II. SEMITIC IDEAS OF ATONEMENT

Atonement in history. What, then, has this death to do with the Atonement? A great deal; but the best way to answer the question will be to obtain a clear idea as to what the Atonement really means and always has meant to Christian experience, notwithstanding the tortuous ways in which the doctrine has been articulated. I am convinced that underneath every genuine attempt to explain the Atonement which has ever held the field for any length of time in Christian history the same truth is always to be found. It is so even with the statement of it which is supposed to be orthodox to-day, but which is quite modern after all, and is practically discredited by all thoughtful minds. The mental dialect changes from one generation to another, but truth does not. As a matter of fact, statements of truth are but conventional symbols at the best, and possess only the ethical and emotional value associated with them in our minds. This is why venerable propositions which seem obscurantist to us originally possessed vital significance to their framers; the ethical and emotional content were greater than the form of statement, as they always must be. Every one of my readers is no doubt aware of the power possessed by some particular landscape or piece of music to awaken certain emotions in the heart or bring back the memory of certain events to the mind. The same scene or song might not do this for anyone else because the associations are different. It is much the same with the forms in which religious truth is stated from age to age. The form is no more the truth than the landscape is the emotion or recollection it excites; it is only a symbol for the truth. To grasp this clearly should not only make us more tolerant of archaic confessions of faith, but should help us to realise that truth is one even under apparently contradictory forms of statement. It is our duty in religion as in everything else to endeavour to express the content of spiritual experience in the forms which best accord with the mental dialect of our own day. I repeat, therefore, that underneath every one of the principal forms of statement in which the doctrine of Atonement has been presented in the past the same truth is to be found. It is an interesting historical and psychological study to try to find out what it is.

Atonement in the Old Testament. As I have already said above, it is usual for writers on the Atonement to begin by taking scripture for granted and presenting an examination of the principal passages in which the Atonement is thought to be presumed or declared. But if what I have just said be true, we have to get behind even the language of scripture and ask how the writers of the Old and New Testaments came to use these particular symbols and what they originally meant. The word “atonement” is not an exact translation of any one Old Testament term, but connotes a group of related religious ideas. In its Christian use other elements enter into it from Greek thought which are not to be found in the Old Testament. But the Old Testament source of the ideas as well as the term is much older than the Greek, and therefore we are right in looking to the Old Testament for the origin of the doctrine which has taken such an important place in Christianity. But here again modern research has opened up an enormous field of investigation. Israel was a member of a vast family of nations all of which had sprung from one stock, and of which the Babylonians and Assyrians were the most powerful representatives. The Israelites were, politically speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk surrounded by mighty empires which had attained a high degree of civilisation. The excavations which are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the territories occupied by ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt, are bringing much valuable and interesting matter to light. We find that the civilisation of these peoples was much older than up to now scholars have believed. The communities inhabiting the land of Canaan, for example, had developed a complex political and commercial organisation long before the Israelitish invasion; Canaan was in fact the highway along which passed the commerce of Egypt with the mighty nations to the north. The painstaking efforts of expert explorers are bringing vast forgotten literatures to light and reconstituting for us the religious ideas and modes of life of these people of the ancient world. One result of these researches has been to prove that Hebrew religious ideas were closely allied to those of other Semitic peoples, and even the way in which they were expressed owed not a little to older civilisations. In nothing was this more clearly the case than with the ideas included afterward in the doctrine of Atonement. The word translated Atonement in our version of the Old Testament scriptures played an important part in the Old Testament sacrificial system, and this again was closely connected with Semitic modes of worship in general.

The Day of Atonement. There was one great day in the Jewish religious year called the Day of Atonement, when a special ritual was gone through and special offerings made to God on account of the sins of the people as a whole. The ceremonial was very elaborate and the occasion was observed with great solemnity by the whole nation. As described in the Old Testament the prescriptions for this Day of Atonement, the Good Friday of the Levitical system as it has been called, probably owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It should be remembered that the outstanding event in later Jewish history was the carrying away of the flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, where they remained for more than two generations. It is quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness and their hatred of their conquerors, the Jews may have borrowed some of their religious ritual from the Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas underlying their respective modes of worship were much the same. Primitive religious sacrifice among Semitic peoples appears to have been mainly of a joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer to their gods sacrifices of everything which the votaries themselves valued, the fruits of the earth, their material possessions, their flocks and herds, the prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally even the children of their own body. It was only on great and solemn occasions, such as the necessity for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in war, that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice was made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us to inquire what were the underlying ideas assumed in Semitic religious sacrifice.

Underlying ideas in Semitic sacrifice. 1. The solidarity of man with God. In the first place there was the idea of community of life between the worshipper and his god. It is doubtful how far this can be pressed, but it is clear that in the Semitic mind there was always a conviction that the deity of the clan or tribe was the giver as well as the sustainer of its life. This did not apply to the minor divinities, the demons of wood and stream, but to the tribal deities, the Chemosh of Moab, the Dagon of the Philistines, the Jehovah of Israel. Probably the Philistines were not Semites, but no doubt ancient worship in general took for granted this community of life between any particular people and their deity. In the offering of the best of their possessions to the god the worshippers thought they were rendering to him of his own. As he was at once the giver and the guardian of life, they felt bound to render him the best of the fruits of life. This was a true thought, a principle essential to all true spiritual life, and implied in all spiritual aspiration. The reader will have already seen that it is fundamental to the New Theology. However crude and even repellent some of its expressions may have been in ancient modes of worship, it is the same truth all ages through the truth that God and man are essentially one.

2. The solidarity of the individual with the community. A further idea underlying primitive sacrifice was that of the solidarity of the individual with the community as a whole. In the Chaldean tribes out of which Israel arose personality as we know it had not even emerged. Readers of the Old Testament will not need to be reminded that in the earlier stages of Israel’s existence as a people the whole nation was repeatedly said to be punished for the behaviour of individuals, and families perished for the transgression of a father, as in the case of Achan. No particular attention was ever paid to the individual as such. A man had no life of his own, and no value, apart from the life of the community. He belonged to it, not to himself. Hence, when any communal act of worship was performed, when any tribal sacrifice was made to the deity, the organic unity of the individual with the whole was specially emphasised. Physically and spiritually the unit was held to belong to the whole, and to exist for the sake of the whole. Here again we have a great truth, the foundation truth of all morality, and a truth which reaches its highest in the life of Jesus. The deepening of individual self-consciousness, and the increased perception of individual value, have neither weakened nor destroyed it, for it is written in the very constitution of the universe. Mankind is fundamentally one; here is morality. We are individually fulfilled in God; here is religion. These are the cognate ideas underlying all modes of sacrificial worship, ancient or modern. These are the ideas which find elaborate ceremonial expression in the Israelitish Day of Atonement as described in the Old Testament. The main purpose of these observances was the desire to assert as solemnly and emphatically as possible the essential oneness of the community with God, and of every individual with all the rest. Everything which tended to separate between Israel and her God was ceremonially put away on this great occasion. From the religious point of view it was the beginning of a new year. The Babylonian new year began about the same time. It was supposed that a man’s good or evil fortune was appointed on new year’s day and settled past all possibility of revision on the tenth day after. The intervening nine days were therefore kept as a sort of Lenten season; the tenth day was the grand occasion for the making sure of the harmonious relations of the community with the deity. It will be seen, therefore, that psychologically the idea of Atonement takes precedence of the idea of sin. Most westerners are accustomed to think exactly the reverse, and that is why the various theories of Atonement which have appeared and disappeared in the course of Christian history have so generally obscured the truth. The root principle of Atonement is not that of escaping punishment for transgression, but the assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man. This may or may not be accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, but it is the very marrow of religion. Atonement implies the acting-together of God and man, the subordination of the individual will to the universal will, the fulfilment of the unit in the whole.

Sense of sin not originally essential to atonement. It ought to be recognised that in Semitic modes of worship the idea of sin did not originally hold the place it has since come to hold in the Christian consciousness. The Babylonian and the early Israelite were greatly afraid of offending God, but they do not seem to have thought of such a transgression as being morally culpable. The profound sense of sin which characterises so many of the psalms and prophetic writings of the Old Testament was a comparatively late development. The primitive Semites had a markedly anthropomorphic idea of their deities. They thought of any divine being as more or less like an ordinary man and liable to take umbrage at little things. It was even possible to offend him without knowing it, and therefore to be left without protection against the ills of life. It was to make sure of smoothing away all possible misunderstandings that covering sacrifices were offered from time to time; but the offering of these sacrifices did not necessarily mean that the worshipper thought he had done anything to be ashamed of and which required to be put right. He was simply treating his god as he would have treated a powerful earthly patron or potentate, that is, he was apologising for anything he might have done to alienate his favour. This notion of the necessity for placating God is to be found in close association with the worthier spiritual instincts to which I have already referred, and it has not even yet disappeared from our thinking. Unbiassed readers of the Old Testament will find abundant justification for this statement. We are told repeatedly therein that the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel or against this or that individual, and that the whole community had in consequence to humble itself before Him in order to avert plague, or pestilence, or some other form of general calamity. Not only was Jehovah thought of as a kind of larger man who was at once protector and tyrant to his people, he was but the God of Israel in contradistinction to the gods of other nations, one God out of many. It was only gradually, and after the lapse of ages, that Israelites came to think of their God as the God of the whole earth and a being who must be worshipped in righteousness. Israel was fortunate in possessing what other nations had not in the same degree, a succession of specially inspired men, teachers of moral and spiritual truth called prophets. The best of these for no doubt the generality of them spoke only the language of their time earnestly protested against material ideas of sacrifice and inadequate notions about God. They declared that God and the moral ideal were one and that the best way to serve the former was to be true to the latter. True sacrifice, they maintained, was of a spiritual kind and ought never to be thought about in any other sense. Thus in the fifty-first psalm the writer, one of the prophetic school, thus contrasts mere ceremonialism with spiritual worship:

Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.

Or take the prophet Micah, chapter vi., verse 6. Here is a reference to human sacrifice, to which the Israelites were prone from time to time, following the example of their neighbours:

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the Most High God? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

And the answer of the prophet is:

He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms that the moral ideal and the religious ideal are one, and that to worship God properly the worshipper must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get the idea that sin against God is not something into which a man may fall without knowing it, but the living of a selfish life.

Atonement never an equivalent for penalty. We ought to recognise too that the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement were never held to secure a complete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man committed theft or murder, he had to bear the appropriate penalty of his misdemeanour because he had been guilty of an action directed against the well-being of the community and the community had to take measures to protect itself; the Day of Atonement availed nothing in such a case. Here is where many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type and anticipation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide of the facts. The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and symbolical assertion of the willingness of the individual and the nation to fulfil their true destiny by being at one with God. If some particular man had been so living as to cut himself off from the communal well-being, he had to suffer.

The significance of the blood. Many people seem to think that some actual saving efficacy was supposed to attach to the shedding of the blood of the victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind material sacrifices came to be looked upon as possessing some virtue in themselves, but the intelligence of the nation never regarded them in this way. In the offering of a victim the worshipper symbolically offered himself. The Semites thought that the life of any organism was in the blood. Thus in Numbers we read, “The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or life).” When, therefore, a man offered the blood of a victim upon the altar, he was symbolically declaring his recognition of the truth that the individual life belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself out to the common life and to God the source of all. Only in this way could individuality realise itself; apart from the whole it was meaningless and valueless.

The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous. This helps us to see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and noble. When a heathen mother passed her child through the fire to Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one’s best and dearest possession for the life of the whole was an action acceptable to God and worthy of our relationship to Him. We have deepened and purified that ideal, but we have not lost it; we never can. As time went on men came to see that there was a higher way of giving the self to the whole than that of immolating a physical life, and a better way of symbolising that offering than by shedding the blood of bulls and goats; but the essential truth beneath all the intricate sacrificial systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is one that can never perish.

To sum up. Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental unity of all existence, the unity of the individual with the race and the race with God. The individual can only realise that unity by sacrificing himself to it. To fulfil the self we must give the self to the All. This is the truth presumed in all ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of placating a manlike God for offences committed against his dignity has been a concomitant of this perception, even a hindrance to it, but it has never wholly obscured the truth itself. That truth is constant and essential to all religion and morality, and is the coordinating principle to all between them.