Dr. Waldenstrom and non-vicarious atonement.

I.-Continued.

Dr. Waldenstrom's additions to Lutheranism necessitate an important modification of it. The Lutheran creed is, that "the unworthy and unbelievers receive the true body and blood of Christ, so that, however, they shall not thence derive either consolation or life." Dr. Waldenstrom, believing that the blood is the life, cannot, of course, hold that unbelievers receive it. "This participation in the life of Jesus " is " by the believers in Him " only. Faith he presses as a necessity, yet it is in the sacrament that "through the bread and wine we really become partakers of Christ's body and blood,-that is, we become one body with Him, and are made partakers of His life." Whether this is possible apart from the sacrament I cannot find that he has said. Our Lord's words are absolute, " Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you ; whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life." (Jno. 6:53, 54.) Dr. Waldenstrom may not take these words as referring to the Supper, and he would be surely right in this; but then it is possible to eat and drink thus by faith alone, and there is no ground for maintaining any other presence of Christ in the sacrament. As for membership in the body of Christ, that is by the baptism of the Spirit (i Cor. 12:13; comp. Acts 1:5), and not by any sacrament at all. Thus all is confusion in these views from first to last.

Dr. Waldenstrom lays stress in this connection upon i Cor. 10:16, 17, the last verse of which he translates " more literally :It is one bread ; we, the many, are one body, for we all have part in that one bread." "Paul," he adds, "says, in effect, 'Here is a communion, a partaking of Christ's own life, given for us in death ; here is a uniting of believers into one body, by their partaking of Christ's body, thus making common cause with Him.' "

But it is unfortunate for the argument that the apostle as much speaks of being χoιvωvo, or communicants, of the devils(5:20, Gk.), and of Israel being (χoιvωvo) "partakers of the altar," as he speaks of the (χoιvωvία) communion of the body or of the blood of Christ. In either case, he is thinking evidently of association, and so identification, whether with the altar or worship of Jehovah, or with the devils to which under their idols the Gentiles sacrificed. And just so at the Lord's table, they were associated and identified with the wondrous revelation of God whose central part is the cross of Christ. Dr. Waldenstrom's views really displace the cross, turn the supper of the Lord from a memorial of the past into what is wholly inconsistent with it. True, he speaks, forced by what is so evidently there, of a " life given up in death," but it is not for him the giving up of life, the death itself, for participation in death (in his sense of participation) could have no meaning. For him, it is participation in life,-not death, but its opposite. For the apostle, in this same epistle, it is a remembrance, and a showing forth the Lord's death.

I have before said, believers are not united into one body by partaking of Christ's body, but by the baptism of the Spirit; and the apostle's language, which our author builds upon, suits better the thought of partaking of the one bread being the expression of the one body than it does the idea of the body being formed by this. For it is' of outward association he is speaking, and not of something entirely hidden save to faith. The doctrine of the body is further on in the epistle (chap, 12:), and there quite different, as we have seen.
"The life that the Son of God gave in death " becomes thus for Dr. Waldenstrom the truth intended in every passage where the blood or the death of Christ is spoken of in connection with justification, remission, redemption, or whatever else has been procured for us by it. An un-scriptural expression is introduced every where for the purpose of making death mean the opposite of death. True, it is admitted, He gave His life in death, but the necessity of that death, the meaning of it, we are never given to know. It reminds us of those who tell us, as to the old sacrifices, that the death of the animal was only needed because the blood could not be otherwise procured! Thus that which cannot be altogether ignored is annulled in its deep reality. The awful cry, "Why hast Thou forsaken Me? "finds no answer. God's making His Son to be sin for us is explained to be only this, that God " allowed Him to be treated by men as a sinner." In this light loose fashion, Dr. Waldenstrom might easily, as he promises to do, "consider briefly all the passages in the New Testament which speak of the blood of Jesus as a means of salvation," secure that if death can be only made to mean life, all is simple. The very texts which most plainly say the opposite become at once the strongest in his favor.

Thus, if the apostle says that " God set forth Christ to be a mercy-seat through faith in His blood," this is by such a process easily made to mean that " by faith sinners are made partakers of the blood of Jesus, or of His life, which He gave in death for them." He does not argue about this, nor need to show it from the context. We have only to bring in the new vocabulary, and read " blood " as " life," and we see it at once. It is not pretended that the passage in Romans proves that the blood means life, or that it says any thing about life. Plainly it does not, but that is no matter.

But why give any consideration to texts that can teach us nothing, and when we have the means of so reducing the most refractory into subjection ? In this all too easy work we need not follow Dr. Waldenstrom. It will be only needful to look at any new argument that may present itself. And here we have what perhaps he would call that:-

" Paul says that' God set forth Christ to be a mercy-seat through faith in His blood,-that is, God has made Him to be a mercy-seat by His giving His life in death. … So far from the case being such that Christ through His blood should be a shield for sinners against God and His righteousness, on the contrary, God Himself has set Him forth to be a mercy-seat for sinners, in order that He might save and bless them through Him.'"

Does Dr. Waldenstrom really believe that Christ's death is maintained by any of those he opposes to be a "shield against God and His righteousness"? Is He not uniformly presented by them as "the Lord our righteousness"? (Jer. 23:16.) Can righteousness be a shelter against righteousness ? At any rate, we need not, and dare not, undertake the defense of any one who does not believe that God "gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

But there is a deeper question. God gave His Son, assuredly; but why to death? why to the cross ? why to be made a curse for us ! Why must the Son of Man be lifted up? Why is it that " except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit"? It is this need which Dr. Waldenstrom seems never to have realized.

That blood-sprinkled mercy-seat of which the apostle speaks here,-for " mercy-seat," I believe, with the Swedish translators, to the proper rendering of the word,-should surely be the very thing to show Dr. Waldenstrom his error. For here, if the blood sprinkled speaks of life, it is life taken, not communicated. It is sprinkled before God, not upon men. It is sprinkled to make the throne of God a " mercy-seat; " to cleanse, not sinners, by any impartation to them, but their sins, so that God may be able to abide among them. (Lev. 16:14-17.) I am aware of Dr. Waldenstrom's comments upon this elsewhere (The Reconciliation, p. 55), but it is not true that the tabernacle, ark, or altar represent or typify the people, as he says. No instance can be shown, and any one who reads the chapter can see the case to be as I have represented it.

Dr. Waldenstrom next takes up Rom. 5:9, 10.; and here he makes (rightly enough) "by His death" to be essentially the equivalent of "by His blood; "and then the usual transformation is effected. But thus he makes justification to be also grounded upon a work in ourselves, instead of the work of the cross:" In the blood of Jesus by faith they had become righteous. By faith they had become partakers of the life of Jesus, which He gave in death for them, and thus had their justification happened." And he is bold enough to add, "Here again, therefore, the same doctrine. There is never in Scripture any thing about the obtainment by faith of any reconciliation or grace or righteousness acquired or purchased by the blood for the world,-no, not one single passage with any such idea can be shown to exist in the Bible"(!)

Yet even Dr. Waldenstrom must admit that the Lord Himself said that " God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish," and that this refers to the cross on which "the Son of Man was lifted up, that whosoever believeth on Him might not perish," as also that He says that for this the " Son of Man must be lifted up." Why "must"? and was nothing in the way of grace even procured by this? It was for the world surely, for it was the fruit of God's love to the world ; and many similar passages might be quoted. Here, the blood indeed is not spoken of directly, but the cross is, and is illustrated as to its meaning by the lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness :why a serpent lifted up ? It is a type, and we may differ about the significance, but it must mean something ; and if you say, " It just means the 'old serpent' overcome," how does the "lifting up" do this? That is not a picture of life, is it ? it is of death, certainly. Why must the death take place that the life might be received ? Even the author is compelled by Scripture to repeat, though it seems to have no meaning for him, " life given up in death:" well, why " given up in death " ? Could we, then, receive it in no other way than by His dying that we might receive it? Must He lose it that we might obtain it? Nay, He laid down His life that He might take it again ? Why was it, then, that He must lay it down ?

Dr. Waldenstrom cannot answer this:he has no answer. He catches at what is in itself true, that we are recipients of life in Him; but if you ask, Why through death ? why " made a curse for us " ? how did He " bear our sins in His own body on the tree " ? how is it " through His stripes we are healed? he does not know-has nothing that will stand a moment's question. The value of Christ's death seems for him only to win the hearts of men, if at least I read aright all that I can find upon it in this tractate:'"By the death,' 'in His blood,'" he says. That Christ by the grace of God had given His life in death for them, that was what had broken their enmity, and reconciled them to God." All well; but is there no more?

To this we shall return, if the Lord will. The strength of Dr. Waldenstrom's position, it will be seen, is just the utterance of half-truths for whole ones, and the reiteration of a bald sophistry, that blood shed in death stands for life. This he repeats and re-repeats, and it would be idle to repeat the exposure of it. What makes against him, he omits to speak of:as where, in Heb. 13:12, the apostle dwells upon the truth that "Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered without the gate," Dr. Waldenstrom insists upon what every one knows, that to be sanctified is to be "cleansed from sin." It is more, but it is that; and so when he says that "the work of Christ was to remedy just the injury which sin had occasioned," that is a truth, though a partial one. We may agree too that " neither is it said that the blood by its merit should move God to consider us holy, although we were not holy." Few, it is to be hoped, believe any such thing ; and there is confusion apparently between holiness and righteousness. That God "justifieth the ungodly" Scripture does say plainly, righteousness being "imputed without works" (Rom. 4:5, 6); but that is the very way in which God produces holiness,-not acts as if it were no matter.

But the gist of the passage in Hebrews Dr. Waldenstrom never notices at all, though it is plain enough in the verse as he quotes it. Why must Jesus, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffer without the gate ? It is this evidently that gives the very blood of Christ power to sanctify, as in the type he tells us that the "bodies of those beasts whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high-priest for sin are burned without the camp." (5:2:) Why that? If the blood be the life, in the way the author puts it, and the impartation of life be the whole thing, how does the burning without the camp help the blood to sanctify ? Dr. Waldenstrom has not a word-does not entertain the question. Though with the apostle of all importance, with him it seems to have none:why but that he and the apostle are not in agreement ?That is the simple reality.

The apostle is speaking of death, and not of life; and even here, he tells us, death alone would not be enough. " Outside the camp " expresses what " outside the gate " of the city of God does afterward-distance from God, because of sin ! Nay, one expression of it in the cross is not enough, but the darkness which throws its pall over the scene must also testify with the agonizing words of the Sufferer which break out from it, " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " " Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law," says the apostle, "being made a curse for us, as it is written, ' Cursed is every one that hangeth upon a tree.' " (Gal. 3:13.) The due of sin is not death alone. The bearing of our sins requires more:and to the real subject of the experience of the twenty-second psalm, the agony of agonies is that which again and again He deprecates-" But be not Thou far from Me, O Lord ! "

Dr. Waldenstrom's system has no place for this :vicarious atonement he refuses. But why this, then?-" Our fathers trusted in Thee; they trusted in Thee, and were not forsaken." Why this exception in the case of the One only absolutely righteous ?

Here, then, we may leave the consideration of Dr. Waldenstrom's first pamphlet on the blood of Jesus. There is nothing more in it that presents any difficulty, if we have clearly mastered what has been before us.

(To be continued.)