LECTURE I.

INTRODUCTORY.

RANCIS TURRETIN, -the greatest of Cal.

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vinistic theologians-in the first of his celebrated dissertations on the Satisfaction offered by our Lord Jesus Christ for the sins of men, speaks of the doctrine of the Atonement as "the chief part of our salvation, the anchor of Faith, the refuge of Hope, the rule of Charity, the true foundation of the Christian religion, and the richest treasure of the Christian Church." "So long," he says, "as this doctrine is maintained in its integrity, Christianity itself and the peace and blessedness of all who believe in Christ are beyond the reach of danger; but if it is rejected, or in any way impaired, the whole structure of the Christian faith must sink into decay and ruin.”1

Such words as these are true only of the Atonement itself; they cannot be justly used concerning any doctrine or theory of the Atonement. There are large numbers of Christian men who have never been able to discover any direct relation between the Death of Christ and the forgiveness of sin, and who sometimes protest

I Note A.

with vehement moral indignation against the doctrine which alone explains the power of the Cross over their own conscience and heart. It remains true that Christ's Death-though they know neither how nor why-has done more than either His teaching or His life to constrain and enable them to trust in the mercy of God for the pardon of sin; and because Christ is the Propitiation for the sins of the world, God has responded to their trust, and they are eternally saved. For it is not the doctrine of the Death of Christ that atones for human sin, but the Death itself; and great as are the uses of the doctrine in promoting the healthy and vigorous development of the spiritual life, the Death of Christ has such a wonderful power, that it inspires faith in God, and purifies the heart, though the doctrine of the Atonement may be unknown or denied.

Even among those who accept, in their direct and obvious sense, the explicit declarations of Holy Scripture, that "Christ once suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God," there are very many-and perhaps their number is rapidly increasing - who shrink from the attempt to determine the precise function of the Death of Christ in human redemption. Reverence restrains their speculation. In the presence of the Son of God, dying for the sins of men, they can only acknowledge with penitence the greatness of their guilt and adore the infinite tenderness and strength of the Divine Love. Or they believe that the mystery of His Death transcends the

limits of human intelligence, and belongs to provinces of the Divine life and thought which are altogether inacessible to us. Or the history of theological doctrine has convinced them that the attempt to form a theory of the Atonement is not only presumptuous but perilous, and will inevitably introduce into our conception of the supreme manifestation of the Divine Mercy elements derived from human imperfection, by which its moral and spiritual power will be diminished and its original glory obscured. It is even feared, and not without reason, that we may so speculate on the relations between the Death of Christ and the Divine government of the human race, as to provoke men to deny that, in any sense, the Lord Jesus Christ died to atone for the sins of the world. We are warned that the fact may be rejected, because our explanations of it are incredible.

No one who has thought much on this doctrine can be insensible either to the difficulties which encompass it, or to the grave and complicated evils which a false conception of it may inflict on the life of the Church, The difficulties are obvious. In the present condition of theological thought many of them are insoluble; and it is more than doubtful whether some of them will ever disappear until we have the open vision of God on the other side of death.

For any complete theory of the Atonement must include a definition of the eternal relations between the Son of God and the Father. It is the habit of

some modern theological thinkers to say that the names by which we know the several Persons of the Trinity are derived from their revealed relations to mankind. This may be conceded; but surely these relations are conditioned by relations deeper than themselves. We cannot imagine that He whom we know as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ could have laid aside His glory and assumed the same relationship to the Son that the Son assumed to Him: if this were possible, then the relationship as known to us between the Lord Jesus Christ and the Father would be purely contingent and arbitrary, and would rest on no eternal fact in the nature of God. What may be described as the internal and mutual relations of the Trinity must contain the ultimate solution of some of the questions suggested by the relation of Christ in His redemptive work to the Father. But the development of the doctrine of the Trinity has been practically arrested for thirteen or fourteen hundred years; and in those early centuries when that doctrine absorbed the theological thought of the Church, the theory of the Atonement had as yet assumed so rudimentary and imperfect a form that it was impossible for theologians to appreciate the close and profound relations between these two great provinces of Christian speculation. During the Athanasian controversies the construction of the doctrine of the Trinity suffered very seriously through the absence of a just theory of the Atonement; and until the doctrine of the Trinity has received a much richer and

fuller development, there are questions relating to the theory of the Atonement to which we can give no reply.

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Nor, on the other hand, has the thought of the Church ever reached a firm, coherent, and permanent conception of the original relation of the Eternal Word or Son of God to the created universe, and especially to our own race—a relation which appears to underlie the possibility of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to involve the solution of some of the severest speculative difficulties connected with the theory of Redemption. It cannot, indeed, be alleged that the question has never been seriously investigated. was forced upon the consideration of the early Church by the wild dreams of Gnosticism; it was partially illustrated by the profound thought of Athanasius; it was not overlooked by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages; it has occupied a prominent place in the noblest theological speculation of Germany during the last half century. But the question has never passed out of the province of speculation into the province of faith. It belongs to theologians, and not to the commonalty of the Church. The great words of St. Paul-"For in Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created by Him and for [eis unto] Him: and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist"-give us I Col. i. 16, 17.