Redeemer
& Redemption
Benjamin B.
Warfield
There is no one of the titles of
Christ which is more precious to
Christian hearts than "Redeemer." There are others, it is true, which
are more often on the lips of Christians. The acknowledgment of our
submission to Christ as our Lord, the recognition of what we owe to Him
as our Saviour,--these things, naturally, are most frequently expressed
in the names we call Him by. "Redeemer," however, is a title of more
intimate revelation than either "Lord" or "Saviour." It gives
expression not merely to our sense that we have received salvation from
Him, but also to our appreciation of what it cost Him to procure this
salvation for us. It is the name specifically of the Christ of the
cross. Whenever we pronounce it, the cross is placarded before our eyes
and our hearts are filled with loving remembrance not only that Christ
has given us salvation, but that He paid a mighty price for it.
It is a name, therefore, which is charged with deep emotion, and is to
be found particularly in the language of devotion. Christian song is
vocal with it. How it appears in Christian song, we may see at once
from old William Dunbar's invocation, "My King, my Lord, and my
Redeemer sweet." Or even from Shakespeare's description of a lost
loved-one as "The precious image of our dear Redeemer." Or from
Christina Rossetti's,
"Up Thy Hill of
Sorrows
Thou all alone,
Jesus, man's Redeemer,
Climbing to a Throne."
Best of all perhaps from Henry Vaughan's ode which he inscribes "To my
most merciful, my most loving, and dearly-loved REDEEMER; the ever
blessed, the only HOLY and JUST ONE, JESUS CHRIST, The Son of the
living God, and the Sacred Virgin Mary," and in which he sings to "My
dear Redeemer, the world's light, And life too, and my heart's delight."
Terms of affection gather to it. Look into your hymnals. Fully eight
and twenty of those in our own Hymnal celebrate our Lord under the name
of "Redeemer." ....From our earliest childhood the preciousness of this
title has been impressed upon us. In The Shorter Catechism, as the most
precise and significant designation of Christ, from the point of view
of what He has done for us, it takes the place of the more usual
"Saviour," which never occurs in that document. Thus there is
permanently imprinted on the hearts of us all, the great fact that "the
only Redeemer of God's elect is the Lord Jesus Christ"; through whom,
in the execution of His offices of a Prophet, of a Priest, and of a
King, God delivers us out of the estate of sin and misery and brings us
into an estate of salvation. The same service is performed for our
sister, Episcopalian, communion by its Book of Common Prayer. The title
"Redeemer" is applied in it to Christ about a dozen times....This
constant pregnant use of the title "Redeemer" to express our sense of
what we owe to Christ, has prevailed in the Church for, say, a
millennium and a half.
...[Now days, unfortunately,] men who have ceased to think of the work
of Christ in terms of purchasing, and to whom the whole conception of
His giving His life for us as a ransom, or of His pouring out His blood
as a price paid for our sins,...feel little difficulty...in still
speaking of Him as our Redeemer, and of His work as a Redemption, and
of the Christianity which He founded as a Redemptive Religion. The
ideas connected with purchase are not so inseparably attached to these
terms in their instinctive thought that the linguistic feeling is
intolerably shocked by the employment of them with no implication of
this set of ideas. Such an evacuation of these great words, the
vehicles thus far of the fundamental Christian confession, of their
whole content as such, is now actually going on about us. And the time
may be looked forward to in the near future when the words "Redeemer,"
"redemption," and "redeem" shall have ceased altogether to convey the
ideas which it has been thus far their whole function in our religious
terminology to convey.
...You see, that what we are doing today as we look out upon our
current religious modes of speech, is assisting at the death bed of a
word. It is sad to witness the death of any worthy thing, even of a
worthy word. And worthy words do die, like any other worthy thing--if
we do not take good care of them. How many worthy words have already
died under our very eyes, because we did not take care of them!
Tennyson calls our attention to one of them. "The grand old name of
gentleman," he sings, "defamed by every charlatan, and soil'd with all
ignoble use." If you persist in calling people who are not gentlemen by
the name of gentleman, you do not make them gentlemen by so calling
them, but you end by making the word gentleman mean that kind of
people. The religious terrain is full of the graves of good words which
have died from lack of care--they stand as close in it as do the graves
today in the flats of Flanders or among the hills of northern France.
And these good words are still dying all around us. There is that good
word "Evangelical." It is certainly moribund, if not already dead.
Nobody any longer seems to know what it means. Even our Dictionaries no
longer know. Certainly there never was a more blundering, floundering
attempt ever made to define a word than The Standard Dictionary's
attempt to define this word; and the Century's Dictionary does little
better. Adolf Harnack begins one of his essays with some paragraphs
animadverting on the varied and confused senses in which the word
"Evangelical" is used in Germany. But he betrays no understanding
whatever of the real source of a great part of this confusion. It is
that the official name of the Protestant Church in a large part of
Germany is "The Evangelical Church." When this name was first acquired
by that church it had a perfectly defined meaning, and described the
church as that kind of a church. But having heen once identified with
that church, it has drifted with it into the bog. The habit of calling
"Evangelical" everything which was from time to time characteristic of
that church or which any strong party in that church wished to make
characteristic of it--has ended in robbing the term of all meaning.
Along a somewhat different pathway we have arrived at the same state of
affairs in America. Does anybody in the world know what "Evangelical"
means, in our current religious speech?
The other day, a professedly evangelical pastor, serving a church which
is certainly committed by its formularies to an evangelical confession,
having occasion to report in one of our newspapers on a religious
meeting composed practically entirely of Unitarians and Jews, remarked
with enthusiasm upon the deeply "evangelical" character of its spirit
and utterances.
But we need not stop with "Evangelical." Take an even greater word.
Does the word "Christianity" any longer bear a definite meaning? Men
are debating on all sides of us what Christianity really is. Auguste
Sabatier makes it out to be just altruism; Josiah Royce identifies it
with the sentiment of loyalty; D. C. Macintosh explains it as nothing
but morality. We hear of Christianity without dogma, Christianity
without miracle, Christianity without Christ. Since, however,
Christianity is a historical religion, an undogmatic Christianity would
be an absurdity; since it is through and through a supernatural
religion, a non-miraculous Christianity would be a
contradiction;...Christless Christianity would be--well, let us say
lamely (but with a lameness which has perhaps its own emphasis), a
misnomer. People who set upon calling unchristian things Christian are
simply washing all meaning out of the name. If everything that is
called Christianity in these days is Christianity, then there is no
such thing as Christianity. A name applied indiscriminately to
everything, designates nothing.
The words "Redeem," "Redemption," "Redeemer" are going the same way.
When we use these terms in so comprehensive a sense--we are following
Kaftan's phraseology--that we understand by "Redemption" whatever
benefit we suppose ourselves to receive through Christ,--no matter what
we happen to think that benefit is--and call Him "Redeemer" merely in
order to express the fact that we somehow or other relate this benefit
to Him--no matter how loosely or unessentially--we have simply
evacuated the terms of all meaning, and would do better to wipe them
out of our vocabulary. Yet this is precisely how modern Liberalism uses
these terms. Sabatier, who reduces Christianity to mere altruism, Royce
who explains it in terms of loyalty, Macintosh who sees in it only
morality--all still speak of it as a "Redemptive Religion," and all are
perfectly willing to call Jesus still by the title of
"Redeemer,"--although some of them at least are quite free to allow
that He seems to them quite unessential to Christianity, and
Christianity would remain all that it is, and just as truly a
"Redemptive Religion," even though He had never existed.
I think you will agree with me that it is a sad thing to see words like
these die like this. And I hope you will determine that, God helping
you, you will not let them die thus, if any care on your part can
preserve them in life and vigor. But the dying of the words is not the
saddest thing which we see here. The saddest thing is the dying out of
the hearts of men of the things for which the words stand. As ministers
of Christ it will be your function to keep the things alive. If you can
do that, the words which express the things will take care of
themselves. Either they will abide in vigor; or other good words and
true will press in to take the place left vacant by them. The real
thing for you to settle in your minds, therefore, is whether Christ is
truly a Redeemer to you, and whether you find an actual Redemption in
Him,--or are you ready to deny the Master that bought you, and to count
His blood an unholy thing? Do you realize that Christ is your Ransomer
and has actually shed His blood for you as your ransom? Do you realize
that your salvation has been bought, bought at a tremendous price, at
the price of nothing less precious than blood, and that the blood of
Christ, the Holy One of God? Or, go a step further: do you realize that
this Christ who has thus shed His blood for you is Himself your God? So
the Scriptures teach
The blood of God
outpoured upon the tree!
So reads the Book. O mind, receive the thought,
Nor helpless murmur thou hast vainly sought
Thought-room within thee for such mystery.
Thou foolish mindling! Do'st thou hope to see
Undazed, untottering, all that God hath wrought?
Before His mighty "shall," thy little "ought"
Be shamed to silence and humility!
Come mindling, I will show thee what 'twere meet
That thou shouldst shrink from marvelling, and flee
As unbelievable,--nay, wonderingly,
With dazed, but still with faithful praises, greet:
Draw near and listen to this sweetest sweet,--
Thy God, O mindling, shed His blood for thee!
Benjamin B. Warfield.
This article was made available
on the internet via REFORMATION INK (www.markers.com/ink). The address
was originally delivered in Miller Chapel, Princeton
Theological Seminary, Sept 17, 1915. It was later published in The
Princeton Theological Review (Vol. 14, 1916, pp. 177-201). It is in the
public domain and may be freely copied
and distributed.