FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57  
58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   >>  
iritual--which is, indeed, but one form of belief in God--pervades the Bible from beginning to end. It knows nothing of our abstract and absolute distinctions; to come to the matter in hand, it knows nothing of a sin which has merely spiritual penalties. Sin is the act or the state of man, and the reaction against it is the reaction of the whole order, at once natural and spiritual, in which man lives. Now the great difficulty which the modern mind has with the Atonement, or with the representation of it in the New Testament, is that it assumes some kind of connection between sin and death. Forgiveness is mediated through Christ, but specifically through His death. He died for our sins; if we can be put right with God apart from this, then, St. Paul tells us, He died for nothing. One is almost ashamed to repeat that this is not Paulinism, but the Christianity of the whole Apostolic Church. What St. Paul made the basis of his preaching, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, he had on his own showing received as the common Christian tradition. But is there anything in it? Can we receive it simply on the authority of the primitive Church? Can we realise any such connection between death and sin as makes it a truth to us, an intelligible, impressive, overpowering thought, that Christ died for our sins? I venture to say that a great part of the difficulty which is felt at this point is due to the false abstraction just referred to. Sin is put into one world--the moral; death is put into another world--the natural; and there is no connection between them. This is very convincing if we find it possible to believe that we live in two unconnected worlds. But if we find it impossible to believe this--and surely the impossibility is patent--its plausibility is gone. It is a shining example of this false abstraction when we are told, as though it were a conclusive objection to all that the New Testament has to say about the relation of sin and death, that 'the specific penalty of sin is not a fact of the natural life, but of the moral life.' What right has any one, in speaking of the ultimate realities in human life, of those experiences in which man becomes conscious of all that is involved in his relations to God and their disturbance by sin, to split that human life into 'natural' and 'moral,' and fix an impassable gulf between? The distinction is legitimate, as has already been remarked, w
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57  
58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   >>  



Top keywords:

natural

 

connection

 

Christ

 

Testament

 

Church

 

reaction

 

spiritual

 

abstraction

 
difficulty
 

worlds


impossible

 

patent

 

impossibility

 

surely

 

unconnected

 

referred

 

convincing

 
remarked
 

experiences

 

conscious


realities
 

speaking

 

ultimate

 

involved

 

relations

 

legitimate

 

disturbance

 

penalty

 

specific

 

plausibility


shining

 

impassable

 

relation

 
venture
 

objection

 
distinction
 

conclusive

 

preaching

 

modern

 

Atonement


representation

 
assumes
 
specifically
 
mediated
 

Forgiveness

 

pervades

 
beginning
 

belief

 

iritual

 

abstract