, this
writer refers to the offering of the blood of Christ, he is thinking
not only of Calvary, but of all that Calvary symbolises, the perfect
spiritual offering of mankind to God, the sacramental realisation of
our oneness with Him. This view is not worked out with the moral
intensity which characterises St. Paul's, but it is unassailably true
once we get the writer's point of view. As a theory it is quite
different from Paul's, unless we are content to shed Paul's literalism,
get rid of all thought of an angry God and a physical death penalty for
sin, and betake ourselves instead to the inner spiritual region where
self-sacrifice is realised to be the means of saving, not only the
individual, but the whole race, by uniting it to the source of all
being.

+The Johannine theory.+--There is a certain similarity between the view
of Atonement set forth in the epistle to the Hebrews and that contained
in the Johannine writings. It is easy to understand why this is so
when we recognise that both are dominated by Alexandrian modes of
thinking. These Johannine writings--the fourth gospel, the three
epistles ascribed to St. John, and the book of Revelation--are all that
have come down to us of what was at one time, no doubt, a considerable
literature. How much the apostle John had to do with it cannot be
determined with any certainty, but it is clear enough that these
writings are not all from one hand, and that they are much later than
the work of St. Paul. The all-important conception in the Johannine
writings is that salvation is secured by the union of the individual
soul with the eternal Christ, or Logos, or Divine Man of pre-Christian
thought and experience. Here again we have a perfectly true and
necessary idea, an idea implied in all spiritual experience worthy of
the name; but as the root factor in a presentation of the doctrine of
Atonement, it differs widely from Paul's way of putting things. When
the Johannine writers speak of the blood of Christ, they mean the
outpoured, forthgiven life of the eternal Son of God, the ideal
humanity, perfectly and centrally expressed in Jesus of Nazareth.
There is not from beginning to end a hint or a suggestion in these
writings that a sinless being was tortured in order to appease the
wrath of God against guilty ones, or that the penalty of sin in a world
to come will be remitted to a penitent sinner in consideration of his
faith in such an arrangement.

+Underlying u