INTRODUCTION:

SYNOPSIS.

The relation of the Forgiveness of Sins to the purpose of the Church. Actual vs. forensic forgiveness.

COMPARATIVE RELIGION:

I. — Theories of Forgiveness of Sins in folk-faith.

a. The appeasement of an angry, evil, or non-moral deity. Origin of commercial theories of forgiveness. The idea of fate and of fear as a religious motive.

b. The substitution of another to bear the penalty of sin : the scapegoat theory in its various forms; sin-eating; the worship of the sacrificial victim; the divine scapegoat in Jewish theory, in the Norse Voluspa, and in the Prometheus Bound; the bearing of this theory upon pessimism and the problem of Pain; the survivals of the scapegoat and substitutionary theory in modern Theology.

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY:

II. - An examination of the New Testament shows that the purpose and work of Jesus is to remove sins, consequently their penalty. Significance of the symbol of the lamb. The New Testament doctrine of ransom an ethical doctrine; its relation to the true idea of God and to the office of the Church. Was the death of Jesus a penal satisfaction, a commercial substitution ?

TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY:

III. In the evolution of Christian Theology survivals of folkfaith have hindered a full reception and free development of the teaching of Jesus concerning forgiveness. But Christian Theologians have not been altogether without moments of insight into this truth. The

opinion of Irenæus, of Origen, of Justin Martyr, of Tertullian, and of Anselm. Ritschl's Criticism of the Anselmic Theory of the Atonement. Further criticisms of this theory; the utility of having a clearly defined system of the Atonement; the mistake of beginning Theology with the fall; survival of paganism.

PRACTICAL ASPECT:

IV.

-a. Turning again to the constructive portion, teach not this doctrine with too much refinement of formal Theology and method.

b. Further consideration of fear as a motive to righteousness leads us to believe that it belongs to a rudimentary stage of the development of human character.

c. The true idea of pain, a coefficient of redemptive

process.

d. Evil rightly understood is perceived to be privative, and sin to be generated by the will; hence forgiveness is rectification of the will.

e. The psychology of sin suggests the answer to the historic question, "Cur Deus Homo?" The essential union of God and man in sacrifice in the sphere of Christ's mediatorial work. This gives an ethical force which forensic theories lack.

f. This teaching stands the test of psychological analysis, g. Of rational scrutiny and of

h. Human experience. The relation of this actual for

giveness of sin to that fictitious forgiveness which, founded on legal phraseology, is powerless to answer the demands of life.

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The final form of the ecumenical creed is precisely, "we confess one baptism for the purpose of removal of sins." 1 This is the Church's antiphon to the great commission of the Master. "As ye journey, make all nations learners, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." 2 The Church of God is a school for learners; perhaps it would be better to say with St. Ignatius,—of those who "hope to begin to learn." The Church is this because it is, as I have already stated, a special manifestation of the Triune Love in Whom we live, and move, and exist, Who is ceaselessly out-yielding Himself, that we may become one with Him. The process by which that union takes place is termed variously, Sanctification, Salvation, Forgiveness of Sins. Because in the Church is the distinctest consciousness of this redemptive operation

1 εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν. We might translate this, "unto the end that there may be a removal of sins." The difference is inappreciable.

2 πορευθέντες μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, κ.τ.λ., St. Matt. xxviii.

19.

of God in His world, set forth by the Lord Jesus Christ, the function or office of the Church in a special way is the removal of the evil of the world, of society, and the forgiveness of sins. Has the Church forgotten that her mission is to heal the woes, and right the wrongs, of the children of men? Her mission is a social, because an individual, work. It is first of all individual. God speaks to humanity in speaking to each individual soul. Externally, baptism, as I have said, is a sign of the Christian covenant, and it is a sign of promise. It is the sacrament of regeneration, because it is the door of birth into a new environment of prayer, praise, and all sanctifying influences, of an attitude of receptiveness towards God, of removal of sins, which is the state of salvation, of deepening the sense of godliness, which is the beginning of the consciousness of God; the beginning, I say, for the Eternal is not a mere Begriff of rectitude. The Church is really a new environment, a supernatural world. The principle of life in the natural world is self-interest, the principle of the Church is unselfishness. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the only true sociology, and we as gospellers should study the questions of modern sociology that we may know how to apply the remedy of the gospel to the ills of the body politic.1 The two worlds are there

1 I recommend all our younger clergy to enter the Christian Social Union of the United States. Particulars may be learned by addressing Prof. Richard T. Ely, Madison, Wis.

fore utterly different. We are born into the natural world, with its fierce struggle for existence, but this is a condition of temporary life. To attain endlessness, we must be born again, into a new environment, and must learn to conform ourselves to it. To this end, Baptism was ordained, that we might be born into a higher plane of action,1 into a visible organisation which is an institution, Christ-founded and God-filled, of which the law is the giving up of self. This renunciation is a condition of the for

giveness of sins. I freely admit that this has not been the generally accepted interpretation of this Article of the Creed, or that doctrine of forgiveness most in vogue throughout all the nineteen centuries of Christendom. A magical and not a moral operation has been the notion of Catholicism and Calvinism

1 The Gorham judgment settled nothing for the doctrine of baptism in the English Church, for the decision was based upon a statement which the Privy Council attributed to Mr. Gorham, but which he took special pains to deny. Mr. Gorham's real position was undoubtedly that of conditional regeneration, in the old traditional sense of regeneration. His bishop, Dr. Philpotts of Exeter, possessed of the same traditional idea, affirmed that baptismal regeneration is unconditional in the case of infants, but conditional in the case of adults, thus implicitly affirming two baptisms, which is contrary to the Creed. Proby, Annals of the LowChurch Party in England, II. c. 38. This confusion illustrates

the untenability of the notion of substantial grace, imparted or infused, when brought to any scientific test, and it suggests to us the necessity of examining carefully the full significance of the baptismal covenant.