WHEN we pass from primitive Christian preaching to the epistles of St.

Paul, we are embarrassed not by the scantiness but by the abundance of our materials. It is not possible to argue that the death of Christ has less than a central, or rather than the central and fundamental place, in the apostle’s gospel. But before proceeding to investigate more closely the significance he assigns to it, there are some preliminary considerations to which it is necessary to attend. Attempts have often been made, while admitting that St. Paul teaches what he does teach, to evade it — either because it is a purely individual interpretation of the death of Jesus, which has no authority for others; or because it is a theologoumenon, and not a part of the apostolic testimony; or because it is not a fixed thing, but a stage in the development of apostolic thought, which St. Paul was on the way to transcend, and would eventually have transcended, and which we (by his help) can quite well leave behind us; or because it is really inconsistent with itself, a bit of patchwork, pieced out here and there with incongruous elements, to meet the exigencies of controversy; or because it unites, in a way inevitable for one born a Pharisee, but simply false for those who have been born Christian, conceptions belonging to the imperfect as well as to the perfect religion — conceptions which it is our duty to allow to lapse. I do not propose to consider such criticisms of St.

Paul’s teaching on the death of Christ directly. For one thing, abstract discussion of such statements, apart from their application to given eases, never leads to any conclusive results; for another, when we do come to the actual matters in question, it often happens that the distinctions just suggested disappear; the apostolic words have a virtue in them which enables them to combine in a kind of higher unity what might otherwise be distinguished as testimony and theology. But while this is so it is relevant, and one may think important, to point out certain characteristics of St.

Paul’s presentation of his teaching which constitute a formidable difficulty in the way of those who would evade it.

The first is, the assurance with which he expresses himself. The doctrine of the death of Christ and its significance was not St. Paul’s theology, it was his gospel. It was all he had to preach. It is with it in his mind — immediately after the mention of our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins , that He might deliver us from this present world with all its evils — that he says to the Galatians: ‘Though we or an angel from heaven preach a gospel to you contravening the gospel which we preached, let him be anathema.

As we have said before, so say I now again, if any man is preaching a gospel to you contravening what you received, let him be anathema’ (Galatians 1:4,8 f.).

I cannot agree with those who disparage this, or affect to forgive it, as the unhappy beginning of religious intolerance. Neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament has any conception of a religion without this intolerance. The first commandment is, ‘Thou shalt have none other gods beside Me,’ and that is the foundation of the true religion. As there is only one God, so there can be only one gospel. If God has really done something in Christ on which the salvation of the world depends, and if He has made it known, then it is a Christian duty to be intolerant of everything which ignores, denies, or explains it away. The man who perverts it is the worst enemy of God and men; and it is not bad temper or narrow mindedness in St. Paul which explains this vehement language, it is the jealousy of God which has kindled in a soul redeemed by the death of Christ a corresponding jealousy for the Savior. It is intolerant only as Peter is intolerant when he says, ‘Neither is there salvation in any other’ (Acts 4:12), or John, when he says, ‘He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life’ (1 John 5:12); or Jesus Himself when He says, No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him’ (Matthew 11:27).

Intolerance like this is an essential element in the true religion; it is the instinct of self-preservation in it; the unforced and uncompromising defense of that on which the glory of God and the salvation of the world depends. If the evangelist has not something to preach of which he can say, If any man makes it his business to subvert this, let him be anathema, he has no gospel at all. Intolerance in this sense has its counterpart in comprehension; it is when we have the only gospel, and not until then, that we have the gospel for all. It is a great argument, therefore, for the essential as opposed to the casual or accidental character of St. Paul’s teaching on Christ’s death — for it is with this that the Epistle to the Galatians is concerned — that he displays his intolerance in connection with it. To touch his teaching here is not to do something which leaves his gospel unaffected; as he understands it, it is to wound his gospel mortally.

Another consideration of importance in this connection is St. Paul’s relation to the common Christian tradition. No doubt the apostle was an original thinker, and in the Epistle to the Galatians he is concerned to vindicate his originality, or at least his independence; but his originality is sometimes exaggerated. He did not invent Christianity; there were apostles and preachers and men in Christ before him. And he tells us expressly that in the fundamentals of Christianity he not only agreed with them, but was indebted to them. ‘I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received , that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He hath been raised the third day, according to the Scriptures’ (1 Corinthians 15:3).

It is impossible to leave out of the tradition which St. Paul had himself received, and which he transmitted to the Corinthians, the reference to the meaning of Christ’s death — ‘He died for our sins according to the Scriptures’ — and to limit it to the fact: the fact needed no such authentication. It is the fact in its meaning for sinners which constitutes a gospel, and this, he wishes to assert, is the only gospel known. ‘Whether it be I or they — whether it be I or the twelve apostles at Jerusalem — this is the way we preach, and it was thus that you became believers’ (1 Corinthians 15:11).

And the doctrinal tradition of Christianity, if we may call it so, was supplemented and guaranteed by the ritual one. In the same Epistle to the Corinthians St. Paul says again, speaking of the Supper, ‘I received of the Lord this, which also I delivered unto you’ (1 Corinthians 11:23). An immediate supernatural revelation of what took place on the last night of our Lord’s life has no affinity to anything we know of revelations, we must understand St. Paul to say that what he had handed on to the Corinthians had before been handed on to him, and went back originally to the Lord Himself. The Lord was the point from which it started. But Paul could not receive this ritual tradition, and we know he did not, without receiving at the same time the great interpretative words about the new covenant in Christ’s blood, which put the death of Christ, once for all, at the foundation of the Gospel. 1 It is not Paulinism which does this, it is the Christianity of Christ. The point at issue between the apostle and his Jewish-Christian adversaries was not whether Christ had died for sins; every Christian believed that. It was rather how far this death of Christ reached in the way of producing or explaining the Christian life. To St.

Paul it reached the whole way; it explained everything; it supplanted everything he could call a righteousness of his own; it inspired everything he could call righteousness at all. To his opponents, it did not so much supplant as supplement, but for the atoning death, indeed, the sinner is hopeless; but even when he has believed in it, he has much to do on his own account, much which is not generated in him by the sense of obligation to Christ, but must be explained on other principles — e .g ., that of the authority of the Jewish law. It is not necessary to enter into this controversy here, but what may fairly be insisted upon is the fact, which is evident in all the epistles, that underneath the controversy St. Paul and his opponents agreed in the common Christian interpretation of Christ’s death as a death in which sin had been so dealt with that it no longer barred fellowship between God and those who believed in Jesus. This, again, should make us slow to reject anything on this subject in St. Paul as being merely Pauline — an idiosyncrasy of the individual. We must remember that his great argument against Judaising Christians is that they are acting inconsistently: they are unwittingly doing something which contravenes, not Paulinism, but the gospel they have already received of redemption through the death of Christ.

Again, the perception of St. Paul’s place in Christian tradition, and of his debt to it, should make us slow to lay stress on the development which has been discovered in his writings. Leaving out the Pastorals, Paul wrote his other epistles within the space of ten years. But he had been preaching the gospel, in which the death of Christ had from the beginning the place and significance which we have just seen, at least fifteen years before any of the extant epistles were written. Is it credible that he had no intellectual life at all for those fifteen years, and that then, all of a sudden, his brain began to work at high pressure, and continued to work so till the end of his life? It is true that in the epistles of the imprisonment, as they may be conveniently called — Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians — we see the whole gospel in other relations than those in which it is exhibited in the epistles of the great missionary period — Thessalonians, Corinthians, Galatians, Romans. But this is something quite different from a development in the gospel itself; and in point of fact we cannot discover in St. Paul’s interpretation of Christ’s death anything which essentially distinguishes his earliest epistles from his latest. To suppose that a great expansion of his thoughts took place between the letters to the Thessalonians and those to the Corinthians is to ignore at once the chronology, the nature of letters, and the nature of the human mind. St.

Paul tells us himself that he came to Corinth determined to know nothing among the Corinthians but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. But he came in that mood straight from Thessalonica, and in that mood he wrote from Corinth the letters to Thessalonica, in which, nevertheless, there is, as we shall see, only a passing allusion to Christ’s death. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly how entirely a matter of accident it is — that is, how entirely it depends upon conditions which we may or may not have the means of discovering — whether any particular part of the apostle’s whole conception of Christianity shall appear in any given epistle. If development might be asserted anywhere, on general grounds, it would be in this case and on this subject; there is far more about Christ’s death, and far more that is explicit, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians than in the First to the Thessalonians. Yet precisely at this point our knowledge of St.

Paul’s mind when he reached Corinth (1 Corinthians 2:1 f.), and of the brief interval which lay between this and his visit to Thessalonica, puts the idea of development utterly out of the question. As far as the evidence goes — the evidence including St. Paul’s epistles on the one hand, and St.

Paul’s admitted relation to the doctrinal and ritual tradition of Christianity on the other — the apostle had one message on Christ’s death from first to last of his Christian career. His gospel, and it was the only gospel he knew, was always ‘the Word of the Cross’ (1 Corinthians 1:18), or ‘the Word of reconciliation’ (2 Corinthians 5:19). The applications might be infinitely varied, for, as has been already pointed out, everything was involved in it, and the whole of Christianity was deduced from it; but this is not to say that it was in process of evolution itself.

There are two other sets of questions which might be raised here, either independently or in relation to each other — the questions involved in the experimental, and in the controversial or apologetic, aspects of St. Paul’s theology. How much of what he tells us of the death of Christ is the interpretation of experience, and has value as such? How much is mere fencing with opponents, or squaring of accounts with his own old ways of thinking about God and the soul, but has no value now, because the conditions to which it is relative no longer exist? These questions, as has been already remarked, are not to be discussed abstractly, because taken abstractly the antitheses they present are inevitably tainted with falsehood. They assume an opposition which does not exist, and they ignore the capacity of the truth to serve a variety of intellectual and spiritual purposes. St. Paul could use his gospel, no doubt, in controversy and in apology, but it was not devised for controversial or apologetic ends.

The truth always has it in itself to be its own vindication and defense. It can define itself in all relations, against all adversaries; but it is not constituted truth, it is only exhibited as truth, when it does so. The fact that Christ died for our sins — that His death is an atoning death — is a magnificent apology for the Cross, turning its shame into glory; but it is not philosophy or criticism, it is here unintelligence, to maintain that it was invented or believed just in order to remove the offense of the Cross.

In St. Paul it is not an apologetic or a controversial truth, or a truth relative to the exigencies of Jewish prejudice; it is an independent, eternal, divine truth, the profoundest truth of revelation, which for that very reason contains in it the answer to all religious questions whether of ancient or of modern times. It is so far from being a truth which only a mind of peculiar antecedents or training could apprehend, that it is of all truths the most universal. It was the sense of it, in its truth, that made St. Paul a missionary to all men. When he thought of what it meant, it made him exclaim, Is God a God of Jews only? (Romans 3 29). Is the God who is revealed in the death of Christ for sin a God who speaks a language that only one race can understand? Incredible. The atoning death of Christ, as a revelation of God, is a thing in itself so intelligible, so correspondent to a universal need, so direct and universal in its appeal, that it must be the basis of a universal religion. It is so far from being a truth (if we can speak of truth on such terms) relative only to one race, or one upbringing, or one age, or one set of prejudices, that it is the one truth which for all races and in all ages can never admit of any qualification. In itself true, it can be used as a weapon, but it was no necessity of conflict which fashioned it. It is the very heart of revelation itself.

The same attitude of mind to the Pauline teaching which would discount some of it as controversial or apologetic, as opposed to experimental or absolute, is seen in the disposition to distinguish in that teaching, as the expression is, fact from theory. In all probability this also is a distinction which it will not repay us to discuss in vacuo : everything depends on the kind of fact which we are supposed to be theorizing. The higher we rise in the scale of reality the more evanescent becomes the distinction between the thing ‘itself’ and the theory of it. A fact like the one with which we are here concerned, a fact in which the character of God is revealed, and in which an appeal is to be made to the reason, the conscience, the heart, the whole moral being of man, is a fact which must be, and must be seen to be, full of rational, ethical, and emotional content. If instead of ‘theory’ we use an equivalent word, say ‘meaning,’ we discover that the absolute distinction disappears. The fact is not known to us at all unless it is known in its meaning, in that which constitutes it a revelation of God and an appeal to man; and to say that we know it in its meaning is to say that we know it theoretically, or in or through a theory of it. A fact of which there is no theory is a fact in which we can see no meaning; and though we can apply this distinction so far when we are speaking of physical facts, and argue that it is fire which burns and not the theory of heat, we cannot apply it at all when we are speaking of a fact which has to tell on us in other than physical ways: through conscience, through the heart, through the intelligence, and therefore in a manner to which the mind can really respond. St. Paul’s own words in Romans: 5:11 enable us to illustrate this.

We have received, he says, or taken, the reconciliation. If we could take it physically, as we take a doctor’s prescription, which would tell on us all the same whatever our spiritual attitude to it might be, then we might distinguish clearly between the fact and the theory of it, and argue that as long as we accepted the fact, the theory was neither here nor there; but if the fact with which we are dealing cannot be physically accepted at all — if it addresses itself to a nature which is higher than physical, a nature of which reason, imagination, emotion, conscience, are the elements, then the fact itself must be seen to be one in which there is that which appeals to all these elements; that is, to repeat the truth, it must be an interpreted fact, something in which fact and theory are indissolubly one. The Cross must be exhibited in oJ lo>gov tou~ staurou~ the Reconciliation in oJ lo>gov th~v katallagh~v ; and lo>gov is always a rational, a theoretical word. It is much easier to say there is a distinction of fact and theory, a distinction between the testimony and the theology of St. Paul, than to prove it; it is much easier to imagine that one can preach the gospel without any theory of the death of Christ than, knowing what these words mean, to do so. The simplest preacher, and the most effective, is always the most absolutely theoretical. It is a theory, a tremendous theory, that Christ’s death is a death for sin . But unless a preacher can put some interpretation on the death — unless he can find a meaning in it which is full of appeal — why should he speak of it at all? Is it the want of a theory that deprives it of its place in preaching?

There is one other subject to which also it is necessary to refer before going into detail on St. Paul’s teaching — the connection between Christ’s death and His resurrection. The tradition of Protestant theology undoubtedly tends to isolate the death, and to think of it as a thing by itself, apart from the resurrection; sometimes, one is tempted to say, apart even from any distinct conception of Him who died. But we know that St.

Paul himself puts an extraordinary emphasis on the resurrection.

Sometimes it is coordinated with the death. ‘If we believe that Jesus died and rose again,’ he writes to the Thessalonians, including in this the whole of the Christian faith (1 Thessalonians 4:14). ‘He was delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification,’ he says to the Romans, making the resurrection as essential as the death (Romans 4:25). It is the same with the summary of fundamental truths, which constituted the gospel as he preached it at Corinth, and which has been repeatedly referred to already: ‘first of all that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures’ (1 Corinthians 15:13 f.).

But there are passages in which he gives a more exclusive emphasis to the resurrection. Thus in Romans 10:9 he writes: ‘If thou shalt confess with thy mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in thy heart that God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved’; and in 1 Corinthians 15:17: ‘If Christ is not risen, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.’ It is possible, however, to do full justice to all such expressions without qualifying in the slightest the prominence given in St. Paul to Jesus Christ as crucified. It was the appearance of the Risen One to St. Paul which made him a Christian. What was revealed to him on the way to Damascus was that the Crucified One was Son of God, and the gospel that He preached afterwards was that of the Son of God crucified. There can be no salvation from sin unless there is a living Savior: this explains the emphasis laid by the apostle on the resurrection. But the Living One can only be a Savior because He has died: this explains the emphasis laid on the Cross. The Christian believes in a living Lord, or he could not believe at all; but he believes in a living Lord who died an atoning death, for no other can hold the faith of a soul under the doom of sin.

The importance of St. Paul’s teaching, and the fact that dissent from any specifically New Testament interpretation of Christ’s death usually begins with it, may justify these preliminary observations; we now go on to notice more precisely what the apostle does teach. What then, let us ask, are the relations in which St. Paul defines the death of Christ? What are the realities with which he connects it, so that in these connections it becomes an intelligible thing — not a brute fact, like the facts of physics, while their laws are as yet unknown, but a significant, rational, ethical, appealing fact, which has a meaning, and can act not as a cause but as a motive? In other words, what is the doctrinal construction of this fact in virtue of which St.

Paul can preach it to man as a gospel? (1) To begin with, he defines it by relation to the love of God . The death of Christ is an illustration or rather a demonstration of that love. It is a demonstration of it which can never be surpassed. There are great, though rare examples of love among men, but nothing which could give any suggestion of this. ‘Scarcely for a righteous man will one die; for the good man possibly one might dare even death, but God commends His love to us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:7 f.).

We shall return to this, and to St. Paul’s inferences from it, when the passage in Romans comes before us; but meanwhile we should notice that the interpretation of Christ’s death through the love of God is fundamental in St. Paul. In whatever other relations he may define it, we must assume, unless the contrary can be proved, that they are consistent with this. It is the commonest of all objections to the propitiatory doctrine of the death of Christ that it is inconsistent with the love of God; and not only amateur, but professional theologians of all grades have rejected St. Paul’s doctrine of propitiation as inconsistent with Jesus’ teaching on the love of the Father; but if a mind like St. Paul teaches both things — if he makes the death of Christ in its propitiatory character the supreme demonstration of the Father’s love — is there not an immense probability that there is misunderstanding somewhere? It may be a modern, it is certainly not a Pauline idea, that a death for sins, with a view to their forgiveness, is inconsistent with God’s love. Whatever the process, St. Paul related that death to God’s love as the supreme proof of it. (2) Further, the apostle defines Christ’s death by relation to the love of Christ . ‘The Son of God loved me,’ he says, ‘and gave Himself for me’ (Galatians 2:20). ‘The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that one died for all’ (2 Corinthians 5:14).

Walk in love, as Christ also loved us, and gave Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor’ (Ephesians 5:2). ‘Christ loved the church, and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify it to Himself’ (Ephesians 5:25).

Christ is not an instrument, but the agent, of the Father in all that He does.

The motive in which God acts is the motive in which He acts. The Father and the Son are at one in the work of man’s salvation. It is this which is expressed when the work of Christ is described, as it is in Philippians 2:8 and Romans 5:19, as obedience — obedience unto death, and that the death of the Cross. The obedience is conceived as obedience to the loving will of the Father to save men — that is, it is obedience in the vocation of Redeemer, which involves death for sin. It is not obedience merely in the sense of doing the will of God as other men are called to do it, keeping God’s commandments; it is obedience in this unique and incommunicable yet moral calling, to be at the cost of life the Savior of the world from sin.

Hence it is in the obedience of Christ to the Father that the great demonstration of His love to men is given — ‘He loved me,’ as the apostle says, ‘and gave Himself for me.’ In His obedience, in which He makes His great sacrifice, Christ is fulfilling the will of God; and the response which He evokes by His death is a response toward God. It is at this point, in the last resort, that we become convinced of the deity of Christ. It is a work of God which He is working, and the soul that is won for it is won for God in Him. (3) The relation of Christ’s death to the love of God and of Christ is its fundamental relation on one side; on the other side, St. Paul relates it essentially to sin . It is a death for sin, whatever else may be said of it. ‘First of all, Christ died for our sins.’ It was sin which made death, and not something else, necessary as a demonstration of God’s love and Christ’s.

Why was this so? The answer of the apostle is that it was so because sin had involved us in death, and there was no possibility of Christ’s dealing with sin effectually except by taking our responsibility in it on Himself — that is, except by dying for it. Of course it is assumed in this that there is an ethical connection of some kind between death and sin, and that such a connection of words as, ‘The wages of sin is death,’ (Romans 6:23) really has meaning. No doubt this has been denied. Death, it is argued, is the debt of nature, not the wages of sin; it has no moral character at all. The idea of moral liability to death, when you look at the universality of death quite apart from moral considerations, is a piece of pure mythology. In spite of the assurance with which this argument is put forward it is not difficult to dissent from it. What it really does is to treat man abstractly, as if he were no more than a physical being; whereas, if we are to have either religion or morality preserved in the world, it is essential to maintain that he is more.

The argument is one of the numberless class which proves nothing, because it proves too much. It is part of a vaster argument which would deny at the same time the spiritual nature and the immortality of man. But while it is right to say that death comes physically, that through disease, or accident, or violence, or mere physical exhaustion, it subdues to itself everything that lives, this does not touch the profounder truth with which St. Paul is dealing, that death comes from God, and that it comes in man to a being who is under law to Him. Man is not like a plant or an animal, nor is death to him what it is at the lower levels of life. Man has a moral nature in which there is a reflection of the holy law of God, and everything that befalls him, in eluding death itself, must be interpreted in relation to that nature. Conscience , quickened by the law of God, has to look at death, and to become alive, not to its physical antecedents, but to its divine meaning. What is God ’s voice in death to a spiritual being ? It is what the apostle represents it — death is the wages of sin. 2 It is that in which the divine judgment on sin comes home to the conscience. The connection between the two things is real, though it is not physical; and because it is what it is — because death by God’s ordinance has in the conscience of sinful men the tremendous significance which it does have — because it is a power by which they are all their lifetime held in bondage — because it is the expression of God’s implacable and final opposition to evil — He who came to bear our sin must also die our death. Death is the word which sums up the whole liability of man in relation to sin, and therefore when Christ came to give Himself for our sins He did it by dying. It does not occur to St. Paul to ask how Christ could die the death which is the wages of sin, any more than it occurred to St. Peter to ask how He could bear the sins of others. If any one had argued that the death which Jesus died, since it had not the shadow of a bad conscience cast upon it, was not the death which is the wages of sin, can we not conceive him asking, ‘What death, then, was it? Is there any other? The death He died was the only death we know; it was death in all that tragic reality that we see at Calvary; and the sinlessness of Jesus — when we take His love along with it — may have been so far from making it impossible for Him to know and feel it as all that it was, that it actually enabled him to realize its awful character as no sinful soul had ever done or could do. Instead of saying, He could not die the death which is the wages of sin, it may be far truer to say, None but He could. It may not be amiss here to point out that analysis of the term ‘death’ as it is used by St. Paul almost invariably misleads. According to M.Menegoz, the apostle’s doctrine of the expiation of sin by death is fatally vitiated by the ambiguity of the term. Paul confounds in it two distinct things: (1) death as l ’aneantissement complet et definitif ; (2) death as la peine de mort , le deces .

If we take the word in the first sense, Christ did not die, for He was raised again, and therefore there is no expiation. If we take it in the second sense, there was no need that He should die, for we can all expiate our own sins by dying ourselves. This kind of penetration is hardly to be taken seriously. When Paul spoke of Christ’s death as a death for sin, he had not a definition in his mind, whether l ’aneantissement complet et defjnitif , or la peine de mort ; but neither had he a vague or blurred idea which confused both; he had the awful fact of the crucifixion, with everything, physical and spiritual, which made it real; that was the bearing of sin and expiation of it, whether it answered to any one’s abstract definition or not. The apostle would not have abandoned his gospel because some one demonstrated a priori , by means of definitions, that expiation of sin by death was either (1) impossible, or (2) unnecessary.

He lived in another region. With these general remarks on the different relations in which St. Paul defines the death of Christ, we may now proceed to consider the teaching of the epistles in detail, keeping as far as possible to chronological order. (1.) The Epistles to the Thessalonians do not yield us much. The only indisputable passage is in the first epistle, ch. 5:10: ‘God did not appoint us to wrath, but to the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep we should live together with Him.’

If the question is raised, What did Christ do for us with a view to our salvation, St. Paul has only one answer, He died for us. There is nothing in the epistles like the language of the hymn:— ‘For us despised, for us He bore His holy fast, and hungered sore; For us temptations sharp He knew, For us the Tempter overthrew.’ The only thing He is said to have done for us is to die, and this He did, because it was determined for Him by sin. The relation of sin and death in the nature of things made it binding on Him to die if He was to annul sin.

The purpose here assigned to Christ’s death, that whether we wake or sleep we should live together with Him, suggests that His power to redeem is dependent on His making all our experiences His own. If we are to be His in death and life, then He must take our death and life to Himself. If what is His is to become ours, it is only on the condition that what is ours He first makes His. There is the same suggestion in Romans 14:9: ‘To this end Christ died and lived, that He might be Lord both of dead and living.’

Not as though death made Him Lord of the dead, and rising again, of the living; but as One to whom no human experience is alien, He is qualified to be Lord of men through all. The particular character elsewhere assigned to death as the doom of sin is not here mentioned, but it does not follow that it was not felt. On the contrary, we should rather hold that St. Paul could never allude to the death of Christ without becoming conscious of its propitiatory character and of what gave it that character. The word would fill of its own accord with the meaning which it bears when he says, First of all, Christ died for our sins. (2.) When we pass to the First Epistle to the Corinthians, we have much fuller references to the subject. For one thing, its supreme importance is insisted on when we find the gospel described as ‘the word of the cross ’ (1:18), and the apostle’s endeavors directed to this, ‘that the cross of Christ may not be made void’ (1:17). It is in the same spirit that he contrasts the true gospel with the miracles claimed by the Jews, and the wisdom sought by the Greeks: ‘We preach Christ crucified , the power of God and the wisdom of God.’ So again in the second chapter he reminds the Corinthians how he came to Achaia determined to know nothing among them but. Jesus Christ and Him crucified: his whole gospel, the testimony of God, as he calls it, was in this (2:1 f.). In other passages he refers to the death of Christ in general terms which suggest the cost at which man’s redemption was achieved. Twice over, in chapters 6:20, and 7:23, he writes, ‘Ye were bought with a price ;’ making it in the first instance the basis of an exhortation to glorify God in the nature He had made His own at so dear a rate; and in the other, of an exhortation to assume all the responsibilities of that freedom for which they had been so dearly ransomed, and not to become servants of men, i .e ., not to let the conventions, or judgments, or consciences of others invade a responsibility which had obligations to the Redeemer alone. It may not be possible to work out the figure of a price, which is found in these passages, in detail; we may not be able to say what it answered to, who got it, how it was fixed, and so on. But what we may legitimately insist upon is the idea that the work of man’s salvation was a costly work, and that the cost, however we are to construe it, is represented by the death of Christ. Ye were bought with a price, means, Ye were not bought for nothing. Salvation is not a thing which can be assumed, or taken for granted; it is not an easy thing, about which no difficulty can possibly be raised by any one who has any idea of the goodness of God. The point of view of the New Testament is the very opposite. Salvation is a difficult thing, an incredible thing, an impossible thing; it is the miracle of miracles that such a thing should be; the wonder of it never ceases, and it nowhere finds a more thrilling expression than in St. Paul’s words, Ye were bought with a price.

St. Paul will show us in other ways why cost was necessary, and the cost of Christ’s death in particular; but it is a great step in initiation into the gospel he preached to see that cost, as Bushnell puts it in his book on Forgiveness and Law , had to be made, and actually was made, that men might be redeemed for God.

There is another passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians on which I should lay greater stress than is usually done in connection with the apostle’s teaching on Christ’s death: it is that in the tenth and eleventh chapters in which St. Paul speaks of the Sacraments. He is concerned about the recrudescence of immorality among the saints, about the presumptuous carelessness with which they go into temptation, relying apparently on their sacramental privileges to ensure them against peril. He points out that God’s ancient people had had similar privileges, indeed identical ones, yet had fallen in the wilderness owing to their sins. You are baptized into Christ? Yes, and all our fathers were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; they formed one body with him, and were as sure of God’s favor. You have supernatural meat and supernatural drink in the Holy Supper, meat and drink which have the assurance of a divine and immortal life in them? So had they in the manna and the water from the rock. They all ate the same supernatural meat as you do, they all drank the same supernatural drink; they drank of a supernatural rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ. 5 It is obvious from this passage (1 Corinthians 10:1-4) as well as from the references to baptism in 1:13 f., 12:13, and from the full explanation of the Supper in 11:23 ff., that the Sacraments had a large place in the church at Corinth, and not only a large place, but one of a significance which can hardly be exaggerated. And, as has been pointed out already, there is no interpretation of the Sacraments except by reference to the death of Christ. Baptism has always in view, as part at least of its significance, the forgiveness of sins; and as the rite which marks the believer’s initiation into the new covenant, it is essentially related to the act on which the covenant is based, namely, that which Paul delivered first of all to this Church, that Christ died for our sins. When, in another epistle, Paul argues that baptism into Christ means baptism into His death, he is not striking out a new thought, of a somewhat venturesome originality, to ward off a shrewd blow suddenly aimed at his gospel; he is only bringing out what was all along to him the essential meaning of this ordinance. The Supper, again, of which he speaks at length in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, bears an unmistakable reference to Christ’s death. The cup is specially defined as the new covenant in His blood, and the apostle sums up the meaning of the Sacrament in the words, As often as ye eat this bread and drink the cup, ye publish the Lord’s death until He come (1 Corinthians 11:26). In all probability katagge>llete (publish) implies that the Sacrament was accompanied by words in which its significance was expressed; it was not only a picture in which the death of Christ was represented and its worth to the Church declared; there was an articulate confession of what it was, and of what the Church owed to it. If we compare the sixth chapter of Romans with the tenth and eleventh of 1st Corinthians, it seems obvious that modern Christians try to draw a broader line of distinction between the Sacraments than really exists. Partly, no doubt, this is owing to the fact that in our times baptism is usually that of infants, while the Supper is partaken of only by adults, whereas, in New Testament times, the significance of both was defined in relation to conscious faith. But it would not be easy to show, from St. Paul’s epistles, that in contents and meaning, in the blessings which they represented and which were conveyed through them, there is any very great distinction. The truth seems rather to be that both the Sacraments are forms into which we may put as much of the gospel as they will carry; and St. Paul, for his part, practically puts the whole of his gospel into each. If Baptism is relative to the forgiveness of sins, so is the Supper. If Baptism is relative to the unity of the Church, so is the Supper.

We are not only baptized into one body (1 Corinthians 12:13), but because there is one bread, we, many as we are who partake of it, are one body (1 Corinthians 10:17). If Baptism is relative to a new life in Christ (Romans 6:4 f.), in the Supper Christ Himself is the meat and drink by which the new life is sustained (1 Corinthians 10:3 f.). And in both the Sacraments, the Christ to whom we enter into relation is Christ who died; we are baptized into His death in the one, we proclaim His death until the end of time in the other. I repeat, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the significance of these facts, though it is possible enough to ignore them altogether. The superstition that has gathered round the Sacraments, and that has tempted even good Christians to speak of abolishing them, probably showed itself at a very early date; there are unmistakable traces of it in the First Epistle to the Corinthians itself, especially in the tenth chapter; but instead of lessening, it increases our assurance of the place which these ordinances had in Christianity from the beginning. And although the rationale of the connection between the death of Christ and the blessings of the gospel is not elucidated by them, it is presupposed in them. In ordinances with which every Christian was familiar, and without which a place in the Christian community could neither be acquired nor retained, the death of Christ was perpetually kept before all as a death essentially related in some way to the forgiveness of sins.

Not much light falls on our subject from the one sacrificial allusion to Christ’s death in 1 Corinthians 5:7: ‘For our Passover also has been sacrificed — Christ.’ No doubt to< pa>sca here, as in Mark 14:12, means the paschal lamb, and the apostle is thinking of Christ as the Lamb of God, by whose sacrifice the Church is called and bound to a life of holiness. It is because of this sacrifice that he says, ‘Let us therefore keep festival, not in old leaven, nor in leaven of malice and wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.’ It is implied here certainly that there is an entire incongruity between a life of sin, and a life determined by a relation to the sacrificial death of Christ; but we could not, from this passage alone, make out what, according to St. Paul, was the ground of this incongruity. It would be wrong, in a passage with this simply allusive reference to the passover, to urge the significance of the lamb in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Exodus, and to apply this to interpret the death of Christ.

There is no indication that the apostle himself carried out his thought on these lines.

We now come to the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, which is here of supreme importance. In one point of view, it is a defense of St. Paul’s apostleship, and of his work in the apostolic office. The defense rests mainly on two pillars; first, his comprehension of the gospel; and second, his success in preaching it. There are one or two references in the earlier chapters to the sufferings and even the death of Jesus in an aspect with which we are not here specially concerned. Thus in 1:5, Paul says, ‘The sufferings of Christ abound toward us’; meaning by this that in his apostolic work he suffered abundantly just as Christ had suffered; the weariness and peril from which Jesus could not escape haunted him too; the Lord’s experience was continued in him. Similarly, in 4:10, when he speaks of always bearing about in the body thkrwsin tou~ jIhsou~ — the dying of Jesus — he means that his work and its attendant sufferings are killing him as they killed his Master; every day he feels his strength lessen, and the outer man perish. But it is not in these passages that the great revelation is made of what Christ’s death is in relation to sin. It is in chapter 5, in which he is defending his conduct in the apostolic office against the assaults of his enemies. Extravagant or controlled, the motive of his conduct was always the same. ‘The love of Christ constrains us,’ he writes, ‘because we thus judge, that one died for all (so then all died), and died for all that they who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for them, and rose again.’ The importance of this passage is that it connects the two relations in which St. Paul is in the habit of defining Christ’s death — its relation to the love in which it originated, and to the sin with which it dealt; and it shows us how to construe these two things in relation to each other. Christ’s death, we are enabled to see, was a loving death, so far as men are concerned, only because in that death He took the responsibilities of men upon Himself. Deny that, and it will be impossible to show any ground on which the death can be construed as a loving death at all. It is necessary to examine the passage in detail.

The love of Christ, the apostle argues, constrains us, because we thus judge — i .e ., because we put a certain interpretation on His death. Apart from this interpretation, the death of Christ has no constraining power.

Here we find in St. Paul himself a confirmation of what has been said above about the distinction of fact and theory. It is in virtue of a certain theory of Christ’s death that the fact has its power to constrain the apostle. If it were not susceptible of such an interpretation, if this theory were inapplicable to it, it would cease to constrain. What, then, is the theory? It is that one died for all; uJpentwn means that the interest of all was aimed at and involved in the death of the one. How it was involved in it these words alone do not enable us to say. They do not by themselves show the connection between Christ’s death and the world’s good. But St.

Paul draws an immediate inference from them: ‘so then all died.’ In one sense, it is irrelevant and interrupts his argument. He puts it into a hurried parenthesis, and then eagerly resumes what it had suspended. ‘One died for all (so then all died), and died for all that they who live should no longer live to themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again.’

Yet it is in this immediate inference, that the death of Christ for all involved the death of all — that the missing link is found. It is because Christ’s death has this inclusive character — because, as Athanasius puts it, ‘the death of all was fulfilled in the Lord’s body’ — that His death has in it a power which puts constraint on men to live for Him. 6 I cannot agree with Mr. Lidgett when he says that the words can only be understood in connection with the apostle’s declaration elsewhere, that he has been ‘crucified with Christ.’ 7 That declaration is a declaration of Christian experience, the fruit of faith; but what the apostle is dealing with here is something antecedent to Christian experience, something by which all such experience is to be generated, and which, therefore, is in no sense identical with it. The problem before us is to discover what it is in the death of Christ which gives it its power to generate such experience, to exercise on human hearts the constraining influence of which the apostle speaks; and this is precisely what we discover in the inferential clause: ‘so then all died.’ This clause puts as plainly as it can be put the idea that His death was equivalent to the death of all; in other words, it was the death of all men which was died by Him. Were this not so, His death would be nothing to them. It is beside the mark to say, as Mr. Lidgett does, that His death is died by them rather than theirs by Him; the very point of the apostle’s argument may be said to be that in order that they may die His death He must first die theirs. Our dying His death is not, in the New Testament, a thing which we achieve on our own initiative, or out of our own resources; it is the fruit of His dying ours. If it is our death that Christ died on the Cross, there is in the Cross the constraint of an infinite love; but if it is not our death at all if it is not our burden and doom that He has taken to Himself there — then what is it to us? His death can put the constraint of love upon all men, only when it is thus judged that the death of all was died by Him. When the apostle proceeds to state the purpose of Christ’s death for any, that they which live should not henceforth live to themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again’ — he does it at the psychological and moral level suggested by the words: ‘The love of Christ constrains us’. He who has done so tremendous a thing as to take our death to Himself has established a claim upon our life. We are not in the sphere of mystical union, of dying with Christ and living with Him; but in that of love transcendently shown, and of gratitude profoundly felt. But it will not be easy for any one to be grateful for Christ’s death, especially with a gratitude which will acknowledge that his very life is Christ’s, unless he reads the Cross in the sense that Christ there made the death of all men His own.

It is in this same passage that St. Paul gives the fullest explanation of what he means by reconciliation (katallagh> ), and an examination of this idea will also illustrate his teaching on the death of Christ. Where reconciliation is spoken of in St. Paul, the subject is always God, and the object is always man. The work of reconciling is one in which the initiative is taken by God, and the cost borne by Him; men are reconciled in the passive, or allow themselves to be reconciled, or receive the reconciliation. We never read that God has been reconciled. God does the work of reconciliation in or through Christ, and especially through His death. He was engaged, in Christ, in reconciling the world — or rather, nothing less than a world — to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). He reconciled us to Himself through Christ (5:20). When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son (Romans 5:10). Men who once were alienated, and enemies in mind through wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death (Colossians 1:21 f.). It is very unfortunate that the English word reconcile (and also the German versohnen , which is usually taken as its equivalent) diverge seriously, though in a way of which it is easy to be unconscious, from the Greek katalla>ssein . We cannot say in English, God reconciled us to Himself, without conceiving the persons referred to as being actually at peace with God, as having laid aside all fear, distrust, and love of evil, and entered, in point of fact, into relations of peace and friendship with God. But katalla>ssein , as describing the work of God, or katallagh> , as describing its immediate result, do not necessarily carry us so far. The work of reconciliation, in the sense of the New Testament, is a work which is finished , and which we must conceive to be finished, before the gospel is preached . It is the good tidings of the Gospel, with which the evangelists go forth, that God has wrought in Christ a work of reconciliation which avails for no less than the world, and of which the whole world may have the benefit. The summons of the evangelist is — ‘Receive the reconciliation; consent that it become effective in your case.’ The work of reconciliation is not a work wrought upon the souls of men, though it is a work wrought in their interests, and bearing so directly upon them that we can say God has reconciled the world to Himself; it is a work — as Cromwell said of the covenant — outside of us , in which God so deals in Christ with the sin of the world, that it shall no longer be a barrier between Himself and men.

From this point of view we can understand how many modern theologians, in their use of the word reconciliation, come to argue as it were at cross purposes with the apostle. Writers like Kaftan, 9 for example, who do not think of the work of Christ as anything else than the work which Christ is perpetually doing in winning the souls of men for God, and who describe this as the work of reconciliation, though they may seem to the practical modern intelligence to be keeping close to reality, are doing all that can be done to make the Pauline, or rather the New Testament point of view, bewildering by a modern reader. Reconciliation, in the New Testament sense, is not something which is doing; it is something which is done. No doubt there is a work of Christ which is in process, but it has as its basis a finished work of Christ; it is in virtue of something already consummated on His cross that Christ is able to make the appeal to us which He does, and to win the response in which we receive the reconciliation. A finished work of Christ and an objective atonement — a katallagh> in the New Testament sense — are synonymous terms: the one means exactly the same as the other; and it seems to me self-evident, as I think it did to St.

Paul, that unless we can preach a finished work of Christ in relation to sin, a katallagh> or reconciliation or peace which has been achieved independently of us, at an infinite cost, and to which we are called in a word or ministry of reconciliation, we have no real gospel for sinful men at all. It is not in something Christ would fain do that we see His love, it is in something He has already done; nay, it is only through what He has already done that we can form any idea, or come to any conviction, of what He would fain do. He has died for us all, and by that death — not His own, properly speaking, but the death of the sinful race taken to Himself — He has so demonstrated the reality and infinity of the love of God to the sinful, as to make it possible for apostles and evangelists to preach peace to all men through Him.

In the passage with which we are dealing, St. Paul appends to the apostolic message, abruptly and without any conjunction, the statement of the great truth of Christ’s finished work which underlies it. ‘On Christ’s behalf, then, we are ambassadors, as though God were entreating you through us, we beg of you on Christ’s behalf, Be reconciled to God. Him that knew no sin He made to be sin for us, that we might become God’s righteousness in Him’ (2 Corinthians 5:20 f.).

The want of a conjunction here does not destroy the connection; it only makes the appeal of the writer more solemn and thrilling. There need not be any misunderstanding as to what is meant by the words, Him that knew no sin He made to be sin for us. To every one who has noticed that St.

Paul constantly defines Christ’s death, and nothing but His death, by relation to sin, and who can recall similar passages in the Epistle to the Galatians or to the Romans, to which we shall presently come, it is obvious that these tremendous words cover precisely the same meaning as ‘He died for our sins.’ When the sinless one, in obedience to the will of the Father, died on the Cross the death of all, the death in which sin had involved all, then, and in that sense, God made Him to be sin for all. But what is meant by saying, ‘in that sense.’? It means, ‘in the sense of His death.’ And what that means is not to be answered a priori , or on dogmatic grounds. It is to be answered out of the Gospel history, out of the experience of our Lord in the Garden and on the Cross. It is there we see what death meant for Him; what it meant for Him to make our sin, and the death in which God’s judgment comes upon sin, His own; and it is the love which, in obedience to the Father, did not shrink from that for us which gives power and urgency to the appeal of the Gospel. We ought to feel that moralizing objections here are beside the mark, and that it is not for sinful men, who do not know what love is, to tell beforehand whether, or how far, the love of God can take upon itself the burden and responsibility of the world’s sin; or if it does so, in what way its reality shall be made good. The premise of the Gospel is that we cannot bear that responsibility ourselves; if we are left alone with it, it will crush us to perdition. The message of the gospel, as it is here presented, is that Christ has borne it for us; if we deny that He can do so, is it not tantamount to denying the very possibility of a gospel? Mysterious and awful as the thought is, it is the key to the whole of the New Testament, that Christ bore our sins. Of this, God made Him to be sin for us is merely another equivalent; it means neither more nor less. The end contemplated — that we might become the righteousness of God in Him — is here stated religiously or theologically. Christ takes our place in