013. ATONEMENT GROUNDED IN CREATION

ATONEMENT GROUNDED IN CREATION

There is a strange way of judging on the part of immature Christians. They fancy that joy and sorrow are incompatible. Hence they pursue joy only to find sorrow. It will help such Christians to know that only as they suffer with Christ can they reign with him, and that the reigning as well as the suffering are present facts and experiences. I need a present atonement as much as the patriarchs did. The knowledge that Christ now suffers for my sin is the strongest motive to keep me from my sin. And the duty of bearing the burden of souls will never be strongly felt until there is some understanding of the fact that Christ bears that burden and only asks us to share it with him. It is only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings that the joy of the Lord becomes ours. I know that the idea of Christ suffering in and with the whole sinning and groaning creation, bearing sorrow on account of wicked men and even of demons in hell, because he is the ground of their being and the source of their natural life, is far away from the thoughts of most men. But it is none the less rational and scriptural, for in him all things were created, in him all things consist, and he upholds all things by the word of his power. Bushnell and Beecher were right when they maintained that suffering for sin was the natural consequence of Christ’s relation to the sinning creation. They were wrong in mistaking the nature of that suffering and in not seeing that the constitution of things which necessitates it, since it is the expression of God’s holiness, gives that suffering a penal character and makes Christ a substitutionary offering for the sins of the world. Are angels then redeemed also? They too were created in Christ; they "consist" in him; he must suffer in their sin; God would save them if he consistently could. Yet the Scriptures declare that Christ did not "lay hold" of them to rescue them, though he did lay hold of the seed of Abraham. Why did he not? Perhaps because their sin was like the sin against the Holy Ghost, committed against the fullest light and leaving no susceptibility for redemption; perhaps, also, because their incorporeal nature gives no chance for Christ to objectify his grace and visibly to join himself to them. Whatever the reason for their exclusion from the provisions of redemption, we may be sure that that exclusion was not arbitrary, any more than is the election of believers. God does all for the salvation of all his sinning creatures that he can wisely and consistently do. To every sinner, even to Satan himself, it can be said, "Thou hast destroyed thyself." There is everlasting punishment, but it is not because of God’s arbitrary decree. The sinner makes his own doom, in spite of all God can do to save him. Eternal punishment is the solemn correlative of freedom. The proof of man’s original greatness is found in the depths of his fall. Because he was naturally a partaker of the divine nature and was made in the image of God, he could convert the process of evolution into a process of degradation, Christ’s Relation To Angels And Men could reverse the ascending spiritual movement and make it a descending movement, could by the abuse of free-will turn himself into a brute and a demon forever.

Though God be good and free be heaven, Not force divine can love compel;

And, though the songs of sins forgiven Might sound through lowest hell, The sweet persuasion of his voice Respects the sanctity of will.

He giveth day: thou hast thy choice To walk in darkness still! But finally, does not this doctrine make any true atonement impossible by regarding Christ as no more divine than any other of the sons of men? The answer is furnished to us in the words of Paul, "In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." Christ is not distinguished from men in Scripture by being of a different substance from humanity, but rather by having that substance in its completeness and perfection. Unlike our limitations, all his limitations were self-limitations. He was personally distinct from the Father, but he had a common nature with the Father, so that while in one sense he and the Father were two, in another sense they were one. As Doctor Stalker has said: "Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man." All men are physically and intellectually sons of God, but since the fall only Christ is morally and spiritually Son of God. The sinless and perfect man is such because the Spirit is given without measure to him. He is the representative and ideal man, because he is the fully manifested God. Divinity and humanity are not mutually exclusive. In rough and popular language we may say that humanity is finite divinity and divinity is infinite humanity. But since the gulf between the finite and the infinite is itself infinite, the difference between them is not simply a difference of degree, it is also a difference of kind. The anthropomorphism which is so inevitable is the normal movement of mind by which we recognize the true nature of God. When we take human fatherhood and human sonship and make them ideal and infinite, we are not misinterpreting, but only interpreting, the Godhead. Christ is the only begotten Son, because he is not only finite but infinite, the archetype and source of humanity, the original and eternal humanity in the heart of God. Of him, the eternal Son, all finite sons of God are but partial and temporal manifestations. What the Unitarian calls God we call Christ, and if the consubstantiality of man and God had been recognized a century ago by orthodox believers, the Unitarian defection would have been impossible.

I cannot think that this identification of humanity with Christ works anything but good in our interpretation of the atonement. For we need now no complicated theory of the two natures and of the union between them. We have at the same time and in the same Being complete and sinless humanity combined with suffering and atoning divinity. Man needs a human Lord and King, and Christianity satisfies this need of the soul. But the universal worship of Christ is not idolatry, because in worshiping the complete and perfect man, we are worshiping the only complete and perfect manifestation of God. The Son of Man is also the Son of God, and his human life and sacrificial suffering are the only adequate manifestations of that uncreated Being, that infinite perfection, that hidden trinitarian life, which is the ground and subject of all revelation. "No man hath seen God at anytime," and him "no man can see"; "the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath revealed him." The individual man, however exalted his powers and however noble his character, presents but a detached and colored ray of the Sun of Righteousness, in whose infinite glory all these scattered rays find their source and are blended into pure white light. Once only in the history of this sincursed planet the Maker of all, the Life of nature and of man, took by supernatural conception an individual human form, lived a human life, and showed by his bearing of sin and death how he had been affected by human transgression ever since the fall. Both law and grace, penalty and redemption, became personalized, objectified, demonstrated, as they could never have been while hidden in the heart of God, and so Christ became the power of God for human salvation. My doctrine, then, is psychological dualism combined with metaphysical or philosophical monism. I trust I have made upon my readers the impression that the doctrine is thoroughly Christian, in that it exalts and honors Christ by making him Lord of all. It does this not only theoretically, but practically. It makes plain that, since he is God manifested, Deity revealed, divinity brought down to our human comprehension and engaged in the work of our salvation, he is the only name given under heaven among men whereby we may be saved, the only way, the only truth, the only life, for our souls. Since he is the only revealer of God, to whom else shall we go for truth but to him? Since he is the only source of being, to whom else shall we go for salvation? To accept him is to accept God, and to reject him is to turn our backs on God. I have heard that during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria a plain, unoffending man in citizen’s dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest, and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem to us a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment-bar we are to stand.