By James Denney*
Contents:
THE first edition of The Death of Christ appeared in 1902. It contained the first six of the nine chapters in this book, and its purpose was to explain, in the light of modern historical study, the place held by the death of Christ in the New Testament, and the interpretation put upon it by the apostolic writers.
In its motive, the work was as much evangelical as theological. Assuming that the New Testament presents us with what must be in some sense the norm of Christianity, the writer was convinced that the death of Christ has not in the common Christian mind the place to which its centrality in the New Testament entitles it. It gets less than its due both in ordinary preaching and in ordinary theology. It is not too much to say that there are many indications of aversion to the New Testament presentation of it, and that there are large numbers of people, and even of preachers, whose chief embarrassment in handling the New Testament is that they cannot adjust their minds to its pronouncements on this subject. They are under a constant temptation to evade or to distort what was evidently of critical importance to the first witnesses to the gospel. It was with this in mind that the writer conducted his study of the subject, and while claiming to be impartial and scientific in his treatment of New Testament documents and ideas, he nowhere affected an insensibility he did not feel. He was and remains convinced that the New Testament presents us with a view of Christ’s death which is consistent with itself, true to the whole being and relations of God and man as these have been affected by sin, and vital to Christian religion; and that on the discovery and appreciation of this — or if we prefer it so, on the rediscovery and fresh appreciation of it — the future and the power of Christianity depend. Without it we can have no renewal of Christian life and no large or deep restoration of Christian thought. It is quite true that there is a difference between religion and theology, and it may be argued (as the writer himself has argued elsewhere) that it is possible to have the same religion as the apostles without having the same theology; but the distinction is not absolute. In a religion which has at its heart a historical fact, it is impossible that the meaning of the fact should be a matter of indifference, and the whole question at issue here is the meaning of the fact that Christ died. The chapters in which the New Testament interpretation is examined have been carefully revised, but not essentially modified. A few sentences and paragraphs have been canceled and a few inserted, but in substance the work is what it was before.
The Death of Christ, when published, was reviewed from various standpoints, and in particular it led to a considerable correspondence both with acquaintances and strangers which made still clearer to the writer the mental attitude and atmosphere to which the New Testament message has to be addressed. It was with this in view that the last three chapters were written. Originally delivered as lectures to a Summer School of Theology in Aberdeen, they appeared in The Expositor in the course of 1903, and were subsequently published under the title of The Atonement and the Modern Mind. No one could be more sensible than the writer of the disproportion between this title and what it covered; it could only be justified because, such as it was, the book was a real attempt, guided mainly by the correspondence referred to, to help the mind in which we all have and move to reach a sympathetic comprehension of the central truth in the Christian religion. As a rule, names are not mentioned in these chapters, but where opinions are stated or objections given within inverted commas, they are opinions and objections which have really been expressed, and they are given in the words of their authors, whether in print or manuscript. There are no men of straw among them, constructed by the writer merely to be demolished.
The close connection of The Atonement and the Modern Mind with The Death of Christ makes them virtually one work, and it seemed desirable, for various reasons, that they should appear together. The present volume contains both. The title of the earlier has been retained for the two in combination, and the publishers have made it possible, by resetting the whole in a slightly different form, to issue the two at the original price of the first.
The character and purpose of the book have not been affected by revision. It is not a complete dogmatic study of the subject, but it contributes something to the preliminaries of such a study. It is governed as much by interest in preaching as by interest in theology, and the writer still hopes that it may do something to make evangelists theologians and theologians evangelists.
The full table of contents will enable the reader to dispense with an index.
In the chapel of Trinity College, Glasgow, there is a stained glass window honoring the life and labors of Dr. James Denney. Beside the window on a plaque is inscribed, in part, the following:
James Denney, D. D. (1856- 1917)
Supreme alike as scholar,
teacher, administrator,
and man of God,
to whom many owed their souls.
In paying tribute to Dr. Denney, Professor A. M. Hunter of Christ’s College, Aberdeen, said,
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“To scholarship of the first rank [Denney] brought a burning conviction of the truth and adequacy of the Gospel, and he would have no truck with those who, desiring to be in tune with the Zeitgeist, would have watered it down. In all his writing about the Christian faith he sought to be Biblical, real, whole, and clear, and he often declared that he had not the faintest interest in a theology which he could not preach.” |
Dr. Hunter goes on to point out that James Denney could write on all the chief doctrines of the Christian religion (though he evidenced a weakness when it came to eschatology) “but it was the Atonement which was the center of his thinking.” The cross, Dr. Denney believed was “the hiding place of God’s power and the inspiration of all Christian praise.”
Dr. Denney, however, died in 1917 and there are few today who know anything about him. A brief resume of his life, therefore, is in order.
Born in Paisley, Scotland, James Denney was reared a “Camer- onian” or strict Reformed Presbyterian. His father was a deacon in the church, and all the fervor of Presbeterianism’s long fight for freedom flowed through his veins. It is not surprising that, when further disruptions rocked the denomination, John Denney and his family withdrew and, with a large group of loyal independents, joined the Free Church of Scotland. Such zeal and commitment to what was believed to be the truth were passed on to his son James.
Following his graduation from the local academy, James Denney enrolled in the University of Glasgow (1874) where he distinguished himself in both classical literature and philosophy. He graduated with honors and a Master of Arts degree in 1879 and immediately entered the Free Church College, Glasgow, where he had the good fortune to study under Robert S. Candlish, A. B. Bruce, and T. M. Lindsay. In 1883 he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree.
Denney’s only pastorate was at Broughty Ferry (1886- 1897), where he took his young bride, the former Mary Brown. Their life together was one of happy companionship, and when she died in 1907 without bearing any children, James Denney found nothing to replace his keen sense of loss.
Mary Denney contributed much to her husband’s ministry. He was inclined to be authoritarian, and under her kindly encouragement he became more compassionate. In addition, James Denney was disposed by his training to be theologically “liberal,” and through her tender influence he became more evangelical. In fact, it was due to her recommendations that he began reading the writings of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and the evangelical fervor of this British Baptist preacher radically changed the young Scot’s ministry. One biographer records Denney saying, “Though it is my business to teach, the one thing I covet is to be able to do the work of an evangelist, and that at all events is the work that needs to be done.”
With stress upon expository preaching characterizing his ministry at Broughty Ferry, Denney was invited to contribute two commentaries to The Expositor’s Bible: “The Epistle to the Thessalonians” (1892) and “The Second Epistle to the Corinthians” (1894).
In 1894, James Denney was invited to deliver a series of lectures in theology at the Chicago Theological Seminary. Two things are significant about this invitation. First, Denney was a pastor with a pastor’s heart, yet his abilities had brought him to the attention of those in need of a lecturer in theology; and second, the invitation extended to James Denney gives evidence of his influence beyond the borders of his native Scotland.
Before leaving for the United States, the University of Glasgow honored Denney with a Doctor of Divinity degree.
Of Dr. Denney’s lectures at Chicago (later published under the title Studies in Theology) Dr. Hunter, writing in 1962, had this to say:
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Though forty years have passed since he died, Denney’s work has not lost its relevance or its force. His writing has dated very little. In [him] you will find what you do not always find in our modern theologians — what is in fact one of the first virtues of great theological writing — perfect lucidity of thought and expression. |
In honor of his lectureship, the Chicago Theological Seminary conferred on James Denney a further Doctor of Divinity degree.
On his return to Scotland, Denney was soon called upon to succeed Dr. Robert S. Candlish as Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology in the Free Church College. Two years later, on the passing of Dr. A. B. Bruce, he was appointed to the chair of New Testament Language Literature, and Theology. Later, in 1915, he was invited to become principal of the college, succeeding Dr. T. M. Lindsay. his premature death brought his illustrious career to an untimely end.
While Professor Denney was at home expounding the text of a given book of the Bible, and was also a capable exegete (in 1900 he contributed a work on “The Epistle to the Romans” to The Expositor’s Greek Testament), his greatest contribution was made as a theologian. In this respect, his Death of Christ (1902) may be regarded as his magnum opus.
Dr. Denney laid great stress upon Christ’s physical sufferings. He emphasized the substitutionary nature of His sacrifice and expounded its effects to the believer with evangelical zeal. Such was his aversion to the teachings of certain mystics on the subject of the Atonement that: he avoided all identification with mystical belief. In spite of this, his work on the death of Christ remains one of the most definitive discussions produced to date.
When James Denney died, Dr. H. R. Mcintosh of Edinburgh was invited to pen a tribute to him. Here is part of what he wrote for The Expository Times (1917). His article is entitled “Principal James Denney as a Theologian.”
At the time of his death [he] was at the summit of his power [and] in his passing evangelical religion throughout English- speaking lands has suffered a loss greater, we may say with sober truth, than would have been inflicted by the withdrawal of any other mind.
James Denney deserves to be remembered. His books are his finest memorial. It is hoped that pastors as well as seminarians will purchase and read this excellent treatise, here produced in its unabridged format. Those who do so will find their lives and ministries stimulated and enriched by what this great man of God has to impart.
C. J. Barber
Two assumptions must be made by any one who writes on the death of Christ in the New Testament. The first is, that there is such a thing as a New Testament; and the second, that the death of Christ is a subject which has a real place and importance in it. The first may be said to be the more important of the two, for the denial of it carries with it the denial of the other.
At the present moment there is a strong tendency in certain quarters to depreciate the idea of a New Testament in the sense in which it has rightly or wrongly been established in the Church. It is pointed out that the books which compose our New Testament are in no real sense a unity. They were not written with a view to forming the volume in which we now find them, nor with any view of being related to each other at all. At first, indeed, they had no such relation. They are merely the chief fragments that have survived from a primitive Christian literature which must have been indefinitely larger, not to say richer. The unity which they now possess, and in virtue of which they constitute the New Testament, does not belong to them inherently; it is factitious; it is the artificial, and to a considerable extent the illusive result of the action of the Church in bestowing upon them canonical authority. The age to which they historically belong is an age at which the Church had no ‘New Testament, ’ and hence what is called New Testament theology is an exhibition of the manner in which Christians thought before a New Testament existed. As a self- contradictory thing, therefore, it ought to be abolished. The ‘dogma’ of the New Testament, and the factitious unity which it has created, ought to be superseded, and instead of New Testament theology we should aim at a history of primitive Christian thought and life. It would not be necessary for the purposes of such a history to make any assumptions as to the unity of the ‘New Testament’ books; but though they would not form a holy island in the sea of history, they would gain in life and reality in proportion as the dogmatic tie which binds them to each other was broken, and their living relations to the general phenomena of history revealed. 1
There is not only some plausibility in this but some truth: all I am concerned to point out here is that it is not the whole truth, and possibly not the main truth. The unity which belongs to the books of the New Testament, whatever be its value, is certainly not fortuitous. The books did not come together by chance. They are not held together simply by the art of the bookbinder. It would be truer to say that they gravitated toward each other in the course of the first century of the Church’s life, and imposed their unity on the Christian mind, than that the Church imposed on them by statute — for when ‘dogma’ is used in the abstract sense which contrasts it with fact or history, this is what it means — a unity to which they were inwardly strange. That they are at one in some essential respects is obvious. They have at least unity of subject, they are all concerned with Jesus Christ, and with the manifestation of God’s redeeming love to men in Him. There is even a sense in which we may say there is unity of authorship; for all the books of the New Testament are works of faith. Whether the unity goes further, and if so how far, are questions not to be settled beforehand. It may extend to modes of thought, to fundamental beliefs or convictions, in regard to Christ and the meaning of His presence and work in the world. It is not assumed here that it does, but neither is it assumed that it does not. It is not assumed, with regard to the particular subject before us, that in the different New Testament writings we shall find independent, divergent, or inconsistent interpretations of Christ’s death. The result of an unprejudiced investigation may be to show that on this subject the various writings which go to make up our New Testament are profoundly at one, and even that their oneness on this subject, a oneness not imposed nor artificial, but essential and inherent, justifies against the criticism referred to above the common Christian estimate of the New Testament as a whole.
Without entering on abstract or general grounds into a discussion in which no abstract or general conclusion can be reached, it may be permitted to say, in starting, that in the region with which the New Testament deals we should be on our guard against pressing too strongly some current distinctions which, within their limits, are real enough, but which, if carried beyond their limits, make everything in the New Testament unintelligible. The most important of these is the distinction of historical and dogmatic, or of historito- religious and dogmatico- religious. If the distinction between historical and dogmatic is pressed, it runs back into the distinction between thing and meaning, or between fact and theory; and this, as we shall have occasion to see, is a distinction which it is impossible to press. There is a point at which the two sides in such contrast pass into each other. He who does not see the meaning does not see the thing; or to use the more imposing words, he who refuses to take a ‘dogmatic’ view proves by doing so that he falls short of a completely ‘historical’ one. The same kind of consideration has sometimes to be applied to the distinction of Biblical, or ‘New Testament’ and ‘systematic’ theology. Biblical or New Testament theology deals with the thoughts, or the mode of thinking, of the various New Testament writers; systematic theology is the independent construction of Christianity as a whole in the mind of a later thinker. Here again there is a broad and valid distinction, but not an absolute one. It is the Christian thinking of the first century in the one case, and of the twentieth, let us say, in the other; but in both cases there is Christianity and there is thinking, and if there is truth in either there is bound to be a place at which the distinction disappears. It does not follow from the distinction, with the inevitable limitations, that nothing in the New Testament can be accepted by a modern mind simply as it stands. It does not follow that nothing in St. Paul or St. John — nothing in their interpretation of the death of Jesus, for example — has attained the character of finality. There may be something which has. The thing to be dealt with is one, and the mind, through the centuries, is one, and even in the first century it may have struck to a final truth which the twentieth will not transcend. Certainly we cannot deny this beforehand on the ground that Biblical theology is one thing and Systematic or Philosophical theology another. They may be taught in separate rooms in a theological school, but, except to the pedant or the dilettante, the distinction between them is a vanishing one. And the same may be said, finally, about the distinction of matter and form. There is such a distinction it is possible to put the same matter in different forms. But it does not follow that the form in which a truth or an experience is put by a New Testament writer is always unequal to the matter, or that the matter must always be fused again and cast into a new mold before it can be appropriated by us. The higher the reality with which we deal, the less the distinction of matter and form holds. If Christianity brings us into contact with the ultimate truth and reality, we may find that the ‘form’ into which it was cast at first is more essential to the matter than we had supposed. Just as it would be a rash act to venture to extract the matter of Lycidas, and to exhibit it in a more adequate form, it may be a rash act to venture to tell us what St. Paul or St. John meant in a form more equal to the meaning than the apostles themselves could supply. It is not necessary to say that it would be, but only that it may be. The mind seems to gain freedom and lucidity by working with such distinctions, but if we forget that they are our own distinctions, and that in the real world, in the very nature of things, a point is reached sooner or later at which they disappear, we are certain to be led astray. I do not argue against drawing them or using them, but against making them so absolute that in the long- run one of them must cease to be true, and forfeit all its rights in favor of the other. The chief use, for instance, to which many writers put them is to appeal to the historical against the dogmatic; the historical is employed to drive the dogmatic from the field. To do the reverse would of course be as bad, and my object in these introductory remarks is to deprecate both mistakes. It does not matter, outside the class- room, whether an interpretation is called historical or dogmatic, historico- religious or dogmatico- religious; it does not matter whether we put it under the head of Biblical or of philosophical theology; what we want to know is whether it is true. In the truth such distinctions are apt to disappear.
Without assuming, therefore, the dogmatic unity of the New Testament, either in its representation of Christianity as a whole, or of the death of Christ in particular, we need not feel precluded from approaching it with a presumption that it will exhibit some kind of coherence. Granting that the Church canonized the books, consciously or unconsciously, it did not canonize them for nothing. It must have felt that they really represented and therefore safeguarded the Christian faith, and as the Church of the early days was acutely conscious of the distinction between what did and what did not belong to Christianity, it must have had some sense at least of a consistency in its Christian Scriptures. 2 They did not represent for it two gospels or ten, but one. The view Christians took of the books they valued was instinctively dogmatic without ceasing to be historical; or perhaps we may say, with a lively sense of their historical relations the Church had an instinctive feeling of the dogmatic import of the books in its New Testament. It is in this attitude, which is not blind to either side of the distinction, yet does not let either annul the other, that we ought to approach the study of New Testament problems.
It is hardly necessary to prove that in the New Testament the death of Christ is a real subject. It is distinctly present to the mind of New Testament writers, and they have much to say upon it. It is treated by them as a subject of central and permanent importance to the Christian faith, and it is incredible that it should have filled the place it does fill in the New Testament had it ever been regarded as of trifling consequence for the understanding, the acceptance, or the preaching of the Gospel. As little is it necessary to say that in using the expression ‘the death of Christ, ’ we are not speaking of a thing, but of an experience. Whether we view it as action or as passion, whatever enters into personality has the significance and the worth of personality. The death of Christ in the New Testament is the death of one who is alive for evermore. To every New Testament writer Christ is the Lord, the living and exalted Lord, and it is impossible for them to think of His death except as an experience the result or virtue of which is perpetuated in His risen life. Nevertheless, Christ died. His death is in some sense the center and consummation of His work. It is because of it that His risen life is the hope which it is to sinful men; and it needs no apology, therefore, if one who thinks that it has less than its proper place in preaching and in theology endeavors to bring out as simply as possible its place and meaning in the New Testament. If our religion is to be Christian in any sense of the term which history will justify, it can never afford to ignore what, to say the least of it, is the primary confession of Christian faith.
The starting- point in our investigation must be the life and teaching of Jesus Himself. For this we shall depend in the first instance on the synoptic gospels. Next will come an examination of primitive Christian teaching as it bears on our subject. For this we can only make use of the early chapters in Acts, and with a reserve, which will be explained at the proper place, of the First Epistle of Peter. It will then be necessary to go into greater detail, in proportion as we have more material at command, in regard to the teaching of St. Paul. Of all New Testament writers he is the one who has most deliberately and continually reflected on Christ’s death; if there is a conscious theology of it anywhere it is with him. A study of the epistle to the Hebrews and of the Johannine writings — Apocalypse, Gospel, and Epistle — will bring the subject proper to a close; but I shall venture to add, in a concluding chapter, some reflections on the importance of the New Testament conception of Christ’s death alike to the evangelist and the theologian.
Introduction
Conception of the New Testament, its unity not artificial, Misused distinctions, historical and dogmatic, biblical and systematic, material and formal, The death of Christ a real subject in the New Testament.
Chapter 1: The Synoptic Gospels
The mind of Christ and the mind of the evangelists, The idea that Our Lord’s death must have been foreign to His mind when He entered on His work, Relation to this idea of the narratives of His Baptism and Temptation, Significance of the Baptism in particular, The first suggestions of our Lord’s death and allusions to it, The taking away of the Bridegroom (Mark 2: 19), and the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12: 40), The express predictions of the Passion: critical questions connected with them, (Mark 7: 31, Mark 9: 81, Mark 10: 82, and parallels) — their historicity, Sense in which Christ’s death was necessary:
(a) Inevitable?
(b) Indispensable?
Relation of these two conceptions in the mind of Jesus, Bearing of Old Testament Scripture on this point, What the unintelligence of the disciples meant,
The Ransom saying:
Its historical context, Its interpretation — (a) Hellmann’s view criticized, (b) Wendt’s
Clue to the meaning —(a) In other words of Jesus,(b) In passages of the Old Testament,
The meaning of Kopher the equivalent of lu>tron, The Lord’s Supper: Views of Spitta and Hellmann criticized, The idea of covenant- blood: relation of sacrifice in general to propitiation, Exodus 24 and Jeremiah 21. In relation to the words of Jesus, The idea that ‘the remission of sins’ in Matthew 26: 28 is put into a relation to Christ’s death which is inconsistent with His teaching as a whole, Propitiation, a mode of mediation.
Chapter 2: The Earliest Christian Preaching
Results of last chapter in relation to our Lord’s experience in Gethsemane and on the Cross — not refuted but illustrated, Original attitude of the disciples to the words of Jesus, The Resurrection: the intercourse of the Risen Christ with the disciples according to the New Testament — critical problems,
The great commission: Matthew 28: 18ff., Mark 16: 15f., Luke 24: 47f. and John 20: 21f., Refers either
(a) to Baptism or
(b) to Forgiveness.
In the New Testament these are inter- related and related to the death of Jesus, Importance of this for the unity of the New Testament.
The opening chapters of Acts:
Critical problems again, Primitive character of the Christology, Prominence of the Resurrection — why? Refutation of the idea that the death of the Messiah is only an offense which the Resurrection enables the disciples to overcome, How the earliest Christian preaching made the death of Christ intelligible, Its connection
(1) with a divine purpose, (2) with the prophecy of the Servant of the Lord, (3) with the forgiveness of sins, The Sacraments in Acts, and their significance in this connection.
The First Epistle of St. Peter:
Its ‘Pauline’ features, A ‘witness’ to the sufferings of Christ, The important passages: (1) The salutation, 1: 1f. — the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ — relation to Exodus 24, (2) ‘Redeemed from a vain conversation, ’ 1: 18f. — originality of this idea — what it leaves unexplained, (3) ‘Who Himself bore our sins, ’ 2: 20ff. — mingling of prophecy and testimony — Christ’s sufferings exemplary, yet more — what it is to bear sin — sin- bearing and substitution- the purpose of Christ in bearing our sins, (4) ‘Who died for sins once, the just for the unjust’ — aim of this: to conduct us to God Imitation of Christ conditioned by the consciousness of redemption, The Second Epistle ascribed to Peter.
Chapter 3: The Epistles of St. Paul
Preliminary considerations affecting the estimate of St. Paul’s whole treatment of this subject:
(1) The assurance with which he preaches a gospel in which Christ’s death is fundamental — his ‘intolerance, ’
(2) The relation of his doctrine to the common Christian tradition,
(3) Alleged development in his teaching, and inferences from such development
(4) ‘Experimental’ and ‘apologetic’ elements in it — ‘testimony’ and ‘theology’ — ‘fact’ and ‘theory’: these distinctions criticized,
(5) Connection in St. Paul’s mind of Christ’s death and resurrection.
Relations in which St. Paul defines Christ’s death: (1) To the love of God (2) To the love of Christ (3) To the sons of men. Connection of sin and death as He conceived it — death must be interpreted through the conscience — Menegoz on an alleged incoherence of the apostle.
The witness of the epistles on these points:
1 Thessalonians 5: 10, ‘Who died for us that whether we wake or sleep we should live together with Him.
1 Corinthians — general references — ‘the word of the Cross’ — ‘bought with a price’ — the passages on the Sacraments in ch. 10 and ch. 11. — extreme importance of these — Christ our Passover.
2 Corinthians — ‘the sufferings of Christ’ and ‘the dying of Jesus’ in ch. 1 and ch. 4, The locus classicus in 5: 14ff. — professedly contains a theory: Christ died our death. Meaning of katallagh> (Reconciliation) in St. Paul — Christ’s finished work — necessity for evangelizing that there should be such a work, Christ made sin for us: meaning and purpose of this, Religious and ethical theological and psychological, expressions of the same idea: how they support each other,
Galatians — exclusively occupied with this subject — Christianity asserted as the sum of the effects produced by Christ’s death, and by that alone, Rationale of this as St. Paul’s experience: how Christ’s death is conceived and preached so as to have the power which produces such effects, Conception of Christ ‘under the law’: what it means, The law (a) as expressing God’s will for men, (b) as expressing God’s judgment on men. The last is necessary to explain Galatians 3: 13, and to make it intelligible that Christ’s death is a demonstration of love to the sinful,
Evasions of this argument (1) Only the ceremonial laws in question in Galatians, (2) Only the Jews are in question, (3) Curse is only equivalent to Cross, The ethical passages in Galatians 5: 24 and 6: 14.
Romans — the Righteousness of God demonstrated at the Cross, 3: 21 ff., The Righteousness of God includes: (1) the fact that He is Himself righteous, (2) that He justifies (or holds as righteous) him who believes in Jesus.
Jesus Christ set forth in propitiatory power in His blood is the demonstration of this righteousness in both its elements
Attempts to obliterate the distinction: (1) Those which do not see the problem with which the apostle is dealing, (2) Those which profess to find the key to St. Paul in 2 Isaiah and the Psalms — Ritschl’s idea that the righteousness of God always has its correlate in the righteousness of His people, (3) Seeberg’s view, that God to be righteous is bound to provide for fellowship between Himself and men, and is pleased to do it in this way,
To understand St. Paul, we must discern Law and Necessity in the relation of Christ’s death to sin, Manner in which St. Paul deduces all Christianity from Christ set forth in His blood as a propitiation,
Criticism of the current idea that he has two doctrines of reconciliation, a ‘juridical’ and an ‘ethico- mystical’ one: views of Weiss, Ritschl, Holtzmann,
True relation of Romans 6 to Romans 3, Faith in Christ Who died includes in it a death: (1) to sin, (2) to the flesh, (3) to law, Place of the Spirit in St. Paul’s teaching in this connection, The Epistles of the Imprisonment — reconciliation extended from man to the universe, Spiritual beings whose fortunes are bound up with those of men: the Scripture support for such an idea, An imaginative expression for the absoluteness of the Christian religion, Reconciliation of men to each other as a fruit of Christ’s death, The Pastoral Epistles.
Chapter 4: The Epistle to the Hebrews
Various affinities of this epistle: primitive Christianity, Paulinism, Alexandrian thought,
The most theological writing of the New Testament: its use of aijw>niov
Relations of Christ’s Person and work in it according as we start from:
(a) the Incarnation — Westcott,
(b) the Priesthood — Seeberg,
Christ’s death defined by relation to God and His love: (a) directly, 2: 9, (b) indirectly by allusion (1) to His commission, (2) to His obedience, Christ’s death defined by relation to sin (1: 4 and passim): it is everywhere a sacrificial death, Sacrifice in this epistle to be interpreted in connection with Priesthood, Priesthood represents, embodies, and makes possible a fellowship of God and man, A priest is necessary in religion to deal with sin by way of sacrifice, Ways of interpreting this:
(1) Nature of the relation between Christ’s death and sin deduced from the effect on man ascribed to the death — meaning ofaJgia>zein, teleiou~n and kaqari>zein in Hebrews,
(2) The effect on man deduced from the conception of Christ’s sacrificial death as a finished work.
What gives Christ’s death its propitiatory power? Examination of ch. 9: 14: ‘He offered Himself through eternal spirit, ’ The author held the common Christian view of the relation of death and sin, Examination of the passage in 10: 1- 10 ‘to do Thy will, O God, ’ In what sense obedience is the principle of the Atonement, Connection between the work of Christ and man’s salvation by it: the relation of the ideas expressed by Substitute and Representative, Place and meaning of faith in this epistle.
Chapter 5: The Johannine Writings
Critical considerations,
1. The Apocalypse:
The doxology in 1: 5f.: what inspires the Christian praise of Christ, The Lamb as it had been slain (5: 6-14), The Blood of the Lamb (7: 14, 12: 11) — connecting links in thought, The Lamb’s Book of Life.
2. The Gospel:
General representation: redemption through revelation rather than revelation through redemption — current contrasts of St. Paul and St. John criticized, Place of Christ’s death in the gospel often underestimated, Examination of explicit references:
(1) 1: 29: Behold the Lamb of God, etc., (2) 2: 19: Destroy this Temple, (3) 3: 14, 8: 28, 12: 32: The ‘lifting up’ of the Son of Man death as glorifying, (4) 6: 51f.: ‘My flesh for the life of the world, ’ (5) 10: 11f. The Good Shepherd, (6) 11: 49: The prophecy of Caiaphas, (7) 12: 24, 27: The corn of wheat, etc., (8) 12: 38: The quotation of Isaiah 53., (9) 15: 13: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, ’ (10) 17: 19: ‘For their sakes I sanctify Myself, ’ (11) 18-19: The story of the Passion, All this interpreted in relation to the love of God and the necessity of men as sinners liable to die in their sins in comparison with St. Paul.
3. The Epistle:
Comparison and contrast with the Gospel,
(1) It defines Christ’s death more explicitly by relation to sin, 1: 7; 2: 1f.; 3: 5; 4: 10. Criticism of Westcott’s interpretation of ‘the blood of Christ, ’.(2) Conception of Christ as iJlasmo>v — the correlatives of iJlasmo>v are sacrifice, intercession, and law, (3) Propitiation and the love of God definable only through each other, Place of the Sacraments in the Gospel and First Epistle of St. John — examination of 1 John 5: 6f., Relation of the historical and the spiritual in Christianity generally, The death of Christ in St. John as a victory over Satan.
Chapter 6: The Importance of the Death of Christ in Preaching and in Theology
No abstract distinction to be drawn between theology and preaching Considerations in relation to preaching:
(1) No gospel without Atonement The sense of debt to Christ in the New Testament. The characteristics of the Atonement must be reflected in the gospel:
(a) Perfection — ‘full salvation now, ’ (b) Assurance — Romish and Protestant tendencies (c) Finality — what justification means.
(2) There may be various ways of approaching this central truth of the Christian faith — our Lord’s method with His disciples, Kierkegaard on the sense in which the Father comes before the Son, though no man comes to the Father but through the Son, Relation in Christ of Example and Reconciler — what is our point of contact with Christ?
(3) St. Paul’s meaning in delivering ‘first of all’ that Christ died for our sins
(4) Sense of sin in relation to the Atonement (a) as the condition of accepting or understanding it; (b) as its fruit,
(5) The issues of this gospel — life or death,
Theological considerations:
(1) The Atonement is the key to the unity and therefore to the inspiration of Scripture. The inspiration of Scripture and its unity are correlative terms,
(2) The Atonement is the proper evangelical foundation for a doctrine of the Person of Christ. Harnack’s attempt to dispense with Christology — why it is impracticable,
(3) The Incarnation not intelligible or credible, except when defined by relation to the Atonement — speculative, ethical, and dogmatic reasons alleged against this — view of Westcott carried to its logical issue by Archdeacon Wilson. Grounds for rejecting this view:
(a) It shifts the center of gravity in the New Testament, (b) It puts metaphysical questions in the place of moral ones, (c) It displaces passion by sentimentalism,
(4) The Atonement is the basis for all adequate doctrine of God — sense in which the New Testament teaches that God is love — sin as that which is proof against such love,
(5) The Atonement at the foundation of Christian ethics as of Christian life — Law glorified in the Passion and made an irresistible, ethical impulses.
Chapter 7: The Atonement and the Modern Mind
Sense in which the Atonement and the Christian religion are equivalent, Sympathy and antipathy of the mind in relation to Christianity, The Atonement historically revealed, The modern mind and ‘authority, ’ Simplest expression for the Atonement: its basis in experience, The appeal against it to the Prodigal Son, Characteristics of the modern mind affecting its attitude to atonement, Those induced by the influence of physical and particularly of biological study — some favorable, some the reverse — Relation to the consciousness of sin, Those induced by the idealist movement in philosophy — disinclination or inability to take Christ at His own estimate, Those induced by the historical method of study — relativity of all things— no revelation of the eternal in time — this temper within the Church — significance of the Johannine books,
Two just requirements of the modern mind’
(1) Everything must be based on experience,
(2) Everything in religion must be ethically construed.
Chapter 8: Sin and the Divine Reaction against it
The situation to which the Atonement is related: that of sinful men, The relations of God and men are personal, But they are also ethical, i. e., determined by something of universal import — by law, This does not mean that they are ‘forensic’ or ‘legal’, St. Paul’s view on this point, The ethical relations of God and man have been disordered by sin, No theory of the origin of sin needed evolution and a fall universal experiences,
The reaction against sin:
(a) in conscience,
(b) in nature,
Ultimate unity of the natural and the moral order presupposed in the Scripture view of sin and atonement, Many arguments against atonement based on unreal separation of the natural and the moral order, Biblical Doctrine of Sin and Death: its real meaning, Not refuted by insensibility to death, Nor even by the ethical transformation of death into martyrdom.
Chapter 9: Christ and Man in the Atonement
Possible ideas about sin and forgiveness:
(1) Forgiveness is impossible,
(2) It may be taken for granted,
The Christian doctrine: it is mediated through atonement, The divine necessity for the Atonement — Athanasius and Anselm give imperfect expression to it — Paul on the e]ndeixiv th dikaiosu>nhv tou~ qeou~ in the propitiation, The human necessity for it — regenerative repentance the fruit of the Atonement,
Relation of the divine and the human necessity to each other, Definition of Christ’s relation to man in the Atonement, The conceptions of substitution and representation, The true relation of these two conceptions, Analogies to Christ’s Atonement, and their limits, Sense in which Christ’s life is absorbed in His death, Significance of the Resurrection in a true appreciation of the Atonement, Wrong inferences from Colossians 1: 24: Christ never ceases to be Redeemer, nor believers to be the redeemed.
ALL the gospels describe the sufferings and death of Christ with a minuteness which has no parallel in their narratives of other events of His life, and they all, to a certain extent, by references to the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy or otherwise, indicate their sense of its meaning and importance. This, however, reveals the mind of the evangelists rather than that of the Lord. It is in His life, rather than in the record of His death itself, that we must look for indications of His mind. But here we are at once confronted with certain preliminary difficulties. Quite apart from the question whether it is possible at all to know what Jesus thought or spoke about His death — a question which it is taken for granted is to be answered in the affirmative 1 — it has been asserted, largely upon general grounds, that Jesus cannot have entered on His ministry with the thought of His death present to Him; that He must, on the contrary, have begun His work with brilliant hopes of success; that only as these hopes gradually but irrevocably faded away did first the possibility and then the certainty of a tragic issue dawn upon Him; that it thus became necessary for Him to reconcile Himself to the idea of a violent death, and that in various ways, which can more or less securely be traced in the gospels, He did so; although, as the prayer in Gethsemane shows, there seemed a possibility to Him, even to the last, that a change might come, and the will of the Father be done in some less tragic fashion. This is what is meant by an historical as opposed to a dogmatic reading of the life of Jesus, a dogmatic reading being one which holds that Jesus came into the world in order to die; and it is insisted on as necessary to secure for that life the reality of a genuine human experience. To question or impeach or displace this interpretation is alleged to be docetism; it gives us a phantom as a Savior instead of the man Christ Jesus.
In spite of its plausibility, I venture to urge that this reading of the gospels requires serious qualification. It is almost as much an a priori interpretation of the history of Jesus as if it were deduced from the Nicene creed. It is derived from the word ‘historical, ’ in the sense which that word would bear if it were applied to an ordinary human life, just as abstractly as another reading of the facts might be derived from the words ‘oJmoou>siov tw~| patri>.’ If any one wrote a life of Jesus, in which everything was subordinated to the idea that Jesus was ‘of one substance with the Father, ’ it would no doubt be described as dogmatic, but it is quite as possible to be ‘dogmatic’ in history as in theology. It is a dogma, and an unreasoned dogma besides, that because the life of Jesus is historical, it neither admits nor requires for its interpretation any idea or formula that cannot be used in the interpretation of the common life of man. The Christian religion rests on the fact that there is not only an identity but a difference between His life and ours; and we cannot allow the difference (and with it the Christian religion) to be abolished a priori by a ‘dogmatic’ use of the term ‘historical. ’ We must turn to our historical documents — the gospels — and when we do, there is much to give us pause.
All the gospels, we remark in the first place, begin with an account of the baptism of Jesus. Whatever may be doubtful about this it cannot be doubtful that it was the occasion of a great spiritual experience to Jesus. Ideas, as Dr. Johnson says, must be given through something; and Jesus, we must believe, gave His disciples an idea of what His experience at baptism was in the narratives which we now read in the gospels. The sum of that experience is often put by saying that He came then to the consciousness of His Sonship. But the manner in which Jesus Himself puts it is much more revealing. ‘A voice came from heaven, Thou art My Son, the Beloved, in Thee I am well pleased. ’ A voice from heaven does not mean a voice from the clouds, but a voice from God; and it is important to notice that the voice from God speaks in familiar Old Testament words. It does not come unmediated, but mediated through psalm and prophecy. It is through the absorption of Old Testament Scripture that Jesus comes; to the consciousness of what He is; and the Scriptures which He uses to convey His experience to the disciples are the 2nd Psalm, and the forty-second chapter of Isaiah. The first words of the heavenly voice are from the Psalm, the next from the prophet. Nothing could be more suggestive than this. The Messianic consciousness in Jesus from the very beginning was one with the consciousness of the Servant of the Lord. The King, to whom Jehovah says, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee (Psalm 2: 7), 2 is at the same time (in the mind of Jesus) that mysterious Servant of Jehovah — ‘My beloved, in whom I am well pleased’ — whose tragic yet glorious destiny is adumbrated in the second Isaiah (42: 1ff.). It is not necessary to inquire how Jesus could combine beforehand two lines of anticipation which at the first glance seem so inconsistent with each other; the point is, that on the evidence before us, which seems to the writer as indisputable as anything in the gospels, He did combine them, and therefore cannot have started on His ministry with the cloudless hopes which are sometimes ascribed to Him. However ‘unhistorical’ it might seem on general grounds, on the ground of the evidence which is here available we must hold that from the very beginning of His public work the sense of something tragic in His destiny — something which in form might only become definite with time, but in substance was sure — was present to the mind of Jesus. When it did emerge in definite form it brought necessities and appeals along with it which were not there from the beginning; it brought demands for definite action, for assuming a definite attitude, for giving more or less explicit instruction; but it did not bring a monstrous and unanticipated disappointment to which Jesus had to reconcile Himself as best He could. It was not a brutal dementi to all His hopes. It had a necessary relation to His consciousness from the beginning, just as surely as His consciousness from the beginning had a necessary relation to the prophetic conception of the Servant of the Lord.
This is confirmed if we look from the baptism to that which in all the gospels is closely connected with it, and is of equal importance as illustrating our Lord’s conception of Himself and His work — the temptation. Nothing can be more gratuitous than to ascribe this wonderful narrative to the ‘productive activity’ of the Church, and to allege that the temptations which it records are those which Jesus encountered during His career, and that they are antedated for effect, or for catechetical convenience. Psychologically, the connection of the temptations with the baptism is strikingly true, and two of the three are connected even for many with the divine voice, Thou art My Son (Matthew 3: 17 and 4: 3, 6). The natural supposition is that Jesus spoke often to His disciples of a terrible spiritual experience which followed the sublime experience of the baptism — sometimes without detail, as in Mark, who mentions only a prolonged conflict with Satan, during which Jesus was sustained by the ministry of angels; sometimes, as in Matthew and Luke, with details which gave insight into the nature of the conflict. It does not matter that the temptations which are here described actually assailed Jesus at later stages in His life. Of course they did. They are the temptations of the Christ, and they not only assailed Him at particular moments, some of which we can still identify (Matthew 16: 22f. and John 6: 15), they must in some way have haunted Him incessantly. 3 But they were present to His mind from the outset of His career; that is the very meaning of the temptation story, standing where it stands. The Christ sees the two paths that lie before Him, and He chooses at the outset, in spiritual conflict, that which He knows will set Him in irreconcilable antagonism to the hopes and expectations of those to whom He is to appeal. A soul which sees its vocation shadowed out in the Servant of the Lord, which is driven of the Spirit into the wilderness to face the dreadful alternatives raised by that vocation, and which takes the side which Jesus took in conflict with the enemy, does not enter on its life- work with any superficial illusions: it has looked Satan and all he can do in the face; it is prepared for conflict, it may shrink from death, when death confronts it in the path of its vocation, as hideous and unnatural, but it cannot be startled by it as by an unthought of, unfamiliar thing. The possibility, at least, of a tragic issue to His work — when we remember the Servant of the Lord, far more than the possibility — belongs to the consciousness of Jesus from the first. Not that His ultimate triumph is compromised, but He knows before He begins that it will not be attained by any primrose path. If there was a period in His life during which He had other thoughts, it is antecedent to that at which we have any knowledge of Him.
These considerations justify us in emphasizing, in relation to our subject, not merely the fact of Jesus’ baptism, but its meaning. It was a baptism of repentance with a view to remission of sins, and there is undoubtedly something paradoxical, at a first glance, in the idea of Jesus submitting to such a baptism. Neither here nor elsewhere in the gospel does He betray any consciousness of sin. The opinion of a recent writer on the life of Jesus, 4 who ascribes to the fragments of the gospel according to the Hebrews an authority equal, and at this point superior, to that of the canonical gospels, is not likely to find many supporters. Jerome tells us that in this gospel, which in his day was still used by the Nazarenes, and could be seen in the library at Caesarea, the narrative ran, ‘Behold the mother of the Lord and His brethren said to Him: John Baptist is baptizing with a view to remission of sins’ let us go and be baptized by him. But He said to them, ‘What sin have I done that I should go and be baptized by him? Unless, indeed, this very word I have spoken is ignorantia, ’ i. e., a sin of ignorance or inadvertence (cf. ajgno>hma, Hebrews 9: 7, and hn;n;v] in Old Testament). 5 We should have to suppose in this case that Jesus went up to Jordan half reluctantly, His first thought being that a baptism like John’s could mean nothing to Him, His next that possibly this proud thought, or the utterance of it, indicated that He might have something to repent of after all, and more perhaps than He knew. This mingling of what might not unfairly be called petulance with a sudden access of misgiving, as of one who was too sure of himself and yet not quite sure, is as unlike as anything could be to the simplicity and truth of Jesus; 6 and surely it needs no proof that it is another mood than this to which the heavens are opened, and on which divine assurance and divine strength are bestowed. We must abide by the canonical narratives as consistent in themselves, and consistent with the New Testament as a whole. What we see there is Jesus, who, according to all apostolic testimony, and according to the suggestion of the Baptist himself in Matthew 3: 14, knew no sin, submitting to a baptism which is defined as a baptism of repentance. It would not have been astonishing if Jesus had come from Galilee to baptize along with John, if He had taken His stand by John’s side confronting the people; the astonishing thing is that being what He was He came to be baptized, and took His stand side by side with the people. He identified Himself with them. As far as the baptism could express it, He made all that was theirs His. It is as though He had looked on them under the oppression of their sin, and said, ‘On Me let all that burden, all that responsibility descend. ’ The key to the act is to be found in the great passage in Isaiah 53. in which the vocation of the Servant of the Lord, which, as we have seen, was present to our Lord’s mind at the moment, is most amply unfolded. The deepest word in that chapter, He was numbered with the transgressors, is expressly applied to our Lord by Himself at a later period (Luke 22: 37); and however mysterious that word may be when we try to define it by relation to the providence and redemption of God — however appalling it may seem to render it as St. Paul does, Him who knew no sin, God made to be sin for us — here in the baptism we see not the word but the thing: Jesus numbering Himself with the transgressors, submitting to be baptized with their baptism, identifying Himself with them in their relation to God as sinners, making all their responsibilities His own. It was ‘a great act of loving communion with our misery, ’ and in that hour, in the will and act of Jesus, the work of atonement was begun. It was no accident that now, and not at some other hour, the Father’s voice declared Him the beloved Son, the chosen One in whom His soul delighted. For in so identifying Himself with sinful men, in so making their last and most dreadful responsibilities His own, Jesus approved Himself the true Son of the Father, the true Servant and Representative of Him whose name from of old is Redeemer. 7 It is impossible to have this in mind, and to remember the career which the fifty- third chapter of Isaiah sets before the Servant of the Lord, without feeling that from the moment He entered on His ministry our Lord’s thoughts of the future must have been more in keeping with the reality than those which are sometimes ascribed to Him as alone consistent with a truly human career. His career was truly His own as well as truly human, and the shadow of the world’s sin lay on it from the first. 8
Starting from this point, we may now go on to examine the facts as they are put before us in the gospels.
It is only, indeed, after the great day of Caesarea Philippi, on which Jesus accepts from the lips of His disciples the confession of Messiahship, that He begins expressly to teach the necessity of His death. But there are indications earlier than this that it was not alien to His thoughts, as indeed there was much to prompt the thought of it. There was the experience of ancient prophets, to which He refers from the sermon on the mount, at the opening of His ministry (Matthew 5: 10-12), to the great denunciation of the Pharisees at its close (Matthew 23: 37). There was the fate of John the Baptist, which, though the precise date of it is uncertain, was felt by Jesus to be parallel to His own (Mark 9: 12, 13). There was the sense underlying all His early success, to speak of it in such language, of an irreconcilable antipathy in His adversaries, of a temper which would incur the guilt of eternal sin rather than acknowledge His claims (Mark 3: 20-30); there was the consciousness, going back, if we can trust the evangelic narrative at all, to very early days, that the most opposite parties were combining to destroy Him (Mark 3: 6). And there is one pathetic word in which the sense of the contrast between the present and the future comes out with moving power.
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‘Can the children of the bride- chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast. But days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in that day’ (Mark 2: 19f.). |
The force of this exquisite word has been evaded in two ways.
(1) Hollmann 9 has argued that 5: 20, in which the taking away of the bridegroom is spoken of, is not really a word of Jesus, but due to the productive activity of the Church. It is irrelevant in the circumstances, and it is only made possible by the parable of Jesus being treated as an allegory. All that is apposite to the occasion is the first clause, ‘Can the children of the bride- chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? ’ But the allegory, which is thus used to discredit 5: 20, must, as Wellhausen has fairly pointed out, be assumed if we are to get any pertinent meaning even for 5: 19; and few will follow him in expunging both verses alike. 10
(2) It has been argued that the words do not necessarily refer to a violent or premature or unnatural death, but merely to the parting which is inevitable in the case of all human relations, however joyful they may be, and which perhaps suggests itself the more readily the more joyful they are. 11 But there is nothing elsewhere in the words of Jesus so sentimental and otiose as this. He does not aim at cheap pathetic effects, like the modern romance writers, who studiously paint the brightness and gaiety of life against the omnipresent black background of death. The taking away of the bridegroom from the bridal party is not the universal experience of man, applied to an individual case; it is something startling, tragic, like sudden storm in a summer sky; and it is as such that it is present to the mind of Jesus as a figure of His own death. Even in the Galilean springtime, when His fortune seems to rise like the rising tide, there is this sad presentiment at His heart, and once at least He suffers it to break through.
It is not possible, for critical reasons, to insist in the same way on the saying about being three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly (Matthew 12: 40); in the parallel passage in Luke 11: 29f. the sign of Jonah must be interpreted without any such reference to the fortunes of Jesus. But even if Jesus did make an allusion of this sort to the issue of His life — an allusion which none of His hearers could understand — it does not carry us any way into the understanding of His death. It only suggests that it is not a final defeat, but has the true victory of His cause beyond it. What He came to do will be effectively done, not before He dies, but after He has come again through death. And this is the only sign which His enemies can have. 12
But leaving these allusive references to His death, let us proceed to those in which it is the express subject of our Lord’s teaching.
All the synoptics introduce it, in this sense, at the same point (Mark 8: 31, Matthew 16: 21 and Luke 9: 22). Matthew lays a peculiar emphasis on the date, using it to mark the division of his gospel into two great parts. ‘From that time Jesus began, ’ he says in 4: 17, ‘to preach and to say — Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. ’ ‘From that time, ’ he says in 16: 21,
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‘Jesus began to show to His disciples that He must go up to Jerusalem and be killed. ’ |
A comparison of the evangelists justifies us in saying broadly that a new epoch in our Lord’s ministry had now begun. His audience is not so much the multitudes as the twelve; His method is not so much preaching as teaching; His subject is not so much the Kingdom as Himself, and in particular His death. All the evangelists mention three occasions on which He made deliberate and earnest efforts to initiate the disciples into His thoughts (Mark 8: 31, 9: 31 and 10: 32, with parallels in Matthew and Luke). Mark, especially, whose narrative is fundamental, lays stress on the continued and repeated attempts He made to familiarize them with what was drawing near (notice the imperfects ejdi>dasken in 9: 31). There is no reason whatever to doubt this general representation. It is mere wantonness to eliminate from the narrative one or two of the three passages on the ground that they are but duplicates or triplicates of the same thing. In Mark, especially, they are distinctly characterized by the varying attitude of the disciples. Further, in the first we have the presumptuous protest of Peter, which guarantees the historicity of the whole, if anything could. In the second the disciples are silent. They could not make him out (hjgno>oun to< rJh~ma), and with the remembrance of the overwhelming rebuke which Peter had drawn down on himself, they were afraid to put any question to Him (9: 82). The third is attached to that never- to- be- forgotten incident in which, as they were on the way to Jerusalem, Jesus took the lead in some startling manner, so that they followed in amazement and fear. If anything in the gospels has the stamp of real and live recollection upon it, it is this. It is necessary to insist on this repeated instruction of the disciples by Jesus as a fact, quite apart from what He was able to teach or they to learn. It is often said that the death of Christ has a place in the epistles out of all proportion to that which it has in the gospels. This is hardly the fact, even if the space were to be estimated merely by the number of words devoted to it in the gospels and epistles respectively; but it is still less the fact when we remember that that which, according to the gospels themselves, characterized the last months of our Lord’s life was a deliberate and thricerepeated attempt to teach His disciples something about His death.
The critical questions which have been raised as to the contents of these passages need not here detain us. It has been suggested that they must have become more detailed in the telling — that unconsciously and involuntarily the Church put into the lips of the Lord words which were only supplied to its own mind by its knowledge of what actually took place — that the references to mocking, scourging, spitting, in particular, could not have been so explicit — above all, that the resurrection on the third day must, if spoken of at all, have been veiled in some figurative form which baffled the disciples at the moment. It has been suggested, on the other hand, that it may have been the idea of a resurrection on the third day, and not on the familiar great day at the end of all things, which put them out. It may not be possible, and it is certainly not necessary, to say beforehand that there is nothing in any of these suggestions. 13 But one may hold sincerely, and with good grounds, that there is very little in them, and that even that little is persuasive rather for dogmatic than for historical reasons. Surely we cannot imagine Jesus iterating and reiterating (as we know He did), with the most earnest desire to impress and instruct His followers, such vague, elusive, impalpable hints of what lay before Him as some critics would put in the place of what they regard, for extra- historical reasons, as impossibly definite predictions. Jesus must have had something entirely definite and sayable to say, when He tried so persistently to get it apprehended. He did not live in cloudland; what He spoke of was the sternest of realities; and for whatever reason His disciples failed to understand Him, it cannot have been that He talked to them incessantly and importunately in shadowy riddles, the thing could not be done. As far, however, as our present purpose is concerned, it is not affected by any reasonable opinion we may come to on the critical questions here in view. The one point in which all the narratives agree is that Jesus taught that He must go up to Jerusalem and die; and the one question it is of importance to answer is, What is meant by this must (dei~)?
There are obviously two meanings which it might have. It might signify that His death was inevitable; the must being one of outward constraint. No doubt, in this sense it was true that He must die. The hostile forces which were arrayed against Him were irreconcilable, and were only waiting their time. Sooner or later it would come, and they would crush Him without remorse. But it might also signify that His death was indispensable, the must being one of inward constraint. It might signify that death was something He was bound to accept and contemplate if the work He came to do was to be done, if the vocation with which he was called was to be fulfilled. These two senses, of course, are not incompatible; but there may be a question as to their relation to each other. Most frequently the second is made to depend upon the first. Jesus, we are told, came to see that His death was inevitable, such were the forces arrayed against Him; but being unable, as the well- beloved Son of the Father, merely to submit to the inevitable, merely to encounter death as a blind fate, He reconciled Himself to it by interpreting it as indispensable, as something which properly entered into His work and contributed to its success. It became not a thing to endure, but a thing to do. The passion was converted into the sublimest of actions. We do not need to say that this reasoning has nothing in it; but it is too abstract, and the relation in which the two necessities are put to one another does not answer to the presentation of the facts in the gospels. The inward necessity which Jesus recognized for His death was not simply the moral solution which He had discovered for the fatal situation in which He found Himself. An inward necessity is identical with the will of God, and the will of God for Jesus is expressed, not primarily in outward conditions, but in that Scripture which is for Him the word of God. We have seen already that from the very beginning our Lord’s sense of His own vocation and destiny was essentially related to that of the Servant of the Lord in the Book of Isaiah, and it is there that the ultimate source of the dei~ is to be found. The divine necessity for a career of suffering and death is primary; it belongs, in however vague and undefined a form, to our Lord’s consciousness of what He is and what He is called to do; it is not deduced from the malignant necessities by which He is encompassed; it rises up within Him, in divine power, to encounter these outward necessities and subdue them.
This connection of ideas is confirmed when we notice that what Jesus began to teach His disciples is the doctrine of a suffering Messiah. As soon as they have confessed Him to be the Christ, He begins to give them this lesson. The necessity of His death, in other words, is not a dreary, incomprehensible somewhat that He is compelled to reckon with by untoward circumstances; for Him it is given, so to speak, with the very conception of His person and His work. When He unfolds Messiahship it contains death. This was the first and last thing He taught about it, the first and last thing He wished His disciples to learn. In Matthew 16: 21, Westcott and Hort read, ‘From that time began Jesus Christ to show to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things, ’ while Mark and Luke, in the corresponding passage, speak of the Son of Man.
The official expressions, or, to use a less objectionable term, the names which denote the vocation of Jesus, ‘the Christ’ and ‘the Son of Man, ’ show that in this lesson He is speaking out of the sense of his vocation, and not merely out of a view of His historical circumstances. The necessity to suffer and die, which was involved in His vocation, and the dim sense of which belonged to His very being, so that without it He would not have been what He was, was now beginning to take definite shape in His mind. As events made plain the forces with which He had to deal, He could see more clearly how the necessity would work itself out. He could go beyond that early word about the taking away of the bridegroom, and speak of Jerusalem, and of rejection by the elders and chief priests and scribes. And this consideration justifies us in believing that these details in the evangelic narrative are historical. But the manner in which the necessity did work itself out, and the greater or less detail with which, from a greater or less distance, Jesus could anticipate its course, do not affect in the least the character of that necessity itself. It is the necessity involved in the divine vocation of one in whom the Old Testament prophecy of the Servant of the Lord is to be fulfilled.
It must be admitted that in none of the three summary references which the evangelists make to our Lord’s teaching on His death do they say anything of explicitly theological import. They tell us
(1) that it was necessary — in the sense, we now assume, which has just been explained;
(2) that it should be attended by such and such circumstances of pain and ignominy; and
(3) that it should be speedily followed by His resurrection.
The repeated assurances that His disciples could not understand Him must surely refer to the meaning and necessity which He wished them to see in His death. They cannot but have understood His words about dying and rising, unless, as has been suggested already, the date of the rising puzzled them. All that remains is to suppose that the incomprehensible element in the new teaching of Jesus was the truths He wished to convey to them about the necessity, the meaning, the purpose, the power, of His death. But if we observe the unanimity with which every part of the early Church taught that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures — if, as will be shown below, we see how in Acts, in Peter, in Hebrews, in John, in Paul, passages referring to the Servant of the Lord, and especially to His bearing sin, and being numbered with the transgressors, are applied to Christ — it becomes very difficult to believe that this consent, in what might seem by no means obvious, can have any other source than the teaching of Jesus Himself. Hollmann, indeed, makes a remarkable attempt to prove that Jesus never applied the fifty- third chapter of Isaiah to Himself except in Luke 22: 37, and that there, when He says (with singular emphasis), ‘that which is written must be fulfilled in Me, — the word’ and He was numbered with transgressors, ‘He is not thinking of His death at all as having expiatory value in relation to sin. He is only thinking of the dreary fact that His countrymen are going to treat Him as a criminal instead of as the Holy One of God. 14 But there is surely no reason why the most superficial sense of profound words, a sense, too, which evacuates them of all their original associations, should be the only one allowed to Jesus. If there is any truth at all in the connection we have asserted between His own consciousness of what He was and the Old Testament conception of the Servant of the Lord, it is surely improbable that He applied to Himself the most wonderful expression in Isaiah 53. in a shallow verbal fashion, and put from Him the great meanings of which the chapter is full, and which the New Testament writers embrace with one accord. On the strength of that quotation, and of the consent of the New Testament as a whole, which has no basis but in Jesus, we are entitled to argue from the dei~ of the evangelists — in other words, from the divine necessity Jesus saw in His death — that what He sought in those repeated lessons to induce His disciples to do was to recognize in the Messiah the person who should fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah 53. The ideal in their minds was something far other than this, and there is no dead lift so heavy as that which is required to change an ideal. We do not wonder that at the moment it was too much for Him and for them. We do not wonder that at the moment they could not turn, one is tempted to say bodily round, so as to see and understand what He was talking about. And just as little do we wonder that when the meaning of His words broke on them later, it was with that overwhelming power which made the thing that had once baffled them the sum and substance of their gospel. The center of gravity in their world changed, and their whole being swung round into equilibrium in a new position. Their inspiration came from what had once alarmed, grieved, discomfited them. The word they preached was the very thing which had once made them afraid to speak.
But we are not limited, in investigating our Lord’s teaching on His death, to inferences more or less secure. There are at least two great words in the gospels which expressly refer to it — the one contained in His answer to James and John when they asked the places at His right hand and His left in His kingdom, the other spoken at the Supper. We now proceed to consider these.
Part of the difficulty we always have in interpreting Scripture is the want of context; we do not know what were the ideas in the minds of the original speakers or hearers to which the words that have been preserved for us were immediately related. This difficulty has perhaps been needlessly aggravated, especially in the first of the passages with which we are concerned. Yet the context here, even as we have it, is particularly suggestive. Jesus and His disciples are on the way to Jerusalem, when Jesus takes the start of them, apparently under some overpowering impulse, and they follow in amazement and fear (Mark 10: 32). He takes them aside once more, and makes the third of those deliberate attempts to which reference has already been made, to familiarize them with His death.
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‘Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of Man shall be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes; and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him unto the Gentiles: and they shall mock Him, and shall spit upon Him and scourge Him, and shall kill Him; and after three days He shall rise again’ (Mark 10: 33f.). |
It was while Jesus was in the grip of such thoughts — setting His face steadfastly, with a rapt and solemn passion, to go to Jerusalem — that James and John came to Him with their ambitious request. How was He to speak to them so that they might understand Him? As Bengel finely says, He was dwelling in His passion; He was to have others on His right hand and on His left before that; and their minds were in another world. How was He to bridge the gulf between their thoughts and his own? ‘Are ye able, ’ He asks, ‘to drink the cup which I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? ’ The cup and the baptism are poetic terms in which the destiny which awaits Him is veiled and transfigured. They are religious terms, in which that destiny is represented, in all its awfulness, as something involved in the will of God, and involving in itself a consecration. The cup is put into His hand by the Father, and if the baptism is a flood of suffering in which He is overwhelmed, it has through the very name which He uses to describe it the character of a religious act assigned to it; He goes to be baptized with it, as He takes the cup which the Father gives Him to drink. That the reference in both figures is to His death, and to His death in that tragic aspect which has just been described in the immediately preceding verses, is not open to doubt. And just as little is it open to doubt that in the next scene in the gospel — that in which Jesus speaks to the disciples who were indignant with James and John for trying to steal a march upon them — a reference to His death is so natural as to be inevitable. True greatness, He tells them, does not mean dominance, but service. That is the law for all, even for the highest. It is by supremacy in service that the King in the Kingdom of God wins his place. ‘Even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many. ’
It is not inept to insist on the sequence and connection of ideas throughout this passage, because when it is really understood it puts the last words — ‘to give His life a ransom for many’ — beyond assault. It is often asserted that these words are an indication of Pauline influence in the second evangelist. Let us hope that one may be forgiven if he says frankly that this is an assertion which he cannot understand. The words are perfectly in place. They are in line with everything that precedes. They are words in the only key, of the only fullness, which answers to our Lord’s absorption at the time in the thought of His death. A theological aversion to them may be conceived, but otherwise there is no reason whatever to call them in question. There is no critical evidence against them, and their psychological truth is indubitable. So far from saying that Jesus could not have uttered anything so definitely theological, we should rather deny that the words are theological, in the technical question- begging sense of the term, yet maintain that in an hour of intense preoccupation with His death no other words would have been adequate to express the whole heart and mind of our Lord.
From this point of view, we must notice a common evasion of their import even by some who do not question that Jesus spoke them. It is pointed out, for instance, that the death is here set in line with the life of our Lord. He came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and (in particular, and at last, as His crowning service) to give His life a ransom for many. His death is the consummation of His life, and the consummation of His ministry; but it has no other end than His life, and we must not seek another interpretation for it. An extreme example of this is seen in Hollmann, 15 whose exegesis of the passage brings out the following result. Jesus came into the world to serve men, and especially to serve them by awakening them to that repentance which is the condition of entering the Kingdom of God and inheriting its blessings. So far, His ministry has not been without success; some have already repented, and entered into the Kingdom. But even where He has not proved successful, it is not yet necessary to despair: many will be won to repentance by His death who resisted all the appeal of His life. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the connection of ideas here is not in the least that which belongs to the words of Jesus. Hollmann actually speaks of a Glaubensurtheil, a conviction which Jesus held by faith, that even His death (tragic and disconcerting as we must suppose it to be) will, by the grace of the Father, nevertheless contribute to the success of His work, and win many whom He has yet failed to reach. But this completely leaves out the one thing to which the words of Jesus gives prominence — the fact, namely, that the Son of Man came expressly to do a service which involved the giving of His life a ransom for many. Hollmann’s interpretation means that Jesus could by faith in the Father reconcile Himself to His death as something which would, though it is not clear how, contribute to the carrying out of His vocation — something which, in spite of appearances, would not prove inconsistent with it; but what the words in the gospel mean is that the death of Jesus, or the giving of His life a ransom for many, is itself the very soul of His vocation. He does not say that He can bear to die, because His death will win many to repentance who are yet impenitent, but that the object of His coming was to give His life a ransom for many.
The same consideration discredits an interpretation like Wendt’s, 16 which finds the key to the passage in Matthew 11: 29f. Wendt lays all the stress on the effect to be produced on human character by realizing what the death of Jesus is. If men would only put on the yoke of Jesus and learn of Him — if they would drink of His cup and be baptized with His baptism — if, as St. Paul says, they would be conformed to His death, their souls would be liberated from the restless passions of pride and ambition by which James and John, and the other ten not less than they, were tormented, and death itself would cease to be a terror to them. However true this may be, one cannot look at the text without being impressed by its irrelevance as an interpretation. There is nothing in it to explain the introduction of Christ’s death at all as the very end contemplated in His coming. There is nothing in it to explain either lu>tron, or ajnti>, orpollw~n, or lu>tron ajnti< pollw~n. In spite of the attention it has attracted, it is an ingenious vagary which has surely merited oblivion.
In what direction, then, are we to seek the meaning? The only clue is that which is furnished by the passages in which our Lord Himself speaks of the soul and of the possibility of losing or ransoming it. Thus in Mark 8: 34f., immediately after the first announcement of His death, He calls the multitude to Him with His disciples, and says: ‘If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoso will save his life (yuch>n) shall lose it: but whoso shall lose his life (yuch>n) for My sake and the gospel’s, shall find it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life (yuch>n)? For what can a man give in exchange for his life (ajnta>llagma th~v yuch~v aujtou~)? ’ It is clear from a passage like this that Jesus was familiar with the idea that the yuch> or life of man, in the higher or lower sense of the term, might be lost, and that when it was lost there could be no compensation for it, as there was no means of buying it back. It is in the circle of such ideas that the words about giving His life a ransom for many must find their point of attachment, and it is not only for the simplest and most obvious interpretation, but for the most profound and the most consonant with the New Testament as a whole, that Jesus in this passage conceives the lives of the many as being somehow under forfeit, and teaches that the very object with which He came into the world was to lay down His own life as a ransom price that those to whom these forfeited lives belonged might obtain them again. This was the supreme service the Son of Man was to render to mankind; it demanded the supreme sacrifice, and was the path to supreme greatness, Anything short of this is in the circumstances an anticlimax; it falls far beneath the passion with which our Lord condenses into a single phrase the last meaning of His life and death.
Nothing has been gained for the understanding of this passage by the elaborate investigation of the Hebrew or Aramaic equivalents of lu>tron. In truth it does not matter whether rp,Ko or öwOyd]Pi, whether hL;auN] orryjim] or purkana is most akin to it in the language which Jesus spoke; ifdou~nai th tron ajnti< pollw~n does not convey His idea, it will certainly not be conveyed by any of the precarious equivalents for this Greek expression which are offered for our acceptance. The best fruit of these attempts to get behind the Greek has been Ritschl’s reference to Psalm 49: 7f. and Job 33: 23f., as passages furnishing a real clue to the mind of Christ. In both of these the Hebrew word rp,Ko occurs, which Ritschl regards as the equivalent of lu>tron, and in both also the verb hd;P; is used, with which, rather than with rp,Ko , Hollmann would connect the word of Jesus. But the ideas which the words express are inseparable: therp,Ko is in both passages that by means of which, or at the cost of which, the action of the verb hd;P; (to deliver) is accomplished. 17 The Psalm makes it particularly plain. What no man can do for his brother — namely, give to God a ransom for him ( wOrP]K; ) so that he may still live always and not see corruption; what no man can do for his brother, because the redemption ( öwOyd]Pi ) of their soul is precious, and must be let alone for ever, this the Son of Man claims to do for many, and to do by giving His life a ransom for them. It seems hardly open to doubt that the world in which our Lord’s mind moved as He spoke was that of the writer of the Psalm, and if this be so, it is possible to find in it confirmation for the meaning just assigned to His words. Dr. Driver 18 defines rp,Ko as ‘properly a covering (viz. of an offense), hence a propitiatory gift, but restricted by usage to a gift offered to propitiate or satisfy the avenger- ofblood, and so the satisfaction offered for a life, i. e., a ransom. ’ Without going into meaningless questions as to how the ransom was fixed, or to whom it was paid, it is important to recognize the fact that our Lord speaks of the surrender of His life in this way. A ransom is not wanted at all except where life has been forfeited, and the meaning of the sentence unambiguously is that the forfeited lives of many are liberated by the surrender of Christ’s life, and that to surrender His life to do them this incalculable service was the very soul of His calling. If we find the same thought in St. Paul, we shall not say that the evangelist has Paulinized, but that St. Paul has sat at the feet of Jesus. And if we feel that such a thought carries us suddenly out of our depth — that as the words fall on our minds we seem to hear the plunge of the lead into fathomless waters — we shall not for that imagine that we have lost our way. By these things men live, and wholly therein is the life of our spirit. We cast ourselves on them, because they outgo us; in their very immensity, we are assured that God is in them. 19
One almost despairs of saying anything about the Lord’s Supper which will not seem invalid to some upon critical or more general grounds. Our main interest is in the words which Jesus spoke, and in the light which these words throw on His own conception of His death. Here we are confronted at once by the paradoxical view of Spitta that in what actually took place on the occasion there was no reference to the death of Christ at all. What Jesus did in the upper room (so we are to suppose) was to anticipate with His disciples the Messianic Supper of the world to come. In that supper, according to Rabbinical and Apocalyptic writers, the good to be enjoyed is the Messiah Himself, and it is to this that Jesus refers when He speaks of the bread and wine as His own body and blood. He is preoccupied with the completion of His work, with the blessed prospect of the time when God shall have brought His kingdom to victory, and when from Him, the Messiah sent of God, the powers of knowledge and of eternal life shall flow unimpeded into the disciples as the gift of the meal which God prepares for those who are faithful to Him. The representation of the Supper in the evangelists is quite different, Spitta admits; but the form it there assumes; is due to the intervening death of Jesus, which compelled the disciples to give His words another turn. I do not feel it necessary to contest this construction of what took place. A conception of the Supper which sets aside the whole testimony of the New Testament to what it meant, which ignores its association with the Passover, the explicit references in every account of it to the shedding of Jesus’ blood, and above all, the character expressly stamped upon it in the evangelists as a meal in which Jesus knew that He was sitting with the Twelve for the last time and was preoccupied with the idea of His parting from them, does not demand refutation. Nor is it entitled to forbid our asking — on the basis of the narratives in our hands — what Jesus said and did, and what is the bearing of this on the interpretation of His death? 20
There is at least a general consent in this, that Jesus took bread, and when He had broken it, or as He broke it, said, This is My body; that He took a cup with wine in it, or a cup into which He poured wine, saying as He did so, This is My blood, which is poured out for many. This is all that is admitted, e. g., by Hollmann, and it enables him to give the same interpretation to the supper as he gives to the word about the lu>tron 21 . Christ’s death is in question, certainly, but it has no reference to those who are sitting at the table, and who are members of the Kingdom of God. The many in whose interest it takes place — the many who are to have benefit by it — are the same as the many for whom the ransom is to be given; they are the numbers, as yet impenitent, who will be won to penitence by the death of Jesus. According to this interpretation, the idea of a supper is a complete mistake. The persons at the table had really no interest in the death of Christ; they had already all that God could give. Hollmann, therefore, expunges from Mark as a liturgical insertion, intended to adapt the narrative to ecclesiastical custom, the very first word spoken by Jesus, Take (la>bete). In propriety, the disciples should not have taken, as His death meant nothing to them. He quotes, with approval, a remark of Schmiedel, ‘The most significant thing is, at least in the first instance, the breaking of the bread and the pouring out of the wine, The distribution of these foods to be partaken of attaches itself to this as a second thing. So far as the main matter is concerned, it might have been treated as superfluous; but as they were sitting at table any how, it was natural. ’ It is difficult to believe that this sort of thing is written seriously, if courtesy compels us to acknowledge that it is, we can only draw the melancholy conclusion that it is possible for the human mind to be serious even when it has completely lost contact with reality. The primary narrative of Mark begins by saying plainly, ‘He took bread, and when He had given thanks He brake it and gave it to them and said, Take, this is My body. Then He took a cup, and when He had given thanks He gave it to them, and they drank of it every one (pa>ntev last and emphatic). And He said to them, This is My blood of the covenant shed for many. ’ This is not qualified by any other of the New Testament authorities, nor by the practice of the Church as the New Testament reveals it; and I submit that it is not open to any one to go behind it, and to tell us blankly out of his own head (for that is; the only authority left) that the bearing of what took place was really quite independent of this giving and taking, eating and drinking; and that while the death of Jesus was the subject of the symbolical actions of breaking the bread and pouring out the wine, and was no doubt meant to benefit some persons, it was a thing in which those who were present, and who at Jesus’ word ate and drank the symbols of it, had no interest at all. Jesus made the bread and wine symbols of His death, this is not denied. He handed them to His disciples, pronouncing as He did so the very words in which He conferred on them this symbolical character. this also is not denied. But when He did so, it was not that the disciples might take them in this character. On the contrary, it was only because they were at their supper anyhow, and because bread and wine are naturally eaten and drunk. That is how bread and wine are disposed of in this world, but it has nothing to do with the story. If there is anybody in the world who finds this convincing, presumably it cannot be helped.
But it is not only necessary to insist on the eating and drinking of the bread and wine, which as broken and outpoured symbolized Christ’s death, and as eaten and drunk symbolized the interest of the disciples in that death, and their making it somehow their own; it is necessary to insist on what was further said by Jesus. All the evangelists in their narratives introduce the word ‘covenant’ (diaqh>kh) in some construction or other. Mark has, This is My blood of the covenant (14: 24). Matthew, according to some authorities (including that combination of Latin and Syriac versions to which critics seem inclined to ascribe a higher value than once seemed probable) has, This is My blood of the new covenant (26: 28). Luke has what is apparently a Pauline form, This cup is the new covenant in My blood (22: 20). For long it was an admitted point among critics that this was an indubitable word of Jesus. Brandt, whose criticism is skeptical enough, holds that the only historically certain words in the whole story are, This is My covenant blood, drink ye all of it. But even these words have lately been assailed in the determined effort to get behind the gospels. Three grounds have been assigned for questioning them. 22 The first is that the expression