Section XI

Christ's solemn Sabbath; the redemption and reconciliation of the world; Christ's entrance into the world of spirits, and the mystery of his birth from death to new life

While the spirit of carnal Judaism, like an unblessed spectre, wandered restlessly on the quiet Sabbath-day around the sepulchre of Jesus, and while the Roman power guarded the seal and the stone of His sepulchre, Christ was resting in His chamber, or rather in the bosom of His Father. He was solemnizing the great sabbath of eternity after the heat and labour of the day on which He had finished the work of redemption. Some of the finest of the hymns which sing of our Lord’s passion are dedicated to His rest in the grave.¹ We feel that in them breathes the peace of Christ’s sabbath—the second and great sabbath of the world, in which the first divine sabbath has been renewed in a higher form.

The first divine rest consisted in this, that with the formation of the first man God had reached the aim of His creation. This aim was the heart of man, to which He could impart Himself, in which He could reside. Therefore Adam’s prayerful repose was an expression of the rest of God—of his God, who sat enthroned in his heart.

But this first human heart abandoned and lost its unity with God, and thereby lost its calmness, its composure, and its peace. Disquiet and restlessness, this was the heart in the heart of the world. The loudest expression of this disquiet was the fierce fanaticism with which the Jew zealously laboured and strove for the stiff form of a dead sabbath-repose.

But now there was founded in the midst of the world a second and higher sabbath—the sabbath which the heart of Christ had regained in His death. Adam had lost the sabbatic rest of his heart even in the midst of the natural peace of the paradise which surrounded him. The wild throbbing of his sinful heart broke the appointed rest of the world; from the disquiet of his heart issued all the trouble and toil which ever since has distracted and encumbered all below the sun. But Christ preserved the peace of His heart amid the disquiet of the world, in the ardour of His contest with all the temptations of the world. And the sabbath of His soul was perfected in this, that He maintained the quietness, composure, and stedfastness of His soul amid the labour of the cross, the wild excitement of men, the pangs of shaken nature, and the billows of God’s judgments. See Isa 63:1-19.

The broken heart of Christ is the pure, strong, and calm heart which, firmly fixed in God, is hidden in the infinite depths of the Godhead from all the disquiet of life, and in which the Father can sit securely enthroned more peacefully than on the rocky heights of earth or the stars of heaven. Therefore the heart of Christ, tried and approved, is itself the new sabbath of the world. It is the source whence issues all divine peace which has been allotted to the world. The pacification of the world, the reducing of its confusion to order, the stilling of its commotions, and the transformation of its cheerless toils into sacred and solemn joy, all proceed from Him in the power of His righteousness, Spirit, and life. For man is the heart of the world, and Christ is the heart of mankind; but the heart of His heart is the divine peace of His soul which He preserved amid His sore labour and won for man.

The great disquiet of man consists in his always fleeing from God and His judgments with a consciousness of guilt. But flight from God is in its very nature the severest and most painful toil. For where shall we flee from His presence and find rest? Flight from His judgments is flight from all the ills of life, from every semblance of the ills, and from every thought of that semblance. It is flight from distress and all her messengers, from death and all his shadows; nay, more, it is flight from all earnest inward life—from conscience and all its mysterious warnings and alarms. Therefore this flight is the curse of sin. While man flees from God in His judgments, he sinks deeper into the ruinous unrest of sin.

Therefore the Sabbath could return only with Him who has destroyed the curse of sin by putting an end to this flight from God. This He did by making a full and faithful surrender of Himself to the darkest and most unfathomable judgment of God, the centre of all His judgments. In the death of the cross He sought and found for the world the grace of God. This is the reconciliation of the world.

But to perceive the fulness as well as the definiteness of the world’s redemption which Christ has finished, we must distinguish between redemption, expiation, and reconciliation.

Christ comes as the great Prophet from God. In His name He comes to men. As the Mighty One of God He puts Himself at the head of mankind to redeem them from their hereditary enemies—from sin, death, and hell, and from that servitude to the prince of darkness into which they had fallen. The power of this enmity is represented by the ungodly principles, suppositions, and powers of the old world.² The bonds of their servitude consist above all in the fear of death, which includes fear of hatred, persecution, suffering, and shame.³ Even Christ was claimed as vassal by the old world because He was man. He seemed to it to be a servant as all others are, because He had the form of a servant. So the old weapons of the kingdom of darkness, calumnies, suspicions, examinations, excommunication, and outlawry, the scourge and the cross, must be employed to disable and bind Him. But He yielded not before the spell of these old-world terrors. He maintained the glory of His new life unshaken by all its imperiousness and power. In order to retain its honour, its repose, its life, the old world entered into conflict with Him, seeking to seize and bind Him to itself; but He relinquished all, even His body, to secure His independency of it. If freemen, when contending against outward odds, would gain security from slavery, the infallible means is to yield their life to the enemy. At this price Christ maintained His freedom against the power and the claims of the old world, and at the same time laid the foundation of the world’s freedom. He purchased the freedom of mankind; it was not for Himself alone, but for mankind, that, while opposing the darkness of the world, He maintained His inward life by surrendering the outward. He destroyed the spell which the fear of death laid upon them. The preaching of the cross produced on earth the holy courage to face death and the cross, against which the power of darkness put forth its might in vain. All who believe on Him know that in Him they are already free. And this freedom becomes theirs by their entering into the fellowship of His death, and being ready for His sake to surrender their lives to the old world. This is the redemption which Christ has obtained by His blood.⁴

But in that despotic sway which the hostile powers exercised over man, the judgment of God was revealed under which men as sinners had justly fallen. But this at first only deepened the estrangement arising from sin. Man, with his guilty conscience, perceived the righteous judgments of God in the consequences of sin. But God’s goodness he could not perceive in His judgments. The righteousness of God was to him something harsh and inexorable. With the cowardly and slavish mind of conscious guilt, he saw hostility in the countenance of the Judge. Hence his continual fleeing from God. Hence the infinite difficulty of bringing this terrified slavish mind to stop and turn. But Christ removed this ban. Coming as the great Prophet from God to men, He has gone to God as the great High Priest in the name of mankind. Submission to God is the soul of all religion, and the root of all sacrifice. The full and free submission to the judgments of God which one relatively guiltless yields in fellowship with guilty persons, and for them, forms the heart and essence of priesthood. And every surrender of this kind to a death of relative sacrifice has something relatively expiatory. Many a priestly heart has thus atoned for the historic crimes of his house, and by expiation prevented the reappearance of its curse. But the essential expiation must extend over all time and all space: it must embrace mankind in the power of the Eternal Spirit. This reconciliation Christ has effected. God’s judgment on the world lay in their nailing Him to the cross. This He clearly and consciously perceived, felt it in sympathy; and, in faithful submission to God, transformed it into light and salvation. He freely surrendered Himself to the unsearchable and unfathomable depths of divine judgment, in the full confidence of finding therein His God, and the grace of His God for His people. Thus He expiated the infinite flight of the world from God by an infinite fleeing to Him, through the midst of all His judgments. And now, through the power and blessing of His offering, men are drawn to God, as formerly they had fled from Him. The symbol of this drawing is the brightness and glory of the cross. All who find essential expiation in Christ, have at the same time learnt to see the rescuing hand of God even in the judgments which they undergo, and to turn these sufferings, through priestly submission, into salvation and blessing.⁵ Thus Christ, in the eternal spirit of His surrender, has brought in the ever-abiding and efficacious atoning sacrifice.

But when Christ comes in God’s name to men to redeem them, and in their name appears before God to expiate their guilt, He is not divided, but One, in this twofold acting. Nay, He thereby completes the eternal unity of His divine-human life, and exhibits in this unity the consciousness of kingly power.

As the true King of man, He maintained the unity of His being and His freedom of spirit in a contest in which the feeling of discord between man and the righteousness of God pierced His soul, and in which the distractions of the world sought to distract His heart. He held fast by God, and preserved the divinity of His life, when in His oneness with mankind, in His sympathy with man, He was shaken by the feeling of God’s desertion. And He held fast by man when with perfect and divine consciousness He acknowledged in His death God’s judgment on the world as death-deserving. And thereby He achieved the reconciliation between God and the world. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.⁶ In His heart God remained His God, notwithstanding that He withdrew Himself from the world in its judgment; the world continued the world beloved by Him in His heart, notwithstanding that it seemed separated from God and sunk in death; and He Himself maintained the union of the divine and human by maintaining His position as the God-man, while it seemed as if the waves of human anguish in His breast would quench His divinity, and the thunderbolts of divine justice would destroy in Him the humanity of the Son of man. Thus in this victory of Christ lay the reconciliation of the world and the removal of its curse.

The heaviest curse of sin consists in this, that man turned the knowledge that divine punishment necessarily follows sin into a new and pernicious delusion. He began by misunderstanding that connection. He was not satisfied with identifying sin and punishment, and thus confounding the rule of the prince of darkness with the rule of God’s righteousness. He accustomed himself more and more to see in sin only an ill of life, an inevitable fatality, and again in this ill the real evil. He let himself be fettered by sin, as if it were an unavoidable destiny, or even a fixed law of life; on the other hand, he grew terrified at the judgment of God on guilt, as if that were the real evil to be avoided at any price, and which he could succeed in escaping from. This fearful confounding of sin and suffering decided the slavery of man in the service of darkness. It cast a spell over him, which made temptations seem right, and God’s judgments wrong.

This curse none but Christ could abolish. And this He did by becoming a curse and suffering for us, while preserving the blessing in His heart. Seemingly given up by God to die as man, He held fast by the divine and drew it down with Him into the depths of death; rejected and thrown back by man into the bosom of God, in the faithfulness of His heart He drew humanity up with Him into the Father’s bosom. As the Prophet of God, He broke sin’s power of temptation—as the High Priest of man, He revealed the gracious design of God’s judgments; but it was as the royal God-man that He demolished the delusion in men’s minds which had changed temptation into a divine law, and judgment into temptation. He demolished this delusion in the one great fact of sacrificing His life. For this sacrifice was so voluntary, that to this day it appears wilful to most men, and its accordance with the higher law is completely hidden from the eyes of the world. But its spontaneity proclaims in the strongest manner the freedom, in the exercise of which Christ gave a pure and absolute denial to the pretensions of the world’s temptation, and at the same time laid down His life. But this sacrifice was as legally demanded by God, and historically necessary, as it was voluntary; and therefore it is altogether a deed of Christ’s submission to the will of God, when His judgment on the world was revealed, and a testimony of perfect confidence that God’s gracious presence is to be found in His judgments. And thus is the old curse abolished: the temptation of the cross was entirely different from the judgment in it; temptation was proved powerless, but judgment was glorified as a heavenly power of rescue.

The death of Jesus finished redemption, expiated sin, and brought in reconciliation. Thus He entered into the realm of spirits surrounded by the glory of this victory, Himself being made perfect and His work of redemption completed.

If we believe in the certainty of immortality, we must also believe that there is a world of separate spirits corresponding to the world of men in the body. But as men in this world are subject to mutual influence, we must assume the same in respect to men in the kingdom of the dead, and this the rather, as there is no absolute separation between the two worlds. Hence it follows, that the entrance of Christ into the world of spirits was for it a great event, the report of which must have spread far and wide through it. And so much the more, as through the realm of death He was going to the Father. For that must imply that, in the unfolding of His life beyond the grave, He ascended through the domains of imperfect life, of longing and waiting, to the height of perfect spiritual life; through all the regions of that spiritual kingdom which is poor in manifestations, to the region of the highest and richest revelation of the Father’s glory. Thus His death was necessarily and essentially a triumphant march through the waiting lower world in paradise. Now as He went in the power of the unfolding of His being through every region of the life beyond the grave, from the lowest limits of the kingdom of the dead to the highest of the resurrection, He had experience of them all, and His transit affected them all. But as He passed through them in the full power of the living Redeemer made perfect in God, His passing through each region necessarily caused commotion in it, and assumed the shape of a divine revelation of salvation for its inhabitants.

The very entrance of Christ into that kingdom was, in fact, an announcement of the completion of redemption, a preaching of the Gospel for departed spirits, and an actual transforming of the relations of that world.

If we, as Christians, are convinced of the reality of the world of spirits beyond the grave, we must at the same time believe that, so long as redemption was not decided, its relations necessarily remain more or less undecided, as states of longing, of waiting, and of formation. But we must equally assume that in that region thousands of God’s elect had grown ripe for the day of decision; as in this world there had been matured Zacharias, Elisabeth, Simeon, Anna, and especially Mary; and that it needed only the annunciation of the perfected Redeemer to make them partakers of the blessings of the New Covenant, and joyful messengers of salvation for the world of spirits, so that Christ needed not go through a course of wandering, wonder-working, and teaching there. Everything was ready for the final decision. His entrance into the world of spirits announced His victory with a shock of life which could not fail to shake all its regions, and the working of that mighty power, from its very nature, continues active through all times and spaces of that world.

But we cannot consider this effect of Christ’s victory as unintentional; nay, it rather belongs to His mission and the work of His life. He was sent to mankind, not merely to men in this world.⁷ The old predilection of the Israelite for this world shows itself again in the tendency of the old orthodox scholasticism to assign to it exclusive claims to the redemption which is in Christ; and perhaps this is partly the cause that in our day the ‘modern’ spirit turns away in disgust from considering the state of the dead, owing to the gloomy representations given of it. This abridging and limiting the sphere of the Gospel contradicts not only the Apostles’ Creed,⁸ but also the Holy Scriptures,⁹—not only Scripture, but also the power and grace of Christ, the whole idea and significance of His work and kingdom. When He, as the perfected Saviour of the world, entered into the kingdom of the dead, and thousands of elected saints, millions of repentant souls, were waiting for Him there, was it not quite in accordance with His spirit and His relation to this great waiting congregation, that He should preach the Gospel to them on His entrance? (See Psa 22:25) And He really did preach the Gospel in the kingdom of the dead. But the proclamation of it was so prepared for these, that it only needed His salutation of peace to form a church of spirits, and to surround Him with a triumphant congregation. Thereby the new paradise was founded, into which He received the penitent thief also, a centre for the saving work of Christ in the other world. But as the Gospel works in this world under conditions of freedom, so also there. There are many who would maintain that the preaching of the Gospel to them that are dead could only tend to condemnation, while others think that it could tend only to salvation. These are two contrary kinds of superstition which are doomed to maintain a resultless contest with each other; but they both agree in making time lord over grace, and in exalting space into a fate over the freedom of man’s self-determination. The Gospel acts everywhere according to its nature and the nature of the sinful human heart. It is of itself a savour of life unto life, which yet unto many becomes a savour of death unto death through their own fault. It produces decision everywhere, in the other world as in this, and so lays the foundation for judgment and for resurrection.¹⁰ The expression usually employed by Christ, when speaking of His coming death, was, that He was going to the Father. His death was in the most proper sense a merging and sinking Himself into the bosom and heart of God, which implies that by death in God He recovered from death. Therefore, maltreated, suffering, and toilworn, He had to die really—to yield to death—in order to be thoroughly quickened and revived to new life in God. Had He recovered from being half dead, or from a semblance of death, He would have brought His deadly wounds back with Him into life, and the apparently Risen One would have been in reality a sick person, who afterwards must have succumbed to the effects of the deadly strokes which He had received. There would then have been a sickly and diseased human form, where now the Christian may and must see only the Risen One—the essential type of eternal life-the embodied power of the resurrection. It is death which first frees the sufferer from His sickness; it is death which first destroys the effect of deadly wounds.

Thus Christ was really dead, and by death became free from the fatal effects of His sufferings, and from the power of the death of this world. But His death, when accomplished, had to be transformed immediately to resurrection in the mystery of a new birth.

We must, in the first place, consider His death as the absolute repose of His spirit in God, in the enjoyment of the victory He had achieved; further, as the deepest and most inward life, and consequently as the most vitally powerful impulse to become visible, as a power which forthwith develops itself into a living paradise, and begins to form a new paradise surrounded with spiritual beauty.

But as Christ sinks Himself and moves in God, God works in Him. Christ’s repose in God corresponds to God’s solemn joy in the perfection of His heart. Thus the victor-joy of Christ in God meets with an absolute announcement of God’s joy over Him in His Spirit. But the most inward revelation of the Father’s quickening glory in the Son, corresponds to the inward life of the Son in the Father. Finally, God’s breath of life, as the creative power which awakes Him from the dead, meets with the tendency to manifestation and appearance of the life of Christ in God.

In any case Christ must have risen again from the dead, because His being as man had been perfected in God, and thereby became the perfected power of life and appearance; therefore He must have risen again immediately, or very shortly after His death, because He, in the glory of His being, had risen above the matter and the time of this world. Even if He had not risen in it, yet He must have solemnized His resurrection in the other world. But would that have been perfect resurrection? Was the power of His spirit and life to obtain dominion over the whole world, and not over His own dead body? Was He, in the power of His life, again to assume a living visible form, and, in doing so, pass by and neglect the body which had first really served to manifest His life? That would have been to pass by and neglect humanity. For how could men be able to recognize Him as the Risen One, had He appeared in another body? And if He had not appeared to men here in His resurrection, His resurrection would have had no significance for man. Would it then have been the real, full, and perfect resurrection? Would the redemption of the world have been decided, to say nothing of its being crowned and sealed by the resurrection? The tendency of Christ’s life to manifestation in newness of life was, above all, an impulse of His heart to bring to His mourning people here, and to this sinful world, the greeting of peace—the peace of the resurrection and of reconciliation. But it is not merely on these more general grounds that we must hold the dead body of Christ to be the necessary organ of His resurrection. Was not this body the pure image of His being, the pure formation of the Holy Ghost? Was it not impenetrated by His holy disposition, His works of wonder and spiritual victories? And now, finally, it had been impenetrated by His sufferings—the fire of sacrifice had passed through it, permeated and dedicated by the lightning flash of justice. Thus the body of Christ was thrice dedicated for His resurrection—by His holy birth, by His holy life, and by His holy death. Therefore this sacred body was brought always nearer and nearer to eternal life, and that chiefly and at last by means of death. When death deprived it of existence in this world, it reposed in the bosom of the presence of God as the pure life-form of the Holy One, which corruption durst not approach, which the Father only needed to breathe upon and Christ to touch in His tendency to resurrection to raise it up to eternal life, to awaken in it the holy initiative to resurrection, to beget the first birth from the dead.¹¹

We must here remember that, according to the deep and living view of Christianity, man was originally to pass to eternity, not by entire separation from his body, but by transformation. The idea of the transition in paradise was without doubt that of a metamorphosis, resembling death, but not really death. Not the corruptible corn of wheat, but the butterfly bursting forth from the chrysalis, is the symbol of the transition originally designed for man.

Christ had to go the way of death with sinners to redeem them from death. But as soon as He was dead, the power of the resurrection had to be realized in His body, in that form of transformation in which man in paradise was destined to pass from the first to the second life, and which shall be realized in the case of the righteous at the end of the world.¹² Thus it was in the central point of the body in which He had formerly existed that the spark of the new life commenced, that mysterious movement of transformation which was completed with His resurrection on the third day. He was not, like Lazarus, to return into the old and first life. He was not to belong exclusively to either world; but His perfect life was to embrace both realms of life. He had to experience the death of separation from the body as well as that of transformation, so that, as Prince of the resurrection, He might have power over the entire realm of death, and at last entirely abolish it, transforming it into life. Thus the divine mystery of the coming resurrection was working unseen in the sanctuary of our Lord’s sepulchre. The powerless spirits of corruption dared not approach that mighty form which the Spirit of eternal life had already breathed upon with His breath of flame.

The world knew not this mystery. Its dominant thought was death; its desire, the stillness of the grave. But the kingdom of spirits was in great commotion; the gentler movements also of the earthquake seemed still to continue; and even the men of this world had secret presentiments, of which they were not clearly conscious, respecting that mystery. His enemies were guarding the stone and the seal with superstitious fear; His friends were preparing the anointing for the dead with as devoted love as if they had been providing royal honours for the living.

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Notes

1. Among the hymns referred to which celebrate with deep Christian feeling the death of Christ, and His rest in the grave, we may mention the following in particular: Es ist vollbracht! Er ist verschieden, by S. Frank; O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid, by J. Rist; Am Kreuz erblasst, by Ch. Fr. Neander; Nun schlummerst du, nach: So ruhest du, by S. Frank. The three last hymns have the same tune, which touchingly expresses the feeling of Christ’s sabbath-rest. [The air referred to may be seen in ‘The Chorale Book for England;’ the hymns translated by Cath. Winkworth, the melodies arranged by Prof. Bennett and Otto Goldschmidt. Lond. 1863.—Ed.]

2. From not sufficiently distinguishing the three elements in the deliverance of the world, namely, redemption, expiation, and reconciliation, the most one-sided notions have been adopted; and these notions again have been much misapprehended. It was in accordance with the natural development of this threefold dogma that the fathers Irenæus, Origen, &c., should specially bring forward and unfold the element of redemption; that afterwards the Scholastics, particularly Anselm of Canterbury, should develop the element of expiation; and finally, modern theology that of reconciliation in the narrower sense. What is one-sided in this development arises from neglecting these distinctions, and still more from misapprehending them. For example, how many contemptible and unfair remarks have been made on this doctrine of Origen and his associates: The Redeemer gave His soul as a ransom, not to God, but to the devil! (See Von Baur, die christliche Lehre von der versöhnung, &c., 49.) It has not been considered that the fathers were specially called upon to exhibit the first practical side of redemption, the freeing of man from the power of darkness. Von Baur shows how they were specially led to this in order to correct the doctrine of the Gnostics, according to which Christ had to satisfy the law of the Demiurge by His death. They felt themselves bound to insist, at least mainly, upon the element of redemption, but they virtually included that of expiation. Similarly we may explain the one-sidedness of Anselm’s theory, and also the one-sidedness of many unfair critiques on it. Thus it is said, Anselm should have given special prominence to the idea of reconciliation; but his calling was to set forth the weight and importance of expiation. Modern theories of reconciliation (in the narrower sense) are pretty generally one-sided and inadequate from the same cause, for the ideas of redemption and expiation are apt to be left too much out of view when giving a one-sided prominence to the idea of reconciliation. While making the above-mentioned distinctions, we must firmly hold that the three elements work together in living unity in the concrete fact of salvation, and the practical expression of Scripture agrees with this view. The idea of redemption least of all bears being treated of apart; because the judicial government of God must always be taken into account when treating of the historic power and prevalence of the darkness of the world. What Von Baur says (p. 7) by way of distinguishing between redemption and reconciliation, is partly inadequate and partly incorrect. Thus he says, ‘Reconciliation is consequently the inner, which necessarily presupposes redemption as the outer;’ or, as Christ is Redeemer, by His whole manifestation and actions, He is Reconciler by His death.

He further remarks by way of explanation (p. 9): Reconciliation may be regarded, in the first place, as a process in the being of God Himself, whereby He mediates with Himself, in order to realize the conception of His own being. This view, which flows from later Greek, to say nothing of later and lower Christian notions, can only confuse the Christian’s idea of God. The distinction between the idea of expiation and that of reconciliation has been insisted upon and explained by Nitzsch in his System der christlichen Lehre (Clark’s Tr. 268). Nitzsch points to the difference between καταλλαγὴ, reconciliatio, and ἱλασμὸς, expiatio. By reconciliation he understands the testimony—completed by the death of Jesus—of God’s grace to men; by expiation, the fact, that Jesus as innocent, who had not to suffer for Himself but for others, consequently suffered death in their stead, and overcame death, so that He might be the end of all purely legal condemnation or pardon. Although this, and what he further says in explanation, does not quite express the idea of expiation, yet the venerable divine plainly condemns the aversion which is felt by many theologians to the very idea of expiation. On the relation between punishment and guilt, and the connection between punishment and forgiveness, compare the profound treatise by Göschel: Das Strafrecht und die christliche Lehre von der Satisfaction in der Schrift desselben: Zerstreute Blätter, i. 468. Another jurist, F. J. Stahl, in his work, Fundamente einer christlichen Philosophie, has, in his doctrine of expiation, 156, given a contribution which throws light upon the doctrine of reconciliation. Yet he appears to us to have failed in his attempt to disconnect the idea of expiation from that of punishment. He fails to perceive that the two stand in eternal relation to each other, that punishment (as it proceeds from God) always tends to expiation, that expiation (as appropriated by man) is always brought about by free submission (in conformity to a moral demand) to punitive justice. He says of punishment: ‘It is morally and intrinsically, like guilt itself, infinite, eternal; the incessant pain,’ &c. He should have stated here that he refers to punishment not in its active but in its passive sense, not as it is inflicted by God, but as it is suffered by man. Then we dispute the proposition, that the endurance of punishment must, as a matter of course (even in the case of those who are conscious of the presence of the spirit who punishes), continue eternally, incessant pain. When it is said of expiation, It is distinguished from punishment by its effect, this difference in effect must be founded upon the difference between the mind and spirit of him who makes the expiation and the disposition of him who is punished. Our author then cites a series of examples in which relative expiation is illustrated, and very properly dwells on the example of Antigone. He then gives this definition: The idea of expiation is to avert eternal punishment by submitting to sufferings which come to an end. This proposition, by being general, is too inexact, for it includes mere relative expiation. To guard against misunderstanding, it is well to remark, that any particular kind of expiation always bears reference to a particular law and its sphere of operation, and to the sin, curse, punishment, and removal of the curse within that sphere. Expiation, in its highest grade, is the removal of sin from man by means of punitive suffering. Sin as the curse always increases suffering, but free submission to God’s grace in this punitive suffering turns the curse into a blessing. The significance of the submission, however, is always to be judged according to the sphere in which it is exercised and to which it bears relation. For example—Antigone expiates the historical blood-guiltiness of her house, its offence as a family against the spirit of social morality. She does this by voluntarily devoting herself to death, approving her fidelity as a sister and priestess, and so glorifying the spirit of the family which that guilt substantially quenches. But in the sphere of universal spiritual law, in which righteousness in God’s sight is demanded, she must be regarded not as expiating, but as standing in need of reconciliation. The author himself brings out this distinction, since he regards reconciliation in Christ as expiation in its absolute form. ‘Here alone,’ says he, ‘is true expiation; elsewhere, only presentiment and symbol.’ This is perhaps going too far on the other side. Certainly relative expiations are mere presentiment and symbol in relation to the absolute expiation. But in their own conditioned conception and sphere, they have at the same time a real side. Even the Old Testament expiations by the blood of animals had a real side in relation to the sphere of Levitical law. This law was, indeed, altogether symbolical; and if the offerer did not acknowledge this, his Levitical righteousness was an offence against the essential law of the kingdom of God. But that did not nullify the conditioned value of his offering. The penitent thief on the cross could not expiate his guilt before God, but by his death he gave satisfaction for his civil offence against society, nay, he even expiated it in this relation so soon as he, by reconciliation in Christ, freely accepted God’s punishment in his sufferings. The author therefore is wrong in thinking that the guilty can never accomplish expiation through punitive suffering; for if a pardoned criminal still thought death his proper due, that would be held as an expiation of his former guilt, that is, when we speak of expiation in a somewhat indefinite sense. When a prince pardons a criminal, he does so because he finds the expiation, in the circumstances of the case, supplemented by a mitigated punishment, or because he takes it on trust that the crime is expiated. How else would the pardon have removed the punishment? But as the pardon of the criminal can expiate his punishment, so also can his voluntary surrender to punitive suffering. True, this is only relative expiation of relative punishment, and not absolute reconciliation. Expiations of this kind are so rare, because the criminal generally sees only an act of hostility in his sentence, and therefore in his suffering sin still continues a curse. The more superficial or external the sphere is, so much the easier is it for him who is punished to make expiation through the blessing of a deeper region of life. Conversely, the difficulty is increased with the increasing power of the curse and of fear. Finally, in the sphere of absolute justice all men were enemies, that is, they all saw hostility in God, the Judge; and so here the unshaken, holy, and pure consciousness of Christ could alone stand before all the terrors of God, and accomplish expiation by full surrender, in divine confidence, to grace in judgment. Stahl is right in maintaining that the first requisite in expiation is voluntariness; yet we must add—connected with a deep moral necessity. Further, he who makes the expiation must be innocent (at all events, innocent relatively to the sphere in which the guilt is contracted and the expiation made), when he removes by expiation another’s punitive sufferings. Yet, we must add, that besides freedom from guilt, community of life with the guilty is requisite, and such a community as can legally be considered unity of life. Finally, expiation requires vicarious suffering; at least, as the rule, it requires this. Keeping in view this last limitation, we can remember nothing against this definition. Nay, it may be maintained that even the penitent thief, who expiated his civic guilt by his believing death, suffered more or less vicariously for the crimes of his associates. Our author rightly maintains, against one-sided scholastic views, that Christ was not punished by God, that He did not undergo divine punishment simply as punishment; but He has not sufficiently taken into account that His suffering was punitive suffering for guilt and for the guilty, although he has acknowledged that Christ really underwent a great punitive judgment of God on men, and thereby turned it into a blessing. Could men, in the centre-point of time, incur a greater judgment than crucifying the Lord of glory, in the blindness to which they were given over? This was the guilt of the world and the divine punishment which lay upon Him, the burden of which He felt by His sympathy with us, that we might have peace; for His love outweighed the guilt, and His firm trust made the punishment an act of love. Stahl has shown that the contrast between God’s love and righteousness in the work of reconciliation forms no dualism. His distinction also between expiation and punishment must tend to throw light on the doctrine of reconciliation, by leading us to distinguish more clearly than has hitherto been done between the voluntary expiatory suffering of an innocent person which turns judgment into deliverance, and the involuntary punitive suffering of the guilty which perverts salutary punishment into a baleful curse. It is cheering to see the doctrine of reconciliation advanced thus by believing jurists, while many theologians are unthinkingly opposed to all the deeper spiritual relations of human life, and especially deny entirely the historical significance of guilt, curse, and reconciliation. How many are there who cannot conceive of the love of God except as identical with an eternal natural tenderness, and think this so passive, that they cannot suffer in it the contrast of righteousness and grace! They will not hear of punishment, curse, and reconciliation, least of all of a curse which the innocent can suffer along with the guilty, or of an expiation which the guilty may partake of through the innocent. They talk more willingly of dark mishap, death, and destruction; and instead of discovering in the Greek tragedians presentiments of judgment and expiation allied to Christianity, they rather introduce their own later-Greek, pagan ideas of destiny into the works of those tragedians. We may safely assert that Sophocles, in particular, knew more of guilt, curse, and expiation, than many a doctor of divinity. For the doctrine of the Rabbis regarding reconciliation, see Sepp, iii. 589.¹³

1) See Note 1.

2) Ἐλυτρῴθητε ἐκ τῆς ματαίας ὑμῶν ἀναστροφῆς πατροπαραδότου. 1 Pet. i. 18

3) See Heb. ii. 15.

4) The λύτρωσις or ἀπολύτρωσις. In the New Testament redemption is generally conjoined with reconciliation in accordance with its concrete view and manner of expression. Hence these expressions commonly denote reconciliation ; but we take it here in the narrower sense, with special reference to 1 Pet. i. 18.

5) This is the expiation included in the λύτρωσις or ἀπολύτρωσις, and denoted more distinctly by ἱλασμός or ἱλαστήριον.

6) This is the καταλλαγή. See 2 Cor. v. 19

7) Compare Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine (Tr. Clark) 391 ; Köuig, Die Lehre Christi Höllenfahrt, 213.

8) Descendit ad inferna. The rendering, descended into hell, is certainly liable to be misconstrued; yet this might lead to an exaggeration of the doctrine of salvation
in the other world rather than to the reverse. It is, besides, very characteristic, that the heroes of the day are specially perplexed with this article, evidently in unthinking fear of the sound of the words, while the article in its idea gives the support of the Church to the utmost amplitude of Christian hope of redemption. Compare Ackermann, Die Glaubenssätze von Christi Höllenfahrt und von der Auferstelmng des Fleisches, &c.

9) Compare Matt, xxvii. 52, 53 ; Eph. iv. 8-10 ; 1 Pet. iii. 19, iv. 6

10) On the doctrines of the Jews and heathens concerning Hades, compare Sepp, iii. 621. The doctrines of the fathers and of the moderns are exhibited in the learned and valuable work of König which we have referred to. [The opinions of the fathers are very fully exhibited by Pearson on the Creed (article, He descended into Hell ). He is himself opposed to the view advocated above; saying of it, that as the authority is most uncertain, so is the doctrine most incongruous. The days which follow after death were never made for opportunities to a better life. . . . If they be in a state of salvation now, by the virtue of Christ s descent into hell, which were numbered among the damned before His death, at the day of the general judgment they must be returned into hell again; or, if they be received then into eternal happiness, it will follow, either that they were not justly condemned to those flames at first, according to the general dispensations of God, or else they did not receive the things done in their body at the last; which all shall as certainly receive as all appear. Pearson s own view, that the end for which He descended was, that He might undergo the condition of a dead man as well as of a living ('legem mortuorum servare,' Irenaeus). seems on many accounts preferable even to Calvin s, for which see Instit. II. xvi. 10.—ED.]

11) Schmieder (in his treatise, The Spirit of the United Evangelical Church] ingeniously refers the article in the Apostles' Creed, descendit ad inferna, in the first place to this event. But, at the same time, he ascribed to our Lord an activity in accordance with this transformation.

12) The first proposition follows from the second. On the second, see 1 Cor. xv. 51, comp. 2 Cor. v. 2; Rom. viii. 22. See my essay in Stud, und Krit. 1836, iii. 693.

13) [The precise meaning and scriptural usage of the words spoken of above; the connection between expiation, reconciliation, and redemption ; and the relation of the sufferings of Christ to the punishment clue to sinners and to the punitive justice of God, are discussed in all the works bearing on the Socinian controversy at large. Those who desire to compare the author s views with the ordinary and received opinions, will find ample material in Grotius, Defensio Fid. Cathol. de Satisfactione Christl adv. F. Socinum (c. vi. 'An Deus voluerit Christum puuire,' and following chapters, De placatione, reconciliatione, redemptione, expiatione per mortem Christ! facta). Also, the defence of this work by G. J. Vossius, and the reply to Crellius attack upon it, by Stillingfleet, in his masterly Discourses on Christ s Satisfaction; Turrettin, De Satisf. Ckristi Disput. pp. 70, 200, 324 (Ed. 1696); Magee, Discourses on Atonement, Illustrations 26, 27, 28; Pye Smith's Four Discourses on the Sacrifice and Priesthood (especially Disc, iv.) ; Cunningham, Historical Theology, ii. 286.—ED.]