The so-called "epistle" is not a letter at all, but a homily, a religious essay or exhortation, belonging to the same class of early Christian writings as 2 Clement.

The chief characteristic of the homily is the author's attempt to establish analogies between the Jewish system, the details of which he seems to have imperfectly understood, and the new religion of the Christ. No more than Paul did he comprehend the origin and nature of the Jewish sacrificial system. It was not his fault that the science of comparative religion did not then exist, and that he was ignorant of the correspondence between Judaism and Oriental paganism. But, waiving this fundamental defect in the homily, a careful examination of it shows that there has been widespread misinterpretation of it.

The idea of sacrifice so prominent in this writing, is not expiation or propitiation, but purification or cleansing. This is made clear at the very outset, where it is said of the Son that, "when he had made a purification for sins, he sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high." This is the controlling thought of the homily. The argument is twofold:

First, that Jesus performs for his people essentially the same office that the High Priest performed for the Jews, only much more effectually; and that he performed it once for all, so that it does not need to be repeated. That office was to put away sin, which was accomplished in symbol by the High Priest going on the day of Atonement into the Holy of Holies and sprinkling the mercyseat with blood. Jesus, by the shedding of his blood, has once for all effected the purification, sanctification, cleansing, perfecting (all of these terms are employed in turn) of all that trust in him. Throughout the first eight chapters, Jesus is likened to the High Priest, not the victim; he is represented as making the sacrifice of purification, not as being the sacrifice.

Second, in the ninth and tenth chapters, Jesus is also spoken of as the victim, as "being offered," but the end of the offering is still to purify his people from their sins. There is no doctrine of expiation or vicarious sacrifice anywhere in the "epistle." (1)

Hebrews is therefore wholly in accord with the view that the real significance of the death of Jesus is that it completed and perfected that revelation of God's character as the loving Father of all men, which it was the chief object of the entire life and teaching of Jesus to make to the world. It is most untrue to say that if the death of Christ was not expiatory, it was no more than the death of any martyr. His death was in any case as much greater than any martyr's, as his life and personality were greater than any martyr's. The significance of any death is not the act of dying, for we all die, but in the character of him who dies. The most orthodox theologian is compelled to stress that, and to regard the expiatory value of Christ's death as resting on his Person, not on the mere fact of his death. If we deny expiatory value to the death of Christ, the significance of his Person remains, unaffected by any theory of atonement.

Some sort of death was an inseparable part of the human life of the Son of God. Without experiencing death, he could not have been a full man. Without death, the Captain of our salvation could not have been "made perfect through suffering." The particular death of Jesus on the cross was the natural effect and culmination of his prophetic labors, Judaea being what it was in his day. He could not be faithful to his mission and fail so to die. Not his death of the cross per se, therefore, but his death in obedience to his Father's will, and in the accomplishment of his mission of revealing God to men and so reconciling men to God, is the significant thing. Jesus died for the world in the same sense that he lived and taught (1) Heb. 9:13, 14, 22, 26; 10:10, 14.

for the world. His whole life was a sacrifice, an offering to his Father of a lowly and obedient heart, not his death merely.

It has already been asserted that no doctrine of atonement can be deduced from the words of Jesus, without doing inexcusable violence to them. It should be added that this does not necessarily involve the inference that no doctrine of atonement is possible or true. The thesis cannot possibly be maintained that Jesus taught all truth, and that nothing is to be accepted as true in the sphere of religion, if it cannot be found in his words. The thesis that can be maintained is, that Jesus taught all that is fundamental in religious truth, and therefore no doctrine can be accepted as true that is irreconcilable with his teaching. His promise of the Spirit of Truth, to lead his disciples into all the truth, warrants us in hoping and believing that continual progress in apprehension of truth is possible to us. But no later development of Christian ideas can set aside positive teaching of Jesus. Whatever contradicts Jesus is not a further increment of truth, but an increment of error.

Consequently, whatever ideas of atonement we hold, they must, to be worthy of even provisional acceptance as truth, be in full accord with the teaching of Jesus: that God freely forgives men their sins on condition of repentance solely; that he forgives men their sins, because he loves us as a Father. And furthermore, the main feature of a doctrine of atonement should be its capacity and tendency to promote that repentance, or change of attitude toward God and man, which alone procures the divine forgiveness. (1)

(1) "The first question to ask concerning any dogma of the Church is not whether it conforms, or does not conform, to orthodox standards, but whether it serves to reveal or obscure the Figure of the Living Christ. For thousands of willing souls Christ lies buried in a grave of theological subtleties. It is for us to roll away the stones, not to dispute about the inscriptions upon them." E. Herman, "Christianity in the New Age," p. 180. N. Y., 1919.

VI

Jesus taught, then, that the way of deliverance is by repentance, change of attitude toward God. God forgives the sinner because he is God, our Father. Jesus nowhere claims that he procures from God forgiveness of sins for man; he makes known to man God's love and consequent willingness to forgive sins. Paul taught that deliverance is by way of propitiation and expiation: God forgives because his Son has made a sacrifice for man, and by trust in that sacrifice the sinner is "justified." Are these two forms of teaching so mutually incompatible that if we choose one we must reject the other?

Not if we understand neither as giving us, or attempting to give us, a scientific definition of God's forgiveness of sins. Not if we understand both Jesus and Paul to be illustrating the character of God and his forgiveness through human relations. Not if we concede that all illustrations are not the truth, but the clothes of truth. Illustrations can give us only glimpses of underlying reality, helpful but not exhaustive. None separately, nor all together, can tell us the whole truth about God and his relation to men. Viewed as scientific definitions, the teaching of Jesus and Paul cannot be reconciled; viewed as illustrations, each may be regarded as exhibiting part of the truth.

Nevertheless, it seems to be open to us to say that one illustration discloses more of God's nature than another, that one conveys a better idea of the essential truth than another, that one conforms better than another to the ethics of to-day, that one is drawn from dead institutions while another is in accord with living experiences. So that the antithesis between Jesus and Paul is not necessarily that between absolute truth and absolute error, but that between higher truth and lower, between better methods of setting forth the character of God and his dealings with us and inferior methods. Will religion lose any

thing, will even theology be seriously damaged, by admission that Jesus understood God better than Paul? Shall we fear to say that the relation of Fatherhood helps our age to understand God better than the relation of Judge?

Truth-meaning our apprehension of truth-is relative not absolute, dynamic not static, progressive not final. Paul's teachings about justification and atonement were finer and higher ideas of God and his relations to men than had been previously known to those who first read his letters. They continued to be helpful ideas for many generations. We are fortunate enough now to have attained still better ideas, chiefly through fuller comprehension of what Jesus taught. Must Paul, once an inspiration to Christian thought, henceforth be an incubus, because we insist on valuing the form of his teaching more highly than the substance?

The essential content of Paul's doctrine of atonement, apart from the form in which it is conveyed, is capable of restatement in terms of individual ethical responsibility, to which the world has now advanced. The difficulty is more than half eliminated the moment we assent to the proposition that Paul does not give us rigid and precise scientific formulae, that he is not a systematic theologian in the sense that Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were such. We shall then attach no more than their proper meaning to words like "propitiation," "redemption," "justification" and the like. Regarding such terms as fluid, not rigid, without doing them violence we can reach an interpretation that will accord with modern ethical ideas. For example, when the apostle says that the death of Jesus was to establish the righteousness of God (not his justice, as Paul's interpreters say), did he necessarily mean anything more than this: that the death of Jesus was the supreme act of obedience in a life wholly ruled by the will of his Father?

So interpreted, the sacrificial or expiatory element in