Despite this, his work on the death of Christ remains one of the most definitive discussions. Importance of this for the unity of the New Testament, The opening chapters of Acts:. Sense in which the Atonement and the Christian religion are equivalent, Sympathy and antipathy of the mind in relation to Christianity,.
The ultimate unity of the natural and moral order presupposed in the biblical view of sin and the atonement.
INTRODUCTION
The unity which belongs to the books of the New Testament, whatever its value, is certainly not accidental. There is even a sense in which we can say there is unity of authorship; for all the books of the New Testament are works of faith. Biblical or New Testament theology deals with the thinking, or the way of thinking, of the various New Testament writers; systematic theology is the independent.
It is treated by them as a subject of central and permanent importance to the Christian faith, and it is incredible that it should have filled the place it does in the New Testament if it was ever understood as of minor consequence to the acceptance, or the proclamation of the Gospel.
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
We note first of all that all the Gospels begin with an account of the baptism of Jesus. They are words in the only key, of the only fullness, which correspond to the absorption of our Lord at that moment in the thought of His death. This is what is present in the mind of our Lord when He says of the wine poured out: This is My blood of the covenant.
It is not from His lips, nor from the lips of any of the apostles that we thus learn Christ.
THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN PREACHING
It ignores, in the first place, all that has been already established as to our Lord’s own teaching about the necessity and the meaning of His death
And secondly, it neglects the spiritual power of Christ's death in those who believe in Him, as shown in the New Testament and as seen in all subsequent ages of the Church. They argue that the apostles had to find a way to overcome the problems of the crucified. This is what is suggested when Jesus identifies himself with the servant of the Lord.
It is expressly so in the case of the Supper, and St. Paul's expression of baptism into the death of Christ (Romans 6:3) shows that it is so also in the case of the other Sacrament. In fact, it is the moral quality of Christ's sufferings and their exemplary character that first appeals to the apostle.
And the only hint here given of the line of interpretation is that involved in the reference to the sacrificial lamb. It is not an uncertain or a happy resolution of an embarrassment - the death of the Messiah; it is the foundation of the Christian religion, the one hope of sinful people. This is the answer to some of the objections commonly raised against the idea of substitution on moral grounds.
This interpretation of the passage in the second chapter is confirmed when we turn to that in the third. There is no other passage in the first letter of Peter that speaks so clearly of the redemptive significance of Christ's death.
THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL
The obedience is considered as obedience to the loving will of the Father to save people - that is, it is obedience in the calling of. It is at this point, in the last resort, that we are convinced of the deity of Christ. This is what the apostle represents - death is the wages of sin.2 This is where the divine judgment about sin comes home to the conscience.
And while it does not clarify the rationale of the connection between the death of Christ and the blessings of the gospel, it does imply it. It is thanks to a certain theory of the death of Christ that this fact has the power to restrain the apostle. It is that one died for all; uJpe
Reconciliation, in the New Testament sense, is not something that is being done; it is something that is done. It must be answered from the story of the Gospel, from the experience of our Lord in the Garden and on the Cross. However mysterious and terrifying the thought, it is the key to the whole New Testament, that Christ bore our sins.
But next it is a demonstration of the inconsistency of such a line of action with what is involved in justification. But the new life is involved in the faith produced by the sin-bearing death of Christ, and in nothing else; it is. It really is such a driving force, and the only one in the world when we realize what it is.
It is with this certainty that the Spirit is connected when Paul opens his discussion of this subject in Romans 5:5: .
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
They point to the exaltation that followed - He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. We see God in it because it is not His own will, but the will of the Father that it accomplished. It is quite possible to lose ourselves here by trying to give the details of the sacrificial language of the letter a meaning which they will not bear.
In his interpretation of Christ's death, the writer refers to sacrifices of various kinds. In Hebrews, as everywhere in the New Testament, sin is a problem, and the burden of the book is that God dealt with the problem in a way that befits its magnitude. The writer of Hebrews does not conceive of the regenerating or, in the modern sense of the term, the sanctifying effect of Christ's death upon the soul as immediate or primary.
It is often asserted that the idea of an antecedent relationship between the death of Christ and sin—antecedent, that is, to the liberation of the soul from the power of sin—is essentially unreal, nothing more than the caput mortuum of this great experience. He has qualified himself by the immeasurable condescension of the incarnation and life in the flesh to be all that a priest should be. Some of what is included in this may be suggested by the contrast here drawn in the epistle between Christ's sacrifice of himself through eternal spirit and the sacrifices of the Old Testament.
There the writer contrasts the sacrifices of the old covenant with the new. Therefore, it does not exhaust the writer's meaning to say that He is our representative, and that He does nothing for us that it is not ours to do again.
THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS
The opening words of the Apocalypse take us immediately to the heart of our subject. To say that they overcame because of the blood of the Lamb is to say that they were restrained by the love of Christ. But does this emphasis on Jesus' death in the Gospel shed light on its significance?
This spontaneity of Jesus, when placed in relation to the Father's love in giving the Son, manifests itself as obedience. Since it comes from the love of the Father and the Son, it is not conceived as arbitrary. To understand the evangelist here it is by no means necessary to accept the strange caprice which captivated Westcott, and to differ with him in the blood of Christ.
It is sin, according to the uniform teaching of the New Testament, which creates the necessity for it, and which in a certain sense is its object. All that is divine, the whole moral order of the world, all that we mean by the law of God, has been made right by it in the death of Christ. The sin of the whole world has been atoned for, as the apostle expressly asserts (2:2);
The connection between these two things, as we have seen, is universal in the New Testament. If we speak of the death of Christ, it would not only be directed against the gospel or against the letter of St.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST IN PREACHING AND IN THEOLOGY
And we should also remember that it is not always intellectual sensitivity or concern for the moral interests involved that prompts the mind to criticize statements about the atonement. Not only must reconciliation by Christ's death be preached if we want to preach the gospel of the New Testament, but the characteristics of. We can understand and appreciate the motive which, both in the Roman and in the Protestant churches, in relation to assurance, has produced a temper which is not of the New Testament, and which does not correspond to the completeness and certainty of the finished work of Christ. .
Most preachers in any sympathy with this line of thought have lamented in the present or the last generation the decay of the sense of sin.3 Now, the Atonement is directed to the sense of sin. This is largely due to the dominance in the mind for the last forty or fifty years of the categories of natural science, and especially of a naturalistic theory of evolution. Paul made no mistake when he conveyed to the Corinthians ejn prw>toiv the message of the Atonement.
If its importance to the sinner is left out of account, the highest importance of the doctrine of the atonement is of course its importance to the. The doctrine of atonement, in the central place that Scripture acquires for it, has decisive importance in another way: it is the right evangelical foundation for a doctrine about the Person of Christ. It is the doctrine of the Atonement that secures for Christ His place in the gospel, and which makes it inevitable that we must have a Christology or a doctrine of His Person.
Reduced to the simplest religious expression, the doctrine of the Atonement means that we owe our whole being as Christians to Christ and to His finished work. It is as if they have lost the breadth and variety of interest and motive which appeals to the conscience of the life of Christ in the pages of the evangelists.
