enough. We believe it is used in the same way wherever it occurs
in the epistle.

The considerations which have convinced us, and which we think
ought to convince every unprejudiced mind, that the Calvinistic
scheme of a substitutional expiation for sin, a placation of
Divine wrath by the offering of Divine blood, was not in the mind
of the author, and does not inform his expressions when they are
rightly understood, may be briefly presented. First, the notion
that the suffering of Christ in itself ransomed lost souls, bought
the withheld grace and pardon of God for us, is confessedly
foreign and repulsive to the instinctive moral sense and to
natural reason, but is supposed to rest on the authority of
revelation. Secondly, that doctrine is nowhere specifically stated
in the epistle, but is assumed, or inferred, to explain language
which to a superficial look seems to imply it, perhaps even seems
to be inexplicable without it;22 but in reality such a view is
inconsistent with that language when it is accurately studied. For
example, notice the following passage: "When Christ cometh into
the world," he is represented as saying, "I come to do thy will, O
God." "By the which will," the writer continues, "we are
sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus." That is,
the death of Christ, involving his resurrection and ascension into
heaven, fulfils and exemplifies the gracious purpose of God, not
purchases for us an otherwise impossible benignity. The above
cited explicit declaration is irreconcilable

21 Opuscula: De Imaginibus Judaicis in Epist. ad Hebraos.

22 That these texts were not originally understood as implying any
vicarious efficacy in Christ's painful death, but as attributing a
typical power to his triumphant resurrection, his glorious return
from the world of the dead into heaven, appears very plainly in
the following instance, Theodoret, one of the earliest explanatory
writers on the New Testament, says, while expressly speaking of
Christ's death, the sufferings through which he was perfected,
"His resurrection certified a resurrection for us all." Comm. in
Epist. ad Heb. cap. 2, v. 10.

with the thought that Christ came into the world to die that he
might appease the flaming justice and anger of God, and by
vicarious agony buy the remission of human sins: it conveys the
idea, on the contrary, that God sent Christ to prove and
illustrate to men the free fulness of his forgiving love. Thirdly