexicon of the
New Testament under apapTid), interpret " made Him
to be sin " to mean " treated Him, who knew not sin,
as a sinner." God treats things as they are, and His
treatment is only the natural consequence of what
they are. If He treats us who are sinners as though
in Christ we were not sinners, it is because in Christ
we are not sinners. And it is only as we are not sin
ners in Christ that we shall be treated so ; it is only
as He has abolished our sin that He has abolished our
condemnation. We are not under the condemnation
of the flesh because in Christ we are not in the flesh,
we are dead to it. If, then, God condemned, cruci
fied, and destroyed anything in Jesus Christ, it is not
that He made Him to represent that thing and then
treated Him as though He were it, but that Jesus
Christ took upon Him, in His human nature, that
which needed to be, and which was in Him, con
demned, crucified, and destroyed, viz. our sin. Only
it was He Himself, His love, His holiness, His obedi
ence unto death, who was its crucifixion and destruc
tion. The two passages already treated suggest yet a
third of kindred tenor (Gal. 3 : 13) : " Christ re-

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 257
deemed us from the curse of the law, having become
a curse for us." Every human being who is under
the law is under a curse. The law is nothing but
the expression of our own perfection and blessedness.
What it requires of us is only that we shall be that
and do that which constitutes, and which alone can
constitute, our perfection and blessedness. But the
law requires of us for these that which, in our flesh
or in the present condition of our nature, it is impos
sible for us to render. And not to obey and fulfil
the law is in itself imperfection and brings its own
condemnation and curse. In the language of the
New Testament the law cannot make holy; it can
only convince and convict of sin and bring us under
its condemnation and punishment, which is death.
Let us see how this curse of the law works. We
have seen before how, from our very nature as spirit
ual, and not only moral, beings (i.e. capable of obedi
ence to the divine law only through and in union
with the divine life), law cannot justify us. It makes
no difference what meaning we give to justify. If
it means only that obedience to law can never be for
us a ground or procuring cause of the divine favor
and acceptance, that can only be because it can never
make us worthy or proper objects of the divine favor
and acceptance. Whatever meaning we give to jus
tify, it must come back in the end to mean make
righteous. If we cannot be justified by obedience or
works of the law, but only by faith of Jesus Christ,
it can be at bottom only because we cannot by obedi
ence or works become what God can recognize as
righteous, and therefore what is righteous ; and we

258 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
can become so through faith of Jesus Christ. We
cannot obey unto righteousness, but we can believe
unto righteousness ; which means that we cannot
become righteous of ourselves by our own obedience
to the law of righteousness, but we can become right
eous of God by reception through faith of the spirit
of righteousness; i.e. the spirit of Jesus Christ the
Righteous imparting to us the righteousness of Christ.
Consequently, even if we were unfallen, law as such
could not justify us. But St. Paul does not go back
so far as this in his present argument. We are fallen,
and the application to us of the divine, which is also
our own, law can only have the effect of revealing
to us the fact of our disobedience and the impossibil
ity of our obedience to it. The ministration of the
law, therefore, is simply the ministration to us of the
knowledge of sin, judgment, and death.
In the flesh, consequently, and under the law, we
are under a curse. The curse is not something ex
ternal to us and arbitrary ; it is inherent in and in
separable from the situation itself. Every man born
of Adam inherits a nature in which he not only sins
against God but sins against himself, and transgresses
the law not only of God but of his own perfection
and blessedness. To tell him so by revealing and
applying to him the law of holiness, righteousness,
and life does not help or save him. It only converts
him from an unconscious into a conscious transgres
sor, and by so making his sin sinful plunges him into
deeper depths of sin. The curse of such a situation
is in itself ; sin known becomes its own condemnation
and punishment.

HUMAN NATURE OF JESUS CHRIST. 259
What is our Salvation from the fact of the flesh
and the curse of the law? The Apostle in this
epistle tells us that " God sent forth His Son made
of a woman, made under the law, to redeem us that
are under the law." That is, Jesus Christ came in
the flesh and under the law to set- us free from the
power of the flesh and the curse of the law. He
came in the flesh, with no difference in it from us ;
only that whereas we obey, He broke, its power. But
now let us see what was His relation to the law and
its curse. When it is said that our Lord came under
the law, it is meant that He came also under the
curse of the law; and he was made a curse iden
tically as we have seen that He was made sin for us.
He was under the curse, not in the sense that the
curse was arbitrarily or vicariously imposed upon
Him, but simply in that and because He was in the
flesh. Inasmuch as the nature in which He came
was subject to all the natural consequences of the
sin that had been committed in it, He in it was under
the curse of it, for these inherited consequences con
stituted its curse. Thus He was not only subject to
physical death, but spiritually and morally it was
necessary for Him to inflict death upon it, in order
not to be Himself subject to its death. That He was
not subject to the sin and death of our flesh was
solely in consequence of His crucifying the flesh of
sin and death. That He was under the curse of our
nature is evidenced by the fact of His having to die
to sin, i.e. having to crucify, and be crucified in, that
in Him which if it had not been crucified would have
been sin in Him. " In that He died," says St. Paul,

260 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
"He died to sin" (Rom. 6:10); or "the death that
He died was the death to sin " — that same death to
sin which he goes on immediately (without any dis
crimination) to say that we must believe that we now
share with Him: "Likewise reckon ye yourselves
also to be dead unto sin and alive unto God." His
death, as ours in Him, was the crucifixion of the flesh
or nature of sin ; and His life, as ours in Him, was
the liberation and resurrection of the spiritual, or
God-related, personality in us from the bondage and
death of the flesh.

CHAPTER EIGHTEENTH.
OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT IN RELATION TO
OUR LORD.
The conclusions so far reached may best, perhaps,
be summed up and presented in the illustration used
by St. Paul in Rom. 7 : 1-6, to which I now call
attention. " Do ye not know, brethren, that the law
hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?"
And then he proceeds to illustrate the point he
wishes especially to make, viz. that if we are not
now, as we are not, under the law, its requirements,
condemnation, and penalties, it is because in Christ
we no longer live, or are no longer alive. In Him
we are dead in that wherein we were under the law.
The man over whom the law exercises dominion is
the natural man. Upon him it makes its claims ; the
obedience, the righteousness it exacts of him is his
obedience and righteousness. If he fails to render
this and satisfy its demands, he comes under its con
demnation and incurs its penalties. As long as the
natural man lives, it is impossible for him to evade
the alternative of either perfectly (himself) fulfilling
the law, or suffering all the consequences of its non-
fulfilment. The law is the necessary and inevitable

262 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
law of the natural man : it is but the expression of
what he must be, for life and blessedness. Disobe
dience to it cannot but be imperfection and death.
The only defect or weakness of the law is not in
itself, but in us : it lies in the fact that it makes its
requirement of us who are unable to meet it, i.e.
upon us in ourselves and our own natural powers of
obedience and righteousness. As long as we continue
for life and righteousness in ourselves, in our natural
powers, i.e. in the natural man, we are and cannot
but be under the law, either to render it a perfect
obedience,' or else to suffer all the necessary conse
quences of disobedience. The only way to escape
the dominion of the law is to forsake the natural
man, to escape from ourselves into God in Ghrist.
Now Christ is Himself the death of the natural and
the life of the spiritual man, the death of humanity
in itself, and its life in God ; and so in Christ we are
dead in that wherein we were under the condemnation
and death of the law, and alive in that wherein we
are set free from these. The Apostle's illustration
is as follows : " The woman that hath a husband is
bound by law to the husband while he liveth ; but if
the husband die, she is discharged from the law of
the husband. So, then, if, while the husband liveth,
she be joined to another man, she shall be called an
adulteress : but if the husband die, she is free from
the law, so that she is no adulteress though she be
joined to another man. Wherefore, my brethren, ye
also were made dead to the law through the body of
Christ ; that ye should be joined to another, even to
Him that was raised from the dead, that we might

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 263
bring forth fruit unto God. 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 released from
the law, having died in that (i.e. in that old, or
natural man) wherein we were holden, or were sub
ject to the law. So that we serve in newness of the
spirit, and not in oldness of the letter." In this
little parable, the wife is we, humanity or the indi
vidual human soul or personality, viewed as first in
the old man, or natural man, or Adam, and secondly
in Christ; these two being the two husbands. So
long as we are in the natural man, we are under the
law of the natural man. And the law of the natural
man, as we have seen, is the law of natural obedience,
of our own righteousness. But our natural manhood
is that of Adam, of a fallen nature, of the flesh. And
in it we are incapable of obedience or righteousness.
The law which requires of us perfection cannot make
us perfect, but only reveals our imperfection. Or
dained for righteousness, it only aggravates our un
righteousness ; for life, it produces death. As long
as we are in the flesh, the sinful passions, which, so
far from being suppressed, are only excited and
strengthened by the law, work in our members to
bring forth fruit unto death. The only way in which"
we can be no longer under the law is to be no longer
in the flesh; so long as we are in it, the law will
work in us only sin and death. Not until we are
dead in the flesh shall we be alive from the law. But
how can we be dead in the flesh, and so to the law ?
If we would but know and receive and realize it, not

264 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
only in thought but in faith, we are dead in the flesh
and to the law. " Brethren, ye were made dead to
the law Bia tov o-copaTo? tov Xpio-Tov, by or through
the body of Christ." " I by the law died to the law,
that I may live to God. I was crucified with Christ ;
and 1 live no longer ; Christ lives in me " (Gal.
2 : 19, 20). Jesus Christ has, both in Himself and in
us, both in His natural and in His mystical body,
crucified the flesh. This, in the absolute terms in
which it is expressed, is true for us, of course, only
in the Word of God, and in our faith. It is true in
us in fact, only in so far as we have as yet realized
or actualized it in ourselves ; and this, according to
the mind of the Scriptures and in the experience of
the Church, is a process necessarily gradual, and
never completed in this life. But what is not yet
true in fact is already true va. faith; so that the same
Apostle who said, in the language of one, " Not that
I have already obtained, or am already made perfect ;
but I press on, that 1 may apprehend that for which
I was also apprehended by Christ Jesus," could also
say, in the language of the other, " We are complete
in Him"; and could represent us as not only dead
and buried with Christ, but risen, ascended, and seated
at God's right hand in Him, and there already blessed
with all spiritual blessings.
In Christ Jesus, therefore, we are dead in the old
man, or first husband, and no longer under his law,
and we are married to and five in the new man, or
second husband. But to bring out the full meaning
of the illustration and apply it to what has gone
before, it is necessary to develop anew two thoughts.

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 265
First, What is called in the New Testament not only
the death, but the violent death, the crucifixion, of the
old man is a very essential principle and element not
only in all true religion, but in all real and effectual
ethics. One of the notes of Messiah in the Old Tes
tament is that "He will carry out right to truth,"
i.e. He will carry out righteousness and judgment,
et? dXrjdeiav, to the fullest realization or actuality
(Is. 42:3), or as St. Matthew quotes it (12:20),
et? viko<;, to victory. He will establish right upon
earth (Is. 42:4). But all et? dXtfdeiav is et? vikos;
all triumph and realization of right is victory over
something resistant and hostile, and that in ourselves.
I have stated how Kant makes virtue to consist in
the victory of reason over sensibility or natural in
clination ; and recognizes such an abnormal force of
this latter in us that he calls it " radical evil," a term
quite as strong as " original sin." And how Bishop
Butler says that even prior to or outside of the fact of
" the Fall," there is in the very nature of propension
or particular affection that which reason and free will
have to overcome in order to virtue : but then fully
recognizes how much this is strengthened and con
firmed by the accumulated, consolidated, and trans
mitted effects of that transgression of the race which
we call the Fall. So there is an old man in whom
we are, a husband to whom we are bound, by nature.
And this old man with whom, in Adam, I am indis
solubly bound up is both / and not I. If he were I,
how could I desire to be, and be, released and sepa
rated from him by his death ? On the other hand,
he is so /that all denial of him is unquestionably for

266 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
me seZ/-denial, and his crucifixion is a self -crucifixion.
" I am crucified with Christ," in whom my old man
is crucified ; therefore the old man was I. " Never
theless I live " ; therefore the old man was not I. The
paradox is, of course, easily enough understood and
needs no explanation. But what needs to be brought
out is that all virtue and righteousness, as well as all
holiness or life of God in us, requires a separation or
divorce by death from that in us which is so little our
selves that we can -only become ourselves by separa
tion from it, and yet is so much ourselves that its death
is ours also. Well does St. Paul say that the wife is
" done away " or " abolished " from the first husband
and his law (KaTijpyvTai,), and that we Karnpyridnp^ev
dirb tov vopov, diro0av6vTe<; iv eS KaTeiyopeda, were
done away by death from the old man and his law.
But the old man is the natural man as natural and
not merely as sinful, in his righteousness as well as
in his unrighteousness ; i.e. in the impotency of his
righteousness as well as in the evil of his unright
eousness ; in his dead as well as in his wicked works.
So long as the battle of righteousness is fought out
on the line of one's own, or natural, righteousness, it
must be fought under the law, and be judged by the
law, and abide by the sentence and awards of the law.
If our righteousness is to be our righteousness, the
righteousness of the natural man or first husband, it
can be none other than that which the law prescribes ;
and it must be attained by us for life and blessedness,
or by its non-attainment life and blessedness must be
forfeited. The alternative, that righteousness is not to be

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 267
earned through obedience, but received through faith;
that it is not wrought by the natural man, but wrought
in the spiritual man ; that it is not from us to God,
but from God in us ; and that it is not until we have
realized the impotency and failure, have felt the sin
and guilt, and have suffered the death of the old or
natural man that we can live the life and work the
works of the new or spiritual man — all this is, as
our Lord Himself says, not a destroying the law, but
a fulfilling it. It is, as the passage we are studying
concludes, a substitution of the service of the spirit
for that of the letter, — the replacing the demand for
an impossible obedience by the gift of one made
divinely possible and actual in us by the spirit of
God. But the second point in St. Paul's illustration, and
in his teaching generally, which I have alluded to as
bearing directly upon our argument is this : that
Jesus Christ is just as much represented as having
accomplished the death of our flesh as He was by His
resurrection the life of our spirit. He just as much
crucified, in the nature He assumed, our old man as
by His personal human faith and life in the nature
He quickened and raised our new man. " We were
made dead [in the old man, and so] to the law
through the body of Christ." Our old man was cru
cified in Him. Of course, in so far as what we
understand by the old man is the result of sins
which we have ourselves, i.e. personally, committed,
there could have been no such thing in Jesus Christ.
But in so far as it is something in the nature and not
of ourselves, something from which we need to be

268 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
redeemed in order to be ourselves, the whole lan
guage of the epistles in asserting that He was its
diro9io-9ai and d^eV^o-t? — - its putting off and annul
ling — assumes that He had first taken it upon Him
self with His flesh. We say that our Lord, inasmuch
as He was the death of the flesh, Himself died in it
and to it. The difference between us and Him is
this: We, who not only inherited the flesh of sin,
but have been guilty of the sin of the flesh, never
theless being, through Him, dead in that flesh in
which we sinned, are now dead from the sin and
from all its guilt and consequences. He who is
dead is free from sin, not only in the real sense of
St. Peter (1 Pet. 4 : 1), " He that hath suffered [i.e.
died] in the flesh hath ceased from sin," but in the
judicial as well as real sense of St. Paul (Rom. 6 : 7),
" He that hath died is justified from sin " (i.e. pro
nounced righteous because made righteous from sin).
The fact of our freedom from all power, guilt, and
death of sin is due to the fact that in Jesus Christ
we are dead in the flesh, and so dead to the law and
its claims, judgment, and sentence. Christ, on the
other hand, who inherited the flesh of sin but was
Himself sinless in it, in no sense of course died to
His own sin, because He had none to die to ; but
He did die to sin in that His very sinlessness in the
flesh was the death of that flesh of sin which, if He
had not died in it and to it, would have been sin in
Him. As I have frequently said, our Lord's sinless
ness in the flesh was not the sinlessness of His flesh,
but His own sinlessness in the flesh. It was His cru
cifixion of sin in His flesh before it became sin. The

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 269
sin which He crucified was not His own but ours,
and it was not, it did not become, His own because
He condemned and destroyed it by His sinlessness.
He did no sin because He crucified in Himself that,
the not crucifying of which in us is sin.
The death of the flesh to the spirit in Christ is as
really our resurrection from the dead as the death of
the spirit to the flesh in Adam was and is our fall.
But in a different way ; we are related to Adam by
natural fact, we are related to Christ by spiritual
act. The fall of Adam, coming through the nature,
extends to all ; the resurrection of Christ, coming by
the divine Word addressed to, and the divine Spirit
operating in, the personal consciousness, free will,
and self -activity, extends only to those who believe.
But still the resurrection of Jesus Christ is just as
much that of every man and all men who believe as
Adam's fall was that of all men who are naturally
born of him. " We died [in the flesh, and so] to the
law, by the body of Jesus Christ." In all who are in
Christ Jesus by a real and living baptism the same
ivepyeia ®eov works which wrought in Him, and to
the same result — the death of the old man in them
and the resurrection and life of the new.
The Christian consciousness might be expressed as
follows in the matter we have been discussing. The
question with every man is whether he shall dominate
or be dominated by his nature or flesh. So far as we
are able to determine the issue, it is already decided
against us. The flesh is dominant, and we are help
less in any real sense or degree to recover the su
premacy which we ought to exercise over it. To do

270 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
that would require not merely that we shall, in an
unfallen and unimpaired nature, acquire a habit and
character of faith, obedience, and life, but that we
shall rid ourselves of, separate from ourselves and
put off a fallen nature, i.e. a false nature of unbelief,
disobedience, and death which has been organizing
and consolidating itself in the whole histoiy of the
race of which we are members, and has come down
to us through a thousand generations. But all that
Salvation would be in us has been enacted for us in
Christ. In Him God is become our Salvation and
reveals the divine ivepyeia, or inworking, which is
needed and is able to save us. In Christ, and in us
in Christ by grace through faith, the inherited nature
of sin, the a-ap^ dp,apTia<;, is condemned and destroyed,
and we are raised up in the spirit, or in the activity
of a personal life made alive in God and enabled to
fulfil its law, and so to freely and perfectly realize
itself. In Christ, therefore, we are crucified, dead,
and buried in the flesh and risen and alive in the
spirit. In the life of the spirit we are no longer
under the disabilities and curse of the law. Jesus
Christ through faith and by grace, and no longer the
law through our own impossible obedience to it, is
our righteousness. Not that we are not to be
righteous — nothing can absolve us from that, for
righteousness is our only life and blessedness. It
is a question not of whether we shall be, but only of
how we shall be righteous, — whether by our being,
or God in Christ making us so through our faith.
And it was only as our Lord was made a curse for
us that He became our righteousness. It was only

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 271
as He took our flesh of sin and nailed it to His cross,
that He abolished sin in the flesh and made us free
from sin.
There has been much effort expended upon the
vain attempt to explain upon any other ground than
the above our Lord's own comparison of His cruci
fixion to the lifting up of the serpent in the wilder
ness (St. John 3 : 14). The serpent crawling upon
his belly and eating dust is the symbol of the life of
sense, the merely natural as opposed to the higher
spiritual. The lifting up of the serpent is the exact
figurative expression for the crucifixion of the sen
suous nature or flesh by the victorious activity and
life of the spirit. So " Christ was once offered et? to
•7roXXol>v dveveyKelv apapTias (Heb. 9 : 28) to lift up
and nail to His cross the sins of many," i.e. to crucify
for all men that flesh which is the seat and source
of all their sins, and in the death of which their sins
are dead.
I am fully aware not only of the certainty of being
misunderstood, but also of the danger of grievous
error in venturing to describe thus the flesh of our
Lord. And, consequently, while I am confident of
being in the mind of the New Testament, I am con
scious also of a desire to repeat, perhaps, too much,
explanations which may guard against error and mis
conception. The delicacy and vital importance of
the subject will be, I hope, sufficient excuse for this.
The so-called sin of our common nature or flesh, the
flesh which our Lord Himself assumed, consists
wholly in its determining us to sin. We can not sin
only by resisting, denying, and crucifying it ; and we

272 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
are unable to do this to the extent of not sinning, or
being sinless. If, however, we could and should so
resist, deny, and crucify it as by our personal act and
life to not obey, but subdue and destroy, sin in our
flesh, so far from sin only a higher sinlessness and
holiness could be predicated of us. In fact so high
a sinlessness as would be impossible for human nature,
and as would testify more strongly than anything
else could to the presence and power of God in it.
That our Lord should have accomplished in our flesh
this natural impossibility, that He should have been
sinless not merely in a sinless but in a sinful nature,
so far from compromising Him and His work, seems
to me immeasurably to elevate both. But, more
over, let us never forget that the application of the
term sin to our Lord's nature, or to any nature as
such, is an improper and merely popular use of the
term. In reply to the question whether our Lord
in His human birth took original sin, my answer
would be that He took all of original sin except the
sin, except that which makes it properly and really
sin, viz. that it should have caused Him to sin, which
it did not. That which destroys us in our nature,
He destroyed in our nature ; that which is sin and
death in us, because by reason of it we sin and die,
was not so in Him who was the destroyer in Himself
of sin and death. But there was no difference in
His nature and ours save what He made in it. He
was made like unto us in all respects, and was in all
points tempted like as we are only with a different
result. He was different from us not in having a
different nature or flesh but only in that He by His

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 273
crucifixion of the flesh, by His victorious sinlessness
in and over the flesh, condemned and destroyed sin
in the flesh.
Since the defence of the view of Salvation here
advocated has been so far drawn only from St. Paul,
it may be well to see how far it is in harmony with
the thought underlying the other epistles of the New
Testament. Let us, then, consider a few passages
selected from other writers.
1 Pet. 2 : 24. "Who His own self bare our sins in
His body on the tree [or carried up our sins in His
body to the tree], that we having died unto sins
might live unto righteousness ; by whose stripes ye
were healed." In the body which our Lord took
and which He lifted up and nailed to the tree, He
crucified that flesh of sin in which all sin is crucified,
in order that we (in Him) having died to sins may
live to righteousness. So by His stripes we are
healed ; by His crucifixion of our flesh we are dead
in and dead from the flesh and made alive in the
spirit. The whole point of view is identical with
that of Rom. 6, where Christ is represented as hav
ing crucified our old man and abolished the whole
body of sin, that we might no longer serve sin, be
cause he who has died in that which is sinful, or in
which he was sinful, is free from sin.
1 Pet. 3 : 18. " Christ suffered once for sin, the
just for the unjust, in order to bring us to God,
0avaTco0el<; pev a-apm £<ooTroi7]0eh Be irvevpaTi, being
put to death in the flesh but quickened in the spirit."
His bringing us to God, i.e. into oneness with God,
consisted in His destroying the separation between

274 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
us and God. This He accomplished by His death in
the flesh and life in the spirit. " The righteous for
the unrighteous " : That He was righteous does not
mean that there was nothing wrong in the nature He
took. If there was not, why did His righteousness
involve and consist in His crucifixion of it? The
interpretation of this passage receives light from and
throws light upon one which follows in the same
context (1 Pet. 4 : 1, 2), " Christ therefore having
suffered in the flesh, do ye arm yourselves with the
same mind ; because he who has suffered in the flesh
has ceased from sin, that we should no longer live
to the lusts of men but to the will of God." To
suffer, or die, in the flesh is to cease from sin, be
cause it is to be dead in that in which we were sin
ners. We must be conformed to Christ in His death
in the flesh and to sin. Now of course Christ can
not be said by His death in the flesh and to sin to
have ceased from sin in the sense of His having
previously sinned. But may it not be said that He
ceased from sin before it became and without its be
coming sin in Him? He crucified it in the flesh
before and without its extending to Himself and be
coming His own. It was the one instance in human
ity of a perfect obstare principiis : so resisting and
excluding the principles and beginnings of sin, so
crushing it in its bud in the flesh, as to, so to speak,
destroy it before it existed.
We shall see how this explains certain bold expres
sions in the Epistle to the Hebrews. For example, it
is distinctly said in Heb. 7 : 27 that our Lord, in His
function as High Priest, "by His offering of Him-

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 275
self, offered first for His own sins and then for the
sins of the people." This will be explained more
fully under the discussion of the sin offering. But I
will say here that the irepl dpapTia<;, the truth un
derlying the sin offering, means the necessity of dying
in the flesh as the only condition of not sinning.
And our Lord Himself as man was not free from this
necessity. For Him as for us sinlessness was to be
attained only through that crucifixion of the fle.sh
which is a dying to sin. He had to die for and to His
own, not indeed actual, sins, — for that would imply
that He had sinned, and, therefore, that He was not
the perfect sin offering or death for and to sin, — but
for and to the sins potential in His flesh or human
nature, and which only did not become actual in Him
through His crucifixion of them in His flesh.
Again (Heb. 9 : 28), " Christ having been once
offered to bear the sins of many [i.e. (dveveyKelv)
to lift them up and nail them to His cross] will
appear a second time without sin to those who look
for Him for salvation." When he was seen by them
the first time it was with sin, for it was in the act of
crucifying it in His own body, in His human flesh.
Not His sin, for He crucified it, and was, therefore,
Himself sinless in His flesh, but the sin of the flesh
which He crucified ; for why otherwise did He crucify
it ? When He appears again, it will be without the
flesh of sin which He took to destroy, and as the
quickened and risen spiritual man in whom is no sin,
because no nature or place of sin.
In the First Epistle of St. John the subject is rather
regeneration than death and resurrection.

276 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
I am here tempted to give, at least an application, if
not an explanation, of that passage in the Old Testa
ment (Gen. 3: 16) where the curse is laid upon Eve:
"In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." The
physical fact almost seems to have been instituted to
express a spiritual truth; not merely generation in
general to be the symbol of regeneration, but genera
tion since the Fall through deathly pangs and travail
to express the fact that, now, only through death can
the spiritual birth take place into the new life of
regeneration. If we were not fallen how normally and
blissfully would the natural man be born by grace
through faith into the spiritual man ! How, without
undoing or unbecoming, would the man in Adam or
nature become, through spiritual knowledge and free
will, by the appropriation of faith and the self-conform
ity of obedience, the man in Christ and in God ! But
now in sorrow only can we conceive the truth and
bring forth the life. It is only through the pangs
and death throes of the" flesh that the spirit can be
born in us.
St. John does not dwell upon all this. He is dealing
with the great fact of the life and of the necessity of
our being in it, without direct thought at the moment
of the death through which, in us as in our Lord, it
is born. But when he says that if we are walking in
the light, — of truth, of holiness, of love, and joy, and
peace, — then only and thereby we know that we are
born anew into the life of God in Christ, and that
the blood of Christ is cleansing us from all sin,
this practical allusion to the actual cleansing power
and effect of Christ's blood shows that the truth is

OF THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 277
only in the background and not wholly absent. The
truth, namely, that it is only in the death of Christ
and in our own actual death in Christ that we are
released from that flesh which is the source of all our
darkness and sin and misery, and made alive in that
spirit in which alone we have light and life. And
so with him the a^eo-t? dpapria<; is a real putting
away of sin, and not only (although it includes) a
present pardon and peace. And with him, too, Ka0a-
/jia-yu-o'? and iXacrpo? are not mere imputative or judi
cial acts, but effectual acts of a real cleansing and a
real reconciling with God through the putting away
from us in Christ of all that separates from God.
But let us dwell a little more fully upon one pas
sage in this epistle (ch. 3 : 5, 6). " And ye know that
He was manifested to take away sin, and in Him is
no sin. Every one who abideth in Him sinneth not.
No one that sinneth hath seen Him or known Him."
In St. John's Gospel 1 : 29, we are told that John the
Baptist looking upon Jesus, Whom he had recently
baptized, exclaimed, " Behold the Lamb of God that
taketh away the sin of the world." Thayer's Lexicon
of the New Testament (under a'ipw) interprets aipeiv
dpiapTiav in this passage, "to remove the guilt and
punishment of sin by expiation, or to cause that
sin be neither imputed nor punished." There is no
context here to contradict this interpretation, and
so it is possible to give it. But in 1 John 3 : 5, 6,
quoted above, there is a context which renders that
explanation impossible, and so the same Lexicon is
compelled to give a very different meaning to iden
tically the same words. There it makes tos dpap-

278 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Tias a'lpeiv to mean, "to cause sin actually to cease,
so that in Christ who is free from sin we no longer
sin." I interpret the passage thus: 1st, "He was
manifested to take away sins." The end and result
of our Lord's Incarnation was, in our flesh, to be the
destroyer, by His own holiness and life, of sin and
death. 2d, " And in Him was no sin." Why? Be
cause by His crucifixion of the flesh of sin He de
stroyed sin in His flesh. 3d, " Every one that abid
eth in Him sinneth not." And why not ? Because
to be truly in Him is to be so in His death of
the flesh that our flesh is dead in Him, and so in
His life of the spirit that we are spiritually alive in
Him. 4th, and finally, " No one who sinneth hath
seen Him or known Him." Truly by faith to see Him
and truly by experience to know Him is necessarily
to be just what He is, to cease from sin and be holy.
In proportion as we see and know Him as He is, we
are made like Him. So Christ takes away sin.

CHAPTER NINETEENTH.
OF THE WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH.
Our Lord speaks frequently of the epyov, or work,
which His Father had given Him to do. It is His
meat and drink to do it, and at the close of His life
He is conscious that He has accomplished it. What
was that work ?
We might bring the question before us in this
way. All men who have been great actors in the
world, and have left their impress upon it, have in
one way or another accomplished some great thing.
The assertion will scarcely, from any point of view,
be questioned that Jesus Christ has made a greater
and more permanent impression upon the world than
any man who has lived in it. What did He do to
produce so deep and abiding an impress ? We might
say that He arose from the dead, and that that ac
counts for the effect produced by Him : it was the
resurrection that created the Church and Christian
ity. That is, or is not, a sufficient account of the
matter of our inquiry according to what and how
much we mean by it. If we mean simply the fact of
a physical resurrection — which, of course, no one can
mean — it is wholly insufficient. Even if Jesus Christ

280 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
did physically arise from the dead, taken by itself it
would have been a barren and dead fact in the history
of the world. But if by our Lord's resurrection from
the dead we mean all that it really does mean, all
the spiritual and moral invisible truth that lies be
hind the visible fact, then it is sufficient to account
for everything that has, and for a great deal more
that ought to have, resulted from it. In saying that
He arose from the dead* we say much that does not
appear in the letter of the words, as it did not appear
on the surface of the fact. To some minds it is a
sufficient explanation of our Lord's resurrection to
say that He was God. That is reason enough ; of
course He could not be holden of death. But our
Lord's resurrection was essentially a human fact and
a human act. The reasons for it lie back in the hu
man activities and life of Jesus, and not merely in
His deity. The scriptural account of it is this : The
physical resurrection is merely the outer and visible
side of a great spiritual and moral act on our Lord's
part. He was the conqueror of death only because
He was the conqueror of sin. All His life through
He was accomplishing something greater than rais
ing His body from the grave. From beginning to end
He was the spiritual and moral resurrector and resur
rection of the human nature in which He lived. I
do not say of the fallen nature in which He lived,
for He could not be said to live in a fallen nature
who was its perpetual resurrection. But He could
only be the resurrection of it as in itself it needed to
be raised ; and by being as much the death of that in
it which needed to die as the life of that which needed

WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 281
to be made alive. That He by a not merely physical
but spiritual and moral act arose e'« veKpwv, implies
that He had been in some real sense iv vexpok. So
far as His nature as man, His flesh, was concerned, He
was among the dead and arose from the dead. That
He did not succumb to the physical death of the
flesh was because He had overcome the spiritual and
moral cause of death in the flesh, viz. sin. That
He, and He alone among men, conquered both the
sin and the death of the flesh, we can, of course, only
account for by saying that He was not a mere man,
but the Logos become man. But if He was the Logos
become man, the evidence of it, the grounds of our
believing Him to be such, is that He was a man em
bodying to us the Logos; i.e. the divine eternal
thought, will, and purpose of humanity. Because as
man in the flesh of our sin and death He conquered
and destroyed sin and death, and was the sanctifica
tion, redemption, and resurrection of humanity, we
say that He was not mere man, but God in humanity
reconciling it unto Himself.
The work of Jesus Christ was thus simply in our
human nature to be our human holiness, righteous
ness, and life ; which involved His being our sanctifi
cation, our redemption, and our resurrection. In the
perfection of His own human faith, obedience, and
life His work on earth was accomplished. His min
istry in heaven is to baptize us with the spirit, to
communicate to us the power, to take us into, and
sustain us in, the communion, of His own risen life ;
to impart to us the virtue of His own death and res
urrection. With our Lord the rising of the physical

282 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
body is but a secondary incident and consequence of
a previous spiritual act or fact, just as it is said of
us, that if our spirit be life because of righteousness,
then shall also our mortal body be quickened by the
spirit that dwelleth in us (Rom. 8 : 10, etc.).
Every other great man whom the world has known
was necessarily separated, by the pre-eminence and
peculiarity of his greatness, from other men, and
made to stand alone. There can be, at the same time,
but one Alexander who conquers the world. If there
were two, neither would be conqueror of the world.
The work of Jesus Christ is the only one which, so
far from being exclusive, is inclusive of all men's
work. In Him we are potentially, and may be act
ually, all, in the truest and most real sense, conquer
ors of the world.
Aristotle asks: Has everything that exists its
epyov, or function in the world; has each part or
organ of man its function — the eye to see, the mind
to understand, etc. ; and has man as a whole, man as
man, no specific epyov, or function ? What, then, is
the proper work of man as man, and consequently
of every man? Is it not simply to be a man; i.e. to
bring into ivepyeia, or actuality, every Bvvapi<;, or po
tentiality, of his manhood ? Is it not to fulfil one's
self, not only as a product and part of nature, but as
a spiritual and moral personality in the world; to
know, to do, and to be what, through our intelligence,
our free-will, and our self-activity, will make us that
for which we are predestined, viz. our completed and
perfected selves ?
The epyov of Jesus Christ is thus simply that of

WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 283
man, and of every man. He is the man, He in whom
manhood has fulfilled itself. And since man is man
only in relation, and is perfect man only in the per
fection of his relation to all the beings to whom his
nature relates him, Jesus Christ is the perfect man
through the perfection in Him of all these relations.
He is man in perfected relation with God, with men,
with things, and with himself. Through the perfec
tion of his human faith, or divine relationship, He is
the perfect spiritual man, the man in whom God
wholly is, and who therefore is wholly in God.
Through the perfection of His human obedience, or
conduct or character, He is the perfect moral man,
the man in whom the law of God is wholly fulfilled,
and the law of man fully realized. Through that
necessary relation between a man's personality and
his nature which makes the physical always event
ually what the spiritual in him is, He is the perfect
natural man, the man who has attained the highest
self-realization and blessedness. Alexander the Great
can be a study or model only for conquerors, Socrates
only for philosophers ; but Jesus Christ is to every
human being, of every kind or degree, a study and a
model of and for himself. He is for every man the
rt fjv eivai dv&pdoTTov, what it were to be a man. What
He was as man is the end of everjr human life ; to
have faith, to do righteousness, to live as man the
life of God, sums it all up. How simple, how little
it is, yet how much, how all ! Put away your sin,
cease to do wrong, arise from the dead. So universal
and therefore so common an epyov as this has nothing
of the Selat, the observation, the visible glory of the

284 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
career of the so-called world's conquerors. But in
reality is not Jesus Christ the only real conqueror
and world's conqueror? The Old-Testament Messiah
was to be the Saviour of his people by being the con
queror of their enemies. In the universality and ab
soluteness of this conception, Jesus Christ is the
Saviour of humanity by being the conqueror of its
enemies. But what are the enemies of humanity,
and what is it to be their conqueror ? Its only real
enemies are sin, transgression, and death; and its
only possible conquests of these are holiness, right
eousness, and life. The man who conquers these is
the only true conqueror, and the man who has wholly
conquered them has conquered the world.
Bishop Butler has shown conclusively how it is
the nature, the actual tendency, and the destiny of
virtue or righteousness to prevail over its opposite,
and to possess the earth. The Scriptures are one
long prophecy of the final victory and everlasting
reign of righteousness. Jesus Christ the Righteous
is the heir of the future, the possessor of the world
to come, the KXnpovopos irdvTcov. Of the enemies of
His kingdom, the first is sin and the last is death.
But they all have been, and they all shall be, put
under His feet, and through Him God shall reign
and man shall be saved.
But let us come down more definitely and in detail
to the investigation and analysis of the specific work
of Christ on earth. We say in the Litany : By the
mystery of Thy holy Incarnation; by Thy holy Na
tivity and Circumcision; by Thy Baptism, Fasting,
and Temptation ; by Thine Agony and Bloody Sweat;

WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 285
by Thy Cross and Passion ; by Thy precious Death
and Burial ; by Thy glorious Resurrection and Ascen
sion ; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost — Good
Lord, deliver us. And we are thoroughly scriptural
in this selection and enumeration in their order of
the elements and acts in our Lord's life which entered
into and constituted the work of human redemption
and Salvation. Now every one of these has direct
reference to Himself and to His own human charac
ter and life. Take the three symbols of circumcision,
baptism, and crucifixion, as applied to Him. These all
mean identically one and the same thing. The cross
is only in whole what circumcision is in part ; if the
latter is the putting away the sins of the flesh, the
former is the putting off the whole flesh of sin. It
is putting the axe to the root, and doing away with
the evil fruit by extirpating the evil tree. And what
is baptism but death in the flesh of sin and life in the
spirit of holiness ? And that, quite independently of
the form of baptism ; if immersion and emersion
symbolize death and resurrection, no less does any
other form of the application of water. The water
itself, not simply nor chiefly in its cleansing, but in
its quickening, power, contains all the symbolism of
death and life. For as the seed is not quickened
except it die, so it can neither die nor be quickened
save through the action upon it of water. And simi
larly we can neither die in the flesh nor be quickened
in the spirit except as we are baptized with that which
the water symbolizes, the spirit and power of Christ's
death and resurrection ; i.e. the power of the Divine
Spirit by which He died and rose. Jesus Christ,

286 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
who was Himself 0avaTw0eU pev aapKi ^moiroinOeU
Be irvevpaTi; who Himself, as one of us, crucified,
put off, and abolished our flesh of sin, and quickened
and raised up in our nature the spirit of life ; by His
own circumcision, baptism, and resurrection, deliv
ered and delivers us from sin and death.
When we turn from these symbols of His work to
the personal experiences enumerated in the Litany,
to the fasting and temptation, the agony and bloody
sweat and bitter passion, by which He learned obedi
ence, and being Himself perfected, became the author
of eternal Salvation to all who believe and obey Him,
the case becomes yet clearer. His work was, through
His own self-perfection, to perfect us; by His own
death in the flesh to sin, by His own life in the spirit
to God, to become, both objectively in Himself for
our faith, and subjectively in us through our faith,
our death and life, and so our Salvation.
When our Lord appeals on behalf of Himself and
His claims to His works, He certainly refers immedi
ately to what we call His miracles. "The works
that I do, they bear witness of me " (St. John
5 : 36). But one may see all through the chapter a
deeper reference to a more permanent witness to
Him. Assuredly those temporary and incidental
works were not the work the Father had given Him
to do. That work was to be the Resurrection and
the Life — and that not in Himself alone, but in
every man in all time who should hear, as Lazarus
heard in his grave, His divinely enabling "Come
forth." It was, and it is, to be the power of His
own death and resurrection in every one who be-

WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 287
lieves and is baptized. To-day the one convincing
testimony to our Lord and His divine claims is the
works that He does, or rather the one work of human
regeneration and resurrection. The man whom He
raises up and saves, the Church which is the body of
His resurrection and life, believes on Him. And the
only way we can prove Him to others is not by de
duction of reason, but by testimony of fact. Apart
from other very apparent uses, the " miracles " of
our Lord were, in a sense, but parables of His real
work. As, for example, in the case of the paralytic,
where He Himself says : " But that ye may know
that the Son of man hath power on earth dcpievai
dpapTias, arise and take up thy bed." To put away
sin — that was His work, and that, by His offering of
Himself, i.e. by His own crucifixion and abolition of
sin. The healing of bodies, except as ultimate effect
•of the healing of souls, was no part of His work. To
make it so now, by modern miracles, faith cures, or
any otherwise than as part of the general beneficent
work of Christianity, through the sanctified use of
natural means, is to elevate what was incidental and
temporary into a permanent part of Christianity, and
so to lower the true purpose and operation of the
latter. The work of Christ is manifested here in
risen hearts and minds, and will be manifested here
after in risen bodies. So, again, the raising of Laz
arus, e.g. was used by our Lord Himself to illustrate
or symbolize the fact that He is the resurrection and
the life. But it was not His work to raise men back
again into natural life as He did Lazarus. That was
no more a thing to be habitually repeated in the

288 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Church than the daily changing of water into wine
for social purposes. Each such miracle taught by
visible sign its invisible lesson once for all, and the
repetition of the sign, as though that and not the
thing signified were Christianity, is not only useless,
but injurious to the true end and work of Christ.
The resurrection of Lazarus symbolized, but only that
of Jesus Christ Himself was that which He came into
the world to effect. It is a resurrection not in kind,
or in the same kind, but in another kind. What is
sown is not the body that shall be, and what is raised
is not the body that was. Whatever identity con
nects them, one was the natural body and the other
is the spiritual body. His work is primarily a spir
itual and moral one, and physical or natural only in
its ultimate consequences. It is to die in the old
man, or flesh of sin, and to rise in the new spiritual
man of holiness, righteousness, and the divine life.
The only essential and permanent miracles, therefore,
of our Lord — if miracles they ought to be called —
are those of His person and of His proper work in
raising humanity, in Himself and in His Church, from
what it was through the Fall to what it has become
by His resurrection.
As with the works or miracles of our Lord, so with
His teaching. As I would not undertake to say that
the works were not practically necessary to His per
forming His work in the world, so I would not take
away from the value and importance of His oral in
struction. But the Sermon on the Mount, or the
Parables, or the discourses recorded by St. John 
in a word, our Lord's teaching was no more His work

WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 289
than His miracles were. He did not come to preach,
He came to be, the Word of God to us. It is what
He was, and not what He did or taught, that infi
nitely and eternally concerns us ; or what He did and
taught only as these revealed to us what He was.
And — let me say it with humility — our infinite
concern with what our Lord was and is, is not so
much the theological question of what He was as
God as the human and more practical question of
what He became as man, and what we are to become
through His manhood.
" Learn of me," says our Lord. It has always been
one of the paradoxes of the gospel that the one only
selfless man preached only Himself. And He preached
His manhood not His Godhood. " Learn of me, for
I am meek and lowly, and ye shall find rest unto
your souls." Take my yoke upon you ; bear my
cross; walk in my steps. As St. Paul says, "Let
this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus."
And St. Peter : " Christ has suffered for you, leaving
you an example that you should walk in His steps.
Forasmuch as Christ suffered in the flesh, arm your
selves with the same mind; for He that hath suf
fered in the flesh hath ceased from sin." And St.
John : he who professes to be and to abide in Christ
" ought himself to walk as He walked."
What I wish to illustrate and affirm is, that Jesus
Christ speaks with authority in matters of the spirit
ual and moral life, not because He is God, but because
as man He embodies and has realized in His own per
sonal human experience all spiritual and moral truth,
righteousness, and life. It is as Son of Man that He

290 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
is constituted both Lord and Judge of the spiritual
and moral world.
When among His last words He said: "Peace I
leave with you, my peace I give unto you. In the
world ye have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I
have overcome the world," the peace He bequeaths
us is, as He says, His peace, a peace He has Him
self experienced ; so perfectly, and so alone perfectly,
attained and experienced that He is properly called
the author of it, as He is elsewhere called the author
and perfecter of faith. And yet it is an essentially
human peace, a peace every man is free to experi
ence as wholly as He; or only not free as he is in
bondage to sin. It is the only peace of a perfect
faith, a perfect obedience, a perfect spiritual and
moral ivepyeia, or life, in God. "In the world ye
have tribulation," and shall have to the end of time.
There is no Salvation promised from this, as He was
not saved from it. His Salvation and ours is not
from, but in and through, tribulation. " But be of
good cheer, I have overcome the world." In the
world and in the flesh I have conquered the world
and the flesh and entered into the peace of God,
and my victory and its fruits are all yours !
And as the peace He preached at the close was
His, so the poverty, the sorrow, the meekness, the
hunger and thirst, He preached at the beginning were
His own also. The Beatitudes were but a declara
tion of His own beatitude. It was because He knew
to the bottom the bitterness and the blessedness of
that human emptiness and poverty which God has
made to receive and contain His divine fulness ; the

WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 291
human sorrow without which thjsre can be no divine
joy; the meekness that inherits and possesses the
earth ; the hunger and thirst which is the condition
of all fulness ; the mercy that obtains mercy ; the
purity of heart that sees God ; the peacemaking that
makes us the children of God — I say that it was be
cause He knew all these Himself, and was in posses
sion of the secret of human life, and had learned all
the ways of God and the way to God, that He taught
as He taught. He did indeed teach Himself and was
Himself all that He taught. He does not say, I will
tell you the way, and teach you the truth, and de
clare to you the life ; but I am the way and the truth
and the life. And so I repeat, the work of Jesus
Christ was not to teach but to be the Word of God,
our way to God, because God's truth of us and God's
life in us.
It might be said, in seeming refutation of all this,
that our Lord's concern was never with Himself.
His work was never that of His own personal holi
ness, righteousness, or life as such. This is true ;
and it is a truth which it will repay us to dwell upon
for a moment. The idea that the end or motive —
I do not say the effect or result, but the motive — of
Christianity is to save our own souls, is as effectually
refuted as a thing can be, by the whole spirit and
purpose of our Lord's own life. In contrast with
the self-aim, the self-development and perfection, the
self-enjoyment, in a word, the egoism, of the ancient
or classical ethical systems, the self-forgetfulness as
well as self-sacrifice of the Christian principle of
ethics is evident enough in its founder and in its

292 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Scriptures, if not always so in actual, so-called, Chris
tianity. To forgive injuries for the magnanimity of
it, to sacrifice ourself for the beauty and nobility
of self-sacrifice, and not for the sake of those whom
we forgive or for whom we suffer, is to do it for self
and not for others, and from pride and not love. It
is an absolutely true ethical principle that we can
never save ourselves by saving ourselves, or save
ourselves in any way in only saving ourselves. Self
must be lost in the motive, in order to appear in any
real increase or gain as the result of our acts. To
serve God or our neighbor in order to save ourselves
is not serving God or our neighbor, but ourselves,
and will not save us ; because what we need to be
saved from is ourselves.
Of course I do not mean to wholly exclude, or to
exclude at all, the motive of our own Salvation, or of
a personal self-culture, but only to say that where there
is no other or further motive, and no power to forget
and lose self in something without and beyond it, then
Salvation of self, because Salvation from self, is im
possible. Our Lord, it is true, cried to Him that was
able to save Him, and endured the cross for the reward
that lay before Him. But nevertheless He lived and
died for God and others, and not Himself ; and the
height of His exaltation was measured by the depth
of His self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice.
We have shown, and are to show yet more clearly,
how truly the cross is the only proper symbol of
Christ and Christianity ; but in reality, the essential
principle of both Him and it is not self-denial or self-
sacrifice, but love ; except, indeed, as these are identi-

WORK OP JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 293
cal, in which case, also, it is better to designate them
by the positive than by the negative expression of the
one principle. Self-denial or sacrifice, as such only,
is still egoistic ; for its motive and its dealing is with
self, though it be in the way of denial and surrender.
The only possible pure and genuine self-denial is that
love which forgets and forsakes self, not for the sake
of, or with any thought or motive of self, but wholly
through thought, and for the sake of, its object.
Jesus Christ, therefore, while He is the only pure
representative of the principle of the cross, or self-
sacrifice, is never, Himself, consciously or intention
ally actuated by that motive. For, indeed, that,
merely in and for itself, and as an end in itself, is no
true motive; and no essential part of Christianity,
however it has been often unduly elevated into such.
The positive principle of Christ and of Christianity
is love, which is negatively the only true self-sacrifice,
because it is the only unconscious or self-forgetful
self-sacrifice, i.e. the only self-sacrifice which is not
at all for self. So it comes that while the work of
Jesus Christ is essential holiness, righteousness, and
life in our nature, — which is essential self-salvation,
— that never appears as His conscious end or motive.
While His great achievement was in reality His
crucifixion of the flesh, He never, except in certain
exceptional crises of temptation, appears to us as
crucifying the flesh. But in reality He is always
doing so, and most doing so when He is wholly doing
something else, and not conscious of doing it at all.
For one never crucifies the flesh most truly and
effectively by crucifying the flesh, but by walking in

294 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
the spirit, and so forsaking and forgetting the flesh.
The flesh is never destroyed by fighting ; it dies only
of abandonment and neglect. And our Lord is so
wholly engaged in the life and works of the spirit,
i.e. in His labor of love, that we seldom see Him
sufficiently conscious of the flesh to be engaged in
denying or mortifying it. But we must not say that
love is not self-sacrifice, because it is so perfect as to
have little or nothing in it of the negative motive of
sacrifice for self's sake. And we must not say that
our Lord's was not the truest and purest crucifixion
of the flesh, because He crucified the flesh, not by
crucifying the flesh, but by walking in the spirit,
which is the only effectual not living, and so dying, in
the flesh. " Jesus Christ was never saving Himself."
On the contrary, He was always saving Himself.
" He was concerned only with saving others." Yes ;
but that is the only true Salvation of one's self.
" But that was never His thought or intention."
Certainly not; if it had been, He would not have
been concerned only with others, and not Himself ;
and so would not have been truly saving Himself.
It comes back to the point that, not by self-sacrifice
as such, but only by self-sacrificing love, is one saved.
It is only he who loses himself in the motive, who
will find himself in the final result of his actions and
life. We ourselves, like our Lord, are saved only by
love ; for love is the only true death of the flesh and
life of the spirit. We are saved by the love of God,
but not by the love of God with which we are loved,
but with which we love. If God's love to us in Christ

WORK OF JESUS CHRIST UPON EARTH. 295
is the efficient cause, His love in us in Christ is the
material cause, of our Salvation ; that is to say, it is
our Salvation, and there can be no other. Nothing
less than love — divine love, that love which is God
Himself in us — will consume and destroy the self of
the flesh, and quicken and kindle the spirit of God
and of life in us. So if Jesus Christ went about
only doing good, and not thinking of Himself, He
was, nevertheless, accomplishing in Himself that
which is essentially human diroXvTp(oai<i and TeXei-
ajo-t?. Self-Salvation is nowhere the motive of His
human life ; but for that very reason His life was the
purest and completest Salvation of Himself, and the
perfect revelation to us of our own Salvation.
It will be felt by some that, in asserting thus the
humanity, I have obscured, if not actually diminished
(which would be practically to deny), the divinity of
our Lord's work upon earth. It does not appear so
to me. If the Son of God was manifested to take
away our sin, and in Him in our nature there was no
sin, and in us who are and abide in Him there is also
no more sin ; that is to say, if He has actually abol
ished sin, and brought mankind and the whole crea
tion into oneness with God, into obedience to law, and
into perfect realization of itself, I think that is a work
sufficiently great, sufficiently good, and sufficiently
divine to have justified the Incarnation, and to sus
tain the highest claim we can make for our Lord's
person or work. The work that My Father hath
given Me to accomplish, the work that I do, that is
My witness that the Father hath sent Me.
The epyov, or distinctive work of our Lord, then,

296 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
when on earth, consisted, not in His works or mira
cles, nor in His oral teaching, nor in anything with
out Himself, but in Himself, in what He became and
was as man. In the simple fact — which was yet
the grandest fact in the history of the universe — of
His personal human sinlessness, He became the con
queror of sin, and so of death, and, in a word, the
conqueror and destroyer of the spiritual, moral, and
natural evil of the universe. His work does not ter
minate in Himself, but it began in Himself, as the
captain of our Salvation, as the first-begotten from
the dead, and the first fruits of the resurrection. Be
ing Himself perfected, He became the author of per
fection, or of eternal Salvation to all who believe in
and obey Him. He was Himself the Divine Love
and Power, iv ivepyeia, by whose operation in us we
are raised from the death of our flesh and ourselves
into the selfless life of God in us.

CHAPTER TWENTIETH.
OF JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY.
Our Lord says: "I am the way, and the truth,
and the-life." He was the life in a unique and abso
lute sense. The Greeks spoke of the wise man, and
the Jews of the righteous man — d <rd</>o?, d oY/mto?
— not meaning any actual man, but an ideal man,
who should embody, as no actual man ever did or
could, their distinctive conceptions of wisdom or
righteousness. There is such a thing as wisdom;
there is such a thing as righteousness ; and per
fect wisdom or righteousness, though it be never
realized in a single representative. He who should
realize it would be the wise man, or the right
eous man. Christianity holds that wisdom and right
eousness have been manifested in a life which,
because it embodies the full conception and mean
ing of human life, it calls The Life. Doubtless it is
the life because it is divine — because it was with
God, and came forth from God, and is God's incarna
tion of Himself in humanity. But it is equally true
that it is divine, or that we know it to be divine, be
cause it is the life, because it so actually and perfectly
fulfils and expresses the whole meaning and truth

298 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW, TESTAMENT.
of human life. The perfect manhood of Jesus Christ
is the proper proof of His perfect God-head. The
true artist is revealed in His true art, and not in any
claim or authority outside of that. And we rest the
truest and strongest claim of our Lord's divinity upon
the perfection of His humanity, and not upon any
mere authoritative declaration attached to Him as a
label to inform us that He is God, nor upon any non-
natural, because non-human, manifestation of His
deity bearing witness to itself outside of His proper
humanity. Because He is the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth of human life to every hu
man life that truly knows itself and truly knows
Him, therefore He is believed on, and is going to be
believed on forever, and not upon any external au
thority, merely as such, even of God Himself. God
never meant to finally and forever prove or demon
strate Him by, and our Lord never meant to rest the
proof of Himself to the world upon, external declar
ations or miraculous signs. The fact is, the ultimate
proof of all truth is its truth, and not its proofs.
What is true is going to live in the faith of men, and
to prove itself ever more and more to them ; no other
proof is essential, or can retain its force unimpaired
by time or change.
How do we know Christ to be the truth and the
life? What can we know if not that! Our faith
may be shaken in any external authority of God or
man, but the Christ of the Gospel and the Church is
with us and may be known ; and of whether He be
the truth and the life, the criterion is within us.
When the Greek spoke of his right reason, his wise

JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY. 299
man, etc., he was perfectly aware that there was
much of wrong reason and unwisdom in the world,
and it was calculated to shake his faith in the ab
soluteness, and not mere relativity, of truth. But
the truest of them believed still in a reason to be
used aright and a truth to be known, and in the ever-
increasing triumph of reason and truth. And, how
ever men err in their following of one or pursuit of
the other, in the long run they are capable of know
ing the truth if it is revealed, and recognizing the
life if it is manifested to them. Wisdom is justified
of her children ; and as long as the world lasts, Jesus
Christ will be believed and lived by those who know
themselves and God.
The word truth, as used in the New Testament has,
of course, many senses. The predominant one, I
think, certainly in St. John, is not so much truth as
distinguished from falsehood, as substance or reality
as distinguished from appearance, or the actual as
distinguished from the merely ideal. As, e.g. when
St. John (1 John 2 : 8) says that the law of love is
aX??0e? in Jesus Christ. That is, with Him love is
not a mere objective law, but a subjective fact: the
ideal human motive and conduct is realized and be
come actual in Him and His life ; and through Him
in us. And so here, when our Lord says I am the
truth and the life, He means that He is the truth of
humanity embodied in an actual person, and the life
of humanity manifested in an actual human life. He
is the realized ideal of human nature, human life,
and human destiny.
But when our Lord says not merely I am the truth

300 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and the life, but I am the way, the truth, and the life,
reference is made to the process by which He has
become the two latter ; that is to say, to how it is that
He has come to realize in His human person the truth
of humanity, and in His human life the life of human
ity. He has done so by bringing humanity back
into union and oneness with God, who is its truth
and its life ; but the question is, how has He done
this ? To this we may be sure there can be but one
answer. Whatever any man and every man needs to
do, or to have done, in him in order to come, or be
brought, to God, and to find in Him self-realization
and life, has been accomplished in Jesus Christ. He
is all men's return, and way of return, to God. Our
Lord has been talking to His disciples of going to
prepare a place for them, and promising that when
He has done so He will return and take them to
Himself — " that where I am ye may be also." And
He adds : " And whither I go ye know the way " ; or,
"And the way whither I go ye know." Thomas
questions Him further, and He replies : " / am the
way ; no one cometh to the Father but through me."
Now, whatever of mere local truth there is in our
Lord's going to prepare us a place and then return-
• ing to take us to it, that where He is we may be, I
have no desire to question. But that, when He says
"whither I go ye know the way,", — the way really
in His mind is riot one through space from one place
to another, but the spiritual or moral process through
which it was necessary for Him to pass in order to
bring man into oneness with God, — is apparent from
His own explanation, when the figure of His travers-

JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY. 301
ing or travelling a way through space is dropped for
the truth or fact of His being the way to God. " /
am the way ; no man cometh to the Father but by
me." It is the same figure, of course, as when He calls
Himself the door. He is our way and our entrance
into God in whom we find our truth and our life,
and who is thus our povij, or mansion, our resting and
abiding place forever, our home. But the value of
this truth lies not in its general statement, but in an
analysis in detail of the facts which constitute Jesus
Christ our way, and our only way, to God. He can
only be so in the sense that in Him we are shown
and are able to recognize the spiritual and moral pro
cess by which we shall come, or be brought, to God
and into God. Come to Him, that is, not in or
through space, for we have not to move our place to
come to Him : in one and the same spot, wherever it
be, one may be infinitely near to, or infinitely remote
from, Him. But come to Him in spirit, in truth, and
in life. I say that Jesus Christ can only be the way
to us by showing us in Himself what it were for us
to come to God, by being and doing what it is neces
sary for ms to be and do in order to be in God. If
He, being what we are, has come to God, then we
know by Him our way to God. It is true that, as I
have several times said, just as we see in Adam, not
merely the way in which each man since has fallen
or falls, separately and for himself, but the common
or universal fall of all men in him; so we see in
Christ not the way in which each man, separately
and by himself, is to return to God, but the coming

302 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
or bringing back of all men in Him. But still we
fell in Adam only as we are ourselves actually fallen
like him, i.e. involved in his sin and death ; and so
we are restored in Christ only as we ourselves actu
ally become in Him what He is, i.e. are partakers of
His holiness and life. There is no element or condi
tion of our return to God which has not been realized
in Jesus Christ ; but equally there is none which has
not through Him to be realized in us.
Thus, if the necessary conditions and means of all
personal or spiritual coming to God, and being and
abiding in God, are faith, and prayer, and grace, and
obedience, and love, etc., then through all these Jesus
Christ came in His humanity to God and was our
way. For if He did not come by that which is our
only way to the Father, then He is not our way to
the Father.
Accordingly, we find Him actually coming to God
in the perfect use of all these human means of ap
proach. In the first place, He is the "author and
finisher," the leader and comsummator, of faith.
"From Him we learn faith. In Jesus Christ we
have the perfect example, perfect in realization and
in effect, of that faith which we are to imitate, trust
ing in Him. In His human nature He exhibited faith
in its highest form, from first to last ; and placing
Himself, as it were, at the head of that great army
of the heroes of faith, He carried faith, the source
of their strength, to its most completed perfection
and to its loftiest triumph " (Westcott, Heb. 12 : 2).
All that our Lord was or did as man and for man
was accomplished through faith. His final conquest

JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY. 303
of death and resurrection from the grave is distinctly
described as an act and triumph of faith on His part.
Nothing can arrest or defeat a faith which is equal
to it and which is in the direct line of God's Word
and purpose. God does not promise any thing and
every thing to faith ; for many things which, in our
ignorance, we might ask in faith, and in good faith,
-would be inconsistent with the true end of our faith
and of God's gracious purpose. He does promise us
all things in Christ, but in order that this promise
shall include all things that would constitute our
absolute spiritual, moral, and natural good, it must
exclude all things that would be inconsistent with
this. Faith, therefore, cannot claim unconditionally
as part of the promise in Christ such things as phys
ical health, or wealth, or any of those natural things
Avhich we call goods or blessings, but the absence or
loss of which may in many instances be to us a yet
greater blessing. We have unconditional warrant
for faith in all that Christ is, and no more or less.
But to be and to possess all that Christ is, is all
that we can want or that God can give. In Jesus
Christ we have humanity's conquest of all evil, and
attainment of all good by the one human way of
faith. What He conquered was sin and death ; and
what He attained was God, righteousness, and eter
nal life. And I repeat that Jesus Christ was sinless
through faith, and rose from the dead through faith,
and was one with God, and obeyed His law, and lived
His life through faith. His last though not greatest
victory of faith was His physical conquest of death,
to which He is described as going with the words

304 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
of the Psalmist in His mouth, the perfect expression
of supremest faith under the extremest conditions of
trial and temptation. "I beheld the Lord always
before my face ; for He is on my right hand that I
should not be moved ; therefore my heart was glad
and my tongue rejoiced ; moreover my flesh also shall
dwell in hope, because Thou will not leave my soul
in Hades ; neither wilt Thou give Thy Holy One to
see corruption. Thou madest known unto me the
ways of life; Thou shalt make me full of gladness
with Thy countenance." He believed unto death,
and God through His faith saved Him out of death.
That our Lord was absolutely dependent upon and
perfect in prayer; that through it He was filled
without measure with that .divine grace, which is
measured in God's giving only by the limitations of
our own power of receiving ; that through faith and
prayer and grace He was perfected in His human
obedience and life, is not only in accordance with the
mind of the whole New Testament, but it is the
only sense in which He is to us the way of truth and
life and the only way to the Father.
But there is something more than this under the
figure of speech we are discussing. Our Lord says :
" If any man serve Me let him follow Me ; and where
I am there shall also my servant be." He has, indeed,
prepared a place for us ; and He comes again to
receive each one of us unto Himself, that where He
is we may be also. But if we would be with Him
we must follow Him, and follow Him by the way
He has gone. When the sons of Zebedee would
follow Him and be at his right and left' hand in His

JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY. 305
kingdom, our Lord asks them a significant question :
Can ye drink my cup, and be baptized with my bap
tism? He never fails to couple all following Him
with the taking up His cross and bearing it after
Him. The only way He knew or has left us is the
via crucis. The new and living way which He con
secrated for us into the holy of holies was through
the veil of His rent flesh. "When He had over
come the sharpness of death He opened the kingdom
of Heaven to all believers."
We have in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as alluded
to just above, the most detailed and definite descrip
tion of the way which our Lord has made or opened,
and which He Himself is to us. In Heb. 9 : 8, etc.,
we are shown that in the time preceding the Chris
tian covenant and dispensation the need of a way to
God was constantly taught and more and more felt.
But not only was the way itself not yet opened or
made manifest, but the fact of the contrary was sym
bolized by the Veil of the Temple, which closed and
barred the access of the people to the Holy of Holies,
or the presence of God. The annual act of the High
Priest in entering within the veil on the great day
of atonement was at once a witness to the fact that
the veil of separation was not yet taken away and a
promise and prophecy that it should be taken away.
But now — " in the present time," or under the Chris
tian covenant and dispensation — the barrier or wall
of separation has been removed, and we have bold
ness to enter into the Holiest Place (which is the
symbol of our at-one-ment, or accomplished oneness
with God) " by the blood of Jesus, by the way which

306 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
He dedicated for us, a new and living way, through
the veil, that is to say, His flesh : therefore let us
draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith,"
etc. Now what was the veil, or wall of separation,
between us and God, which was only taken away in
the act of our Lord's death, and what was the way
to God thus laid open for us ?
The veil, we are told, was His flesh. Of course we
are subjected by the limitations of human language
to an unavoidable ambiguity in the use of terms.
From this the New Testament itself is not free in
using the term flesh sometimes in the sense of that
essential human nature which our Lord Himself now
wears in His exaltation, and sometimes again in the
sense of that fallen nature of the first Adam which
He crucified and left behind Him in His grave. It
is the same ambiguity which we feel in the use of the
term <bvo-i<;, or nature, when we are told both that we
are sinners <pvaei, by nature, and yet that all sin is
irapd cpvo-iv, against or contrary to nature. Of
course, as things are, we cannot separate our nature
proper from our sinful nature, or nature as sinful, or
our flesh from our flesh of sin, and in suffering in
one we cannot but suffer in the other. And so our
Lord in crucifying the <rdp% dpaprla^ suffered in that
o-dp% which in Him is now free from sin ; that is, in
crucifying in the nature that in it which needed to
be crucified for its own sanctification and perfection
there was involved a crucifixion of the nature which
was sanctified and perfected, just as the gold itself is
melted in the heat which consumes its dross.
If we should attempt to state the distinction be-

JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY. 307
tween the o-dpf; merely as such and as. adpl; dpapTia<;,
between the flesh as flesh and as flesh of sin, under
the bondage of sin and death, it would be difficult to
do so directly, and yet I think it may be made intel
ligible in a somewhat indirect way.
Every one of us feels that holiness, righteousness,
and life are the true law of our nature ; that anything
else is dvopia, or a contradiction of this law; that
therefore our nature is essentially good; and that
sin and death are irapd <pvaiv, or contradictory and
destructive of it. If our nature were subject to its
law, i.e. if it were at itself and what it ought to be,
we should be good. In that sense we are by nature
good, i.e. in the essential constitution and according
to the true law of our nature. But it is not so with
us. Just what the universal and indisputable fact
which we call the Fall is in our nature, it is hard to
define. But what it results in in ourselves we know
well enough; viz. in our universal and inevitable
subjection to the false or counter law of sin and
death, insomuch that we are now said to be <f>vo-ei,
or by nature, subject to evil and " children of wrath,"
the very term <pvo-i<; being used to designate no
longer our real or essential, but our actual or fallen
nature. In consequence of the fallen condition of our uni
versal nature, virtue or essential manhood for us, so
far from being, as the ancients defined it, a following
of nature, involves and consists in a denial and cruci
fixion of nature. That is, the fulfilling of our essen
tial, or real nature, demands of us an d0eTwo-i<;, the
annulling and undoing, of our actual or false nature.

308 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Now, the New Testament being immediately con
cerned with the great facts of the Fall and its remedy,
sin and Salvation, both <pvai<; and adp% are, not ex
clusively but predominantly, used in the sense of our
actual, and not that of our real or essential, nature ;
i.e to describe our fallen condition.
In accordance with this view of the facts, the
barrier between us and God is in our <f>va-i<; or cap!;,
not as this is according to its essential constitution, but
as it is in its actual condition. The veil that closes
to us all access to the Holiest Place is that of our
flesh. It is only as this has been rent in twain from
top to bottom by our Lord's perfect crucifixion of the
flesh of sin that the way has been thrown wide open to
us into the presence and favor of God. It is an essen
tial truth which the Epistle to the Hebrews brings
out, that without blood there can be no real d^eaif
dp,apTia<; ; that there is no real BiadrjKv, or covenant
relation with God, save through sacrifice ; that wher
ever there is such covenant there must, of necessity,
be involved the death of him who enters into it ; for
that a covenant with God is good only over dead
bodies, eVt veKpok, i.e. the dead selves of those who
make it. That in Heb. 9 : 16, the d Bia0epevo<; whose
death must be brought as the condition of the cove
nant, is the man who is to be taken into relation
with God, is proved by the fact that the passage is
an evident reference to Ps. 50 : 5, — " Gather My
saints together unto Me, those that have made a cove
nant with Me by sacrifice," — where the Greek is
Toil? BiaTi0epevov<; rr/v BiaBrjK'nv.
It is not, of course, an arbitrary disposition on

JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY. 309
God's part which prevents any access to Him save
with blood, or through sacrifice; but it is in the
nature and necessity of the thing itself that we
cannot spiritually come to God, and be one with
Him, save through the sacrifice or death in us of that
which separates us from Him.
The way, then, to God, and the only way for us, is
through the rent veil of our flesh. In the Jewish
tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, or the Holy Place,
symbolized, not merely the presence and favor of
God, but that which is the essential condition of both
these, — personal and spiritual oneness with God : that
which is the end of all religion, and pre-eminently
the end of the final and absolute religion, — absolute
holiness, absolute righteousness, and absolute life.
The first tabernacle, or irpdiTv o-Knvrj, was the place
of, and represented, that relative and temporary relig
ion and worship of the first covenant by which God
was preparing His people for the absolute and final
religion and worship of the second. As long as the
former continued, and th& veil still closed and barred
the way into the Holy of Holies, the fact or truth
symbolized by it was this : that the Way to God was
not yet made or opened. That was not yet done
which should — not merely as those old sacrifices had
done, represent or signify, but — be and effect the
removal of the separation between us and God.
What it should be which should effect this, although
it was not yet made manifest, was fixed and deter
mined from the beginning, not by any arbitrary
counsel of God, but by the facts and necessities of
the case. If Jesus Christ was to be our Salvation,

310 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
He must be what alone our Salvation can be and
must be. That is, He must be the putting off of the
flesh, and putting on of the spirit. He must be the
crucifixion — as I have said before, in default of any
more definite and exact statement of what " the flesh
of sin " is — of all in our nature which disposes us to
sin and subjects us to death, of all that which not to
crucify would be sin and death, and to crucify which
is holiness and life. That this is what the Epistle
to the Hebrews understands to have been what our
Lord did which opened the way to us into not merely
the presence and favor, but a real union and one
ness with God, we may infer from ch. 10 : 19, etc.
"Having, therefore, Brethren, boldness to enter in
the Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by the way
which He dedicated for us, a new and living way,
through the veil ; that is to say, His flesh," etc. That
is, as, when our Lord died upon the cross, the Veil
of the Temple was rent from top to bottom, and the
Holy Place was thrown open, which up to that time
had been closed, and had barred all entrance to the
Mercy Seat, which was the symbol of God's presence ;
so, by the death of our Lord upon the cross, the flesh,
our old Adam, or o-ap^ dp,apTia<;, all the barrier
which our nature or natural condition interposed
between us and God, is rent in twain and swept
away, and an open way and free access made for us
into God. The result of this is that Jesus Christ is
Himself 6 •7rvevp,dTiKo<;, the spiritual man, as contrasted
with Adam, the carnal or natural man, and that
through His death and resurrection we are repre
sented as no longer in the flesh which is dead, but in
the spirit which is quickened and raised up.

JESUS CHRIST AS THE WAY. 311
If, then, Jesus Christ is The Life, the realization of
human life in its fulness, free from all contradiction
or limitation ; if He is The Truth, the perfect revela
tion of both God and man, or of God in man and
man in God ; the incarnation and embodiment of the
Divine Idea which is the eternal truth of man, — He
is these only because He was first The Way ; because
He became these by those human dispositions and acts
by which alone humanity can attain to its truth and
its life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIRST.
OF THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST.
It is unnecessary to discuss the origin in history
of the notion of sacrifice. It is universal. It has ap
peared under more perverted and hideous forms than
perhaps any other principle of human nature. But
it is a principle, and a very essential principle of
human nature and human life; and so far from its
perversions disproving its truth, there is no better
illustration of the old Greek assertion that the per
version of the best is always the worst. The truth
of sacrifice is the essence of all religion and of all
morality, for it is identical with the principle of love.
Although the full meaning of sacrifice is reached
and expressed only in the life and act of Jesus Christ,
yet all the elements of the truth contained in it are
to be found in a less developed form in the Jewish
sacrificial system. Into the details of this system I
do not purpose at all to enter. Such general and
generally accepted interpretation of it as is necessary
for our present purpose may be found, as Aristotle
says, iv toi? eyKv/cXtoj?, in current treatises on the
subject, and may be taken thence for our use.
According to all classifications, then, the Jewish

THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST. 313
sacrifices, although somewhat numerously subdivided,
fall under three heads, the peace offering, the burnt
offering, and the sin offering. Each of these forms
of sacrifice embodies a principle which is a constituent
element of religion and of worship; and the three
taken together, as they were in Jewish worship after
its development under Moses, include all the essen
tial principles of religion and worship.
Thus the peace offering embodied the principle of
fellowship, or union and communion, of man with
God. There were other ideas, of course, involved in
this, — such as homage, thanksgiving, dependence,
and prayer on man's part ; and on God's, grace or
self-communication, — but on the whole and in its
developed form the truth of the peace offering was
that of the essential spiritual connection of man's
Hfe with that of God. The common meal at the
table of the Lord, which was the principal element
in the offering, was the symbol and expression of the
common life. There was not in this sacrifice taken
by itself any recognition of a separation of life be
tween man and God which needed to be closed, or
of an at-one-ment which needed to be accomplished,
in order to union and communion. This latter is
supposed to exist, and is simply expressed and sacra-
mentally sustained by the sacrifice and the sacrificial
feast. It might be added that as both God and man
are supposed to partake of this feast in its spiritual
elements, in a certain sense it represents to both
their " daily bread." As man's life is fed daily, in
this act of union and communion, by the life of God,
so at least the divine goodness and love is fed daily,

314 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and satisfied, by the homage, the thanksgiving, and
the being blessed by Him of the objects of it. " What
shall I render unto the Lord in return for His bless
ings ? I will take the cup of Salvation, and call upon
the name of the Lord." We may indeed bless God
by fitly receiving His blessing. In this true sense
our true sacrifices are a sweet savour to Him ; they
satisfy and gratify a desire and a want which even
in the divine nature is inseparable from love, the
need of communicating or imparting itself. And so
God says to us as we say to Him, " Give me my daily
bread" (See Westcott on Hebrews, p. 287).
As the principle of the peace offering was the dis
tinctively spiritual one of community or fellowship
of life with God, so that of the burnt offering was
the more specifically moral one of self-devotion to
the service of God, or obedience. As I have fre
quently expressed the difference, the idea of the
peace offering is holiness, the principle of which is
faith ; that of the burnt offering is righteousness, of
which the principle is obedience ; the one is a per
sonal relation to God's person, the other is a practical
and active conformity to His law. Of course, the
first is but the root of the second, and the second
but the fruit of the first. The distinctive feature
of the burnt offering, or whole burnt offering, was
that the sacrifice, representing the offerer, was laid
upon the altar whole, and there wholly consumed. It
was supposed all to ascend to God in the incense and
smoke of the offering, which, in the bold Eastern im
agery of the Bible, was grateful and acceptable in His
nostrils. So He whose meat and drink it was to do

THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST. 315
His Father's will, who was eaten up or consumed by
zeal for His Father's house, who spent Himself, and
was spent, in His Father's service, was the true per
sonal embodiment of the principle of the whole burnt
offering. Here again there is no recognition in this
sacrifice itself of anything in us which contradicts or
renders impossible any such self-devotion and service.
The fact of a bondage to a false law within us which
renders us impotent to obey the true law of God and
ourselves, and the need of a redemption in order to
an obedience, is not taken into account.
These two offerings would represent and embody
all of religion and worship and morality (for the love
and service of God includes the fulfilling of all other
relations and duties), if man were unfallen. But
inasmuch as he is fallen, union with God must be
preceded by a bringing into union, or reconciliation ;
and self-devotion and obedience must be preceded by
a redemption, or being made free to obey God's law.
It was to cover the sense of this need, of which men
were only gradually made conscious ; to awaken and
develop this need as well as to meet and satisfy it ;
that the sin offering in due time took its place in the
religious and ritual system of the Jews. And when
it did do so it was made the condition precedent to
the other two offerings, which were always prepared
for and rendered possible by this, so that the sacrifice
of communion should always be preceded by the sac
rifice of atonement, and the sacrifice of obedience by
that of redemption.
What, then, was the religious truth expressed in
the sin offering? It was the great and universal

316 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
truth for man of the necessity of the death of the
flesh in order to the possibility of the life of the spirit.
It was the fact, if not in the constitution, yet in the
condition of our nature, that for man there is no life
except through death. I say not in the essential con
stitution of our nature ; and yet, as I have several
times shown, there would be something correspond
ing to death necessary to life in us, even if our nature
were not in its actual fallen condition. Merely as
natural, the task devolves upon us of becoming spirit
ual, of passing from the natural into a personal rela
tionship to God, which constitutes sonship, and makes
us a new creation in Christ, in whom it attains its
full type and image. This transformation from an
old into a new, from self and nature into God, by the
creative power of the Word and the Spirit acting
through and in our faith and obedience, would be
somewhat of the nature of a death in one kind, and
a life in another kind. We should have to leave be
hind us the flesh, in at least its possibility of sinning,
and I will not say that to do this would involve noth
ing of self-denial, or contain in it no germ of self-sac
rifice. But in this case, while there would be all of
the birth in us of a new, there would be little or
nothing of the death of an old. There would be
nothing of which we should need to be unclothed in
order to be clothed upon.
But if our constitution, while it calls for a change
from one stage into another — "first the natural and
then the spiritual" — calls for no death from one
into the other, our condition does. The natural, or
fleshly, nature in us — not as either natural or fleshly

THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST. 317
in the essential sense of the words, but as so in the
actual sense which the fact of the Fall has given to
them — has in every man to be denied, to be sub
dued, to be destroyed, in order to a true spiritual,
moral, and real life in us. " The flesh must die in
order to the life of the spirit."
Let us see, now, what we may learn in a prepara
tory way from the Jewish sin offering. The animal
offered represented the offerer ; its death represented
the death of the offerer; and it was a death wepl
dp,apTia<> — i.e. having special reference to the fact of
sin. This reference has in the nature of the case a
twofold aspect. In one aspect the death irepl dpap-
Tia? is a death for, or in consequence of, sin, and in
another aspect it is a death from sin. That in us
which sins, or would sin, which is the seat and source of
the possibility of sin and of all impulse and temptation
to sin, must die for or because of sin, before that in
us which is to be saved can die (as our Lord died) to
or from sin. The former is the sinful nature, or the
nature as sinful. It is the old man in us, the old hus
band in union with whom we bring forth only sin,
and will continue to do so as long as he lives or we
live in him. It is the flesh of sin, in reference to
which the position of the New Testament is, that it
is impossible to separate' sin from our flesh, and that
Salvation requires the separation from us of the
whole flesh of sin. The cross is the only effectual
and complete circumcision. On the other hand, that
in us which is to be saved by dying to, and from, sin
is the we, not of our carnal nature, but of our spirit
ual and moral personality, that of which St. Paul

318 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
says : The sin I do /know not, /allow not, / do not.
It is not I that do it, but sin dwelling in my flesh. I
consequently am emancipated, and live only by the
death of the flesh in me, which death is my death in
it for sin, but in myself from sin or to sin.
In this death there is both a passive and an active
element. Inasmuch as I am identified with my fallen
nature, or flesh, as I am in it and suffer all that befalls
it, the death represented by the Jewish sin offering is
on my part a passive death for sin. I suffer in it the
consequences of sin. St. Paul teaches no exemption
from the universal law that death follows sin for every
child of Adam. Christ has purchased for us no ex
emption from this law. The ground of our justifica
tion, as of our sanctification, is that in Christ we
have died and shall die for our sins. He alone who
has died is either judicially justified, or actually freed
from sin. And if there were not a real sense in
which we both did and shall die in Christ because of
and for sin, there would be for us no real justification
or sanctification. I have shown how these two are
identical in fact, and only differ in the point of
view ; that our death for sin in the flesh, which is our
death to and from sin in the spirit, viewed objectively,
and as accomplished for us in Christ, is our justifica
tion, and viewed subjectively as to be accomplished,
or as being accomplished, in us in Christ, is our sanc
tification. Viewed, then, I repeat, as identified with,
or being in, our flesh, the death for sin is passive, or
inflicted upon us. That in us which is sinful, or
which in us will be sin, must die ; in that in us in
which we are sinful, or will be if it lives in us, we

THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST. 319
must die. If we are now justified, or treated and
viewed as though we were not sinners, it is because
we are viewed and treated as having in Christ died
in that old man in whom we were or would be sin
ners. If in any degree we are now sanctified, it is
because in that degree we have in Christ actually
died in the old man, or nature of sin, and are living
in the new man, or personal spirit of holiness and
life. But if we are, on the other hand, viewed as iden
tified not with our flesh, but with that real self
hood or spirit which in every man is akin to God,
and never consents to the flesh of sin, but protests
against it and longs for deliverance' from it and for
the liberty of the children of God, then the death
irepl dpaprias is active rather than passive. That is,
it is death which is not so much suffered by us as
inflicted upon ourselves. It is not our being cruci
fied in the flesh, but rather ourselves gladly and joy
fully crucifying the flesh with all in it that lusts or
wars against the spirit.
Applying the irepl dp,apTia<; in both these aspects
to Jesus Christ, we see both a difference and an
identity in that which took place in Him and which
takes place in us. When it is said (Heb. 4 : 15)
that our great High Priest was tempted in all points
like us, %to/3t? dpapTias, in this "without sin" we
may distinguish two points of difference in Him
from us. First, though tempted like us He did
not sin. Whatever possibility of sin or temptation
to sin there was in His flesh or in His environment,
He was sinless. But, secondly, in one respect He was

320 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
not tempted like us; there was a difference in the
temptation itself, as well as in His conduct under it.
A very large part of our temptation comes not from
our flesh merely, which is without ourselves, but from
ourselves, or from our own previous yielding to the
flesh. After we have ourselves once sinned, though
it be only in thought or will, that which was before
only without us, and which if kept out would not
have been ours, has become our sin. And the temp
tation which would have been in itself sinless if it
had proceeded only from our nature, or from the
effect upon our nature of the sin of others, now that
it proceeds in part from our sin is no longer so. Our
Lord was sinless not only under temptation, but in
the fact of the temptation itself, because no part of
it came from Himself. Whatever of it came not
from mere outward situation, but from His flesh and
from that do-0eveia or weakness of the flesh with
which He like us was girt (Heb. 5:2 and 4:15),
was the effect not of His own, but of Adam's sin,
and was a part of that burden which He took upon
Himself that He might remove it from us. There
was no sin of His own which appealed to Him in the
way- of temptation, there was no sin of His own
which had to be crucified in Him, or which He had
to crucify in Himself. Nevertheless, there was that
in Him — not in Himself, but in His flesh — which,
for sin and because of sin not His own, had to die
passively, and which actively He had to put to death.
He took, and therefore had to bear, our sins in their
consequences in His flesh and in their assault upon
Him through His flesh. The simple fact that our

THE SACRIFICES OE JESUS CHRIST. 321
Lord in His flesh was subject to the natural death of
men who are fallen was a passive endurance on His
part of a consequence of our sin. It was a part of
that sin and that curse for sin which " He was made
for us " by the simple fact of entering into our nature
as it was.
But the fact of subjection to natural or physical
death was but a part, and the least part, of His
taking our sin and bearing our curse. All that
He suffered passively in His flesh, and all that He
achieved actively in His personal and spiritual con
quest of the flesh, was the undoing and throwing off
of that flesh of sin and sin in the flesh which He
took for the purpose of condemning and destroying.
The so-called passive obedience of our Lord was His
voluntary endurance of the sin of the world, the
curse of the law, and the wrath of God, laid upon
Him not merely by imputation, but in fact, through
His entrance into, and life and death in, our flesh.
In that flesh He took and bore in a real sense its
sin, its curse, and its penalty.
He took its sin not of course, personally or in the
sense that He Himself in any wise came under it or
was sinful, but in the sense that in order to be sinless
He had to subdue, crucify, and destroy it in His
flesh or assumed nature. And this is what is meant
by His having in the flesh of sin condemned sin in
the flesh ; by His being d dyid&v, the Sanctifier —
or maker holy from unholy — of the humanity which
He took to Himself; as in Eph. 5 the husband is
described as being the sanctifier of the wife.
He took its curse in that, "made of a woman,"

322 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
He was " made under the law " ; that in His person
our old man, or flesh of sin, came under the con
demnation, sentence, and execution of the law —
was crucified. The old man is the representative in
us not only of sinful, but of dead works. What
Christ died in and put off was not in His case an
old man of actual sins, but an inherited nature,
which had to be died in and put off in order not
to sin. It was an old nature, in which one is im
potent for holiness, righteousness, and life, and there
fore (unless, as by Him, it is thrown off) under
the dominion of sin, disobedience, and death. The
law applied to one in the flesh only makes upon him
impossible demands, convicts and convinces him of
sin, and is the minister to him of condemnation and
death. Now I say that Jesus Christ, as in the flesh,
was under its curse. In it He bore the curse inherent
in it, and He did so in the fact of the necessity of
its crucifixion in His person.
Among the elements enumerated in Heb. 6 : 1 as
the first principles of Christ and of Christianity,
the very first is repentance, not from sinful, but
from dead works. What our Lord put off was, as
I have said, not sins which He had Himself com
mitted, but a nature impotent or dead for holiness,
and in which He could only not sin by putting it
off. And what we put off and are saved from in
Him is not our sins (or the guilt or punishment
of them) in so far as they are past, but only in so
far as they are still present in us as a sinful na
ture or condition, and stand between us and God,
i.e. between us and a community of nature and

THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST. 323
a real union and communion of person with God.
What we put off and are saved from, I say, in Christ
is not our sins, but our nature of sin, the old man in
whom we have sinned and will continue to sin as
long as we are in him. Jesus Christ was the death
of the old man in Himself and in us. " Our old man
was crucified with Him." " I by the law died to the
law. I am crucified with Christ."
If the gist of Salvation by Christ consisted in His
bearing the guilt of past sins, this could be laid upon
Him only by imputation ; He could have died for us
only vicariously, substitutionarily, or representatively.
If it consisted in His breaking the power and abolish
ing the fact of present sin, He did and does this by
being in Himself and in us the power of God unto
sinlessness and holiness, and His death is not a death
instead of ours, but is in a very real sense our death.
It is our death passively in, and actively from, all
that in us from which we need to be saved; our death
in the flesh of sin and from the flesh of sin.
Our sin offering represents us, and His death means
our death, and there is an efficacy in His sacrifice which
the Jewish sacrifice had not, in this fact : that where
as they could only represent and mean, He can be
what He represents and His death can effect what it
means. The very peculiarity of Christ's baptism is
that it is not only with water but with spirit, not only
in sign but in power, that it effects and is all that it
signifies or means. Even the Quaker, who denies
the use of water baptism, believes in the reality of
spirit baptism ; and surely no Christian of any name
can deny that the Christianity of Christ claims to be

324 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and is a baptism from above with and into the spirit
and power and reality of all that Jesus Christ Him
self is. To be baptized, then, by Him and into Him,
to be taken by Him into the fellowship of His death
and resurrection, not only means but -is our death in
the flesh and our life in the spirit, our death to sin
and our life to God.
But there is a true sense in which Christ died
for the guilt of all past sin: inasmuch, i.e. as all
death is not only the natural but the "judicial and
penal consequence of all the spiritual, moral, and
natural transgression which has made it necessary or
produced it. In this sense, all the sin of the world,
all the curse of the law, and all the wrath of God
was visited upon Him : that He had to crucify, and
be crucified in, a nature which was made what it was
in Him by the sin of the world, and in which He
could only be sinless and be saved by its condemna
tion and destruction. Viewed thus as in our flesh
and as crucified in it; as undergoing the condem
nation, the curse, and the death of it; as endur
ing in His human person all that it was neces
sary for the flesh to suffer in order to the freedom
and life of the spirit and the Salvation of humanity,
— our Lord must be said to have rendered to God
a perfect passive obedience. He suffered all that
every man must suffer in order to be saved — that
is, a perfect death in the flesh. But it was only as
viewed in His flesh that our Lord can be said to have
passively endured or suffered the death of the cross.
In Himself — in His spirit or human personality —
the cross was an act of the intensest and most perfect

THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST. 325
active obedience. It was not a mere being crucified,
but a self-crucifixion in the highest and most real
sense. All that the flesh endured the spirit in Him
inflicted; it was actively His life in the spirit which
was in itself passively His death in the flesh. It is
utterly impossible to separate our Lord's active and
His passive obedience. Every breath, or movement,
or activity of life in the spirit is negatively just so
much death in the flesh, and there is no possible
passive death in the flesh except in active life in the
spirit. There was no condemnation or penalty in
flicted by God upon Jesus Christ which was not
inflicted by Himself upon Himself. If we are saved
by what He suffered in the death in Him of our flesh,
then, not equally only, but identically, we are saved
by what He did in the victory, emancipation, and
resurrection of our spirit in Him. In the nature of
the thing, in our Lord or in ourselves, there is no
death of the flesh but in life of the spirit, and no
life of the spirit but in death of the flesh.
But Salvation is not only by the grace but by the
providence of God. God saves us not only by what
He does in us, but by what He does to us ; and we are
saved not only by what we do, but by what we suffer.
Our Lord Himself was perfected in holiness, right
eousness, and life, i.e. in faith, obedience, and all the
activities of His personal, spiritual, manhood, Bid
ira0npdTcov, d(p' <uv eira0ev, by the external experi
ences, trials, and sufferings of His life on earth.
His sufferings would never alone, without Himself
and the grace of God in Him, have sanctified Him,
but neither, humanly speaking, could He have sancti-

326 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
fied Himself or been sanctified without them. Tak
ing the extreme irdBvpa of the cross, it was only in
the divine infliction upon Him that He could have
inflicted upon Himself that condemnation and death
of sin in the flesh, which, as it was the extremest
point of His passive, so was it the supremest act of
His active obedience.
So all of religious truth that was, not contained,
because it could not contain it all, but that was
prefigured and pointed to by the Jewish sin offering,
was realized in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ irepl
dpapTias. In His flesh He died for and because of
sin ; He died in all that which the entrance and the
prevalence of sin in the world rendered necessary
should die in us, in that which must die in every man
in order to holiness, righteousness, and life. He died
in it passively in that it is in itself and by nature
under condemnation and subject to death ; and, more
over, in that God by His external dealings with us
Himself inflicts, as by His grace within He helps
and enables us to inflict, suffering and death upon
the flesh. He died in it actively in that He Himself
in His human personality was never merely the cruci
fied in, but always also the crucifier of, the flesh.
His death in the flesh was His death to sin and from
sin ; it was an obedience on His part unto death and
by means of death.
And the life and death of Jesus Christ contained
in it the truth of not only this, but all the sacrifices
and offerings of the Jewish law.
He was the perfect sin offering in that His death,
by which I mean not only His physical death, but

THE SACRIFICES OF JESUS CHRIST. 327
the whole death of His active and passive obedience,
combined and concentrated in itself all the elements
of a death irepl apapTias — the death of the flesh for
sin and of the spirit from sin.
He was the perfect burnt offering in that His life
and death was one act, of perfect self-consecration,
devotion, and service. He laid Himself wholly upon
the altar of obedience to God, and was wholly con- ,
sumed in accomplishing His Father's will.
He was the perfect peace offering, because in Him
was realized a perfect human oneness — of spirit,
nature, and life — a perfect spiritual union and com
munion, with God.
And our Lord was not only these three, but the
three in this order. It was only through His perfect
self-sacrifice, or crucifixion of the flesh, that He was
perfect righteousness or obedience, and perfect holi
ness or spiritual oneness with God.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SECOND.
OF JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST.
The ideas and figures of the Old Testament have
their antitypes and fulfilment in the New. It is
sometimes the desire and design of the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews to identify and sometimes
to distinguish the Old and the New; sometimes, e.g.
to prove that Jesus Christ was the true sacrifice or
the true High Priest, and sometimes to show that
He was something higher and absolute, which high
priesthood and sacrifice only imperfectly symbolized
or typified. The former, the identification of the
truths or facts of the New Testament with the ideas
and signs of the Old, was necessary for manifest rea
sons in one whose immediate purpose it was to lead
the Jews on from the old into the new religion. It
is helpful to us still and will always have its use ;
but with our knowledge now of the person and work
of Jesus Christ, it is these which throw light upon
the figures rather than the figures upon these. The
truth is more and greater than its shadows, and we
should not be satisfied to interpret and express it
only in the inadequate terms of them.
What is contained in the notion or figure that

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 329
Jesus Christ is our great High Priest? I wish to
answer this question in terms more literal and defi
nite than the mere repetition of the figure itself, i.e.
to translate the figure into the facts which it strove
to express.
The High Priest of humanity is, then, first, He
who embodies the true and perfect concept or notion
or truth of humanity; who interprets or reveals
humanity to itself, or represents and expresses it to
others. In this sense it is identical with the title
which our Lord so commonly applied to Himself, Son
of Man ; by which He designated Himself (Thayer's
Lexicon, under utd?) as " the head of the human race,
the man «ar' i^o^v, the one who both furnished the
pattern of the perfect man and acted in behalf of all
mankind." Secondly, and more specifically, the High Priest
represented humanity in its relations to God (virep
dv0pa)ira>v KaOiaTaTai Ta irpbs tov deov) i.e. as com
ing and as come into the perfection of its predestined
relation to God ; as man in whom God has fulfilled
Himself and who consequently has fulfilled himself
in God, through and in a perfect faith, obedience,
and life. In this sense the High Priest is He in
whom humanity has become "Son of God." Thus
in Heb. 5 : 5 our Lord is said to have been glorified
and consecrated by God to be High Priest in the
words, " Thou art my Son. This day have I begotten
Thee." This day meaning the day of His resurrec
tion, and the sonship consummated on that day being
the perfected relation into which humanity was
brought to God in the human person of Jesus Christ,

330 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and by the completion of the act of at-one-ment.
'Apxiepevs is related to 'Ttd? as we have previously
seen Adyo? to be. Ao'yo? is the divine concept or
truth of man as eternally pre-existing in the mind of
God in the personal Logos. 'Ap%iepev<; is man as
he has in Jesus Christ realized the to, tov deov, all
his divine relations. But both these terms in them
selves lack a content. They do not tell us what was
the eternal thought and predestination of man in the
Divine Mind, nor what are the relations to God in
the fulfilment of which in Jesus Christ he has
realized the divine idea and his own meaning and
destination. The term Ttd? ®eov supplies this con
tent. The Logos is incarnated and the High Priest
enters into the divine presence in the fact of the
perfected sonship of man, i.e. in the fact that Jesus
Christ by His own perfect human holiness, obedience,
and life has brought humanity into a spiritual, moral,
and natural oneness with God ; that God has repro
duced His spirit, His nature, Himself, in man, and
man by such birth from above has been made Son of
God. The High Priest is thus Himself, first of all,
Son of Man and Son of God, and secondly, He is the
way or the entrance for humanity into all that He
Himself is.
But, thirdly, we have seen how for humanity there
can be but one way, or entrance, into any real rela
tion with God. It is no arbitrary or meaningless
condition that the High Priest can enter into the
Holy of Holies only through the rent veil of His
flesh, and bringing with Him the blood of His perfect
self-sacrifice. It thus becomes the most prominent, if

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 331
not the most essential, function of the high priest
hood " to offer sacrifice." But, in fact, this is an
accidental and not the essential function of the High
Priest. It is but a condition or means to the real
end, which is first to represent and secondly to bring
man to God. And even if man were unfallen he
would still have to be brought to God, through the
becoming himself and the fulfilling of all his per
sonal relations to God. There is no reason to doubt
that he would still have needed the objectively in
carnated High Priest of his profession who as Son
of Man and Son of God should realize first for or
to him and then in him his true epyov and destiny.
But in that case while there should have been still
an entrance into the Holy of Holies it would have
been without blood. There may have been in the
functions of the High Priest of an unfallen humanity
the truth of the burnt and the peace offering, but
even in these the element of sacrifice would scarcely
exist; and certainly the sin offering would not be
found at all. But, I repeat, in our actual condition,
the most accentuated and conspicuous function of a
high priesthood for us is sacrifice, and the sacrifice
of the sin offering. Our High Priest cannot enter
into the Holy of Holies, He cannot bring humanity
in His person to God, and represent it in the realiza
tion and perfection of all its divine relations, save
through His own rent flesh and with His own shed
blood. He must become our at-one-ment or bringing
into oneness with God, our redemption or being made
free from an actual bondage, our resurrection from
the dead, before He can be our holiness, our right-

332 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
eousness, and our life. In a word, He must be the
death of our flesh before He can be the life of our
spirit. Assuming now that we have correctly defined in
what objectively consisted the high priesthood of Jesus
Christ, the more difficult question remains of the
how of our own subjective relation to it. We are not
saved by anything that our Lord Himself was or did
merely through our belief in it as an objective fact.
His death, e.g. or His resurrection cannot possibly
otherwise avail us than by in some way becoming
and actually being our own death and resurrection.
It is only as we can and shall ourselves live it that
His life can be of any use to us. An objective Sal
vation is only a Salvation at all as it is capable of
being, and is to be, subjectively realized. The es
sence of faith in Christ is the assurance that "we
are partakers with Him and of Him if we hold fast
the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the
end" (Heb. 3:14).
I have tried to bring out this truth by showing
how in the New Testament Jesus Christ is in every
sense our Salvation not merely exemplarily, nor
merely causally, but personally and really. That
is, He Himself personally in us is Himself our Sal
vation. It is in accordance with this that the ele
ment of sympathy is made so much of in the char
acter of the High Priest. In the first place, the
High Priest must have been all that we are; and
experienced and suffered all that we must suffer;
and done and become all, and in the same way and
by the same means, that we are to do and become.

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 333
But in the second place, this o-vpiradelv of our High
Priest not only was a past, but is a present fact. It
consists not merely in the identity of what He was
and suffered and accomplished when on earth with
what we are, suffer, and are to accomplish, but in the
identity of Him with us and us with Him in what
He was, suffered, and did then, and what we suffer,
do, and are now. His sufferings were ours, and ours
are His, because of His power to enter into us and
our experiences, and to impart to us the power to
enter into Him and His experiences. Thus He
makes His death ours and His life ours, and wholly
re-enacts in us what He enacted first in Himself.
It has been said that " St. Paul's most distinctive
doctrines are merely expositions of the meaning of two
great facts, the death of Christ and the mission of
the Spirit by the glorified Redeemer." In what real
sense is our Lord the Baptizer with the Holy Ghost
if not in this — that by His spiritual presence in
us He imparts to us the power and the reality of
His own death and resurrection? No one can read
St. Paul, St. Peter, or St. John without feeling how
much, not what Jesus Christ did is our objective
Salvation, but Jesus Christ Himself is our subjective
Salvation. All that we are in the new life into which
we are born by His baptism is no longer we, but He,
the risen, living, personal Christ in us. " / live no
longer, Christ lives in me " (Gal. 2 : 20).
There are here two opposite misinterpretations to
be avoided. The first is that of supposing that Christ
is in us merely by influence, or effect, or resemblance
in us to what He was, instead of being Himself in us

334 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
in the ever present power and fact of His death and
resurrection. Which is what is meant by the re
peated statement that the saving acts of our Lord
were all once for all, i.e. operated once, but operating
always, once in Him, forever in us. So that His
death is a continuous dying, and His resurrection a
continuous rising on our part throughout all time.
The other misapprehension is that of so conceiving
St. Paul's " not I, but Christ in me " as to practically
do away with our own personality. In one sense
our personality is lost in His ; in another sense it is
only truly found in Him. Of course, we can con
ceive a mere merging of ourselves into Him which
would be an annihilation of all selfhood of our own.
But a rational, free, and personal being has always
imposed upon him the task of becoming what is at
once another than himself, and yet, in the truest
sense, himself ; that is, what he must become in order
to be himself. Jesus Christ is to every man just that
other than himself whom it is necessary for him to be
come in order to realize his selfhood, or become him
self. There is no higher act of ourselves, or exercise
of our personality, than in becoming and being no
longer ourselves, but Christ ; for Christ is the truth
and the fulfilment of every man. And this fulfilment
of Christ in us, and of us in Him, so far from involv
ing any loss of His personality in ours or ours in
Him, is the result of the union of us with Him as
distinct persons. It is the result of a crvpiradeiv, in
which all that He suffered is made ours, and all that
we suffer is His.
What has been said may be restated a little more

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 335
exactly, as follows : The high priesthood of Jesus
Christ consists in His being, in His humanity, 1st,
Son of Man, i.e. essential manhood ; 2d, Son of God,
i.e. man in the fulfilment and perfection of his divine
relations, or of the self-realization of God in him ; and
3d, as a condition of the above, or "the way" into
Sonship, the perfect sacrifice, the death in us of all, and
the death of us to all, that separates human life from
God. The function or exercise of the high priesthood
is, 1st, to Godward, and 2d, to manward. To God He
represents man, and is man, in all that constitutes for
him a real coming, or being brought, to God. In Him
every man has, potentially as well as representatively,
come to God. That is, every man has in Him died to
all separation from, and is made alive in all oneness
with, God. But that He should be all this to God
depends upon His ability to be what, on the other
hand, He is to man. Unless He is able to be in every
man what He is in Himself, how can He in that
represent and be surety to God for every man ? His
function, then, to manward, is to become to every man
— objectively to his faith, and subjectively through his
faith — his, the man's, death, resurrection, and eternal
life. But Christ's thus becoming, as it were, every
man, is not at the loss of his own personality in the
man's, or of the man's in Him. The unity is not at
the cost of the duality, or of the distinction. It is
not so in any real personal union. The ideal of the
union of husband and wife is not that one should
become a nonentity ; but that both should retain their
personalities in a perfectly free union of minds, wills,

336 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and lives. Individuality may be lost, but personality
is heightened by such a union; and it cannot be
heightened otherwise than by union and communion
with other personalities. Aristotle already shows
how, in true friendship, — of which true marriage is
the highest earthly form, and our union with Christ
is the highest heavenly realization, — the end and
effect is to more than double the personal life of each,
since each lives in, and is lived in by, the other.
So Christianity is not merely Christ's becoming us,
or we Him, but it is a personal relation between Him
and us, as separate persons, by which He impresses
Himself upon, and imparts Himself to, us, through
the mutual love, the union and communion, of Him
and us. And so it is that the Epistle to the Hebrews
makes so much of our Lord's High Priestly function
to usward to consist in the exercise of His divine-
human sympathy. He is our High Priest not only in
what He represents and is to God for us ; as our
accomplished atonement, redemption, and life; in
the fact that He has, in His own human person,
opened the way into the Holy of Holies with His
blood, and is present with God for us, as surety for
our appearance through Him and with Him. But
He is so in the sense that He is also Himself per
sonally present with us, infinitely nearer than though
He were still present in the flesh, by a perfect sym
pathy to be Himself in all our deaths and resurrec
tions, even as by the grace of God we were in His,
and to impart to us the grace of His.
It is only as He is outside and beside us, that He
is truly in us. Just as in a yet larger truth, it is

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 337
only a transcendent God, a God who is other to us,
and not a merely immanent God, a God who is identi
cal with us, who can be one with us in all the fulness
of a spiritual and moral, as well as a natural, oneness.
Such a oneness can only be where there is a distinc
tion of persons.
In accepting Jesus Christ, then, as our High Priest,
we perform the following acts : In the first place, we
recognize in Him the revelation to us of ourselves,
but of ourselves not as we are, but as we shall be
when we have truly become ourselves. In the sec
ond place, and as the condition of the above, we
see in Him all our relations with God realized and
fulfilled in a perfect holiness, righteousness, and
divine-human life. In the third place, and again
as a condition of the preceding, we accept the full
meaning and results of what is called the perfect
sacrifice of our Lord upon the cross. By which we
mean that He as man was crucified in, and Himself
crucified, all that which in man separates him from
God, or stands in the way of the perfect living of
God in him, and of him in God. Finally, we recog
nize and accept in Jesus Christ, not only one who
was and did all the above as an individual man, but
who is able to become the personal manhood of every
man. To each one of us, and into each one of us,
He personally brings the full meaning, spirit, power,
and realization of all that He has Himself done and
become. In each of us He re-enacts His whole
incarnation, saving work, and heavenly exaltation.
He so identifies Himself with us, and us with Him
self, that, in His grace and our answering faith, all
z

338 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
that is true of Him is true of us. In Him we are
dead, risen, ascended, completed, blessed with all
spiritual blessings in the heavenly places. Objec
tively, all this is true of us already ; as subjectively
it shall be all true in us.
These facts of every distinctively Christian con
sciousness appear under different representations in
all the epistles of the New Testament. In the Epis
tle to the Hebrews they are expressed under the fig
ures of the Old Testament High Priesthood and
Sacrifice. Let us run rapidly over the argument of
the epistle.
To begin with (Heb. 1 : 2), the Son in whom God
in the final dispensation has revealed Himself is He
in whom the Kosmos and the Church are to attain
their destination. Just as Adam was the heir (xXvpo-
vopo?) of the natural order, so Christ is that of the
spiritual and moral order, in which also the natural
is to be taken up and completed. In this connection
(ch. 2 : 10) the intimation is given that TeXetWt? will
involve diroXvTpcoo-i<s ; human completion can take
place only through human redemption. It is neces
sary that God in bringing many sons to glory shall
perfect (TeXetwcrai) the captain of their Salvation
through sufferings. The necessity lies in the fact
that human perfection and completion can only be
accomplished through suffering ; i.e. through the defi
nite suffering of that irddeiv aapKi (suffering or dying
in the flesh), which, according to St. Peter, is the con
dition of all human freedom from sin.
The work of Christ is, then (chs. 3 and 4), de
scribed under the figure of a second and greater

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 339
Joshua (ch. 4 : 8), bringing His people into their rest.
The lesson deduced here is that of faith, through
failure of which the temporal Israel failed of its rest
in the promised land, and by means of which alone
we shall enter into the true rest, the promise of
which still remains. " We are partakers of and with
Christ, we share the victory and rest into which He
has entered, if we hold fast the beginning of our
confidence steadfast unto the end." That is, Jesus
Christ as man has attained, represents, and is the
spiritual, moral, and natural end or destination, the
rest, of humanity. In faith we have attained it in
Him, and through faith we shall attain it in Him.
From this figure the epistle passes on (in chs. 5-10)
to that which is distinctively its theme ; viz. Salva
tion described under the symbolism of the Tabernacle
Worship, High Priesthood, and Sacrifice. The great
question of all religion and worship is relation to
God. The Tabernacle symbolized both the fact of
separation from God or sin, and the opening of access
to God through atonement. The irpotTn ctkwvij, or
front Tabernacle, in which the daily or ordinary wor
ship was performed, represented that relative and
possible service which the people were able to offer,
and which God temporarily accepted. The Bevrepa
o-Knviy — inner Tabernacle, or Holy of Holies — which
remained always impenetrably veiled, even the annual
entrance into which, by the High Priest, only served
to emphasize the fact that the way into it was not
yet opened, represented the absolute and as yet im
possible service (the perfect relation to God), for
which God was preparing His people and which, in

340 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
the very nature of things, it was alone possible for
Him finally and permanently to accept. There can
be no real and effectual religion which does not pro
vide an effectual, real, and complete putting away of
sin, or separation, and a consequent and equally real
bringing into oneness with God, or atonement. All
religion means this, and the divine and absolute relig
ion must effect and be this. The time of the irpwrn
o-kwvi], and of its provisional and temporary worship
and service, God put up with, not because it was
acceptable and satisfactory in itself, but merely as a
stage of preparation and training for that which
should be so. It was, in fact, a temporary compro
mise on God's part, an accommodation to the igno
rance and weakness of those who were not ready to
receive anything more or better. The compromise
consisted in the fact that on God's side it was a mere
forbearance, or dvo%rj, a putting up with what was not
yet ready to be removed ; and for man it was a irdpe-
o-is, or passing over, and not a real a<pecri<;, or putting
away, of his sin (Rom. 3 : 25, etc.). The very Old
Testament expression of covering up sin, putting it
only out of sight and not out of existence, is a part
of a covenant of compromise and accommodation.
Such an incomplete and imperfect BiKaioavvn deov
needed explanation and justification, and it found this
only in the bringing in of the complete and perfect
BiKaioavvn ®eov of the gospel in which God appears
at last as absolutely 6 St/eato? Kal 6 BiKaiav ; that is,
not only as perfectly righteous Himself, but as the
perfect righteousness of man, the effectual taker away
of sin and conferrer of holiness, righteousness, and life.

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 341
Throughout the time, then, of the irpd>Tn aKvvij,
the veil remains before the Holy of Holies. The en
trance through it of the High Priest once a year only
accentuates the fact that it is still unremoved, and
symbolizes the act by which alone it should be re
moved. What that act was to be was taught as plainly
as signs could teach it. The High Priest could enter
only with blood. Only through death can man come to
God ; there is no covenant between Him and us save
that which is contracted iirl veKpok, over our dead
selves (Heb. 9 : 16 and 17 ; Ps. 50 : 5). All that is to
be done by us in the way of sacrifice as the condi
tion of access to and into God ; all that is involved
in a perfect death for and to sin, and the consequent
removal of the only separation between us and God,
has been accomplished by our great High Priest. He
represents man, therefore, as perfected in all his rela
tions with God. He is the author and finisher of our
faith ; He is an anchor to us within the veil ; He is
our forerunner into the presence and favor and fel
lowship of God ; and the way by which He entered
He has opened and consecrated for us.
But the function of the High Priest is not finished
and closed with the fact of His having Himself
opened the way, and entered into the Holy of Holies.
Having fulfilled all the conditions of becoming our
High Priest, by His perfect humanity, His perfect
temptation, His perfect sacrifice, and His perfect en
trance, He now ever liveth to discharge the functions
of His high priesthood. These are, as has been said,
in part to Godward and in part to usward. To God
He presents in Himself — in what He has done and

342 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
is, and in what He is able to be to us — a basis, a suf
ficient basis, and the only possible basis, for an abso
lute and final covenant relation between God and
man. For He is able to be to God our all-sufficient
security for all that is needed for such a covenant
relation — our death to sin and self, and our life to"
Him. In the covenant based upon Him there is no
compromise with, or accommodation to, any imper
fection or shortcoming on our part. Any such com
promise or accommodation is impossible alike for
God and for us ; for as He can demand nothing less,
so can we be saved with nothing less, than the per
fect removal of all separation from, and the consum
mation of a perfect and real union and oneness with,
Him. And as He ever lives to God for us, so He ever
lives to us from God. It is not the abstract truth or
the impersonal spirit of a dead or an absent Saviour
with which we have to do. His truth to us and His
spirit in us is always His living and present Self.
God is never abstract, impersonal, or absent. The
righteousness of God in us, or the life of God in us,
is God Himself, our righteousness and our life. In
Christ, God Himself personally stands at the door of
our minds, our hearts, our wills, and our lives, and
knocks for entrance into us and oneness with us.
The Word, by the Holy Ghost, seeks to incarnate
Himself personally in our own personal holiness,
righteousness, and life ; not to displace us by Himself,
but to take us into a perfect personal union with
Himself, that we may be in Him and He in us. A
man may impress his truth upon another and impart

JESUS CHRIST AS OUR HIGH PRIEST. 343
his spirit to another, and our Lord brings to bear
upon us the full force of natural example and of
spiritual influence. But we fall infinitely short of a
true conception of all that He is if we make His ex
ample only the memory and the image to us of what
He was, and His influence a mere natural enthusiasm
of emulation and imitation, instead of realizing that
He Himself, personally present with each of us, seeks
to become in each all that as man He is in Himself.
As to God, so to every man, He is — in what He is
Himself, and in what He is able to be in us — suffi-
cient security for, and absolute assurance of, his own
divine Salvation and eternal life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THIRD.
OF SALVATION IN THE CHURCH.
What strikes one most in the New Testament is
the entire good faith with which it holds and pro
claims its gospel of Salvation. Jesus Christ there is
no mere symbol of Salvation, but a most real, effectual,
and actual Salvation to every one who believes. He
not only Himself died, but is able to impart to others
the power and the fact of His death; He not only
lives, but He is able to take us into the fellowship
and reality of His own risen life. This power over
all flesh to give life to as many as will receive Him,
He embodied in the sacrament of baptism. Baptism
is the expression of two facts. 1st, the power of
Jesus Christ to take us up into the element of His
own divine-human life; and 2d, the effect of this
union with Him in the death in us of what we call
the flesh, and the life in us of what we call the spirit.
This power is the one point of all John the Baptist's
testimony to Jesus. He was to be the baptizer with
the Holy Ghost; i.e. not only with the sign, but with
the power and the reality of all that baptism signifies.
What baptism signifies is participation in the death
and in the life of Jesus Christ. And in the New

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 345
Testament, baptism is just as little a mere symbol as
Jesus Christ Himself is. As Christ is not an idea
but a fact; God realized in man, and man in God;
man dead to self and sin, and alive to God ; so bap
tism is actually all that it signifies, — Christ in the
individual man, and the man in Christ ; and in Christ
dead to sin, and alive to God. The same might be
said of all the essential ordinances of the Church;
but it will be sufficient to illustrate the fact by this
one, and easy to apply it to the others when we have
done so. If this power of Christ in the Church is no
longer a fact, may it not be because we no longer
discern it ?
Passing by, for the present, our Lord's own insti
tution of baptism into the Trinity as the avowed
expression and exercise of His saving and life-giving
power, — " All power is given Me in heaven and in
earth. Go ye, therefore, and . . . baptize ; and lo, I
am with you to the end of the world," — I will, by
two or three passages only, out of many, illustrate
the place assigned to it without question in the New
Testament. To the very first question ever asked in the his
tory of the Christian Church as to the way of Salva
tion through Christ, St. Peter replied, " Repent, and
be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus
Christ, unto, or for, the remission of your sins, and
ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." Bap
tism gives effect to repentance; it is God in Christ
putting away the sin which the man in himself de
sires, but is impotent, to put away. To say, " Repent
and be baptized," is equivalent to saying, "Desire to

346 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
be free from sin and come to God in Christ, to find
the only possible freedom from it." Into the word
peTavorjaaTe, which we translate "repent," if we
make it include effectual repentance, or repentance
completed by baptism with the spirit and power of
Christ, it is quite possible and proper to read the
whole of the spiritual and moral change, or new
creation, which Jesus Christ Himself is, and which
baptism in its completeness not only means but is
in us. The mental and moral after-mind, or new
mind, which evidences the death of the old man and
the life of the new, this the baptism of John could
indeed mean, and express the need and necessity for;
but it could not be or effect it. This difference be
tween a mere sign and the reality of the thing signi
fied is just that which John the Baptist sees between
his own baptism and that of Jesus. " I baptize you
with water, with the symbol only; but He shall
baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and therefore with
the realization in you of the thing symbolized." The
symbol by itself signified all the truth of the death
and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. With the Holy
Ghost it not only signifies, but it is, always potentid,
and wherever and just so far as it is realized by faith,
actu, the death in us of that which died in Christ,
and the life in us of that which lives in Him.
The distinction between what might be called
Old and New Testament baptism might be extended
further. In the Old Testament sacrifice, e.g. there
was a' great deal meant which those sacrifices were
unable to be or to effect. Just because the sacrifice
could not be or effect what it meant, it was accepted

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 347
as though it were and did so. The offerer was
accepted as though with the victim he had died for
his sin, and so were himself dead to and from sin,
although in fact he was not so. So the Old Testa
ment notion of acceptance through another's death,
which is distinctly not one's own, but a substitute for
or instead of it, arose, and was right enough in its
place as an Old Testament notion. But when it is
brought forward into Christianity as a New Testa
ment truth, it is a direct contradiction of the very
distinction between the Old and the New Testaments.
The Old Testament sacrifice was a life instead of a
life, the life of the victim only signifying that of the
offerer, and accepted instead of it, just because of its
inability to be it. But because Jesus Christ is able
to become every man by taking every man up into
Himself, because as many of us as are baptized into
Christ do put on Christ ; that is, because He is able
as for Himself, so for every man, and in every man,
to be the actual and real death of his flesh and life
of his spirit, therefore the sacrifice of Jesus Christ
differs from those of the Old Testament just in this,
that it is not merely representative, or substitutionary,
or vicarious.
Now what I have called the reality, as distin
guished from the mere significance, of baptism, is a
truth necessary to supplement that of the real dis
tinction between our Lord's sacrifice and those of
the Old Testament. For the power of His death to
atone, to redeem, and to save depends upon just that
which is the truth of baptism; viz. the possibility
of such a real relation between Jesus Christ and our-

348 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
selves as that He can become we, and we He; His death
our death, and His life our life. And I say that in
the New Testament the truth that baptism consti
tutes such a real relation between Jesus Christ and
us, and between His death and resurrection and ours,
is as vital a part of our Salvation as that Jesus Christ
Himself was what He was, and suffered and did what
He did. To have arrested the saving act or process
of God in Christ at the moment, say, of His own
ascension, and before the ascended Lord had de
scended in His baptism with the Holy Ghost to
become our Salvation, would have been to interpose
between cause and effect, and frustrate the whole " Be
cause I live ye shall live also." Of what avail is it
to me that Jesus Christ has united Godhead and man
hood if He has not united God and me? That He
is the death of humanity to sin and its life to God
in His own person, if He is not my death and life ?
It is that I am in Him, and in Him potentially and
effectually dead to sin and alive to God; and that
His death and resurrection do not only represent
mine, but are mine ; which constitutes Him my Sav
iour and my Salvation. He is my Salvation in that
He is not only for me, but in me, that than which there
is no other salvation possible for me. He is my Saviour
in that Salvation is no impersonal or abstract thing
from God, but God Himself in me, the Eternal Divine
Logos in whose image I am, and who as my ideal self
realizes Himself in my actual self.
But to return to the words of St. Peter. When he
says, Be baptized each one of you in the name of
Jesus Christ, the full force of the baptism in or into

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 349
that name is not felt until we realize the reality
and completeness of the personal union and one
ness with Christ into which baptism is designed and
is effectual to bring us. A union so real and so
complete as to constitute a veritable regeneration,
or death in one nature and life and birth into
another. If men realized baptism as the New Tes
tament does ; if they felt that the act by which
Jesus Christ incarnates Himself in each man is as
truly a divine act as that by which the Eternal
Logos took flesh in Him (" As Thou Father in me
so I in them ") ; if indeed they regarded baptism as
but one act in the process of that Incarnation in
which the Eternal Word fulfils Himself not only in
the head, but in the whole body which is His irXijpcopa
or fulness, they would understand much better the
place which the New Testament assigns to baptism
and to the Church in the working of our Salvation.
" To be baptized into Christ " ; " to put on Christ
by baptism " ; " to be in Christ by baptism " ; being in
Christ to be all we are and do all we do "in His
name " ; i.e. in the full consciousness and realization
of our oneness with Him; in Him to put off in
thought and in act all that we were and put on all
that He is ; to be able in Him to do and to suffer all
things ; and to feel that God and all things are ours
— these and similar expressions in the New Testa
ment mean something. And to all of us they are just
so much of their meaning as we receive. To whom
they mean little, they are little ; to whom they mean
all that they are, they are all that they mean. " Be
lieve that you have, and you have." Not that the

350 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
merely believing causes us to have, but we really
have if only we will believe. There is no limit to
what we have in Christ but our own inability to be
lieve and receive.
So when St. Peter goes on to say, Be baptized
each one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for,
or unto, the remission of your sins, et? a<peaiv t5>v
dpapTimv vpmv, the force of the et? is complete and
final — unto the very end and consummation of the
whole meaning of peTavoia; to the complete put
ting away of the sin of the flesh because to the
putting off in Christ of the flesh of sin. The divine
a<peai<; in Jesus Christ includes indeed all such par
tial truths as pardon, forgiveness, present acceptance,
etc., but it means, and it is, the actual and the abso
lute putting away of all sin, and of all that belongs
to or is connected in any way with sin.
If one should think that this is taking baptism too
literally, let him for a moment consider how St. Paul
takes it. In Rom. 6 the objection is met that if we
make our Salvation in Christ so purely an act of
divine grace, there is nothing left for us to do; "let
us continue in sin that grace may abound." St. Paul's
reply covers two points. How can we continue in
sin if grace abounds, when grace can only abound in
our sinlessness, i.e. in our death to sin and life to
holiness ? It is evident that the Apostle has no other
conception of grace than the gift of God to us in
Christ, which is participation in His death and in
His life. Grace can be viewed as objectively exist
ing in Christ only as we see in Christ the potency
and foresee in Him the certainty of our becoming

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 351
what He is. To couple His grace, therefore, with
the possibility of our continuing in sin is a contra
diction of the meaning of grace. But in the second
place what I call special attention to in St. Paul's
reply is this : that the very meaning and reality of
grace in the Apostle's mind is involved in the truth
and reality of baptism. What makes Jesus Christ
in such sense potentially every man, and actually
every man who believes, that His death and resur
rection are those of every man, is the fact of baptism.
If there were no such word and no such rite in exist
ence the fact would still remain that unless Jesus
Christ can so take us into union with His person as
to make us actual participants in His death and resur
rection, His own death and resurrection would have
no saving significance or efficiency for us. This fact,
which is an essential and indispensable link in the
chain of saving grace, is in the New Testament not
only expressed by but inseparably associated and
identified with baptism. " Shall we continue in sin
that grace may abound ? " How can we ? " We who
died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Or
are ye ignorant of the fact that we have died to sin ;
that so many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into His death ? We were buried with
Him by baptism into death that as Christ was raised
from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also
should walk in newness of life." It is baptism by
which the Incarnation and all it includes is extended
to and made to include us. I say all that it includes,
for the Incarnation in our Lord Himself was com
pleted only in His ascension, when the Eternal Logos

352 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
was, through His perfect human faith, obedience, and
self-sacrifice, fully entered into and contained in His
perfected human personality. The Incarnation in
volved for its consummation in Him His death aapKi,
and resurrection irvevpan. And when He takes us
up by baptism and includes us in the still continuing
process of His self-incarnation, He takes us into the
fellowship of His still operative death and resurrec
tion. It makes no difference whether in this sixth chap
ter of Romans St. Paul means that we are already
in fact or as yet only in faith dead, etc., in Christ.
Faith is only anticipated fact, and fact is only real
ized faith. The truth of Jesus Christ is our actual
death and life in and with Him, whether we look
at it as accomplished in Him or as to be accom
plished in us ; whether as already appropriated by us
in present faith, or as to be realized in us in a future
consummation in fact. And let us remind ourselves
that in this chapter it is distinctly stated that as we
are to die Christ's death, so He died the death which
we must die in order to be saved. His death was a
death of our old man, or flesh of sin, and so a death
on His part to sin. With this sole difference, that the
old man whom He crucified was the result of all
other men's but not His own sinning, and so the sin
to which He died was not His own sin, and would
only have become His by His not dying to it.
It is not St. Paul alone who, in the epistles of the
New Testament, takes this view of the reality of
baptism and the relation in which it brings us to
Christ and His saving grace. St. Peter (1 Epistle

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 353
3 : 21) speaks of baptism as saving us, not by the
putting away of the filth of the flesh (not as though
it were mere water), but by its power to cleanse the
conscience or consciousness of guilt and sin, " by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ"; i.e. by bringing us
into union with Him who is dead and in whom we
are dead to these and alive from them.
And if St. John in his First Epistle does not men
tion the word baptism, the thing is none the less the
theme from beginning to end. That we are, in
Christ, born anew, and as such dead to sin and
alive in the fellowship of the divine life and nature,
is the subject of the epistle.
When one reflects upon the above, which I believe
truly to reflect the mind of the New Testament, the
only conclusion, it seems to me, which can combine
the entire teaching in one system of truth is the fol
lowing : The end and purpose of the Incarnation is
to be judged of only by taking it in its full sweep
and final consummation. It is the fulfilment of the
eternal divine mind, or Logos, in man, and in the
kosmos, with man as its head. What man in Adam
was to the natural creation, that man in Christ is, or
is to be, to the spiritual and moral creation. But
Adam was not one man, and Christ is not one man.
There must have been one man in whom the natural
order originated, and there must have been one man
in whom the spiritual order originated ; but, in their
several ways, both Adam and Christ are the whole
orders of which they are the respective heads. Adam
is the natural man, and his nature is reproduced and
reappears in every man born of him. Christ is the
. 2a

354 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
spiritual man, and His spirit is reproduced and reap
pears in every man who is born of Him. The dis
tinction is just as important as the resemblance or
analogy between the two. Adam is born, and is in
us, in our impersonal nature ; Christ is born, and is
in us, in our personal spirits. Adam is in us as an
impersonal fact ; Christ is in us only by a personal
act. It is only Adam's nature that is bom and is in
us ; it is Christ Himself who is born and is in us.
If the Divine Word thus incarnated Himself in
Jesus Christ as only the dpxfi, or beginning, of His
self-incarnation in man, or humanity, the Incarna
tion does not end, but only begins, in Jesus Christ
viewed as an individual. And so really it is rep
resented and intended in the New Testament. The
real epyov of our Lord seems but ready to begin
on that famous Pentecost when Christian baptism
began. All before that was but preparation ; the
life was preparing and perfecting itself, which was
now to begin to live in man. The result of this
self-preparation was expressed by our Lord when
He collected His apostles together to receive His
last instructions and witness His ascension : " All
power is given Me in heaven and upon earth " —
power to raise humanity up to God, power to impart
the risen humanity to men, power to give life to as
many as should be baptized into Him — " Go ye there
fore and baptize all nations." Carry the Divine Life
which I am, and bring all men into fellowship with
it. Make all men in Me partakers of the spirit, the
nature, the life of God. " And lo, / am with you
alway." Our Lord had no conception that His pres-

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 355
ence and His operation were to cease upon earth
in consequence of His absence in the flesh. On the
contrary, His presence, irvevpan, only began with His
absence, aapKi. St. Paul judges thus : That if one
died for all, then all died ; and He died for all that
all should be alive, no longer to themselves, but to
Him. So that we know no longer any one wcsto;
adpxa ; not Christ Himself, nor any one in Christ.
If any one is in Christ, he is Kaivr) OTt'o-t? ; he is, with
Christ, 0avaTco0el<; pev aapKi £a>oiroiw0el'i Be irvevpan.
The old things are passed away, and new things
have taken their place. St. Paul knows no longer
Christ KaTa adpKa, for Christ is Himself dead aapKi,
but he knows Him KaTa irvevpa, as not only Himself
alive in the spirit, but the life in the spirit of every
one in whom He lives, i.e. as irvevpa £cooiroiovv. Our
Lord had Himself said that the Father had given to
Him, as His specific epyov, not only " to have life in
Himself," but faoiroieiv, to give life, to be the resur
rection and the life of men. It was given to Him,
not only to have life in Himself as being Himself hu
manity made alive, but to be able to impart His life
to humanity, which should be made alive in Him.
Adam, in whom we all sin and die, is d o-ap/a/co'?, man
under the power of his fallen nature. Christ, in
whom we are all made alive, is d irvevpanKot;, man
who has recovered his spiritual and personal suprem
acy over his flesh, a supremacy which is really re
covered and wholly recovered in the crucifixion,
death, and burial of that in us, only the not crucify
ing of which in us is sin, and the crucifying of which
is our only holiness.

356 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Now just as we say that Jesus Christ is not only
d ayto?, but d dyid^mv ; not only d StVato?, but d
BiKai&v ; not only d TeXeicodek, but d TeXei&v ; SO
He is not only d tjwv irvevpan, but d fooiroi&v irvev-
p,an. And He is not only our life-giver, but our
life. He is the true personality and personal life
of every person ; the true selfhood of every self ;
the true manhood of every man. Every man only
truly becomes himself in becoming Christ ; and every
man who becomes Christ does so by a personal act
of Christ as well as of himself. It is both him
self conforming his actual to his ideal self, and it is
his eternal, divine, and personal ideal transforming
him into Himself ; for it is only as Christ incarnates
Himself in us that we can incarnate Him ; and it is
only as we incarnate Him that He can incarnate Him
self in us.
When it is said in the creed that the Holy Ghost
is the life-giver, it is in the following distinct and
definite sense : Jesus Christ is Himself personally
our life ; but He is so objectively, only as He is to be
so subjectively. And Christ can be personally in us,
as our subjective life, only by the Holy Ghost in us
as the principle and power of our own personal appro
priation and reproduction of Him. The Holy Ghost
prepares the spiritual man for spiritual things; He
manifests Himself in our power to receive and to live
Christ ; His is the power by which our Lord enables
all who believe in Him to become children of God.
The presence of our Lord in the Church, and in its
individual members, is a spiritual one, not only as
He is Himself present KaTa irvevpa, and not Kara

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 357
adpKa ; but in that we can only know and have Him
with us, as we are ourselves in the spirit and not in
the flesh. " The world shall not know, but ye shall
know; for the Holy Ghost shall be in you." It
should be the function of the Holy Ghost to show
and to impart Christ to us, i.e. to mediate His spirit
ual presence among and in us.
Assuming, as I think we must, that the Incarna
tion in the totality of its meaning and purpose is to
be seen not in Christ as an individual man, but in
Christ as spiritual humanity, or humanity as it is to
become spiritual in Him, we cannot call the Incarna
tion completed even in our Lord's own ascension. It
was completed in Him, but not yet begun in us. As
the Epistle to the Hebrews expresses it, we see Christ
as a man, but we see not yet Christ as man TeTeXeico-
pivov. A man, it is true, able to become all men,
and destined to become all who should receive Him,
but as yet containing in Himself alone the irXr/prnpa
of divine life and Salvation with which he was to
fill the whole Church. It was God's purpose to lead
many sons to glory, but as yet " the Captain " only
of this Salvation was made perfect. In the love of
God He was but the means, they were the end ; and
assuredly God's self-incarnation was not completed
in Him without them. The corn of wheat was
planted and sprung up, but why the planting and
the springing up except that it should "bear much
fruit " through the multiplication of itself in others ?
And so again in 1 Cor. 15. While as a man we see
Christ exalted above all, and all enemies, including
death, put under His feet, yet as man, and in His

358 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
relation as Head to all humanity, He is still reigning
until sin and death are abolished and all enemies
shall be put under His feet. So the Incarnation was
not completed in our Lord's individual ascension;
it was but ready to begin. " He that ascended must
descend and fill all things." He who was absent in
His individual body must be spiritually and person
ally present in the Church which is His body — the
fulness of Him who filleth all in all. " Lo, I am with
you always, and the acts you perform in My name /
perform. He who receives you receives Me, and he
that rejects you rejects Me." And so St. Paul, e.g.
performs every such act with this conviction and
feeling, "As though God in Christ did by me."
.As though, not in the sense that God does not, but
that He does by us all that we do in Christ's name.
It seems to me, therefore, that every true baptism
is an integral part of the divine act or process of
incarnation. As the Logos was conceived and born
in the womb of the Virgin, so is the Incarnate Word
by the incarnating Spirit to be conceived and born in
the faith, obedience, and personal life of every indi
vidual man. " Be baptized, each one of you " ; be
every individual man taken into Christ, and into a
real and effectual participation in His death to sin
and His life to God. To every man his own baptis
mal day is at once a true Christmas day and a true
birthday, the day of the birth of Christ in him and of
his own birth in Christ. And if more blessed is he
who hears and receives the Word, in whose personal
faith and obedience and life Christ is born and lives,
than she whose only physical womb gave birth and

SALVATION IN THE CHURCH. 359
human life to the Incarnate Word, then those spir
itual Christmases many are not to be despised in
comparison with that one great physical Christmas
which all the world commemorates. Not, indeed,
that the birth of the Virgin was only a physical
birth ; but in so far as it was that only, it was less
than the least spiritual birth of Christ into the per
sonal and spiritual life of man.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURTH.
OF BAPTISM.
The question will, of course, at once present itself
to us, whether Christian baptism practically sustains,
or can be made to sustain, the dignity and character
attributed to it in the preceding chapter. The act of
baptism is there, if not put on a par, yet brought into
very close comparison with the act by which the
Word took flesh. They are held to be both acts of
the same Divine Person ; only, in one case it is the
Word becoming man, and in the other it is the Word
as man entering into and becoming the manhood and
personal life of individual men. Both are not only
acts of one person, but they are parts of the one
process of His Incarnation viewed as a whole.
If it be said that this is an impossible place and
part to assign to baptism, I ask, Why so ? It is the
position of the New Testament and of the Church in
the beginning. Is not the seeming impossibility of
its being so regarded now a consequence of the loss
of the sense of our Lord's real spiritual presence in
His Church, and of the work of His Incarnation still
going on in the world? Baptism is able to be just
what we are able to make, or to receive, it. If to us

OF BAPTISM. 361
all the Church were the body of our Lord's living
and personal presence, and self-incarnating power and
operation, His baptism would be to us as real as
Himself. We would believe that, as God is in Him,
so is He by baptism in us. We cannot so receive
baptism, because we see that, as a matter of fact,
baptism falls so far short of this. I question whether
there is any greater discrepancy between the divine
meaning and the outward seeming of an act of bap
tism than there was between the divine reality and
the human appearance of that Virgin Birth which
gave life to the world. But if we think so little of
baptism because there is so little in it, is it not possi
ble that there is so little in it because we think so
little of it ? If we could but see in it all that it is,
it would be to us all that it is. The difficulty lies
behind it in our conception of the Church, and yet
behind that in our conception of the Incarnation and
of our Lord Himself. Jesus Christ is God in the
whole process of cosmic and human redemption and
completion. He is the incarnation of God in the
whole history and destiny of the ktio-i?. As all things
began, so all things end, in Him who is at once their
final and their efficient cause. The Incarnation has
been in progress from the beginning, and will be to
the end of things. Jesus Christ was objectively and
individually incarnate as a man only as a means and
a step to His subjective and generic incarnation as
man. His Incarnation is as truly and as really in
process and progress in the Church as it was in Him.
Nay, rather, the Church is as truly He as the body
of flesh in which He was visibly present on earth;

362 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and its baptisms are as really His births into individual
men as His birth of the Virgin was a real birth into
humanity. The majority of men — all but the very
fewest, and they very uncertainly and unstably —
saw no more of God in Jesus Christ than men see
now in the Church and its acts. To most, to almost
all, of those to whom He came in the flesh, He came
as ineffectually, as practically not at all, as He comes
now in the Church and its ordinances. The king
dom of God, now, as at the beginning and always,
cometh not with observation. Except a man be born
from above, he cannot see it.
Every Christian baptism is, then, at least in its
divine intention and meaning, as much the personal
act of Jesus Christ as the Virgin birth was the act of
the Divine Word. In both cases it is by the Holy
Ghost. That is, as the personal Word incarnated
Himself in the human subjective dispositions, in the
faith, obedience, and personal human life of the man
He became, all of which was the work of the Holy
Ghost in the man Christ Jesus : so Jesus Christ can
be born and reproduce Himself and live in us only
through the operation in us of the Holy Ghost,
through those subjective dispositions of faith, etc.,
which it is His function to produce, and through
which we know and receive and reproduce Christ.
If the office of the Holy Ghost is thus aptare hominem
Deo, in the case of Jesus Christ Himself the manhood
was fitted to the Godhead with an infallible complete
ness and perfection. The human conditions in Him
were as complete as the divine activity which incar
nated itself through them. The Incarnation, there-

OF BAPTISM. 363
fore, was perfectly realized in Him. That Jesus
Christ does not through every baptism reproduce
Himself as perfectly in every baptized person as the
Logos incarnated Himself in Him, is not because He
is not as much in every baptism for that purpose, but
because of the imperfection of the human conditions
for receiving and reproducing Him. For, however
completely God gives Himself, man only perfectly
receives Him in a perfect faith, a perfect obedience,
and a perfect life. All I claim is that Jesus Christ
wholly and really gives Himself in every baptism, not
that He is wholly received in any, nor at all in many.
But in any, the failure or limitation of the reception
is in the human conditions, and not in the divine
gift. But what baptism truly means and is ought to be
studied in its ideal and not in its actual character
and effects. Suppose the case, then, of a church
which knows itself as the body of Jesus Christ, and
which performs all its acts in His name as though
Christ Himself performed them through it. And
suppose the baptism given by such a church received
in a faith as real and as living. The supposition of
an ideally complete faith on both sides is, no doubt,
a practical impossibility. Then, of course, the re
generation wrought, viewed as a subjective reproduc
tion of Christ, will be correspondingly incomplete.
But certainly the faith, both of the church and of
the personal subjects of its baptism, might be indefi
nitely more perfect than it is, and if it were complete,
then the new life actually imparted through it would
be complete also. In a condition of things where the

364 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Church does not know itself as Christ's body, the
organ of His presence and His operation, and conse
quently does not perform its acts as His acts ; where
by further consequence its acts are not received as
from Christ Himself, and there is an absence of that
faith through which alone divine grace is able to
work, — under such conditions, I say, how can we
expect that our actual baptism shall sustain and
justify such an ideal character as we have given it?
The only way to understand and receive the New
Testament conception of the divine meaning and
efficacy of baptism is to see in it wholly a divine act
complete in itself, but to be completed in us only as
we receive it. To every baptized person Jesus Christ
is wholly given in all His death to sin and in all His
life to God. That divine act constitutes our regene
ration. Baptism is the instrument of " adoption and
grace," whereby we are "made children of God."
In regeneration, faith is simply receptive, it is not
creative. A man is regenerated through not by^his
faith. His regeneration is Christ in him, in the
power and reality of His death to sin and His life to
God. Neither, consequently, is a man regenerated
by the historical death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ, but only by a present Christ in him in the
present and abiding power of His death and resur
rection. There are these three things, in their order, neces
sary to a man's completed regeneration. 1st, That
Christ should have died and risen, and should be the
resurrection and the life. 2d, That Christ should
come to the man and be to him the power of his

OF BAPTISM. 365
death and resurrection. This is Christ's act, not the
man's, and is the efficient cause of his regeneration.
3d, That the man should through faith, or in faith,
receive and realize, or subjectively actualize, this act
of Christ.
When does Christ's coming to me as my regenera
tion take place ? Is it in the very act and fact of
my faith, neither before nor after but in it, in the
sense that the faith itself constitutes and is my re
generation ? Or, secondly, is it in an act of Christ's
to be distinguished from my act of faith, but coming
after and conditioned upon my faith, in the sense
that my faith must precede and bring Christ's act of
grace? I believe it is neither of these. With the
second I believe that I am regenerated not by my
act of faith, but by Christ's act of baptism, and that
these two ought to be distinguished. But I believe
that the logical order is that the divine act of adop
tion and grace should go before and produce my
faith, and not that my faith should go before and
produce the divine act of adoption and grace. The
function of faith is not to cause but to accept and
receive regeneration. "Because we are sons, God
sends forth the spirit of His Son in our hearts, crying
Abba Father." Because Christ's act has made us
sons prior to any act on our part, even our faith;
God, through our faith coming after and accepting
the grace of God and the fact of our sonship, sheds
abroad in our hearts the spirit of His Son and of sons.
We love Him because He loved us, not vice versa.
The fact of sonship precedes and produces the affec
tion of sons, not the affection the fact.

366 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
" We are all sons-of God, by faith, in Jesus Christ."
These words might grammatically be read either way,
but I have ventured to show by the punctuation what
is the true analysis and order of the thought. We
are, in Christ (i.e. by baptism into Him, as the objec
tive, efficient, divine cause of the relationship), sons
of God, through faith (as the subjective human con
dition or mean). This interpretation is proved by
the very next sentence : " For as many of us as were
baptized into Christ did put on Christ." We were
by God's act of grace baptized into Christ's death, or
the putting off of the flesh and ourselves, and into
Christ's resurrection, or the putting on of His rela
tion and spirit of Sonship, i.e. of Himself. Baptism
is something done to us and not something done by us.
God's act of love precedes always our act of faith,
which simply receives what God has given and real
izes what God has made us.
Of course there is a faith prior to baptism without
which no man would come to it, but no more such
faith can be properly required of one coming to bap
tism than is sufficient to bring him to it, for every
human being is unconditionally entitled to the grace
of God in Christ which baptism imparts. The func
tion of Christian faith proper follows- baptism, and
consists in the realization, not only in the understand
ing but in the will and the life, of what is freely
given to us in Christ. What is freely given, by which
is meant unconditionally given ; for what is given in
Christ by baptism is not conditioned upon anything,
not even faith. Faith is not the condition of God's
giving, but only of our receiving ; and it is not a

OF BAPTISM. 367
condition imposed by God, but inherent in the nature
of the thing. We cannot receive spiritual things
without faith, for faith is our reception of spiritual
things. Faith proper, then, presupposes baptism which
furnishes to it its object and content. As Luther ex
presses it in substance, the function of Christian faith
is to realize our baptism ; it is subjectively appropriat
ing and making good the fact that we have Jeewmade
the sons of God.
The baptism of infants does not mean that they
are by the act subjectively or actually, but that they
are by the act objectively or potentially regenerated.
The former requires faith or reception which cannot
yet exist in them ; the latter is independent of faith
and depends upon grace alone which can be and is
present. When the child begins to exercise faith, its
proper object, the content with which it ought to find
itself filled, is the fact already existing that he is —
that baptism has made him — the child of God in
Christ. What the child's faith has to accomplish is
not to make himself son of God, nor to move God by
an act contingent upon it to make him so, but simply
to accept, to subjectively realize and make good, the
fact that God has made him, and that he is son of
God. The importance of this order of things appears
in the Christian nurture of children when the issue
arises, as it must necessarily arise, whether they are
to be taught that they must believe in order to be
come children of God, as though their faith made
them so, or God was waiting on their faith to make
them so; or whether, on the contrary, they are to
be taught that God, by the unconditional adoption

368 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
and grace of baptism, has made them children, and
that they by their faith must realize or subjectively
fulfil that relation. Our part in Christianity is
simply to be what God makes us ; and His making
precedes and is the condition of our being, and
not the other way. " Behold what manner of love
the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should
be called sons of God, and we are." Faith does not
create that fact, or bring it about ; all it has to do is
to accept it and set us to being what, by the grace of
God, we are.
I fully realize the danger of such an unhesitating
view of the divine character and effect of Christian
baptism. The history of Christianity has fully illus
trated it. It has shown that the teaching of any
divine reality in baptism will lead men to attach a
magical and superstitious importance to it, and to
trust the mere opus operatum. But is the proper
remedy for this to go to the opposite extreme of
denying it all divine significance and virtue? The
no less disastrous consequences of which are visible
enough in the current Christianity around us. Let
us teach a true, rational, and real Salvation, a Salva
tion which means holiness, righteousness, and life ;
and men will not be in danger of expecting to be
saved by magic or superstition. It is quite as possi
ble to attach a magical effect to the imputation to us
Of another's act for the removal of our guilt and
penalty for sin, as it is to attach it to the formula of
a christening or the hocus pocus of a Mass. What
we want is to carry to men by word and sacrament a
real Salvation not only in all its divine causes, but in

OP BAPTISM. 369
all its human effects. If Salvation is made synony
mous with religion, morality, and manhood, men will
not be able to satisfy themselves with any sort of a
magical, opere operato, Salvation.
But to believe that Jesus Christ is God's revela
tion to us of manhood ; that baptism is Christ's gift
to us of the spirit and power of His manhood ; and
that in the grace of that baptism we are enabled and
able to realize all the spiritual, moral, and natural
potentialities of our own manhood, in a perfect faith,
a perfect obedience, and a perfect life — that is nei
ther magic nor superstition. It is Jesus Christ, the
wisdom of God and the power of God to us : it is on
our part simply taking God at His word, and receiv
ing His gifts in the same good faith in which they
are offered. God's acts are to us what they mean,
just in so far as we take them for what they mean.
The world is puzzled by the insistance on the part
of the Church upon so literal an interpretation of
the proper language of sacraments. As, e.g. after
baptism, " Seeing now that this person is regenerate " ;
or, in the other sacrament, " This is my body," etc.
And no doubt the mystification is only added to by
most explanations given.
The underlying principle seems to me to be this.
It is not at all that the language in itself is not capa
ble of a merely figurative, and not literal, significa
tion ; or that it would not ordinarily and naturally
be understood in that way. " This is my body," it
would ordinarily be most reasonable to interpret as
meaning, " This signifies or represents my body."
But the true instinct and mind of the Church clings,
2b

370 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
as it has always done, to the living and operative
presence of Christ in His Church, and in those acts
of the Church which are specifically His own acts.
Sacraments are a divine and not a human language.
They are the utterances of the Word Himself as He
comes to us in the prosecution of His proper and
essential epyov in the world. As I have said, the
truth of the Incarnation would be to me only an
historical fact, an event of eighteen hundred years
ago, without the truth of baptism; if He who be
came incarnate for me stopped, as it were, short of
me, and did not become so in me. His personal
coming to me thus does not await and is not the
result of any act of mine. He comes to me in His
Church and through its ordinances. The office of
faith is to discern Him in these, and to suffer Him
through them to fulfil Himself in me. No man comes
to Christ, Christ comes to him to be accepted or
rejected of him. To believe in baptism is simply to
receive Jesus Christ in the act in which He comes
to include us in Himself, and make us a part of His
Incarnation — to impart to us in Himself the grace
and fact of His death and His life. A true faith will
simply receive baptism for what it is ; not merely as
meaning something, but as being what it means.
And baptism precisely signifies and is, what the Gos
pel of God must mean to every human being, his
death to sin and his life in God.
Every word of man is a mere sign; it expresses
or represents something which in itself it is not.
God's words are not "grammatical vocables"; His
language is not one of signs, but of things. And

OF BAPTISM. 371
even when He speaks through signs they are never
mere signs, but always the things they signify. His
one, only, all-expressive, and all-sufficient Word to us
is Jesus Christ — Jesus Christ as He came for us all
in His flesh ; as He comes to us all in His spirit in
His Church ; as He takes us into union with Him in
baptism, and sustains us in communion with Him
in His Supper ; as He imparts to us through this
union and communion with Himself the power and
reality of His own death and resurrection. When
ever He comes to us in the ways of His appointment,
it is the part of faith to meet and receive Him as
being there in all the actuality of His presence and of
His operation. If the words which He spoke were
spirit and life, how much more is He Himself — the
Word — spirit and life, power and reality, wherever
He is. Baptism is certainly a sign ; but the question
is, Whose sign is it ? If it is God's and not man's,
if it is God's word to us and not man's, then it is
what it means, it is the thing it signifies. If it sig
nifies, if it means, regeneration, — a death to sin and
a birth and new life to God through the spirit and
power of Christ which is able to subdue all things
unto itself, — then it is regeneration. It is not re
generation subjectively realized and completed in
the man himself, but it is regeneration objectively
made his own and secured to him in Christ by the
fact of his being in Christ. It is so his that it will
only be not his by his not believing it to be, and his
own failure to make it, his own. Jesus Christ Him
self, then, put on in baptism, first objectively and
potentially in the grace of God and, secondly, subjec-

372 SOTERIOLOGY OE THE NEW TESTAMENT.
tively and actually through our faith, is and consti
tutes our regeneration.
This distinction between a, first, objective relation
by baptism and a, secondarily, subjective relation
through faith, to Christ as our regeneration, may at
first sight seem formal and unnecessary. But then,
how is one to be subjectively and actually regenerate,
except through faith in a relation to the source and
cause of his regeneration which precedes and is the
condition of his being regenerated by it ? I only live
spiritually through faith in Christ as my life. But it
is not faith, but grace, that makes Christ my life,
and it is only as grace first makes Him that I can
through faith receive Him as my life. The language
of faith is simply to say, " Christ is my life " ; but
how can fa.ith say so, unless He is so ? Baptism, as
God's act of my regeneration, must then be true of
me before faith, as my act of being regenerate, can
take place.
The question of regeneration in the act of baptism
is merely one of our use of the word regeneration.
If we use it in the sense of the subjective personal
change which can take place in us only through
faith, we cannot place regeneration in the act of
baptism. If we mean by it the objective divine act
of our engrafting or incorporation into Christ who
is our regeneration, our death to sin and life in God,
then it takes place not before or after, but in bap
tism. But if it is the divine intention and institu
tion that through our faith in God's taking us into
the life in Christ, we shall be able to begin to live
the life in Christ, then the objective must precede

OE BAPTISM. 373
and be the condition of the subjective regeneration.
And to say that not until the subjective change has
taken place can the objective relation be entered into
is to put the effect before the cause ; it is to make
faith precede the existence of its object and content.
Instead of our exercising the faith and spirit of sons
because we are sons, it is requiring us to exercise the
faith and spirit in order to become sons, which is the
true order neither of nature nor of grace.
Regeneration in its broadest sense covers and in
cludes the entire process of our predestination and
destination in Christ. The resurrection of Jesus
Christ was the potential regeneration of the world;
baptism into Christ, and into the power and fellow
ship of his death and resurrection, is the personal,
but still only potential, regeneration of each man ;
faith and the life of faith is his subjective and actual
regeneration, but as yet only incomplete and in prog
ress; his own resurrection in the last day is his
completed and perfect regeneration in body and
soul. But we live now in faith and hope, and not yet in
consummation. And the proper object and content
of faith is God's Word. To faith, what God says is.
What baptism means and says, it should be to us ;
and if it means regeneration, then to our faith it
should be regeneration. And if it is so to faith, it
will be so in fact, for God's Word depends only upon
our faith to become fact in us. At present, then, the
locus, or place of regeneration, is baptism ; for there,
in the act of God making us regenerate, and not in
our own act of merely realizing, or actualizing, our

374 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
regeneration, do we locate the origin and initiation
of our life in Christ.
One cannot but admire the unhesitating and un
qualified manner in which the Church, in all its
offices, utters the simple and straightforward lan
guage of faith. The trumpet gives forth no uncer
tain sound. By baptism we are dead with Christ and
risen with Christ, and therefore regenerate. The only
non-regeneration of one whom God has baptized is
his own ignorance, or unbelief, or rejection of the
fact that he is regenerate. But the Church assumes,
or suggests, no such doubt or denial, but puts into
his mouth only the language of faith, assurance, and
fulfilment. As Christ died and rose, so the baptized
person is to call and account himself dead to sin and
alive to God. He is to be regenerate by believing
himself regenerate ; he is to realize the fact that he
is regenerate. God has made him so; therefore he
must account himself, and be, so. And he will only
not be so in fact through not being so in faith, i.e.
through not believing that by God's grace and act
he is so.
The Church as a living Church should bring up
her children in a living faith to realize their baptism,
i.e. to make it real by accepting and treating it as
real ; to be children of God by believing that they are
children of God, and not that they have to make
themselves so by any act of theirs. And if we were
born of and into such a living Church, our faith
would be such a living faith, and our baptism would
be, both to us and in us, such a living fact. At any
rate, if it were not, the fault and failure would be,

OF BAPTISM. 375
not in it, but in us : not in its not regenerating, but
in our rejecting and making naught our regeneration.
It would no more make baptism not a divine and a
divinely efficacious act, than the fact of our Lord's
inability to do His mighty works, on account of men's
unbelief, made Him not a divine person.
Recurring to the Church's use of the word regen
eration as applied to baptism. We say that a person
is made rich, or becomes rich, by the act that makes
him so, and prior to any use, or even knowledge, on
his part of his riches. Now all the fulness and
riches of Christ's life is made ours by baptism, and
not (in the case of baptized infants) by our subse
quent knowledge and living of Christ's life. We do
not have it by living, we must have it in order to
live it. It might be said we have it, in this objective
sense, in Jesus Christ Himself, and do not need to
have it by the additional act of baptism. But we do
not have it in the mere historic fact of Christ Him
self, but only as Christ comes to us one by one, and
includes us in Himself, and takes us into the fellow
ship of His regenerate life. This act of inclusion in
Him, baptism represents and is ; and faith is simply
our subjective recognition and realization of it. Just
as in Jesus Christ Himself, it was the Godhead that.
assumed the manhood, and man entered into God
only as God first entered into man, so now our
coming to Christ is simply our recognition and ac
ceptance of the act of Christ's coming to us and
taking us into union with Himself. As important as
it is for us to make the divine act prior to, and the
condition of the human in our Lord's personal incar-

376 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
nation, so important is it to make the divine act and
grace of baptism prior to, and the ground and condi
tion of, the faith through which, subjectively, we re
ceive the vlodeala, and become in ourselves sons of
God.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIFTH.
OF THE LORD'S SUPPER.
Real views of the sacraments and a real interpre
tation of their language are necessarily incomprehen
sible and absurd to those who have not that conception
of the Church, of the Incarnation, and of our Lord
Himself which not only justify, but necessitate them.
Truth is truth only in relation. Taken out of its
place and its connection with the system or organic
whole of truth, that may be false, and even pernicious,
which in its place and connection is reasonable, natu
ral, and necessary. Thus high views of the sacra
ments merely in and for themselves, arguments for
the literal meaning of their language, and claims of
supernatural effects ex opere operato, disconnected
from any rational and spiritual view of where they
belong and what they are, very naturally and properly
seem to many to reduce them to mere magical and
superstitious rites. Such claims, as they are too often
held and presented, are false, absurd, and destructive
of all true and reasonable religion.
But the great truth that the incarnation of God in
man is still going on in this world, and will not be
completed until Jesus Christ shall be glorified in all

378 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
His saints ; and until all His enemies, i.e. all spiritual,
moral, and natural evil, sin, death, and hell, are put
under His feet ; that Jesus Christ is no less actually
and far more effectually present in the world now by
His spirit than formerly in His flesh ; that Christian
ity is not the exercise of our faith upon past aets and
operations of God, but a present acting and operation
of God in and through our faith ; that it is primarily
from God to us, and only secondarily and responsively
from us to God ; that the Church and the sacraments
represent, and to faith are, as in themselves they are,
the objective and divine, as faith is the subjective
and human, side of a very real transaction between
God and us ; that the sacraments therefore are real
acts of God in Christ, and are to be received and
interpreted as such, i.e. as being what they signify —
all this I say, as it is the faith of the New Testament
and the Church, so is it rational and comprehensible
to all who hold an Incarnation at all, and who are
able to take in what must be the scope of an Incarna
tion, if it exists. I would not concentrate all Chris
tianity into the mystery of sacraments. Christianity
is all religion or relation with God; all morality,
virtue, and true manhood; all life and destiny; its
end is all spiritual, moral, and natural ivepyeia, or
activity and actuality. Nothing less than all this
would I accept as that divine Salvation and regenera
tion of humanity which we call Christianity. But I
believe that Salvation, regeneration, and Christianity
are from God to us, and only reflexively from us to
God. And I believe in a present God in Christ by
the Holy Ghost saving, regenerating, and sanctifying

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 379
the world through the Church. I believe that all the
weakness of the Church to regenerate, sanctify, and
save is the inability of Christ through our want of
faith. "He could not, because of their unbelief."
" How would I . . . and ye would not." And I be
lieve that what is wanted for the life of the Church,
and of the world through it, is not faith in an absent,
past, or future Christ, but simple and living recogni
tion of a Christ present to our faith and present in
our faith. What is the Church but this simple pres
ence of Christ to and in Christians? Why should
it be called His body if it is not the form and organ
of His presence ? What is Christianity but the liv
ing oneness of Christians with Christ and with one
another in Christ, and how can it be so if He is not
livingly present with and in them ? And if He is, and
the Church, through its proper functions as His body,
is the organ of His acts, then what is baptism but the
act by which Jesus Christ Himself takes us into Him
self that He through our faith may become in us what
He is in Himself; that being sanctified in Himself,
He may be sanctified and glorified in us His saints?
We have now only to apply the same principles of
interpretation to the other sacrament. As baptism
is the sacrament of our uniting, so the Lord's Supper
is that of our continuous and constantly renewed
union and communion with God through Christ.
They are both sacraments of life, i.e. of our union
with the life who is Christ. They enable us to say
that we are in Christ, and that Christ is in us. They
thus supply a content to our faith which without
them it would lack.

380 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
The innermost and most essential truth of the sec
ond sacrament, then, as also of the first, is Koivwvla,
or fellowship of life. This we have seen to be the
truth of the peace offering, — oneness with God, who
is our life through faith. To which the burnt offer
ing adds the additional and supplementary truth of
self-devotion or service, — not only spiritual oneness
with God's person and life, but moral fulfilment of
God's will or law. These two are essential, — holiness
and righteousness, — and they constitute the whole
of religion on its positive side. Whatever additional
elements attach themselves to the peace offering, —
as confession or acknowledgment, praise, thanksgiv
ing, etc., — -they all centre in the one fact of life
from God and in God and for God.
I have said before, that if our relation with God
were an undisturbed and normal one ; if our union
and communion with Plim were unbroken, and our
service of Him unimpeded, the truth of the peace
and the burnt offerings would be to us the whole of
religion and of worship. In that case the Eucharist
would embody no other elements than those of com
munion and devotion. Our life would still need to
be that of God incarnating Himself in our faith and
obedience. This life would still need to be imparted
to us objectively, or ab extra, in order to be received
by us subjectively. That is, there would still need
to be a sacrament or divine act to usward from God,
as the object to our faith arid the res^ or matter, for
our acceptance ; as the coming to us of the life to be
received in us. All these elements, I repeat, would
still exist in a Eucharist adapted to unfallen man.

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 381
But there are other elements inseparable from the
religion and the worship of men who are fallen, and
found, therefore, in the Christian Eucharist, which
would not exist but for the fact of sin. They are
represented by that third sacrificial act, most ap
propriately called, in the Old. Testament, the irepl
dp,apTia<;, or sin offering. The notion of our life in
God as a salvation, a redemption, a resurrection,
supposes a previous condition of sin, bondage, and
death. In our worship, as in our lives, before union
must come atonement; and before the service of a
free obedience must come redemption. The sacra
ment, therefore, of our life in God is the sacrament,
first, of our death in ourselves ; the sacrament of our
free service or obedience is, first, that of our emanci
pation from the bondage of our flesh or fallen nature.
As in the Jewish system there was no peace or burnt
offering, — no sacrifice of divine communion or self-
devotion, — which was not preceded by the sin offer
ing, so in the Christian system there is no sacrifice
or sacrament of either communion with God or con
secration of ourselves, which is not preceded by that
of our death to, and our resurrection out of, the flesh
of sin. The truth, first of the sin, and then of the
peace and burnt offerings, — first of our at-one-ment
and redemption, and then of our union and commun
ion with, and our service of God, — is all contained
in the great distinctive act of Christian worship.
The Incarnated Life which is made our life, into
which we were taken by baptism, in which we are
nourished and sustained by the Holy Supper, around
which as sacrifice and sacrament, in the supreme act

382 SOTERIOLOGY OP THE NEW TESTAMENT.
of our religion and worship, centre all our acknowl
edgments, praises, and thanksgivings towards God,
and all our receptions from God, is a life which not
only is in union with God, but was brought into union
with God by the cross; which not only is free to live
the life and work the works of God, but was made
free by the crucifixion of the flesh of its bondage
and the liberation of the spirit of a holy obedience.
Just as we are baptized into Christ only as we are
baptized into the fellowship of His death and resur
rection, so the Lamb whom we offer to God in the
Eucharist and receive into ourselves as alone our life,
our righteousness, ourselves received from and given
to God, is " a Lamb as it had been slain." There is
no Christ for us but Christ crucified and risen. The
Koivocvla of His life is conditioned upon that of His
death. We shall live with Him only as we have
died with Him.
But the special point in which we are at present
interested is the reality of the sacrament and of the
language of the sacrament. If Jesus is in His Church
as His living body, and its acts are His living acts,
then they cannot but be real. The real presence in
the sacrament is mere magic and superstition, apart
from the more general real presence of Christ in His
Church. Taken in connection with that, rationally
understood and applied, the real presence is only a
part of the general reality and actuality of Christ in
Christianity ; it is simply making the Church as His
body the organ of His spiritual presence and activity
in the world in the same real sense in which His
natural body was the organ of His natural presence

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 383
and acts ; it is a part of the general system of objec
tive grace, without which there would be no subjec
tive faith or life of Christ in the world. If there is
nothing outward from God to be received, there can
be no real inward reception on our part. If Jesus
Christ does not Himself unite us with Himself in
union, and Himself sustain that union in continuous
communion, then no faith of ours makes us, or can
make us, in any real and actual sense sons of God
and partakers of the divine life. There is a use, and
an important use, in the sacrament, simply as stand
ing for and affirming the objective reality and real
presence of God's part in our Salvation, the objective
grace without which there would not be the subjec
tive faith which is only responsive to and receptive
of it. But the sacrament, according to any New
Testament or Catholic conception, is a dead formal
ity if it is only something put there to represent
God's part and is not God Himself present to per
form, and actually performing, His part in our Sal
vation. Why should it not be ? Are we dealing
with a dead or an absent Christ? If a grace ab extra
is essential to the response of a faith of acceptance
ab intra, why should the grace be dissociated from
those acts in and through which God in Christ pur
ports to impart it? Is it because of the liability
of men to make mere forms of these acts, and then
to attach to them as mere forms a magical power to
effect something which is called, but which is no real,
Salvation ? I freely admit all that can possibly be
said about this liability; but what is the proper
remedy for it ? Is it not, in the most rational, the

384 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
most spiritual, the most natural way possible, to
endeavor to make them not mere forms, but living
realities ? Surely God is not a superstition ! Nor
Jesus Christ, when properly understood as God's
self-incarnation to us and in us ; nor the Holy
Ghost, as the spirit or personal principle of the sub
jective presence and life of God and of Christ in
men. And that God in Christ by the Holy Ghost
should be present to us objectively in the Church and
its functions and present in us subjectively in the
Church through its functions, has nothing in it of
magical or superstitious. Simply, then, to receive
the gospel of our Salvation in the good faith in
which it is offered; to take God at His word and
accept His sacraments for what they mean, and
through their grace and help to look for and expect
the fulfilment of God in us and of ourselves in God,
— this, it seems to me, is the natural and only way
to remove all formality from the sacraments, and to
make them God's realities to us and living realities
in us.
Assuming the existence in the Eucharist of, first,
a sacrificium, and secondly, a sacramentum, let us see
what each of these must be. In the sacrificium there
is the representation and presentation to God of the
death and resurrection of Christ as, first, the one only
perfect and complete act of human access to God, and
secondly, as alone rendering possible and constitut
ing our perfect and complete access to God. In that
offering we discard all other pleas, or claims, or
grounds, or means of access to God, save that only
of Christ's death and resurrection. We come into

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 385
the Holy of Holies only with His shed blood and
through the rent veil of His flesh. This is highly
symbolical language ; it is expressing the facts and
truths of the absolute religion of the New Testament
in the forms of Old Testament type and symbol.
And such poetical forms appeal to the imagination
and understanding and heart of men and make the
truth living and real to them, if only the truth be
not lost under the symbol. But lest this be the
case with us, let us strip away the symbol and look
at the truth itself in its simplicity. We have seen
that the truth expressed by the sin offering is that
death which every man must die in his flesh in order
to any union with or service of God ; that the truth
of the peace offering is the union with God into which
we are brought, and that of the burnt offering is the
service of God which is rendered possible by the pre
cedent fact of the sin offering. We have seen also
that the distinctive difference between the offerings
in the Old Testament and the one offering in the
New Testament for men, and that which constituted
the inefficacy of the former and the efficacy of the
latter, was this : That whereas the former could only
represent and be accepted instead of the acts of men,
the latter could be and be accepted as the act of men.
Dropping now the symbolic language and speaking
literally, we say that Jesus Christ in His human life,
death, and resurrection performed an act which was
for humanity its death in the flesh, its at-one-ment or
restored union and communion of life with God, and
its redemption or restoration to the freedom of God's
holy service and righteousness. By the sacrifice of
2 c

386 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
the altar what we acknowledge to God — along with
our praises, homage, thanksgiving, etc. — is this:
That Jesus Christ is God our Salvation, and our only
Salvation; that He is our atonement, our redemp
tion, our resurrection — our holiness, our righteous
ness, and our life ; that He is our way into the
favor, presence, and fellowship of God, i.e. that His
death is, not only in Him but in us, the rending of
the flesh of sin which was the veil of our separation
from God, and His resurrection is our entrance into
the oneness with God from which sin had separated
us. The sacrificium is our acknowledgment to God,
and the sacramentum is God's impartation to us, of
the whole truth and reality of Christ's death and
resurrection. By our feast upon the sacrifice the
virtue of the sacrifice is made ours. In a true
sacrament the grace and power and full reality of
Christ's death to sin is so imparted to us as to be
made and to become our death to sin; and equally
is His spiritual and moral life to God so imparted to
us as to be made verily and indeed our life to God.
I have before said that the only difference between
a divine imputation and a divine impartation, — the
imputation, e.g. and the impartation of Christ's death
to us, — is that the former makes potentially what
the latter makes actually our own. In the divine
grace and our answering faith that is made in a
moment and in all its ideal completeness ours, which
in fact can only perfectly become ours by a slow pro
cess of gradual appropriation and assimilation.
In speaking of what I have called the literal and
real truth of the language of the sacrament, I have,

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 387
perhaps, failed to make a distinction which ought to
be made between the terms literal and real. " This
is my body " may express a very real without express
ing a literal fact. The doctrine of transubstantiation
seems to me to assume that the real truth of our
Lord's words is inseparable from their literal truth.
The doctrine of the real presence assumes a reality
which is separable from mere literalness, and which
is not less real and far higher for being so separated.
Every verbum Dei must be what it means, but it must
be so in the sphere, or order of being, in which it is
meant or intended. We speak of knowing Christ,
but St. Paul says that we do not any longer know
Him KaTa adpKa, but only KaTa irvevpa. Our Lord
Himself spoke of our continuing to see Him, hear
Him, etc. ; and we do not doubt that we do so in a
very real, although not in a literal, sense. We do
not see or hear or know Him with natural or literal
eyes or ears or understanding. Not only is the
Christ Himself now d irvevpaTiKos, but His whole
relation is to us only as we are irvevpafiKoi. That
is, He is related to us and we to Him, we know
Him, we receive Him, through the organs and func
tions of our spiritual, and not those of our natural
lives. As we do not literally and yet do really see
and hear Him, so we do not literally and yet do really
eat and drink Him. We receive, assimilate, and con
vert Him into our very selves, none the less, but far
the more because we do not do so through natural
mouths and stomachs. We receive Him as really,
as " verily and indeed," through the organs and func
tions of our spiritual lives as we receive natural food

388 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
through the organs of our natural life. And, more
over, we receive Him in the sacrament ; in which the
bread and wine are to us His flesh and blood. The
very purpose and use of the sacrament is to represent
and to be to us the objective element and part in our
spiritual life, that which we receive as the condition
of what, through it, we are to be and do. It is to
save us from the heresy and the vanity of a merely
subjective spiritual life, a life by our own act or state
of mind ; instead of which it makes our life an act of
Christ entering into and incarnating Himself in our
acts and states of mind. But how shall Christ thus
objectively come to us except in some objective act?
How can He speak to us without some language, and
appear to us save in some symbol of His presence ?
Sacraments are immediate acts of Christ to us,
symbols of His real presence and actual operations to
usward. In order that we shall receive them as such,
it is necessary for us to receive them as being what
they mean, as effecting what they signify or represent.
But what they are and effect is all in the sphere of
the spiritual, not of the natural. What we predicate
of them KaTa irvevp,a we are not obliged to predicate
Kara adpKa. To the spiritual man the consecrated
bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ,
and the very food, or substance and matter, of his
life. To the natural man, in the sphere of the senses
and of natural science, they are not so, but still, in
accidents and substance, only bread and wine. Here
as elsewhere we know and have to do with Christ not
KaTa adpKa, in no merely carnal or natural form of
His, and through no merely carnal or natural senses

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 389
or functions of ours, but KaTa irvevpa, only as He
presents Himself to and can be received by our
spiritual organs into our spiritual lives.
But still the question remains. What are "the
body and blood of Christ," which are objectively or
divinely given, and subjectively or humanly received,
in the Lord's Supper ? What is it which under the
terms " body and blood of Christ," is verily and in
deed given and received? The question, it will be
observed, is not now, how it is given and received,
but what is given and received ?
If this question is to be answered in the light of
the whole New Testament teaching, I think we must
say, first, that what is given and received in the
Lord's Supper is Jesus Christ Himself, as not only
our new lives, but our new selves, as the ideal and
spiritual self which in every man is to take the
place of his actual and carnal self. As once for
all, in baptism, we put off the old man and put on
the new, put off ourselves arid put on Christ, so, in
every communion, we repeat that act. For while in
the grace of God, and in our own answering faith,
we are once for all passed out of ourselves into
Christ, yet in fact we need constantly by the grace
of God to be putting off ourselves and putting on
Christ. Baptism may be said to correspond to what
is now called our justification, and the Holy Com
munion to our sanctification. The one is the once-
for-all identification of us with Christ, and the other
is the gradual and progressive identification of us
with Christ.
Secondly, what is given and received in the Holy

390 SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Communion is Jesus Christ crucified and risen, i.e.
Christ in all the meaning and results of His life
and work on earth. As in the sacrificium we repre
sent and present and plead before God, Jesus Christ
as not only our peace and burnt, but our sin offer
ing, i.e. as not only our union with, and our service
of, God, but (what is necessary, first, as the con
dition of these) our death to all separation from
God, and our life in all union with and service
of Him, so in the sacrificial feast or sacramentum,
what we receive from God in Christ is first the spirit
and power and reality, the fellowship, of His death ;
and then only the communication and communion of
His life.
Where is the significance and propriety of express
ing such a giving and receiving of Jesus Christ in
His death and resurrection, to be our death and life,
by the terms of His giving us and our receiving, and
eating and drinking, His flesh and blood ?
The Old Testament feast upon the sacrifice meant
the. subjective appropriation by the offerer — or,
rather, the impartation to the offerer, through his
subjective faith and personal appropriation — of the
objective truth and meaning and benefits of the sac
rifice. What was true to him in the sacrifice became,
or was made, true in him in the sacrament. The
latter is the application to him of the grace, of the
spirit and power and reality, of the former. Flesh
and blood means, first, humanity. As Jesus Christ
took our flesh and blood, i.e. our humanity, to sanctify,
redeem, and raise it, so He gives us His flesh and
blood, or His humanity, sanctified, redeemed, and

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 391
risen. He imparts to us the powers of the new hu
manity which He has instituted, by becoming in us
the holiness, the righteousness, and the life of God.
Secondly, the flesh and blood given us in the Holy
Communion are flesh broken and blood shed; it is
not only humanity, but humanity in sacrifice, brought
into covenant with God by sacrifice. A humanity,
that is, which has become new through the death in
it of that which was old, through its own crucifixion
in itself, as well as God's crucifixion in it, of the flesh
of sin.
Is not this a sufficient explanation and justification
of the " This is my body and my blood " ? And if
we take our Lord at His word, just as baptism is to
us God's justification, so will the Holy Communion
be to us God's sanctification. It will be Christ im
parted to us in the spirit, power, and life in us of
that one only full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice and
oblation which God accepts as the satisfaction for our
sin, because it is able to be, and is to all who believe,
the death of our sin, and our resurrection from sin.

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English scholars.
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ALEXANDER. — The Leading Ideas of the Gospels.
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MILLIGAN. — Lectures on the Apocalypse. By Wil
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