THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND THE ATONEMENT
To countless Christian minds the doctrine of the atonement has been the marrow of theology. We have reserved it for the close of our discussion. Does the social gospel contain anything v^hich v^ould verify, interpret, quicken, or expand that doctrine? And what form of the doctrine would best express and support the social gospel?
The theological interpretation of the death of Christ has a long and varied history. It will aid us in estimating our modern needs if we pass it briefly in review.
To the first disciples the death of their Lord was an astonishing catastrophe, an unexpected, terrible, and apparently impossible outcome of the work of the Messiah. For that very reason they craved an explanation of the event which would interpret it as a fundamental part of God's plan. Their method was to prove that it had been foretold throughout the Scripture and foreshadowed by typology. Paul was the first to give the death of our Lord a really central position in a theological system.
But the early Church never appropriated or utilized more than a few leading ideas of Paul. The most popular and elaborate theological explanation was the theory that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan. By the fall the human race became subject to Satan, and he had a rightful claim on it as its sovereign. God in mercy desired to emancipate humanity from the thraldom of Satan, but would not use his superior power to wrest from him what was his by legal right. So he offered Christ to Satan as a ransom in exchange, and Satan gladly accepted. But in killing the sinless Christ, Satan overstepped his legal claims and thereby forfeited all his rights. Or, according to other Fathers, Satan was attracted by the human beauty of Christ, but did not realize that this was the incarnate Logos; the marriage of Mary to Joseph had concealed from him the mystery of the incarnation. God knew beforehand that even if Satan took possession of the ransom, he could never hold Christ. So God offered Satan a bait and tricked him. When Satan tried to imprison Christ in Hades, he burst the gates and came forth with a throng of souls. This legal negotiation between two sovereigns reminds one of modern diplomacy. A few Fathers objected to the element of trickery, but on the whole this was the orthodox theology till Anselm of Canterbury substituted something better for it in A. D. 1098.
Anselm's doctrine was a real advance in ethical and religious insight. Its main points are these: Our sin has robbed God of the honour due him; an equivalent must be offered him before he can forgive sin; we ourselves can not render the ''satisfaction " due to him; God alone can; therefore God had to become man; being divine and sinless, his death furnished an offset and equivalent for the boundless sins of mankind.
This theory has furnished the ground-work for orthodox theology ever since Anselm. Yet it raises unanswer- able questions and in some respects offends our Christian convictions. How can it satisfy justice to have an innocent one die in place of the guilty? Hov^ can God pay an equivalent to himself? If the debt due to God has been paid by the death of Christ, why is it any longer an act of grace on the part of God to remit sin? The debt we owe to God is not a financial but a moral debt; another man may discharge a debt of $ioo for me, but no man can discharge my obligations as a son or as a father for me; how then can the debt we owe to God be paid by another? If Christ fulfilled the law for us, why are we still obliged to fulfil it? These questions shock our Christian feeling. This is where we get when we try to formulate the relations between God and us on the basis of law and in forensic terms. It ends in wiping out the love and mercy of God, our most essential Christian conviction.
The Reformation made no essential change in this doctrine. Lutherans and Calvinists on the whole taught the same outline of atonement. God, in mercy toward fallen humanity, sent his Son, who shared both the divine and human nature, in order to redeem and reconcile. The justice of God demands the condemnation of all. God can exercise mercy only if vicarious satisfaction is rendered. The infinite worth of the divine nature in Christ makes his suffering an equivalent for the infinite sins of mankind. Christ experienced the wTath of God in his suffering, and that wrath is now satisfied, so that God can forgive.
These traditional theological explanations of the death of Christ have less biblical authority than we are accustomed to suppose. The fundamental terms and ideas — " satisfaction," *' substitution," '' imputation," " merit " — are post-biblical ideas, and are alien from the spirit of the gospel.
It is important to note that every theory of the atonement necessarily used terms and analogies taken from the social life of that age, and that the spirit and problems of contemporary life are always silent factors in the construction of theory. The early Church set the model of formulating the doctrine in the terminology of sacrifice. To us sacrificing is a matter of antiquarian knowledge, kept alive mainly by the Bible. To Christians of the first three centuries it was a social institution which they saw in operation all about them. Paul saw in the death of Christ the solution of the great social problem of his life, the abolition of the Jewish Law and the emancipation of Gentile missions. The theory that the death of Christ was a ransom to Satan was the outgrowth of the semidualistic religion of the Empire and the prevalent belief in the rule of demons. Anselm's theory seems to me clearly the product of the penitential practices of the medieval Church, within which Anselm lived and moved and which was his social order. Every priest in the confessional was constantly assessing the delinquencies of men in terms of penalty and merit, and assigning so much inconvenience or suffering as a " satisfaction " for so much sin. Perhaps the commercial and governmental theories of later Protestantism were the natural social product of the age of capitalistic merchants and of limited monarchies.
These social realities which lay back of the theories gave them their influence and convincing power at the time they originated and for a long time thereafter, but when these social realities disappear, the theories of the atonement based on them become artificial and unconvincing, and sometimes repulsive. Analogies and illustrations taken from the priestly slaughtering of animals or the ritual functions of the Jewish high-priest are remote from our imagination, and instead of clarifying the facts, they themselves need elaborate explanation. Forensic methods and the dealings of autocratic rulers arouse our moral antagonism and have brought the teachings about the atonement under suspicion.
Our dominant ideas are personality and social solidarity. The problems which burden us are the social problems. Has the death of Christ any relation to these? Have we not just as much right to connect this supreme religious event with our problems as Paul and Anselm and Calvin, and to use the terminology and methods of our day? In so far as the historical and social sciences have taught our generation to comprehend solidaristic facts, we are in a better situation to understand the atonement than any previous generation.
As Christian men we believe that the death of our Lord concerns us all. Our sins caused it. He bore the sin of the world. In turn his death was somehow for our good. Our spiritual situation is fundamentally changed in consequence of it. But how? How did he bear our sins? How did his death affect God? How did it affect us? These three questions we shall discuss.
How did Jesus bear sins which he did not commit?
The old theology replied, by imputation. But guilt and merit are personal. They can not be transferred from one person to another. We tamper with moral truth when we shuffle them about. Imputation is a legal device to enable the law to hold one man responsible for the crime committed by another. Imputation sees mankind as a mass of individuals, and the debts of every individual are transferred to Christ. The solution does not lie in that way.
Neither is it enough to say that Jesus bore our sins by sympathy. His contact with sin was a matter of experience as well as sympathy, and experience cuts deeper. Child-birth and travail reveal the realities of life to a woman more than sympathetic observation.
How did Jesus bear our sins? The bar to a true understanding of the atonement has been our individualism. The solution of the problem lies in the recognition of solidarity.
By his human life Jesus was bound up backward and forward and sideward with the life of humanity. He received the influences of the historical life of the Jewish people through the channels of social tradition, and he transmitted the effects of his own life and personality to the future throu'gh the same channels. Palestine was only a little corner of the Roman Empire, but the full life of humanity was there, just as a man's little finger is filled with the flow of life which nourishes his whole body. Even the feeblest mind has some consciousness of the tide of life playing about him. The stronger and more universal a human personality is, the more will he consciously absorb the general life and identify himself with it. To a genius, or to one whose social feeling is made vivid and sensitive by love, even small experiences unlock life, and from a small circle one may prolong great sectors into the wider concentric circles. Jesus had an unparalleled sense of solidarity. Thereby he had the capacity to generalize his personal experiences and make them significant of the common life.
Now, this race life of ours is pervaded by sin; not only by sporadic acts of folly, waywardness, vice or crime which spring spontaneously from human life, but by organized forces and institutions of evil which have stabilized the power of sin and made it effective. Our analysis of race sin culminated in the recognition of a Kingdom of Evil (Chapter IX). Jesus lived in the midst of that Kingdom, and it was this which killed him.
Every personal act of sin, however isolated it may seem, is connected with racial sin. Evil social customs and ideas stimulate or facilitate it; in turn it strengthens the social suggestion to evil for others.
But personal transgression does not develop moral force and resentment enough to slay the prophets of God. It takes public and organized evil to do that. When a travelling pedlar cheats a farmer's wife, he is part and parcel of an ancient system of business which overreaches the customer if it can. But if the pedlar learns that a socialist editor is advocating a system of production which would abolish him and his cunning, he does not waylay and kill the editor to stop his pen. On the other hand if trade and finance have developed a lucrative system of evil income, such as the American slave trade, or the English opium trade, or the universal liquor traffic, or Five Power Loans to China, or a monopoly of colonial trade, then it v^ill resist interference. The gigantic collective pedlar will blast reputations by the press he controls, break men financially by the bank credit he controls, or ruin men politically by the party machinery or official power he controls. When Evil is organized, the prophets suffer. There is probably not a single State of our Union which has not seen the reputation and financial or political standing of good men killed in cold blood because they sincerely opposed high class graft.
These public evils so pervade the social life of humanity in all times and all places that no one can share the common life of our race without coming under the effect of these collective sins. He will either sin by consenting in them, or he will suffer by resisting them. Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 191 7. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.
As one looks across human history with a mind enlightened by the thought of the Kingdom of God, he sees a few great permanent evils which have blighted the life of the race and of every individual in it. They always change their form and yet remain the same in substance. Seize and fight the power of evil at any point, as you will, and soon one of these ruling evils will lift its head and
Strike back at you. The stronger and more influential a man's life is, and the broader his moral interests, the deeper will be his experience of these chief evils. I have been impressed with the fact that so many of them plainly converged on Jesus and had a part in doing him to death.
These evils were not as gigantic and fully developed in Palestine as they have been in the great Empires, including our own. But the fact that even in this remote corner of the ancient world they were present and virulent, proves their universal power in the life of the race. There are few communities, a cross-section of which would not reveal their presence. Jesus experienced his full collision with them when he came to the capital of his nation in the last week. There is a reason why prophets are most likely to die at Jerusalem.
To make this clear I shall enumerate six sins, all of a public nature, which combined to kill Jesus. He bore their crushing attack in his body and soul. He bore them, not by sympathy, but by direct experience. In so far as the personal sins of men have contributed to the existence of these public sins, he came into collision with the totality of evil in mankind. It requires no legal fiction of imputation to explain that " he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.'* Solidarity explains it.
The most persistent force which pushed Jesus toward death, the earliest on the field and the latest on the watch, was religious bigotry. At that time it was embodied in the intellectual expounders and the devotees of Judaism rather than in the priests. Jesus acknowledged the earnestness and outward rectitude of his opponents. The traditional zeal of Judaism, the solemn injunctions of their most sacred books, and the punishments the nation had incurred by slackness and tolerance in the past, seemed ample justification of the vigor with which they set themselves against a man who seemed to flout the Sabbath, to disregard the laws of fasting, to eat with profane and unwashed hands, to overthrow the entire doctrine of clean and unclean food, and to confuse all moral distinctions between good and bad by associating with irreligious men. He was suspected of far-reaching designs against the religion of Jehovah; he had offered to substitute a temple not made with hands for their ancestral sanctuary.
So they counteracted him by innuendo and direct charges, and tried to entrap him. The great invective of Jesus shows that he regarded their influence as the chief cause for the frustration of his work. They were the active agents in the legal steps which led to his death and exerted the pressure to which Pilate had to yield. Secular governors are but poor persecutors compared with men of religion. The persecutions of the Roman Empire against Christians were feeble and occasional as compared with the zeal of the Inquisition. It takes religion to put a steel edge on social intolerance. Just because it is so high and its command of social loyalty so great, it is pitiless when it goes wrong.
Religious bigotry has been one of the permanent evils of mankind, the cause of untold social division, bitterness, persecution, and religious wars. It is always a social sin.
Estimate the harm which the exponents of religion have done simply by suppressing the prophetic minds who had received from God fresh thought on spiritual and intellectual problems, and by cowing those who might have followed the prophets.
Jesus was killed by ecclesiastical religion. He might have appeared in almost any highly developed nation and suffered the same fate. Certainly after religion bore his name, there were a thousand situations in which he would have been put to death by those who offered salvation in his name. Innumerable individuals contribute their little quota to make up this collective evil, and when once the common mind is charged with it, it gets innumerable outlets. This sin, then, was borne by Jesus, not by imputation, nor by sympathy, but by direct experience.
A second social evil which contributed to kill him was the combination of graft and political power. Those who are in control of the machinery of organized society are able to use it for selfish and predatory ends, turning into private profit what ought to serve the common good. In the Oberammergau Passion Play the whole plot turns on the cleansing of the temple. This interpretation has found scholarly support. The market was originally outside the temple gates. A location inside would be a trading privilege. Did the pious hierarchy take no offence at the chaffering and dickering inside of the sacred enclosure? Or was somebody making something out of it? Knowing what we do of human nature and the versatility of graft, it does not seem likely that the concessionaires got their inside stands for love. If this conjecture is true, the feehng that the Galilsean prophet was on the side of right would explain the ready yielding to his command; and the active concern of the traders and the hierarchy in their common business would explain the energy with which the hostile action henceforward moved against him.
We are on sure ground when we realize that the prophetic leadership of Jesus endangered the power of the ruling class. There is always an oligarchy, wherever you look; monarchial and republican forms of government are both protective devices for the-group-that-controlsthings. This group is the universal government. For every oligarchy political power is convertible into financial income and social influence, thus satisfying the powerful double instinct for money and for power.
In the case of the Jewish people, the Romans held the chief power and collected the main taxes through the concessionaires called the publicani or publicans. But considerable powers were left to the native oligarchy, especially the control of the institutions of religion, and from the loyalty of the Jews to their ancestral and centrahzed faith a modest income in cash and considerable social prestige could be harvested. Even distant colonies in the pagan cities remitted the annual temple tax, and a poor widow dropped her two farthings. Also it was pleasant to be called Rabbi, and to get the best seats in the synagogue. Their sincere concern for their religion was reinforced by concern for their special privileges as the custodians of the religious institutions and jurisdictions.
Jesus was a prophet of religion; they were exploiters of religion. This added durable fuel to their bigotry. They assumed that Jesus planned to stir up the revolutionary elements, and they feared that a messianic revolt would lose them the remnants of their power. " Whatever is to be done?" the fourth gospel reports them as saying; "if we let him alone like this, everybody will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and suppress our holy Place and our nation.'* Caiaphas formulated the situation with Machiavellian frankness: " You know nothing about it. You do not understand it is in your interest that one man should die for the People instead of the whole nation being destroyed." ^.
A third historic evil is the corruption of justice. We remember how often the Hebrew prophets denounced the judges who took bribes against the poor. Bearing false witness was so constant an evil that it got a place in the decalogue. Jesus took an illustration of the power of prayer from the case of a widow and a hard judge; though the judge cared neither for religion nor public opinion, she got the better of him by sheer feminine persistence. But it was hard for widows who had no pull.
Injustice between man and man is inevitable and bad enough. But it is far w^orse when the social institution set up in the name of justice gives its support to injustice. What nation can claim to be free from this? We have thought of the political prisons of autocratic Russia as a remnant of the dark ages, but the War has shown that even in free countries the judicial process can swiftly break conscientious convictions and the most cherished rights of democracy. In our own country the delays and appeals permitted by our legal procedure set up a terrible inequality between the rich and poor. Years of public agitation have produced no adequate change. Even if the judge is wholly free from bias, the law itself in all countries, presumably, is on the side of property. The British Parliament, " the mother of free institutions," has always been an assembly of propertied men; only in recent years has it contained an efficient minority of representatives of the working class. Our own legislatures rarely contain any spokesman of the class which needs a voice most of all.
As soon as Jesus was arrested, he became a victim of the courts. In the ecclesiastical court, we are told, distorted and bribed testimony was used. His followers were not present and we have no report of eye-witnesses. It may be that he never made the claim that he would come as the apocalyptic Messiah, and that it was concocted in order to have a political charge to present in the Roman court. The priestly court condemned him on a priestly charge; he was a heretic and blasphemer.
In the Roman court the pull of the upper classes and the pressure of mob clamour were allowed to influence judicial procedure. It was Pilate's high privilege to protect a man whom he felt to be innocent; he had the military power of Rome to back his verdict. He yielded to pressure because his own career, as we know from secular history, was corrupt; the Jews threatened to " get him," and he knew they could. So he took some water and demonstratively washed his hands of what he yet consented to do. Pilate's wash-bowl deserves to be a mystic symbol, the counter-part of the Holy Grail.
So Jesus made experience of one of the permanent sins of organized society, bearing in his own body and soul what so many thousands of the poor and weak have borne before and after, the corruption of justice.
A fourth permanent social sin which participated in the death of Jesus was the mob spirit and mob action. The mob spirit is the social spirit gone mad. The social group then escapes from the control of its wiser and fairer habits, and is lashed into action by primitive passions. The social spirit reacts so powerfully on individuals, that when once the restraints of self-criticism and self-control are shot back, the crowd gets drunk on the mere effluvia of its own emotions. We know only too well that a city of respectable and religious people will do fiendish acts of cruelty and obscenity.
There are radical mobs and conservative mobs. Welldressed mobs are more dangerous than ragged mobs because they are far more efficient. Entire nations may come under the mob spirit, and abdicate their judgment.
Rarely are mobs wholly spontaneous; usually there is leadership to fanaticize the masses. At this point this sin connects with the sins of selfish leadership which we have analysed before. Sometimes the crowd turns against the oligarchy; usually the oligarchy manipulates the crowd.
So it was in the case of Jesus. The mob shouted for the physical force man and against the man who embodied the better spirit of the Jewish nation. There was '' pa- triotism " in this choice. Pilate realized that, and tried to play on it by calling Jesus the king of the Jews, but the native politicians outplayed him. The choice was prophetic. It was the Barabbas type which led the nation to its doom in the Jewish War and the later risings of the Jewish patriots.
So this pervasive sin of community life, the intoxication of the social spirit, before which so many prophets and semi-prophets have had to quail, contributed to the death of Jesus. He bore it, not by sympathy or imputation, but by experience.
The fifth universal sin of organized society which cooperated in the death of Christ w^as militarism. So far as we know, Jesus never passed through an actual war. He probably never saw his home burned, his father killed, his sisters ravished, nor was he ever forced to bear arms. But that he had convictions on war is plain from his sayings. " He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword," shows clear comprehension of the fact that in war neither side gains, and that the reactions of war are as dangerous as the direct effects; of which fact ample demonstrations are before us.
If the words spoken in his lament over Jerusalem are authentic, he not only foresaw that the present drift would carry his nation to war and destruction, but he regarded the acceptance of his leadership as the one means by which his people might have escaped their doom: " If thou hadst known in this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from thine eyes." To his mind, then, the Kingdom of God must have had a conscious and definite relation to war and force revolution.
With his arrest Jesus fell into the hands of the war system. When the soldiers stripped him, beat his back with the leaded whip, pressed the wreath of thorns into his scalp, draped a purple mantle around him and saluted this amusing king of the Jews, and when they blindfolded and struck him, asking him to prophesy who it was and spitting in his face, — this was the humour of the barrack room. This was fun as the professional soldiers of the Roman Empire saw it. The men who drove the spikes through his hands and feet were the equivalent of a firing-squad told off for duty at an execution, and w^hen they gambled for his clothes, they were taking their soldiers' perquisites.
The last of this group of racial sins is class contempt. Class pride and its obverse passion, class contempt, are the necessary spiritual product of class divisions. They are the direct negation of solidarity and love. They substitute a semi-human, semi-ethical relation for full human fraternity. The class system, therefore, is a sinful denial of the Kingdom of God, and one of the characteristic marks and forces of the Kingdom of Evil.
It is almost universal. Our capitalistic semi-democracy has alleviated it but not overcome it. Indeed, while some other nations are slowly breaking up the class systems erected in the past, the present economic tendencies in our country, if allowed to go on, will inevitably build up a durable class system. Economic facts mock at political theory. Sixty-five per cent of the national property before the war was held by two per cent of the population. The war has contributed enormously to the aggregation of great fortunes. ^ Parasitic incomes produce class differences; class differences create class pride and class contempt.
This sin has always rested heavily on the great mass of mankind. It expresses itself in social customs and in the laws of a nation. Where an aristocracy exists, either its members are formally exempt from the degrading forms of punishment, as in Russia, or they are ostensibly liable to them but practically exempt by the inability to put them in prison or keep them there.
In Roman law crucifixion was a punishment reserved for offenders of the lowest classes. No Roman citizen could be crucified. Cicero flung it at Verres as a culminating accusation in the counts of his misrule that he had crucified a Roman. When Jesus was nailed to the tree, therefore, he bore not only the lightning shoots of physical pain imposed by the cruelties of criminal law, but also that contempt for the lower classes which has always dehumanized the upper classes, numbed and crippled the spiritual self-respect of the lower classes, and set up insuperable barriers to the spirit of the Kingdom of God.
Religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit, mili- iThe Minority Report of the Senate Committee on Finance, August 13, 1917, contains tables of 95 industrial corporations and 50 railways in which the average income of 1911-13 is deducted from the net income of 1916, leaving special war profits of 100%, 400%, 1400%, 4500% in some cases. Thus the Bethlehem Steel Corporation made over 1300% or $40,518,860, and the Du Pont Powder Co. over 1400% or $76,581,729.
tarism, and class contempt, — every student of history will recognize that these sum up constitutional forces in the Kingdom of Evil. Jesus bore these sins in no legal or artificial sense, but in their impact on his own body and soul. He had not contributed to them, as we have, and yet they were laid on him. They were not only the sins of Caiaphas, Pilate, or Judas, but the social sin of all mankind, to which all who ever lived have contributed, and under which all who ever lived have suffered. ^
The spiritual insight of Jesus himself has added a further step to this solidaristic interpretation of his death. In the parable of the Vineyard he described the religious history of his nation as a continuous struggle, with God and his prophets on one side, and the selfish exploiters of religion on the other, and set his own impending death at the end of the prophetic succession as its culmination. This was an historical, social, and solidaristic interpretation of his death.
At the close of the invective against the religious leaders (Mathew 2t,) he again outlined this historical process, in which the ruling classes of the past had always silenced the living voices of God, but managed to utilize them
1 1 have not seen this analysis attempted before. My attention has been called to a sermon by President William DeWitt Hyde, on " The Sins which Crucified Jesus," in the collection of " Modern Sermons by World Scholars," Vol. IV, in which he follows a similar line of inquiry. He specifies the envy of the hierarchy, the money-love of Judas, slander, and the servility of Pilate. But, except in the first part, dealing with the hierarchy, he does not place the discussion under the category of solidarity, and that is the decisive point of my argument. See also Henry Sloane Coffin, " Social Aspects of the Cross."
posthumously among the decorative elements and authorities of religion. He warned his own generation that they were on the point of repeating this sin by persecuting the new prophets whom he would send. Thereby they would prove that they were " the sons of them that slew the prophets "; they would " fill up the measure of their fathers "; and would bring upon themselves " all the righteous blood shed on the earth."
His thought is that by repeating the sins of the past we are involved in the guilt of the past. We are linked in a solidarity of evil and guilt with all who have done the same before us, and all who will do the same after us. In so far then as we, by our conscious actions or our passive consent, have repeated the sins which killed Jesus, we have made ourselves guilty of his death. If those who actually killed him stood before us, we could not wholly condemn them, but would have to range ourselves with them as men of their own kind.
This is Christ's own theology. It is not a legal theory of imputation, but a conception of spiritual solidarity, by which our own free and personal acts constitute us partakers of the guilt of others.
Along two lines we have replied to the question how the sins of the world were borne by Jesus: First, the realistic forces which killed Jesus were not accidental and personal causes of his death, but were the reaction of the totality of racial sin against him; and second, the guilt of those who did it spreads to all who re-affirm the acts which killed him. The key to the problem is contained in the realization of solidarity.
We have understood only one side of the atonement when we comprehend how the sins of humanity converged in the death of Jesus and were borne by him. The next question is, in what sense this can be said to affect God and to change the relation of humanity to him.
The first step toward a true view of the atonement is to see the death of Christ as an integral part of his life. Theology has made a fundamental mistake in treating the atonement as something distinct, and making the life of Jesus a mere staging for his death, a matter almost negligible in the work of salvation.
It is not given to all to die a significant death. Usually, as we age or sicken, the work of our life and the things we have loved and lived for, begin to drop from our hands. Instead of dying fighting, we die what our pagan forefathers called a *' straw-death." Sometimes a brave life ends in a dishonorable death. The death of Jesus was wholly of one piece with his life. He gathered all the radiance of his character and purpose in a focus-point of blazing light, and there he died.
In living his life and dying his death as he did, Jesus lived out, confirmed, and achieved his own personality. He did it for himself, as well as for God and humanity. There was no ** merit " in the medieval sense in it; nothing superfluous which he could hand over and credit to others to make up their defects. Just as we owe God the complete best that is in us, so Jesus too owed life and death to God. He was under the law he had proclaimed, that " from him to whom much is given, much shall be required."
His death was not simply an infliction from without.
He accepted his suffering not as a fate to be warded off, but with inward assent and acceptance. He knew it was coming. '*I must go on my way to-day and to-morrow and the day following; for it can not be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.'' When the time came he *' set his face stedfastly to go to Jerusalem." The struggle in the garden was only the last act. Every step was a conflict and a temptation, but whenever the time came for the next step, Jesus was ready. The spiritual and redemptive value of his death was not in the quantity of his mental or physical suffering; (that is a caricature of the atonement;) it was in the willingness with which he took on himself this highest and hardest part of his lifework.
The life of Jesus was a Hfe of love and service. At every moment his life was going out toward God and men. His death, then, had the same significance. It was the culmination of his life, its most luminous point, the most dramatic expression of his personality, the consistent assertion of the purpose and law which had ruled him and formed him.
The law under which he lived was the mind and will of God; the purpose for which he lived was the Kingdom of God. Jesus had to learn that law and try out that purpose. He had it within him, but the great experiences of his life brought the will of God and the needs of the Kingdom to his consciousness. The events leading up to his death were of the highest educational importance to his spirit. Here he learned fully the divine attitude toward malignant sin. He entered into that attitude, made it his own, and thus revealed God at the point where the sin of the world and the mind of God were in sharpest antagonism.
He was evidently deeply helped by contemplating the life of the prophets before him. The historical precedents furnished by them took on the significance of a spiritual law to him. He constantly connected his own work with theirs. His mental contact was not with highpriests and kings, but with the men who bore the living God in their hearts and braved the craft of priests or the yell of the mob to speak his word. He taught his disciples to see themselves in the same succession. They were to take opposition as part of their day's work and not mind it. The consciousness of standing with the prophets was so uplifting to him that he made this the culmination of the beatitudes, bidding his followers to rejoice and be exceeding glad if they tasted the same scorn and hate. What the death of Jesus now does for us, the death of the prophets did for him. None of the later theories of the atonement are taught, or even touched, in the sayings of Jesus, except perhaps at the Lord's Supper. The only clear interpretation of his death from his own mind is this, that he ranged his sufferings in line with those of the prophets. This lifts the experiences and functions of the prophets to a very high level in the redemption of mankind.
We said that through his sufferings Jesus came into full understanding of God's attitude toward malignant sin, and adopted it. God's attitude is combined of opposition and love. God has always borne the brunt of human sin while loving us. He too has been gagged and cast out by men. He has borne our sins with a resistance which never yields and yet is always patient. Within human limits Jesus acted as God acts. The non-resistance of Jesus, so far from being a strange or erratic part of his teaching, is an essential part of his conception of life and of his God-consciousness. When we explain it away or belittle it, we prove that our spirit and his do not coalesce.
In the Sanhedrim, in the court of Pilate, amid the jests of the soldiers, Jesus had to live out the Father's mind and spirit. He did it in the combination of stedfastness and patience. The most striking thing in his bearing is his silence. He never yielded an inch, but neither did he strike back, or allow others to do it for him. " H my kingdom were on a level with yours," he said to Pilate, " my followers would fight to protect me." He did not answer force by force, nor anger by anger. If he had, the world at that point would have subdued him and he would have fallen away from God. If he had headed the Galilseans to storm Pilate's castle, he would have been a God- forsaken Christ.
But his attitude was not soft. He resisted. He fought. Even on the cross he fought. He never fought so hard as then. But not with fist or stick on a physical level of brute force, but by the quietness which both maddens and disarms. If he had blustered, he would have been conquered. Christian art has misreported him when it makes him suffer with head down. His head was up and he was in command of the situation.
We have cleared the way for the question, how this obedience unto death affected God. Of course, any attempt to answer this question on the part of any human mind, inspired or uninspired, is an attempt to express more than it can conceive. " God is in heaven, and thou art on earth; therefore let thy words be few." All theories on the atonement prove how unlovely the image of man is when he enlarges it and projects it to the skies. For a Christian man the only sure guide in speaking of God is the mind of Christ. That is our logic and metaphysic.
If we think of God in a human way, it seems as if the death of Jesus must have been a great experience for God. Pantheistic philosophy represents God as coming to consciousness in the spiritual life of men and rising as our race rises. If we believe that he is immanent in the life of humanity and in a fellowship of love with us as our Father, it does not seem too daring to think that our little sorrows and sins might be great sorrows to him, and that our spiritual triumphs might be great joys. What, then, would it mean to God to be in the personality of Jesus and to go through his suffering and death with him? If the principle of forgiving love had not been in the heart of God before, this experience would fix it there. If he had ever thought and felt like the Jewish Jehovah, he would henceforth think and feel as the Father of Jesus Christ. If Christ was the divine Logos — God himself expressing himself — then the experience of the cross reacted directly on the mind of God.
We may conceive the effect of Christ's life and death on God in another way.
As long as humanity lives within the Kingdom of Evil, it is out of spiritual unity and fellowship with God, and
God is forced into an attitude of opposition where he desires to be in an attitude of love and help. Christ was the first to live fully within the consciousness of God and to share his holy and loving will. He drew others into his realization of God so that they too freely loved God and appropriated his will as their own. Thus he set in motion a new beginning of spiritual life within the organized total of the race, and this henceforth pervaded the common life. This was the embryonic beginning of the Kingdom of God within the race. Therewith humanity began to be lifted to a new level of spiritual existence. To God, who sees the end enfolded in the beginning, this initiation of a new humanity was the guarantee of its potential perfection.
This would alter the relation between God and humanity from antagonism to co-operative unity of will; not by a legal transaction, but by the presence of a new and decisive factor embodied in the racial life which affected its spiritual value and potency. When men would learn to understand and love God; and when God could by anticipation see his own life appropriated by men, God and men would enter into spiritual solidarity, and this would be the only effective reconciliation.^
In this change of relations Christ would be the initiator. His obedience would be the germinal cell from which the new organism would grow. His place within it would be unique. But his aim and effort would be to make himself not unique, but to become /' the first-born among many brethren."
iThis line of thought in substance follows Schleiermacher.
But what place does his death hold in this process of reconciliation? No place apart from his life, his lifepurpose, and the development and expression of his personality; a very great place as the effective completion of his life. Men v^ere coming into fellowship with the Father before his death happened, and before they knew that it was to happen. Jesus labored to unite men with God without referring to his death. If he had lived for thirty years longer, he would have formed a great society of those who shared his conception and religious realization of God, and this would have been that nucleus of a new humanity which would change the relation of God to humanity. Indeed, we can conceive that in thirty years of additional life Jesus could have put the imprint of his mind much more clearly on the movement of Christianity, and protected it from the profound distortions to which it was subjected. There would have been an ample element of prophetic suffering without physical death. Death came by the wickedness of men.
But taken in connection with his life, as the inevitable climax of his prophetic career, his death had an essential place in his work of establishing solidarity and reconciliation between God and man. It was his supreme act of opposition to sin; not even the fear or the pangs of death could make him yield anything of what God had given him to hold. It was the supreme act, also, of obedience to God, to which he was moved by love to God and loyalty to his Kingdom. Moreover, as we shall see, his power to assimilate others to his God-consciousness and to gather a new humanity, was influenced by his death, and the creation of such an effective nucleus is essential to any real reconciliation.
This conception is free from the artificial and immoral elements inherent in all forensic and governmental interpretations of the atonement. It begins with the solidarity between God and Christ, and proceeds to the solidarity between God and mankind. It deals with social and religious realities. It connects the idea of reconciliation and the idea of the Kingdom of God. It does not dispense with the moral effort of men and the moral renewal of social life but absolutely demands both. It furnishes a mystic basis for the social revolution. It would be a theological conception which the social gospel could utilize and enforce.
Finally we must inquire how the atonement affected men. What did the death of Christ add to his life in the way of reconciling, and redemptive power? The answer to this can not be narrowed down to a single influence. An event like the death of Jesus influences human thought and feeling in many ways. I shall mention three.
First: It was the conclusive demonstration of the power of sin in humanity. I can not contemplate the force and malignancy of the six social and racial sins which converged on Jesus without a deep sense of the enormous power of evil in the world and of the bitter task before those who make up the cutting edge of the Kingdom of God. In various ways this realization comes to all who think of the cross of Christ. But the solidaristic interpretation of the killing power of sin is by far the most impressive. The cross forever puts a questionmark alongside of any easy treatment of sin.
Now, the surest way to make sin pall on us is to watch it go its full length. The first beginnings of drink, vice, or war are of exciting interest, but the fourth and fifth act make us very sick. If realistic art would only be faithful and tell the whole story to the end, preachers might suspend business. An evening out; a broken girl; a shamed family; a syphilitic baby; scrophulous bodies for several generations. Show us the last results at the beginning and we should sober up.
Moreover, the moral cure worked by sin is most effective in some way when we see our sin working in another life. A man may be willing to gamble with his own life and take the risk of his sport, but he may shrink from making another life pay for it by agony or death, — provided he realizes the connection. Therefore it is the business of all who profit by sin to make the exploited sinner forget the social effects of his sin. The more innocent and lovable the victim, the more poignant the remorse when we realize what we have done.
When discussing the problem of suffering, (Chapter XV), we made the point that pain in the physical organism has a beneficent preventive use and purpose, and that social suffering serves the same purpose for society, provided it can be effectively brought home, and provided there is enough sense of sympathy and solidarity to care.
From all these points of view the suffering of Christ is an incomparable demonstration of sin. Here we see human sin in its mature and social form; the victim has not contributed to it, so that the guilt can not be divided, palliated, or shifted; the one who suffered was loving and lovable beyond all others; yet great social forces combined with the utmost energy to kill him.
As soon as the passion of the moment subsided and the " interests " were safe again, men were impressed with the innocence of Jesus. The more they realized the holiness of his Hfe, the strength of his love, the divine value of his person, the more would they feel the sinfulness of the sin committed there. Besides, the blame was not confined to those who did the act; all the interpretations of the Church emphasized the universality of the guilt. Every Christian has had his eye fixed on the cross as a place of engrossing interest. Whatever the theories of the atonement might be, was the death of Jesus not bound to produce a deeper moral earnestness of life, a wider sense of sin, and more self-restraint and thoughtfulness?
Suffering is Nature's publicity method to secure attention to something that is wrong. All history demonstrates that men are stupid and callous to suffering, even to their own suffering, and that only the most effective means will arouse them to put a preventive stop to what is destroying them. In all reverence I would say that the cross of Christ was the most tremendous publicity success in the history of mankind. No event in history has received such earnest and constant attention. None has spread so much seriousness, and made men realize the sin of humanity from so many angles. None has so impressed them with their own complicity in it and the solidarity of humanity in sin.
In so far as a genuine consciousness of sin is the first step toward redemption from sin, the cross was an essential part of the redemptive process. The life of Christ never spread such a realization of sin as his death has done.