011. EXPLAINS APPLICATION OF ATONEMENT

EXPLAINS APPLICATION OF ATONEMENT

Here too, I am happy to quote from Professor Simon¹ a passage which shows how man’s natural relation to Christ brings blessing and benefit to all who do not willfully refuse his gifts.

’’ Remember, "he says, ’¹ that men have not first to engraft themselves into Christ, the living whole. . . They subsist naturally in him, and they have to cut themselves off from him if they are to be separate. This is the mistake made in the ’Life of Christ’ theory [referring to the work of Edward White, advocating conditional immortality]. Men are [in this theory] treated as in some sense out of Christ and as having to get into connection with Christ . . But we have not to create the relation ; we have simply to accept, to recognize, to ratify it. Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to become one with Christ as it is refusal to remain one with him, refusal to let him be our life." So we get a clear and satisfactory meaning for that text which has puzzled so many exegetes, in which we read of "the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of them that believe." And we are also enabled to understand the meaning of Christ’s own words when, in the similitude of the vine and the branches, he speaks of the multitude who are connected with him naturally by creation, but who refuse to receive his spiritual life and so are cast out and wither and are burned. It cannot be those who are spiritual branches of the vine that are thus cast out, for of them Christ had said that "they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand." Those who are cast out can only be the natural branches, which in the exercise of free-will have closed the channels of their being to all access and inflowing of the spiritual life of the vine. Eternal life consists in thinking with the thought, loving with the love, and willing with the will of God; and since Christ is God manifested, Deity made available to us, Divinity brought down to our human comprehension and engaged in the work of our salvation, to accept Christ is eternal life, to reject Christ is eternal death. So "the grace of God," to use the language of another,¹ "is as organic in its relation to man as is the evil of his nature. Grace also reigns wherever justice reigns." Salvation must be by grace. For law admits of no palliations. What is is, and that is the end of it. Only grace permits a personal probation of each individual after the first sin. But grace secures the administration of all human history in the interest of man’s salvation. As the Logos or divine Reason, Christ dwells in humanity everywhere and constitutes the principle of its being, humanity shares with Christ in the image of God. That image is never wholly lost. It is completely restored in sinners when the Spirit of Christ secures control of their wills and leads them to merge their life in his. This work Christ is carrying on over the whole earth. In the Hebrew nation he made peculiar communications of his truth. The inspiration of the prophets was "what the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify." But all truth, whether made known by reason, conscience, or tradition, is Christ’s communication to mankind. Heathen religions, so far as they convict of sin and lead to trust in God’s mercy, are Christ’s revelation. Because "all things consist in him," the heathen come already in contact with Christ, sin against light, have a just probation, are without excuse, need no further trial. The doctrine thus propounded is a doctrine which immeasurably exalts the person of our Lord. It makes worship of Christ and dependence upon Christ rational. For Christ is practically, and so far as we are concerned, all there is of God and of the universe. In his life the law appears

Drawn out in living characters, simply because he is the organic law at the heart of things, both in physical nature and in the constitution of man. His life in the flesh only manifests the nature of God and the truth of being. Not only all the fullness of the Godhead was in him, but all the fullness of humanity also. When he atoned, humanity atoned. He could pay man’s penalty, because he constituted the essence of man’s nature. The offering in time was the outward expression of an offering that reached beyond the bounds of time. "Through the eternal Spirit he offered himself without spot to God"; the provision and the sacrifice were eternal. It was fitting that all nature should hide her face and shudder when Jesus breathed out his life upon the cross, for the sufferer was he "in whom all things consist."

Well might the sun in darkness hide And shut his glories in, When Christ, the mighty Maker, died For man, the creature’s sin!

I do not regard the monistic doctrine as contravening any article of the Christian faith. I rather hold that it furnishes a point of view from which each of these articles may be more broadly, profoundly, and successfully studied. Old objections to revealed truth disappear in the light of it. To many a perplexed believer, distressed because common explanations cease to satisfy, the new doctrine will give new faith and hope. Let me simply glance at a few problems which are thus illuminated. If Christ be the principle and life of all things, then the immortality and value of man’s soul are comprehensible; the psalmist’s words have new meaning: "Thou madest him a little lower than God"; and he could "call them gods unto whom the word of God came." Divine sovereignty and human freedom, if they are not absolutely reconciled, at least lose their ancient antagonism, and we can rationally "work out our own salvation," for the very reason that "it is God that worketh in us, both to will and to work, for his good pleasure." The person of Christ has new light thrown upon it, for he who, as the divine reason and power, is the only-begotten Son of God, in taking our humanity only limits himself by a special and permanent assumption of that which was never foreign to him, and so becomes the Son of Man. Not metaphorically and ideally, but literally and really, can it be said of Christ that, because "one died for all, therefore all (that is, all believers) died " in him, just as it had been also said of Adam that, because one man sinned, "all sinned" in him. The efficacy of prayer is intelligible now; since Christ, who is with his people always, even unto the end of the world, is the connecting link between them and the whole physical and moral universe, which he "upholds by the word of his power." The conversion of the sinner is simply a breaking down of the barriers which the human will has set up against the inflowing of Christ’s life; sanctification is the larger and larger appropriation of this same life of Christ—an "eating of his flesh" and a "drinking of his blood."

Miracle and prophecy are relieved of their difficulties when we remember that nature is a manifestation of the mind and will of Christ, and that it is as plastic in his hand as is your thought to you, the thinker of it. Jesus can ascend into heaven from the hillside at Bethany, and he can come again in the clouds so that every eye in every part of the earth can see him; for hillside and clouds and heavens are nothing but manifestations of him. The problem of the resurrection can no longer stumble us; all physical things are but the expression of his mind and will; since he is the resurrection and the life, all that are in the tombs can hear his voice; he can raise both just and unjust, for body and spirit alike "consist," or hold together, only "in him." He can be the judge of all, for he has been the sustainer of all human life, the compacter of every joint and sinew, the observer of every human act and of every human thought. There is no escape from Christ. Though I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, the wings of the morning and the uttermost parts of the sea are themselves Christ, and I shall find that his hand leads me, and his right hand holds me. He is the one and only punisher of sin. Since "all things consist in him," the reaction of the natural laws of man’s being, administered as they are by the Christ to whom all creatures and things are naturally united, is itself "the wrath of the Lamb."

How plain it is that to reject Christ is to reject God! Personal, deliberate, conscious turning away from Christ is turning away from all light and love and hope. The mediaeval story relates that when Jesus was carrying his heavy cross along the streets of Jerusalem, on his way to Calvary, he stopped a moment at the door of a Jewish shoemaker, to ease him of his burden. But the shoemaker came forth and brutally bade the Saviour pass on. For this he is condemned to be himself forever passing on, roaming from land to land, seeking rest but finding none, until Christ comes again. Gustave Dore has given us a series of pictures of this "Wandering Jew." The most solemn feature in them is the perpetually recurring cross. When the Jew lifts his eyes heavenward, he sees the cross upon the top of the cathedral spire; when he comes to the meeting of the ways, the guidepost makes a cross before him; rivers and floods, clouds and sunbeams, habitations of men and solitudes of nature, are all and evermore holding up to him the cross and reminding him of the One who died upon it, and whom he rejected and scorned so long ago. It is a parable of Christ’s omnipresence. The suffering Saviour is the life of nature and of man. Through all history he is working out his atonement. The mark of the cross is upon every sun and star, upon every chemical atom, upon the body and the soul of every man. There is no other name given under heaven whereby we may be saved. If we accept him, we become spiritually partakers of the divine nature, and all things are ours. If we reject him, the very stars in their courses fight against us, and the whole universe becomes a cross, to condemn and to punish.

Let me then sum up my monistic doctrine by saying: There is but one substance—God. The eternal Word, whom in his historic manifestation we call Christ, is the only complete and perfect expression of God. The universe is Christ’s finite and temporal manifestation of God. The universe is not itself God—it is only the partial unfolding of God’s wisdom and power, adapted to the comprehension of finite intelligences. It has had a beginning—the world is temporal, while the Word is eternal. All expression or manifestation of the infinite and eternal Word under the forms of time and space must be a self-limitation. Matter is Christ’s selflimitation under the law of cause and effect. Humanity is his self-limitation under the law of free-will, with its correlate, the possibility of sin. The incarnation and atonement are his self-limitations under the law of grace. This is not pantheism, for pantheism is not simply monism, but monism coupled with two denials, the denial of the personality of God and the denial of the transcendence of God. My doctrine takes the grain of truth in pantheism, namely, its monistic element, while it maintains in opposition to pantheism the personality of God and the personality of man, though it regards the latter as related to the former, somewhat as the persons of the Trinity are related to the one all-inclusive divine personality. My doctrine maintains, with equal strenuousness, the transcendence of God, though it regards transcendence as not necessarily outsideness in space, but rather inexhaustibleness of resource within, and so conceives of evolution as the common method of God, while it leaves room for supernatural working in incarnation, resurrection, regeneration.

There are no second causes in nature. The forces and laws of nature are the habits or generic volitions of God. Finite spirits are the only second causes, for only they have freedom. Having freedom, they do not reproduce in particular acts a generic volition of God; they may set their wills in opposition to God. That these finite spirits are circumscriptions of the divine substance and have in them the divine life shows the infinite value of their being; but it also shows the dreadfulness of their sin when they morally sunder themselves from God. While deterministic monism puts both man and God under the law of cause and effect, and so makes impossible the sin on the part of man which requires redemption and the free grace on the part of God which provides redemption, Christian or Ethical Monism holds to self-determination in both God and man and maintains the reality and guilt of sin as well as the possibility and reality of grace.

Ethical Monism gives an explanation of the atonement by showing that the union of Christ with all men, by creation, involves him in responsibility for their sin, even though he himself is the absolutely Holy One. The union of all men with Christ, by creation, shows us how certain benefits of his redemption, such as justification from hereditary and unconscious sin, may inure to all, while justification from conscious and personal sin may inure only to those who become one with Christ by faith. That all men are naturally the offspring of God, and in a subordinate sense partake of the divine nature in Christ, no more proves the future annihilation of all impenitent sinners or the future restoration of all men, than it proves the present annihilation of all sin ners or the present restoration of all men. Ethical Monism holds to one substance; but it also holds to free-will, and the very dignity of man’s origin makes his self-perversion the more awful. If he can resist God here, he can resist him forever, and the very fact that God has breathed into man the breath of life may only result in an immortality of misery to him who has devoted that breath of life to the pursuit of evil. In an earlier part of this discussion I have said that the proof of such doctrine as monism must be inductive—its ability to solve the problems of existence in a more complete and satisfactory way than that of the older dualistic theory. I believe that the tendency toward monism in physical and metaphysical science, in biology and psychology, in literature and theology, shows that the monistic theory meets a great want of our time. If it can be proved that the Scriptures, either directly or by implication, teach the opposite doctrine, I shall be the first to confess the vanity of my reasoning and to return to the common view. But prolonged examination of the Bible leads me to believe that monism is itself the Scripture doctrine, implicitly if not explicitly taught, not only by John but by Paul, and I therefore provisionally accept it.

Dr. Lyman Abbott has been advocating of late the divinity of man, and Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst has been comparing the relations between man and God to the relation between the waves and the ocean. Such expressions sound dangerously pantheistic, and the last of them seems inconsistent with personal immortality. But let us not interpret these brethren too narrowly. In these rather ill-chosen phrases they are doubtless striving to declare that God is the one and only principle of existence, and that man has life only as he lives in God. Pantheists like Spinoza have had currency simply because there has been a great truth at the foundation of their systems. It is the truth which Emerson put into verse:

I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year. Of Ciesar’s hand and Plato’s brain, Of Lord Christ* s heart and Shakespeare’s strain.

All this is an unconscious effort to set forth the fact that, by virtue of his relationship to God, unfallen man is lord of nature, and that in Christ regenerate man has all things put beneath his feet. When Wordsworth writes: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, Not yet in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home, he is only giving poetical expression to the thought that all life is from God, that there is community between our life and the divine. Moses had declared it thirtyfive centuries before when he wrote: "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations." And Paul declared it when eighteen hundred years ago he said that for him to live was Christ, and that not he lived, but Christ lived in him. It is "The Higher Pantheism" of which Tennyson writes: The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains— Are not these, O soul, the vision of him who reigns?

Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why; For is not he all but thou, that hast power to feel "I am I"?

Speak to him thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see; But if we could see and hear, this vision—were it not he?’ But this "higher pantheism" is not pantheism at all, for it recognizes the great truths which pantheism denies, the separate personality of both man and God, and God’s infinite exaltation above the universe which only partially manifests him; in other words, the higher pantheism rightly understood is only Ethical Monism. So too, we acknowledge the truth which scientific men like Darwin and Huxley have discovered, while we add to it the illuminating principle which they have ignored. So long as they refuse to recognize Jesus Christ in physics and in history, the humblest Christian knows more of the secret of the universe than they. To the Christian, the wonderful panorama of nature which Christ has caused to pass before him has become transparent, and he has seen behind it the author of all. To him the great drama of history has a unity and a meaning, for he has seen that the purpose of it all is to glorify Christ, for whom as well as through whom all things have been created. An Ethical Monism recognizes all the truth there is in pantheism, without including any of its errors. It recognizes God as the all-inclusive life of the universe, while it adds the truths which pantheism ignores—God’s personality and transcendence. The full acknowledgment in theology of this doctrine of one substance has been delayed, for the same reason that the Trinity was not more clearly revealed to the Old Testament saints—preparatory doctrines needed to be taught first. In the education of the race the teaching of God’s unity had to precede the teaching of God’s trinity, because, otherwise, trinity would have been interpreted as polytheism. So the teaching of human personality, freedom, responsibility, sin, has had to precede the teaching that man is of one substance with God, because, otherwise, con substantiality would have been interpreted as pantheism. But now theology enters upon a new stage of scientific completeness. The principle of unity has been found to be Christ, "in whom all things consist." No man can measure the importance of this discovery. It will exert an influence in both philosophy and theology like that which was exerted by the change from Ptolemy to Copernicus. He who unites humanity and deity is the central sun about whom revolve all the orbs of human knowledge, and from him they derive their light. There is hope for philosophy and for theology, because "in him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." Christ in creation furnishes to both philosophy and theology their greatest desideratum—an Ethical Monism.