PART VI.

SOTERIOLOGY, OR THE DOCTRINE OF SALVATION THROUGH THE WORK OF CHRIST AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

CHAPTER I.

CHRISTOLOGY, OR THE REDEMPTION WROUGHT BY CHRIST.

SECTION I.-HISTORICAL PREPARATION FOR REDEMPTION.

Since God had from eternity determined to redeem mankind, the history of the race from the time of the Fall to the coming of Christ was providentially arranged to prepare the way for this redemption. The preparation was two-fold:

L NEGATIVE PREPARATION,—in the history of the heathen world.

This showed (1) the true nature of sin, and the depth of spiritual ignorance and of moral depravity to which the race, left to itself, must fall; and (2) the powerlessness of human nature to preserve or regain an adequate knowledge of God, or to deliver itself from sin by philosophy or art.

Why could not Eve have been the mother of the chosen seed, as she doubtless at the first supposed that she was? (Gen. 4:1-"and she conceived, and bare Cain [i. e., 'gotten', or acquired' ], and said, I have gotten a man, even Jehovah "). Why was not the cross set up at the gates of Eden? Scripture intimates that a preparation was needful (Gal. 4 : 4-"but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son"). Of the two agencies made use of, we have called heatbenism the negative preparation. But it was not wholly negative; it was partly positive also. Justin Martyr spoke of a Aóyos σперμаTIкós among the heathen. Clement of Alexandria called Plato a Moons ȧTTIKiswv-a Greek-speaking Moses. Notice the priestly attitude of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Pindar, Sophocles. The Bible recognizes Job, Balaam, Melchisedek, as instances of priesthood, or divine communication, outside the bounds of the chosen people. Heathen religions either were not religions, or God had a part in them. Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, were at least reformers, raised up in God's providence. Gal. 4: 3 classes Judaism with the 'rudiments of the world,' and Rom. 5: 20 tells us that 'the law came in beside,' as a force coöperating with other human factors, primitive revelation, sin, etc."

The positive preparation in heathenism receives greater attention when we conceive of Christ as the immanent God, revealing himself in conscience and in history. This was the real meaning of Justin Martyr, Apol. 1: 46; 2: 10, 13—“The whole race of men partook of the Logos, and those who lived according to reason (λóyou), were Christians, even though they were accounted atheists. Such among the Greeks were Socrates and Heracleitus, and those who resembled them. ... Christ was known in part even to Socrates.... The teachings of Plato are not alien to those of Christ, though not in all respects similar. For all the writers of antiquity were able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the implanted Word (Aóyov ).” Justin Martyr claimed inspiration for Socrates. Tertullian spoke of Socrates as "pæne nos

ter"

"almost one of us." Paul speaks of the Cretans as having "a prophet of their own (Tit. 1: 12)-probably Epimenides (596 B. C.) whom Plato calls a velos avip-"a man of God," and whom Cicero couples with Bacis and the Erythræan Sibyl. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1: 19; 6:5-"The same God who furnished both the covenants was the giver of the Greek philosophy to the Greeks, by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks." Augustine: "Plato made me know the true God; Jesus Christ showed me the way to him."

...

Bruce, Apologetics, 207—“God gave to the Gentiles at least the starlight of religious knowledge. The Jews were elected for the sake of the Gentiles. There was some light even for pagans, though heathenism on the whole was a failure. But its very failure was a prepartion for receiving the true religion." Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 133, 238"Neo-Platonism, that splendid vision of incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek philosophy set. . . . On its ethical side Christianity had large elements in common with reformed Stoicism; on its theological side it moved in harmony with the new movements of Platonism." E. G. Robinson: "The idea that all religions but the Christian are the direct work of the devil is a Jewish idea, and is now abandoned. On the contrary, God has revealed himself to the race just so far as they have been capable of knowing him. . . . Any religion is better than none, for all religion implies restraint."

46

John 1:9"There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world "— has its Old Testament equivalent in Ps. 94: 10-"He that chastiseth the nations, shall not he correct, Even he that teacheth man knowledge?" Christ is the great educator of the race. The preincarnate Word exerted an influence upon the consciences of the heathen. He alone makes it true that 'anima naturaliter Christiana est." Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 138-140—“Religion is union between God and the soul. That experience was first perfectly realized in Christ. Here are the ideal fact and the historical fact united and blended. Origen's and Tertullian's rationalism and orthodoxy each has its truth. The religious consciousness of Christ is the fountain head from which Christianity has flowed. He was a beginning of life to men. He had the spirit of sonship-God in man, and man in God. 'Quid interius Deo?' He showed us insistence on the moral ideal, yet the preaching of mercy to the sinner. The gospel was the acorn, and Christianity is the oak that has sprung from it. In the acorn, as in the tree, are some Hebraic elements that are temporary. Paganism is the materializing of religion; Judaism is the legalizing of religion. *In me,' says Charles Secretan, 'lives some one greater than I.'"

But the positive element in heathenism was slight. Her altars and sacrifices, her philosophy and art, roused cravings which she was powerless to satisfy. Her religious systems became sources of deeper corruption. There was no hope, and no progress. "The Sphynx's moveless calm symbolizes the monotony of Egyptian civilization.” Classical nations became more despairing, as they became more cultivated. To the best minds, truth seemed impossible of attainment, and all hope of general well-being seemed a dream. The Jews were the only forward-looking people; and all our modern confidence in destiny and development comes from them. They, in their turn, drew their hopefulness solely from prophecy. Not their "genius for religion," but special revelation from God, made them what they were.

Although God was in heathen history, yet so exceptional were the advantages of the Jews, that we can almost assent to the doctrine of the New Englander, Sept. 1883: 576 "The Bible does not recognize other revelations. It speaks of the 'face of the covering that covereth all peoples, and the veil that is spread over all nations' (Is. 25: 7); Acts 14: 16, 17-'who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways. And yet he left not himself without witness' = not an internal revelation in the hearts of sages, but an external revelation in nature, 'in that he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.' The convictions of heathen reformers with regard to divine inspiration were dim and intangible, compared with the consciousness of prophets and apostles that God was speaking through them to his people."

On heathenism as a preparation for Christ, see Tholuck, Nature and Moral Influence of Heathenism, in Bib. Repos., 1832 : 80, 246, 441; Döllinger, Gentile and Jew; Pressensé, Religions before Christ; Max Müller, Science of Religion, 1-128; Cocker, Christianity and Greek Philosophy; Ackerman, Christian Element in Plato; Farrar, Seekers after God; Renan, on Rome and Christianity, in Hibbert Lectures for 1880.

II. POSITIVE PREPARATION,- in the history of Israel.

A single people was separated from all others, from the time of Abraham, and was educated in three great truths: (1) the majesty of God, in his

unity, omnipotence, and holiness; (2) the sinfulness of man, and his moral helplessness; (3) the certainty of a coming salvation. This education from the time of Moses was conducted by the use of three principal agencies:

A. Law. The Mosaic legislation, (a) by its theophanies and miracles, cultivated faith in a personal and almighty God and Judge; (b) by its commands and threatenings, wakened the sense of sin; (c) by its priestly and sacrificial system, inspired hope of some way of pardon and access to God.

The education of the Jews was first of all an education by Law. In the history of the world, as in the history of the individual, law must precede gospel, John the Baptist must go before Christ, knowledge of sin must prepare a welcome entrance for knowledge of a Savior. While the heathen were studying God's works, the chosen people were studying God. Men teach by words as well as by works, so does God. And words reveal heart to heart, as works never can. "The Jews were made to know, on behalf of all mankind, the guilt and shame of sin. Yet just when the disease was at its height, the physicians were beneath contempt." Wrightnour: "As if to teach all subsequent ages that no outward cleansing would furnish a remedy, the great deluge, which washed away the whole sinful antediluvian world with the exception of one comparatively pure family, had not cleansed the world from sin."

With this gradual growth in the sense of sin there was also a widening and deepening faith. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, 67—" Abel, Abraham, Moses the individual, the family, the nation. By faith Abel obtained witness; by faith Abraham received the son of the promise; and by faith Moses led Israel through the Red Sea." Kurtz, Religionslehre, speaks of the relation between law and gospel as “ Ein fliessender Gegensatz”—“a flowing antithesis"-- like that between flower and fruit. A. B. Davidson, Expositor, 6:163-"The course of revelation is like a river, which cannot be cut up into sections." E. G. Robinson: "The two fundamental ideas of Judaism were: 1. theological- the unity of God; 2. philosophical-the distinctness of God from the material world. Judaism went to seed. Jesus, with the sledge-hammer of truth, broke up the dead forms, and the Jews thought he was destroying the Law." On methods pursued with humanity by God, see Simon, Reconciliation, 232–251.

B. Prophecy. This was of two kinds: (a) verbal, - beginning with the protevangelium in the garden, and extending to within four hundred years of the coming of Christ; (b) typical, —in persons, as Adam, Melchisedek, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Jonah; and in acts, as Isaac's sacrifice, and Moses' lifting up the serpent in the wilderness.

The relation of law to gospel was like that of a sketch to the finished picture, or of David's plan for the temple to Solomon's execution of it. When all other nations were sunk in pessimism and despair, the light of hope burned brightly among the Hebrews. The nation was forward-bound. Faith was its very life. The O. T. saints saw all the troubles of the present "sub specie eternitatis," and believed that "Light is sown for the righteous, And gladness for the upright in heart" (Ps. 97: 11). The hope of Job was the hope of the chosen people: "I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth" (Job 19: 25). Hutton, Essays, 2:237-"Hebrew supernaturalism has transmuted forever the pure naturalism of Greek poetry. And now no modern poet can ever become really great who does not feel and reproduce in his writings the difference between the natural and the supernatural."

Christ was the reality, to which the types and ceremonies of Judaism pointed; and these latter disappeared when Christ had come, just as the petals of the blossom drop away when the fruit appears. Many promises to the O. T. saints which seemed to them promises of temporal blessing, were fulfilled in a better, because a more spiritual, way than they expected. Thus God cultivated in them a boundless trust-a trust which was essentially the same thing with the faith of the new dispensation, because it was the absolute reliance of a consciously helpless sinner upon God's method of salvation, and so was implicitly, though not explicitly, a faith in Christ.

The protevangelium (Gen. 3: 15) said "it [this promised seed] shall bruise thy head." The

"it" was rendered in some Latin manuscripts "ipsa." Hence Roman Catholic divines attributed the victory to the Virgin. Notice that Satan was cursed, but not Adam and Eve; for they were candidates for restoration. The promise of the Messiah narrowed itself down as the race grew older, from Abraham to Judah, David, Bethlehem, and the Virgin. Prophecy spoke of "the sceptre" and of "the seventy weeks." Haggai and Malachi foretold that the Lord should suddenly come to the second temple. Christ was to be true man and true God; prophet, priest, and king; humbled and exalted. When prophecy had become complete, a brief interval elapsed, and then he, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, actually came.

All these preparations for Christ's coming, however, through the perversity of man became most formidable obstacles to the progress of the gospel. The Roman Empire put Christ to death. Philosophy rejected Christ as foolishness. Jewish ritualism, the mere shadow, usurped the place of worship and faith, the substance of religion. God's last method of preparation in the case of Israel was that of

C. Judgment.-Repeated divine chastisements for idolatry culminated in the overthrow of the kingdom, and the captivity of the Jews. The exile had two principal effects: (a) religious,—in giving monotheism firm root in the heart of the people, and in leading to the establishment of the synagogue-system, by which monotheism was thereafter preserved and propagated; (b) civil,-in converting the Jews from an agricultural to a trading people, scattering them among all nations, and finally imbuing them with the spirit of Roman law and organization.

Thus a people was made ready to receive the gospel and to propagate it throughout the world, at the very time when the world had become conscious of its needs, and, through its greatest philosophers and poets, was expressing its longings for deliverance.

At the junction of Europe, Asia, and Africa, there lay a little land through which passed all the caravan-routes from the East to the West. Palestine was "the eye of the world." The Hebrews throughout the Roman world were "the greater Palestine of the Dispersion." The scattering of the Jews through all lands had prepared a monotheistic starting point for the gospel in every heathen city. Jewish synagogues had prepared places of assembly for the hearing of the gospel. The Greek language- the universal literary language of the world-had prepared a medium in which that gospel could be spoken. Cæsar had unified the Latin West, as Alexander the Greek East"; and universal peace, together with Roman roads and Roman law, made it possible for that gospel, when once it had got a foothold, to spread itself to the ends of the earth. The first dawn of missionary enterprise appears among the proselyting Jews before Christ's time. Christianity laid hold of this proselyting spirit, and sanctified it, to conquer the world to the faith of Christ.

Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 2:9, 10—“In his great expedition across the Hellespont, Paul reversed the course which Alexander took, and carried the gospel into Europe to the centres of the old Greek culture." In all these preparations we see many lines converging to one result, in a manner inexplicable, unless we take them as proofs of the wisdom and power of God preparing the way for the kingdom of his Son; and all this in spite of the fact that "a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come (Rom. 11:25). James Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 15-"Israel now instructs the world in the worship of Mammon, after having once taught it the knowledge of God."

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On Judaism, as a preparation for Christ, see Döllinger, Gentile and Jew, 2:291-419; Martensen, Dogmatics, 224-236; Hengstenberg, Christology of the O. T.; Smith, Proph ecy a Preparation for Christ; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 458-485; Fairbairn, Typology; MacWhorter, Jahveh Christ; Kurtz, Christliche Religionslehre, 114; Edwards' History of Redemption, in Works, 1: 297-395; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation; Cony beare and Howson, Life and Epistles of St. Paul, 1:1-37; Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 257-281; Schaff, Hist. Christian Ch., 1: 32-49; Butler's Analogy, Bohn's ed., 228238; Bushnell, Vicarious Sac., 63-66; Max Müller, Science of Language, 2: 443; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1: 463–485; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 47-73.

SECTION II.-THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

The redemption of mankind from sin was to be effected through a Mediator who should unite in himself both the human nature and the divine, in order that he might reconcile God to man and man to God. To facilitate an understanding of the Scriptural doctrine under consideration, it will be desirable at the outset to present a brief historical survey of views respecting the Person of Christ.

In the history of doctrine, as we have seen, beliefs held in solution at the beginning are only gradually precipitated and crystallized into definite formulas. The first question which Christians naturally asked themselves was "What think ye of the Christ" (Mat. 22: 42 ) ; then his relation to the Father, then, in due succession, the nature of sin, of atonement, of justification, of regeneration. Connecting these questions with the names of the great leaders who sought respectively to answer them, we have: 1. the Person of Christ, treated by Gregory Nazianzen (328); 2. the Trinity, by Athanasius (325-373); 3. Sin, by Augustine (353-430); 4. Atonement, by Anselm (1033-1109); 5. Justification by faith, by Luther (1485–1560); 6. Regeneration, by John Wesley (1703-1791); - six weekdays of theology, leaving only a seventh, for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which may be the work of our age. John 10: 36-"him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world"- hints at some mysterious process by which the Son was prepared for his mission. Athanasius: "If the Word of God is in the world, as in a body, what is there strange in affirming that he has also entered into humanity?" This is the natural end of evolution from lower to higher. See Medd, Bampton Lectures for 1882, on The One Mediator: The Operation of the Son of God in Nature and in Grace; Orr, God's Image in Man.

I.

HISTORICAL SURVEY OF VIEWS RESPECTING THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

1. The Ebionites (= 'poor'; A. D. 107?) denied the reality of Christ's divine nature, and held him to be merely man, whether naturally or supernaturally conceived. This man, however, held a peculiar relation to God, in that, from the time of his baptism, an unmeasured fulness of the divine Spirit rested upon him. Ebionism was simply Judaism within the pale of the Christian church, and its denial of Christ's godhood was occasioned by the apparent incompatibility of this doctrine with monotheism.

Fürst (Heb. Lexicon ) derives the name 'Ebionite' from the word signifying 'poor'; see Is. 25: 4—" thou hast been a stronghold to the poor"; Mat. 5:3-"Blessed are the poor in spirit." It means "oppressed, pious souls." Epiphanius traces them back to the Christians who took refuge, A. D. 66, at Pella, just before the destruction of Jerusalem. They lasted down to the fourth century. Dorner can assign no age for the formation of the sect, nor any historically ascertained person as its head. It was not Judaic Christianity, but only a fraction of this. There were two divisions of the Ebionites:

(a) The Nazarenes, who held to the supernatural birth of Christ, while they would not go to the length of admitting the preëxisting hypostasis of the Son. They are said to have had the gospel of Matthew, in Hebrew.

(b) The Cerinthian Ebionites, who put the baptism of Christ in place of his supernatural birth, and made the ethical sonship the cause of the physical. It seemed to them a heathenish fable that the Son of God should be born of the Virgin. There was no persoual union between the divine and human in Christ. Christ, as distinct from Jesus, was not a merely impersonal power descending upon Jesus, but a preëxisting hypostasis above the world-creating powers. The Cerinthian Ebionites, who on the whole best represent the spirit of Ebionism, approximated to Pharisaic Judaism, and were hostile to the writings of Paul. The Epistle to the Hebrews, in fact, is intended to counteract an Ebionitic tendency to overstrain law and to underrate Christ. In a complete view, however, should also be mentioned:

(e) The Gnostic Ebionism of the pseudo-Clementines, which in order to destroy the deity of Christ and save the pure monotheism, so-called, of primitive religion, gave up even the best part of the Old Testament. In all its forms, Ebionism conceives of God and man as external to each other. God could not become man. Christ was no more