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.

Grace Is Much More Than Sympathy And Pity

The tendency to dwell upon the passive obedience of Christ is but the theological way of expressing the tendency to dwell on God’s sympathy and to ignore His salvation. There is little doubt that the sympathetic tendency is the more popular to-day, and to press salvation in a real sense is to be accused of a reactionary bias to theology. But a God who is merely or mainly sympathetic is not the Christian God. The Father of an infinite benediction is not the Father of an infinite grace.  
 

We are often warned of the dangers of anthropomorphism, especially by those who are preoccupied with the super-personal element in God. But what we need much more to-day is a caution against anthropopathism, or a conception of God which thinks of Him chiefly as the divine consummation of all our human pity and tenderness to man’s mischance, bewilderment, sorrow and sin. A being of infinite pity would not rise to the height of the Christian God. And a religion of far more sympathy than we have yet felt would not be the Christian religion.
 

It is needless to dwell on the preciousness of sympathy. The man who needs none is something less than human; and the man who receives none remains so. But a sympathy which has no help in it mocks us with an enlargement of our own sensitive impotence, which means so much better than it can. And yet a sympathy which could only help would not secure us against the fear that all its help might be at last in vain. It might not reach me, or not my worst need; or it might be arrested in some future by a power more mighty to foil than to help.
 

We must have a sympathy that can not only help but save, save to the uttermost, save for ever, and not only bless but redeem. Nay, far more, we must have, for the entire confidence of faith, a sympathy that has redeemed, and already triumphs in a conclusive salvation. If God, indeed, could not sympathise, He would be less than God. There would be a region, large or small, into which He could not pass. There would be an insuperable obstacle set to Almighty God by a something which by so far reduced His power and resisted His access. He would be a limited being, tied up, as impersonal things are, by their own nature, and incapable of passing beyond it.
 

But all the same, if God were all sympathy, if His divine power lay chiefly in His ability to infuse Himself with super-human intimacy of feeling into the most unspeakable tangles and crises of human life, then also He would be less than God, and we should have no more than what might be called a monism of heart. Even a loving God is really God not because He loves, but because He has power to subdue all things to the holiness of His love, and even sin itself to His love as redeeming grace. A sympathetic God is really God because He is a holy, saving, redeeming God; because in Him already the great world-transaction is done, and the kingdom of His holy love already set up on His foregone conquest of all evil.
 

The great and crucial thing is done in God and not before Him, in His will and not in His presence, by Him and not/or Him by any servants, not even by a son. It is an act of His own being, a victory in His own immutable and invincible being. And to be saved, in any non- egoistical sense of the word, means that God gains His own victory over again in me, and that I have lost in life’s great issue unless He do. God’s participation in man’s affairs is much more than that of a fellow-sufferer on a divine scale, whose love can rise to a painless sympathy with pain. He not only perfectly understands our case and our problem, but He has morally, actively, finally solved it. The solution is for ever present with Him. Already He sees, and for ever sees, the travail of His soul and is satisfied. All the jars, collisions, contradictions, crises, pities, tragedies and terrors of life are in Him for ever adjusted in a peace which is not resigned and quietist, but triumphant and exultant; and nothing can pluck us from His hands.
 

All history, through His great act at its moral centre, is, in God; resolved into the harmonies of a foregone and final conquest. And our faith is not merely that God is with us, nor that one day He will clear all things up and triumph; but that for Him all things are already triumphant, clear, and sure. All things are working together for good, as good is in the cross of Christ and its saving effect. Our faith is not that one day we shall solve the riddles of providence, and see all things put under us, but that now we see Jesus; and that we commit ourselves to one who has both the solution of every tragic thing and the glory of every dark thing clear and sure in a kingdom that cannot be moved, and, therefore alone, moves for ever on.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 58-62.

The Unity of Humanity in Sin and in Atonement

The more public we make the sin, the more social and racial, so much the more are we driven upon a treatment of it which is ethical and not temperamental, which is racial as well as personal, and not only racial but divine.

Now there is no treatment of it which satisfies these demands of the soul, the conscience, society, and God, but the atonement in Christ’s cross. In the old juridical theories the social, or racial, aspect of the atonement, its connection with the moral order, is one of the great truths. And the more these theories become unsatisfactory on other grounds the more should the truth of their social sense of sin be developed in terms of modern society. But then the more sin is socialised so much the more imperative becomes the necessity of an atonement. 

As man grows the sin grows. The kingdom of evil grows with the kingdom of good. Sin, self, exploits every stage in the progress of society. It becomes unified, organised, and it must therefore be dealt with at a centre. The social organism has a common and organic sin. And a collective sin must have a central treatment. 

The more I lament and amend social wrongs the more I must realise before God the responsibility for them of me and mine. It is not only the Plutocrats. If it is man that is wronged it is man that has wronged him, it is man that has sinned, man that is condemned. You cannot split up the race. You insist, indeed, on its solidarity. Its unity and solidarity is one of the commonplaces of modern thought. Surely, therefore, if sin there be, man is the sinner. The wrong inflicted on man sets up a corresponding responsibility on man at his centre. There must be a central and solidary treatment of sin and one where responsibility is borne in man, even though it be vicariously. And any atonement becomes a matter of judgment, and not mere repentance or reparation. That seems inevitable if we believe in responsibility, and also believe in the unity of the human race. It seems logical.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.35-37.
 

The Cross and Reconciliation

Our chief natural legacy from the past is distance and alienation from God. The chief problem of the present (and of every present) is to reduce and destroy that. It is reconciliation.

But reconciliation is no aesthetic, or educational, or impressionist affair. It is not a revival. It is not a question of touching a certain number of individuals, and gathering them for salvation out of a lost mankind. It cannot be done by a magnetic temperament, a noble character, or a lofty sage. It means changing a whole race’s relation to God. For good and all that could only be done from God’s side; and it was done in the cross.

We have to be redeemed into that reconciliation, and redeemed as a race. It was a work that had to be done, and not merely a personal influence that was to be conveyed. Christ did not die simply to affect men but to effect salvation, not simply to move man’s heart but to accomplish God’s will. All we may do to reconcile men to God is but the following up of a great and final deed of God— the cross.

It is the cross, then, that is the key to Christ. None but a Christ essentially divine could do what the Church beyond all other knowledge knows the cross to have done for its soul. The divinity of Christ is what the Church was driven upon to explain the effect on it of the cross. Nothing less could explain the new creation, which is so much deeper than any impression on us, and calls for an author so much more than prophetic, hortatory, or impressionist in soul.

The atonement of the cross is the key that opens the door, but the house we enter is not made with hands. It is the very heart of God we have in Christ. We are not landed in a vestibule but straight in the sanctuary of the place. This Son of God is God the Son.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.29-30.