THE MEANING OF VICARIOUS SACRIFICE.

IT is a matter of sorrowful indication, that the thing most wanting to be cleared in Christianity is still, as it ever has been, the principal thing; viz., the meaning and method of reconciliation itself, or of what is commonly called the vicarious sacrifice. This fact would even be itself a considerable evidence against the gospel, were it not that the subject matter--so vast in the reach of its complications, and so nearly transcendent in the height of its reasons--yields up easily to faith its practical significance, when refusing to be theoretically mastered, as yet, by the understanding.

There has been a litigation of the sacrifice going on for these eighteen hundred years, and especially for the last eight hundred; yet still it remains an open question with many, whether any such thing as vicarious sacrifice pertains to the work of salvation Christ has accomplished. On one side the fact is abjured as irrational and revolting. On the other it is affirmed as a principal fact of the Christian salvation; though I feel obliged to confess that it is too commonly maintained under definitions and forms of argument that make it revolting. And which of the two is the greater wrong and most to be deplored, that by which the fact itself is rejected, or that by which it is made fit to be rejected, I will not stay to discuss. Enough that Christianity, in either way, suffers incalculable loss; or must, if there be any such principal matter in it, as I most certainly believe that there is.

Assuming now, for the subject of this treatise, the main question stated, our first point must be to settle a just and true conception of vicarious sacrifice, or of what is the real undertaking of Christ in the matter of such sacrifice. For in all such matters, the main issue is commonly decided by adjusting other and better conceptions of the question itself, and not by forcing old ones through into victory, by the artillery practice of better contrived arguments.

This word vicarious, that has made so conspicuous a figure in the debates of theology, it must be admitted is no word of the Scripture. The same is true, however, of free agency, character, theology, and of many other terms which the conveniences of use have made common. If a word appears to be wanted in Christian discussions or teachings, the fact that it is not found in the Scripture is no objection to it; we have only to be sure that we understand what we mean by it. In the case, too, of this particular word vicarious, a special care is needed, lest we enter something into the meaning, from ourselves, which is not included in the large variety of Scripture terms and expressions the word is set to represent.

Thus we have--"made a curse for us"--"bare our sins"--"hath laid on him the iniquity of us all"--"made to be sin for us"--"offered to bear the sins of many"--"borne our griefs and carried our sorrows"--"wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities"--"tasted death for every man." The whole Gospel is a texture, thus of vicarious conceptions, in which Christ is represented, in one way or another, as coming into our place, substituted in our stead, bearing our burdens, answering for us, and standing in a kind of suffering sponsorship for the race.

Now the word vicarious is chosen to represent, and gather up into itself all these varieties of expression. It is the same word, in the root, as the word vice in vicegerent, viceroy, vicar, vicar-general, vice-president, and the like. It is a word that carries always a face of substitution, indicating that one person comes in place, somehow, of another. Thus a vice-president is one who is to act in certain contingencies, as and for the president; a viceroy, for the king. The ecclesiastical vicar too, was a vicar as being sent to act for the monastic body, whose duties were laid as a charge upon him; and the pope is called the vicar of Christ, in the same way, as being authorized to fill Christ's place. Any person acts vicariously, in this view, just so far as he comes in place of another. The commercial agent, the trustee, the attorney, are examples of vicarious action at common law.

Then if we speak of "sacrifice," any person acts in a way of "vicarious sacrifice," not when he burns upon an altar in some other's place, but when he makes loss for him, even as he would make loss for himself, in the offering of a sacrifice for his sin. The expression is a figure, representing that the party making such sacrifice for another, comes into burden, pain, weariness, or even to the yielding up of life for his sake. The word "vicarious" does not say all, nor the word "sacrifice," but the two together make out the true figure of Christ and his Gospel.

In this sense it is that Christianity or the Christian salvation is a vicarious sacrifice. It does not mean simply that Christ puts himself into the case of man as a helper; one man helps another without any vicarious relationship implied or supposed. Neither does it mean that Christ undertakes for man in a way of influence; one man tries to influence another, without coming at all into his place. Neither does the vicarious sacrifice imply that he simply comes under common liabilities with us, as when every citizen suffers for the wrongs and general misconduct and consequent misgovernment of the community to which he belongs. Nor that he simply comes into the track of those penal retributions which outrun the wrongs they chastise, passing over upon the innocent, as the sins of fathers propagate their evils in the generations of their children coming after. The idea of Christ's vicarious sacrifice is not matched by any of these lighter examples, though it has something in common with them all, and is therefore just so much likelier to be confounded with them by a lighter and really sophistical interpretation.

On the other hand, we are not to hold the Scripture terms of vicarious sacrifice, as importing a literal substitution of places, by which Christ becomes a sinner for sinners, or penally subject to our deserved penalties. That is a kind of substitution that offends every strongest sentiment of our nature. He can not become guilty for us. Neither, as God is a just being, can he be any how punishable in our place--all God's moral sentiments would be revolted by that. And if Christ should himself consent to such punishment, he would only ask to have all the most immovable convictions, both of God's moral nature and our own, confounded, or eternally put by.

Excluding now all these under-stated and over-stated explanations we come to the true conception, which is that Christ, in what is called his vicarious sacrifice, simply engages, at the expense of great suffering and even of death itself, to bring us out of our sins themselves and so out of their penalties; being himself profoundly identified with us in our fallen state, and burdened in feeling with our evils. Nor is there any thing so remote, or difficult, or violent, in this vicarious relation, assumed by Christ as many appear to suppose. It would rather be a wonder if, being what he is, he did not assume it. For we are to see and make our due account of this one fact, that a good being is, by the supposition, ready, just according to his goodness, to act vicariously in behalf of any bad, or miserable being, whose condition he is able to restore. For a good being is not simply one who gives bounties and favors, but one who is in the principle of love; and it is the nature of love, universally, to insert itself into the miseries, and take upon its feeling the burdens of others. Love does not consider the ill desert of the subject; he may even be a cruel and relentless enemy. It does not consider the expense of toil, and sacrifice, and suffering the intervention may cost. It stops at nothing but the known impossibility of relief, or benefit; asks for nothing as inducement, but the opportunity of success. Love is a principle essentially vicarious in its own nature, identifying the subject with others, so as to suffer their adversities and pains, and taking on itself the burden of their evils. It does not come in officiously and abruptly, and propose to be substituted in some formal and literal way that overturns all the moral relations of law and desert, but it clings to the evil and lost man as in feeling, afflicted for him, burdened by his ill deserts, incapacities and pains, encountering gladly any loss or suffering for his sake. Approving nothing wrong in him, but faithfully reproving and condemning him in all sin, it is yet made sin--plunged, so to speak, into all the fortunes of sin, by its friendly sympathy. In this manner it is entered vicariously into sacrifice on his account. So naturally and easily does the vicarious sacrifice commend itself to our intelligence, by the stock ideas and feelings out of which it grows.

How it was with Christ, and how he bore our sins, we can see exactly, from a very impressive and remarkable passage in Matthew's Gospel, where he conceives that Christ is entered vicariously into men's diseases, just as he is elsewhere shown to bear, and to be vicariously entered into, the burden of their sins. produce the passage, at this early point in the discussion, because of the very great and decisive importance it has; for it is remarkable as being the one Scripture citation, that gives, beyond a question, the exact usus loquendi of all the vicarious and sacrificial language of the New Testament.

Christ has been pouring out his sympathies, all day, in acts of healing, run down, as it were, by the wretched multitudes crowding about him and imploring his pity. No humblest, most repulsive creature is neglected or fails to receive his tenderest, most brotherly consideration. His heart accepts each one as a burden upon its feeling, and by that feeling he is inserted into the lot, the pain, the sickness, the sorrow of each. And so the evangelist, having, as we see, no reference whatever to the substitution for sin, says--"That it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying--Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses.'"1 And the text is the more remarkable that the passage he cites from Isaiah, is from his 53d chapter, which is, in fact, a kind of stock chapter, whence all the most vicarious language of the New Testament is drawn. Besides the word bare occurs in the citation; a word that is based on the very same figure of carrying as that which is used in the expression, "bare our sins," "bare the sins of many," and is moreover precisely the same word which is used by the Apostle when he says [Βασταζετε] "bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." If then we desire to know exactly what the substitution of Christ for sin was, and how far it went--what it means for example that he bare our sin--we have only to revert back to what is here said of his relation to sicknesses, and our question is resolved.

What then does it mean that Christ "bare our sicknesses?" Does it mean that he literally had our sicknesses transferred to him, and so taken off from us? Does it mean that he became blind for the blind, lame for the lame, a leper for the lepers, suffering in himself all the fevers and pains he took away from others? No one had ever such a thought. How then did he bear our sicknesses, or in what sense? In the sense that he took them on his feeling, had his heart burdened by the sense of them, bore the disgusts of their loathsome decays, felt their pains over again, in the tenderness of his more than human sensibility. Thus manifestly it was that he bare our sicknesses--his very love to us put him, so far, in a vicarious relation to them, and made him, so far, a partaker in them.2

Here then we have the true law of interpretation, when the vicarious relation of Christ to our sins comes into view. It does not mean that he takes them literally upon him, as some of the old theologians and a very few moderns appear to believe; it does not mean that he took their ill desert upon him by some mysterious act of imputation, or had their punishment transferred to his person. A sickness might possibly be transferred, but a sin can not by any rational possibility. It does not mean that he literally came into the hell of our retributive evils under sin, and satisfied, by his own suffering, the violated justice of God; for that kind of penal suffering would satisfy nothing but the very worst injustice. No, but the bearing of our sins does mean, that Christ bore them on his feeling, became inserted into their bad lot by his sympathy as a friend, yielded up himself and his life, even, to an effort of restoring mercy; in a word that he bore our sins in just the same sense that he bore our sicknesses. Understand that love itself is an essentially vicarious principle, and the solution is no longer difficult.

See how it is with love in the case of a mother. She loves her child, and it comes out in that fact, or from it, that she watches for the child, bears all its pains and sicknesses on her own feeling, and when it is wronged, is stung herself, by the wrong put upon it, more bitterly far than the child. She takes every chance of sacrifice for it, as her own opportunity. She creates, in fact, imaginary ills for it, because she has not opportunities enough of sacrifice. In the same manner a friend that is real and true takes all the sufferings, losses, wrongs, indignities, of a friend on his own feeling, and will sometimes suffer even more for him than he does for himself. So also with the patriot or citizen who truly loves his country, even though that love is mixed with many false fires that are only fires of ambition or revenge--how does it wrench his feeling, what a burden does it lay upon his concern, by day and by night, when that country, so dear to him, is being torn by faction, and the fate of its laws and liberties is thrown upon the chances of an armed rebellion. Then you will see how many thousands of citizens, who never knew before what sacrifices it was in the power of their love to make for their country's welfare, rushing to the field and throwing their bodies and dear lives on the battle's edge to save it!

Thus it is that every sort of love is found twining its feeling always into the feeling, and loss, and want, and woe, of whatever people, or person, or even enemy, it loves; thus that God himself takes our sinning enmity upon his heart, painfully burdened by our broken state, and travailing, in all the deepest feeling of his nature, to recover us to himself. And this it is which the cross and vicarious sacrifice of Jesus signify to us, or outwardly express. Such a God in love, must be such a Saviour in suffering--he could not well be other or less. There is a Gethsemane hid in all love, and when the fit occasion comes, no matter how great and high the subject may be, its heavy groaning will be heard--even as it was in Christ. He was in an agony, exceeding sorrowful even unto death. By that sign it was that God's love broke into the world, and Christianity was born!

Here, then, as I conceive, is the true seed principle of the Christian salvation. What we call the vicarious sacrifice of Christ is nothing strange as regards the principle of it, no superlative, unexampled, and therefore unintelligible grace. It only does and suffers, and comes into substitution for, just what any and all love will, according to its degree. And, in this view, it is not something higher in principle than our human virtue knows, and which we ourselves are never to copy or receive, but it is to be understood by what we know already, and is to be more fully understood by what we are to know hereafter, when we are complete in Christ. Nothing is wanting to resolve the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus, but the commonly known, always familiar principle of love, accepted as the fundamental law of duty, even by mankind. Given the universality of love, the universality of vicarious sacrifice is given also. Here is the center and deepest spot of good, or goodness, conceivable. At this point we look into heaven's eye itself, and read the meaning of all heavenly grace.

How much to be regretted then is it, that Christianity has been made so great an offense, to so many ingenuous and genuinely thoughtful souls, at just this point of vicarious sacrifice, where it is noblest to thought, and grandest, and most impressive to feeling. There ought never to be a question over its reality and truth to nature, more than over a mother's watch and waiting for her child. And yet there has been kept up, for centuries, what a strain of logical, or theological endeavor--shall I call it high, or shall I call it weak and low--to make out some formal, legal, literal account of substitution and vicarious sacrifice, in which all God's quickening motivity and power are taken away from the feeling, and nothing left but a sapless wood, or dry stubble of reason, for a mortal sinner's faith to cling to. Nothing is so simple, and beautiful, and true, and close to feeling, as this same blessed truth--Jesus the Lord in vicarious sacrifice; and yet there is made of it, I know not what, or how many riddles, which to solve, were it possible, were only to miss of its power; much more which to miss of solving, is only to be lost in mazes and desert windings where even faith itself is only turned to jangling. How often has the innate sense of justice in men been mocked by the speculated satisfactions of justice, or schemes of satisfaction, made up for God; how often has the human feeling that would have been attracted and melted, by the gracious love of Jesus, coming to assume our nature and bear our sin, been chilled, or revolted, by some account of his death, that turns it to a theologic fiction, by contriving how he literally had our sin upon him, and was therefore held to die retributively on account of it.

At the same time, there have been thrown off into antagonism, a great many times, whole sects of disciples, who could see no way to escape the revolting theories of vicarious sacrifice, but to formally deny the fact; and then what evidence have they given of the fact, as a distinctive integral element of Christianity, by their utter inability, in the way of denial, to maintain the vitality and propagating power of Christian society with. out it. If God's love has no vicarious element, theirs of course will have as little; if he simply stands by law and retribution, if he never enters himself into human evils and sins, so as to be burdened by them, never identifies himself with souls under evil, to bear them--enemies and outcasts though they be--then it will be seen that they, as believers, are never in affliction for the sin of others, never burdened as intercessors for them; for there was in fact no such mind in Christ Jesus himself. On the contrary, as God stands off, waiting only by the laws of duty and abstract justice, moved vicariously to no intervention, so will they lose out the soul-bond of unity and religious fellowship with their kind, dropping asunder into atoms of righteous individuality, and counting it even a kind of undignified officiousness to be overmuch concerned for others. Christian society is by that time gone. The sense of God, translating himself into the evils and fallen fortunes of souls, in the vicarious love and passion of his Son, was the root of it; and that being gone, the divine life takes no headship in them, they no membership of unity with each other. They are only incommunicable monads--the Christian koinonia is lost or abolished. "I will take care of myself, answer for myself, and let every other do the same"--that is the Christianity left--it is duty, self-care, right living atomically held before moral standards. As to the church, or the church life, it no longer exists; Christ is the head of nothing, because he has never come into the cause, or feeling, or life of any, by coming into their lot. So necessary is the faith of a vicarious sacrifice to the maintenance of any genuine Christian life and society. Without and apart from it individualties are never bridged, never made coalescent, or common to each other. The chill that follows must in due time be fatal. No such mode of necessary unfellowship can live.

By this experimental proof, it can be clearly seen how necessary to the living Gospel and church of Christ is the faith, in some true sense, of a vicarious sacrifice. And what that sense may be it is not difficult, I think, to find. We have already found that love itself contains the fact and is the sufficient and easy solution.

But there is an objection to be encountered even here, before the solution will be satisfactory to some; it is that if love, love in God, and love in all beings created and uncreated, is an essentially vicarious element or principle; if it moves to the certain identification of the loving party with evil minds and their pains, and the assuming of them, to be a burden on its feeling, or even a possible agony in it; then, as long as there is any such thing as evil and death, love must be a cause of unhappiness, a lot of suffering and sorrow. In one view it must, in another it will be joy itself, the fullest, and profoundest, and sublimest joy conceivable. There was never a being on earth so deep in his peace and so essentially blessed as Jesus Christ. Even his agony itself is scarcely an exception. There is no joy so grand as that which has a form of tragedy, and there is besides, in a soul given up to loss and pain for love's sake, such a consciousness of good--it is so far ennobled by its own great feeling--that it rises in the sense of magnitude, and majesty, and Godlikeness, and has thoughts breaking out in it as the sound of many waters, joys that are full as the sea. And this, too, corresponds exactly with our human experience. We are never so happy, so essentially blessed as when we suffer well, wearing out our life in sympathies spent on the evil and undeserving, burdened heavily in our prayers, struggling on through secret Gethsemanes and groaning before God in groanings audible to God alone, for those who have no mercy on themselves. What man of the race ever finds that in such love as this he has been made unhappy? As Christ himself bequeathed his joy to such, so has he found it to be a most real and dear bequest, and that when he has been able, after Christ's example, to bear most and be deepest in sacrifice for others--even painful sacrifice--then has he been raised to the highest pitch of beatitude. The compensations of such a life transcend, how sublimely, the losses. As they did with Christ, so they do with us, so they will in all beings and worlds. Therefore when we say that love is a principle of vicarious sacrifice, how far off are we from casting any shade of gloom on the possibilities and fortunes of this love. We only magnify its joy and brighten its prospect.

Thus we take our beginning for this great subject, the grace of the cross, and the Christian salvation. As yet we have scarcely passed the gate, but the gate is open. This one thing is clear, that love is a vicarious principle, bound by its own nature itself to take upon its feeling, and care, and sympathy, those who are down under evil and its penalties. Thus it is that Jesus takes our nature upon him, to be made a curse for us and to bear our sin. Holding such a view of vicarious sacrifice, we must find it belonging to the essential nature of all holy virtue. We are also required, of course, to go forward and show how it pertains to all other good beings, as truly as to Christ himself in the flesh--how the eternal Father before Christ, and the Holy Spirit coming after, and the good angels both before and after, all alike have borne the burdens, struggled in the pains of their vi. carious feeling for men; and then, at last, how Christianity comes to its issue, in begetting in us the same vicarious love that reigns in all the glorified and good minds of the heavenly kingdom; gathering us in after Christ our Master, as they that have learned to bear his cross, and be with him in his passion. Then having seen how Christ, as a power on character and life, renews us in this love, we shall be able to consider the very greatly inferior question, how far and in what manner he becomes our substitute, before the law violated by our transgression.

I should scarcely be justified in concluding this chapter, if I did not first suggest, for the benefit of some, who may recoil from this profoundly earnest truth of sacrifice, as one that rather shocks, than approves itself to, their feeling, that it is a kind of truth not likely to be realized, without experience. It will seem to be a truth overdrawn, unless it is drawn out of the soul's own consciousness, at least in some elementary degree. Some theologians, I fear, will not be taken by it, because it has never sufficiently taken hold of them. Mere understanding is an element too sterile and dry to know this kind of truth--it seems to be no truth at all, but a pietistic straining rather after something better than anybody can solidly know.

Let me stop then here, upon the margin of the subject, and without any thought of preaching to my reader who parts company with me thus early, put him on a practical experiment that will let him a great way farther into this first chapter of divine knowledge, than, as yet, he thinks it possible to go. The problem I would give you is this; viz., that you find how to practically bear an enemy, or a person whom you dislike, so as to be exactly satisfied and happy in your relationship. If you can stand off in disgust, or set yourself squarely against him in hatred, or revenge, then do it and bless yourself in it. If that is impossible, try indifference, turn your back and say, "let him go and fare as his deserts will help him." If there is no sweetness in this, as there certainly is none, then begin to pray for him, that he may have a better mind and that you may be duly patient with him. This will be softer, and you may begin to feel that you are a good deal Christian or Christian-like, towards him. And yet there will be a certain dryness in your feeling, as if you had only come into the formality of good. Then go just one step farther--take the man upon your love, bear him and his wrong as a mind's burden, undertake for him, study by what means and by what help obtained from God, you can get him out of his evils, and make a friend of him--God's friend and yours--do this and see if it does not open to you a very great and wonderful discovery--the sublime reality and solidly grand significance of vicarious sacrifice. Christ will be no more any stone of stumbling in it, the truth itself no more an offense, or extravagance; for you now have in your heart, what is no stone at all, but a living and self-evidencing grace by which to solve it. The offense of the cross--how surely is it ended, when once you have learned the way in which God bears an enemy! The quarrels of the head will be smoothed away how soon, by the simple methods of a wise and loving heart. The recoil you were in is over. In the problem how to bear an enemy you have found your Gethsemane and sounded for yourself the tragic depths of good--depths of joyful as of sorrow-burdened feeling--and so you understand how easily, believe in what glorious evidence, the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the world. 

[1] Matth. vii, 17.

[2] This most natural and certainly great and worthy meaning for the passage from Matthew is so far off from the dogmatic and prosy literalism of many, that they are able to see scarcely any thing in it. Bishop Pearce, just because the passage does not meet his notion of Isaiah’s famous Christological chapter, and does not signify any thing true enough in itself, imagines that it must be an interpolation! Dr. Magee (Vol. I., pp. 313-355) expends more than forty pages of learning on it, contriving how he may get the Prophet and Evangelist together, in some meaning that will make room for a more literal and penal bearing of sins than there can be of sicknesses. By a heavy practice on the Hebrew verb in the first clause, and the Hebrew noun in the second, he gets the “took” converted into “took away” and the sicknesses into “sorrows;” reading thus—“Himself took away our infirmities and bare our sorrows.” But it happens most unfortunately that the Greek word of the evangelist [ελαβε] will not bear any such meaning as “took away,” but insists on signifying only that kind of taking which appropriates, or receives, or even seizes by robbery; and the Greek word [νοσος] never means any thing but “sickness;” save when it is used as an epithet in speaking figuratively of the “diseases of the mind.” The fact is that the evangelist translates the prophet well, and the English version translates the evangelist well, and the vicariousness resulting is a grand, living idea, such as meets the highest intelligence, and yields an impression that accords with the best revelations of consciousness, in the state of love. Every true Christian knows what it is to bear the sins of wrongdoers and enemies in this manner, and loves to imagine that, in doing it, he learns from the cross of his Master—being almost raised into the plane of divinity himself, by a participation so exalted. There was never a case of construction more simple and plain than this, and it has the merit, if we receive it, of carrying us completely clear, at once, of all the fearful stumbling blocks which a crude, over-literal interpretation has been piling about the cross for so many centuries. There is no stranger freak of dullness in all the literary history of the world, and nothing that is going to make a more curious chapter for the ages to come, than the constructions raised on these vicarious forms of Scripture, and the immense torment of learning and theologic debate that has occupied a whole millenium in consequence. The long period, preceding, when Christ was regarded as a ransom paid to the devil, will be more easily qualified by allowances that save it in respect.