CHAPTER XIV

THE ATONEMENT

"O Captain of the wars, whence won Ye so great scars?

In what fight did Ye smite, and what manner was the foe?
Was it on a day of rout they compassed Thee about,

Or gat Ye these adornings when Ye wrought their overthrow?"

"Twas on a day of rout they girded Me about,

They wounded all My brow, and they smote Me through the side: My hand held no sword when I met their armed horde,

And the conqueror fell down, and the Conquered bruised his pride."

"What is Thy Name? Oh, show!"-" My Name ye may not know;
'Tis a going forth with banners, and a baring of much swords:
But My titles that are high, are they not upon My thigh?

'King of Kings!' are the words, Lord of Lords!'

It is written King of Kings, Lord of Lords.''

FRANCIS THOMPSON.

OUR whole position is threatened with ruin by the fact of Evil. We have taken value, conceived as a perfect co-relation of subject and object, as the constitutive principle or true "substance" of all things. But this only intensifies the urgency of the problem of Evil, which always threatens to overwhelm Theism of any kind. If God is good, and God made the world, why is there evil in the world? I have attempted some discussion of the main outlines of the problem elsewhere; here we are concerned with it only from the point of view of a Value-metaphysic which finds its

1 In Mens Creatrix, pp. 261-92. This chapter has been criticised as a very inadequate statement of the Christian solution. It certainly is; but my critics failed to notice that it is avowedly a statement of the problem and its solution in terms of a general philosophy, without regard to Christian revelation, which in that book is first introduced in the following chapter.

centre in the historic Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. We shall therefore not repeat the argument which leads to the conclusion that evil, in principle, may be justified by the fact that it affords the occasion for a higher form of good (such as heroism and moral victory) than would be possible without it. It is enough to insist that this argument does not merely claim that the positive value of the resultant good is greater than the negative value of the evil, so that on the balance good predominates; what it claims is that the facts or episodes which are evil in themselves can become constituent elements of the absolute good.1

The philosophic treatment of evil often seems to the religious man singularly inept. It appears to take a cold abstraction which it merges in a system that absorbs it, and substitutes this for the washing of the sin-stained soul in the Blood of the Son of God. But there is no real conflict here between religion and philosophy. The interest of religion is mainly practical, to overcome the evil that exists. The interest of philosophy is mainly theoretic, to show that the evil when overcome is justified. It is to be noticed that even from the standpoint of philosophy the religious interest is the more important; if evil, when overcome, is justified, the business of primary importance is to overcome it. Part of the disappointment of religious folk with philosophy in this connexion is, however, due to another cause. The religious man is concerned with the problem of evil chiefly as a problem of sin and its forgiveness; but this concern at once assumes the view-point, or level of thought, of a man who is by his sin alienated from God. It is therefore a mockery to speak to such a man from the view-point of the unity of all things in God, unless he

Cf. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, Lecture vi., and The Value and Destiny of the Individual, Lectures vi. and vii.

2 How passionate the impulse of philosophy can be even when its form of expression is at its coldest all sympathetic readers of Spinoza are aware.

is first told how he may himself recover that unity with God, and therewith the apprehension of the world and life which it makes possible. For this reason the Atonement is commonly thought of as only a means to the Forgiveness of Sins; it is in fact much more than that; it is the mode of the Deity of God. But for men it is first the means to forgiveness, and must be understood as such before its deeper meaning can be apprehended.

The very notion of forgiveness presupposes an alienation, a severed unity. Man as sinner stands over against his Creator; we are back on the level of justice "of claims and counter-claims; God is Other than man, and demands from man his due. And this is sheer fact. No theory of Atonement which merely denies this alienation or otherness between God and man can begin to be satisfactory. The alienation is spiritual fact. The first need is not to deny it, but to end it. The unity of God and man must be reconstituted in me before I can look on God's creation from God's view-point and find it very good; and as I belong partly to the world," this can never completely happen, at least in "this age"; only by faith, not by actual attainment, can I conceive the world as God sees it, though I may hope hereafter to have "the fruition of the glorious God-head."

Philosophy itself is profoundly concerned about this practical problem. It may proclaim the perfection of the Absolute, and declare that in the temporal conquest of evil the eternal perfection consists. But if so, it assumes that in some way the evil can be conquered. Forgiveness, we shall see, is bound up with this conquest. What is the Christian doctrine of Forgiveness?

We begin with the teaching of our Lord. This need not here be dealt with at length, for no one can read the Synoptic Gospels without noticing its prominence. Many of the miracles of healing are

accompanied by declarations of forgiveness of sins; the claim to make such a declaration was one of the first occasions for accusation against our Lord by the religious leaders of the time. The Fourth Gospel does not anywhere use the words " forgiveness

or

forgive "; but, as we have received it, it contains the words spoken to the adulteress: "Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more." The classical expression of our Lord's teaching is of course the parable of the Prodigal Son. Its significance is luminously clear. The son is allowed to take his patrimony and go his own way; the father does not in any smallest degree curtail his liberty; when he is gone, the father longs for his return, and shows as soon as his son approaches that he has always been ready to restore him to the old relationship; but he does not send for him or fetch him; he waits until the son comes to himself and makes up his own mind to return as a penitent. Dr. Rashdall is perfectly right when he says that the plain teaching of the parable is that God freely forgives all who repent, and that the rest of the teaching of our Lord accords with this.1

But what our Lord said must not be separated from what He did; and what He did supplies an answer to two problems that arise immediately in connexion with the doctrine of free forgiveness conditioned only by repentance. The first of these is the question how forgiveness can be freely given without loss to the majesty of the moral law. The second is the question how, if repentance is the condition of forgiveness, that condition is in fact to be fulfilled. To those two questions the Cross gives the answer.

The great doctrine of the Atonement has suffered more, perhaps, than any fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith from the pendulum-swing of human thought as it sways from one reaction to another. 1 The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology, PP. 25 ff.

Let us then make a few points clear at the outset. (1) No doctrine can be Christian which starts from a conception of God as moved by any motive alien from holy love. If it is suggested by any doctrine of the Atonement that the wrath of God had quenched or even obscured His love before the atoning sacrifice was offered by Jesus Christ, that doctrine is less than Christian. The starting-point in the New Testament is never the wrath of God but always His love. "God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.' "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son." 1 (2) Forgiveness does not consist of remission of penalty. So long as we think of it in that way, we show that we have not reached the Christian relationship to God. When a child who has done wrong says to his father, "Please forgive me," he does not only mean, "Don't punish me"; he also means, "Please let us be to each other as if I had not done it." If I have injured my friend and ask him to forgive me, I am not asking him to refrain from prosecuting me; I am asking him to let our friendship stand unbroken in spite of what I have done. To forgive is to restore to the old relationship. It is because men have pictured God's judgement of souls so much in the likeness of the courts of earthly justice that this has been so often obscured. The prisoner in the dock has never been in any close relationship with the judge on the bench. He is not occupied with anxious thoughts concerning the grief which his misconduct may have caused to that worthy fellow-citizen; his only concern with the judge is to know what the judge is going to inflict upon him. If we think so of our responsibility before God, we have not taken up our position as Christians at all. "You did not receive a spirit of slavery to relapse into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, in which we cry

1 Romans v. 8; St. John iii. 16.

S