Atonement

We live in our natural world by adapting to the environment. People who thrive in colder climates do so by adapting clothing and housing to the climate. The same is true in warmer climates. We can even provide an artificial environment for staying underwater in a natural environment that would kill us in minutes. On the other hand, a fish out of water will die in short order. This is where being created in God’s image with a rational mind is an advantage over being a creature living entirely by instinct.

Being created in God’s image, we also have a spiritual environment to which we should be adapting. Each soul thrives or shrinks as the person accommodates himself to God’s presence. The eyes do not create light. The ears do not create sound. The lungs do not create air. But they all respond to those external forces acting upon them. In like manner, God acts upon the soul of man and as man responds, his consciousness of God becomes stronger and his spiritual faculties become more acute. Mankind is made to respond to God.

Sin is the refusal or the failure to respond to God. Notice either refusal or failure produces sin. Many people would never deny God, but find it easy to ignore Him. It is as possible to destroy one’s life passively by starvation as it is to do so actively by poisoning. The essence of sin is selfishness – an unwillingness to go to the trouble of responding to God. When we insist on having our own way, we are sure to create difficulties both with God and with one another. It is because someone insists on having his own way that quarrels and discords arise, that wars and strife are fomented, that crime and cruelty corrupt our society. God wills harmony, righteousness, peace, and love. When we fail to respond to that Divine Will, we are committing sin against God.

Any way we look at it, sin is a matter of choice. God created man fully equipped for a perfect response to the Divine Will. But that response had to be free to be valid. Man chose his own way rather than God’s way, and so sin entered into the world with all its corrupting influence. We can apply all our efforts to remedy social maladjustments, racial antipathies, and international animosities but we are dealing only with effects and ignoring the causes. Behind each of them lies a spiritual dislocation that both allows and promotes deviation from God’s order. If we clean up the social problems, more of them will arise. If we wash out the spiritual perversion, the social problems will take care of themselves.

God decreed a righteous creation and He could not be finally thwarted, so something had to be done about this question of sin. God could not force men to be good without violating His own gift of free-will. The correction had to come by the way of human choice. At the same time, only God was capable of accomplishing the necessary reconciliation.

Therefore God became Man in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. What man could not do for himself, God did for him in the person of our Saviour. His life was a perfect offering to the Heavenly Father, sealed by His death on the cross. He surmounted the obstacle of human sin, and as we become identified with Him we are relieved of our own spiritual disabilities which cannot exist in union with Christ. He did more than provide us an example in the life of a single human life. He took on human nature and died for each and every one of us. This is what is meant by redemption – a buying-back. “The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.”

E. G. Selwyn told the following story about Formosa when it was still part of the Chinese empire. The island had a history of annual human sacrifice which was satisfied by assigning a condemned criminal as the victim. The newly appointed governor could not bring himself to assign a criminal to satisfy the annual human sacrifice. He convinced them to substitute a pig or goat which went well for a few years. But ultimately, the people reverted and demanded a human sacrifice. They threatened to seize their own victim if the governor failed to assign one. He finally told them when and where they would find their victim in a red robe and hat with his face covered with a scarlet cloth. The natives found the man at the appointed place and time and he was killed immediately. When the cloth was removed from the man’s face, they found the new governor was their victim. Since that day, there have been no human sacrifices. Instead, they celebrate a solemn thanksgiving on the anniversary of his death.

If a sacrifice for the sake of others is effective when man does it for man, how much more effective must it be when God does it for mankind. The singular character of the Christian religion lies in the fact that vicarious sacrifice stands at the center of it. Sin is selfishness, and the best antidote is the self-giving of vicarious sacrifice. The motive, of course, is love which continues to give without counting costs. Ours is a Gospel of sacrifice, not just service.

This is sometimes tied to a doctrine of “substitution.” We owe God our best and failed to give it to Him. So Christ did it for us, substituting Himself in our stead. There is an element of truth in this but we must remember, it does not relieve us from all responsibility. The effect of his sacrifice is available to us only as we identify ourselves with Him, follow His way of life, and keep ourselves receptive to His gifts of grace. That is why the sacraments follow on the Incarnation and the Atonement. They are the channels through which His spiritual benefits continue to reach us.

There are two points to be remembered. First, the cross is the symbol of Christian redemption and marks the climax of our Lord’s sacrificial offering. But His death cannot be separated from His life. When He said, “I lay down my life,” He meant more than the isolated fact of the Crucifixion. He meant the whole offering of daily obedience to the Heavenly Father. We study the individual events in His life but His life as a whole was what was sacrificed. In the Eucharist, we talk about ourselves, being a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice unto God. That is what we strive to do to in following Christ’s way of life. That is the redemptive work of Christ’s life.

Second, we see the Atonement occurring at a particular time on the stage of history. The divine significance of the Atonement rests in eternity. God sees all of eternity but we humans can only see things in time. Things occur to us in a chronological order, but God sees life as a whole.

As the Procession of the Ages, the past, the present, and the future, moves toward God, we see one time before and one time after. To God, all are present in the eternal “Now”. The Atonement is part of God’s order. Once sin became a possibility, redemption became a necessity. The reason we cannot comprehend the full meaning of the Atonement is that we are still part of the procession in time.

The Church has never attempted to formulate a formal doctrine of the Atonement because it is so sweeping in application and implication that we would not know where to begin or end. Still we find value in theorizing about what we find embedded in the Gospel and the effects we experience in our Christian lives. Redemption is the atmosphere in which Christians live. You have probably heard the explanation that atonement is a combination of “at” and “one” and “ment” to indicate the state of being “at one” with God. In Medieval English, “onement” was used to indicate unity. Atonement is actually a 16^th century English translation of a Medieval Latin term Adunamentum. The concept is much older than the reformation.

Remember that Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the New Testament with all the miracles removed. At the time of the French Revolution, Some decided to abolish Christianity in favor of the reign of Reason. In pursuit of that goal, some Philosophers devised a new religion which was stripped of everything supernatural, mysterious and irrational. One of the inventing philosophers complained to Talleyrand (a French Diplomat representing the Church), that no one was interested in his new religion. He was told there is only one way to do it. “You must lead a sinless life; you must get yourself crucified; and on the third day you must rise from the dead. Then perhaps you can found a religion which will compete with the Christian faith.” Needless to day, the young philosophers failed to do so.