Atonement Creates A Renewed Moral Centre In Humanity

If Christianity do not make a revolution in human nature we make a revolution in Christianity. A religion centring wholly in the graciousness of Christ, or His submission, or His spiritual insight can be no foundation for a commanding ethic or a triumphant faith. It lacks the virile note. Christ did not come as a grand spiritual personality, but as the Redeemer. It was not to spiritualise us that He came but to save us. 

Moral verve is bound to relax if the religion of the cross become but a hallowed addition to life’s spiritual interests or touching moods, if it do not carry the stamp of moral crisis and personal decision for death or life. Ethic is bound to grow less strenuous, even while we bustle about ethical conduct, if the sublime ethical issue of the universe is not the marrow of our personal divinity and the principle of our personal religion. We can find a strong foundation only in that centre where the holy God both bears our load and performs His new creative act. If in the cross we have but the greatest of love’s renunciations instead of the one establishment of God’s holy will, if we have but the divine Kenosis and not also the divine Plerosis, then the sense of God’s presence in the cross, and in the Church, and in the world’s moral war, is bound to fade. 

The eternal ruling God cannot be a God in a passive or touching cross merely. A religion of simple service is no religion to rule a world like this. We shall come to feel that in such a cross, a cross that only stands for sacrifice, there is no God, but only a victory of God’s foes, another and a tremendous case of the world crushing the good and just, another case of the soul’s defeat by fate. Then, of course, Christianity must die. “The cross is either the life of our religion, or it is the death of all religion. Either it is the supreme atonement, and so the final guarantee of God’s Fatherhood and its victory; or else it is a mere martyr death, and so an eclipse of that fatherhood, its greatest historic eclipse, which would mean its extinction.” Christ would then have publicly trusted a God who did not publicly give Him the victory. 

Such a pathetic, mystic, and martyred Messiah could stir the sympathy of many, but He could not win the worship of the world. He could impress but not forgive; he could move men but not redeem them; he could criticise society but not judge the world. A king the world could just crucify is no king the world could fear; it needs a king who in his cross judged the world, and did not simply find his fate there. There is nothing central, nothing creative for life in such a fate. There may be much in it to appeal to our sympathetic and religious side, but nothing to establish faith, nothing to ethicise it for ever from a creative centre, nothing to fortify us against the unholy, nothing to set conscience and holiness on the throne of the world. If Christ died to saving and central purpose, then He died as the act of God. His death was God’s act in the sense that it was the moral activity of God. God was in Christ and His death, acting there, setting up an everlasting kingdom, and not simply inflicting a racial penalty, nor simply suffering a racial fate.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 66-69.