Justice

The passage: Mercy belongs to you as well, Lord, for you deal with every man by his work. (Psalm lxii. 12.)

Some translators put kindness or goodness where our Bible has mercy, but I assume the word means essentially the same in all of them.

Yet anyone schooled in the theories still popular in the so-called religious world will find this unfamiliar. To suit those theories, the verse would have to read: “Justice belongs to you, Lord, for you deal with every man by his work.”

Why I chose this striking verse as the sermon’s motto I leave unexplained for now. I mean to build no logical argument on it.

Let us see clearly what we mean by justice, and whether we mean what we should, especially of God. His justice is the living, active justice that gives our minds and hearts the very idea of it. We can know justice, and carry the idea so deep within us, only because he is just.

What do we usually mean by justice? Surely applying the law and handing out the penalty it sets for an offence. A just judge applies it without bias, favour or dislike, and where guilt is plain punishes exactly as much as the law prescribes. Yet justice may still not be done: the law may be unjust, the judge mistaken, or, more likely, the law’s hangers-on may twist its working to their own profit. Even a good law, fully enforced, doesn’t guarantee justice.

Say my watch is stolen. I catch the thief, he is brought before the magistrate, proved guilty and given a fair prison sentence. Perhaps justice has been done to him, but where is my watch? It’s gone, and I’m still wronged. Who wronged me? The thief. Who can set it right? Only the thief; God might move him to do it, but not even God can set it right without him. If the watch were recovered, would we be square? I might forgive him, but the wrong wouldn’t be removed. Now suppose the thief repents. He can’t return the watch, but he comes, says he’s sorry, and asks me to take what little he can bring as a start on making amends. Wouldn’t I feel his confession and first payment did more to repair the injury than returning the watch could? They would appeal to the best in me, to our common brotherhood, and be atonement enough between man and man. If he offered to bear whatever I laid on him, would justice require me to inflict some set suffering? I’d still have a claim on him for the watch, but I’d likely forget it. Whoever commits the offence can make up for it, and he alone.

One thing is plain: punishing the wrongdoer doesn’t atone for the wrong. Does it make up for my watch that the thief was punished? The wrong stands as before. I’m not saying he shouldn’t be punished, only that punishment does nothing for the man wronged. If the thief, watch in pocket, flogged himself savagely, would my sense of injury shrink, or would he gain a right to the watch? Punishment may do the offender good, but that’s a different matter, and an important one.

Another thing is plain: even where the loss can’t be made good, repentance removes the offence as no suffering could. I’d have no more quarrel with him, and the repentant brother he’d put into my heart would be worth far more than the watch; he owed me himself as well as the watch, but the greater more than covers the lesser. Suppose someone objects, “You may forgive, but he has sinned against God!” Then, I answer, a man can be more merciful than his maker, can do what would be too merciful for God! Mercy would then be no divine attribute, since it could overshoot; it wouldn’t be infinite, and so couldn’t be God’s own.

“Mercy may go against justice.” Never, if by justice you mean what I mean; anything against justice is cruelty, not mercy. The psalm gives mercy to the Lord because he deals with every man by his work. There is no opposition between mercy and justice. To say justice punishes sin, mercy doesn’t, and God is both, splits the very idea of God. So what is divine justice?

Human justice may be a poor, warped shadow of justice, but God’s must be perfect. We can’t thwart it, but are we fair to it in our idea of it? Ask an ordinary Sunday congregation in England what God’s justice means, and nineteen in twenty will say it is his punishing sin. But a man who punished every wrong would show little justice: a Roman emperor or a Turkish cadi could do it and be the most unjust of men, and Ahab could be just on the throne of punishment and the murderer of Naboth in his garden. God is one, and the depth of folly is a theology that gives him different offices and a different character in each, making him do as magistrate what he would never do as father. How foolish to explain God before obeying him, to map his character instead of asking, Lord, what do you want me to do? God is no magistrate; if he were, only his fatherhood would give him the right, and it covers every right he could be supposed to have. God’s justice is this: he gives everything that has being, every man, woman, child and beast, fair play (a boy’s phrase, but the best word left). He deals with each man by his work, and there lies his perfect mercy, since nothing else could be merciful to the man and nothing but mercy fair to him. God does nothing a just man wouldn’t call fair if he saw it fully. A scoundrel might insist on prosecuting every offender; a just man is one who always tries to give everyone fair play in everything. When we speak of God’s justice, let’s mean justice. Punishing the guilty may be part of it, but it makes up God’s justice no more than a man’s.

“But surely nobody doubts that God gives fair play!”

“Perhaps, but that counts for little if you say God does things that aren’t fair.”

“If God does it, you can be sure it’s fair.”

“Of course, or he couldn’t be God, except to devils. But you say he does such-and-such and is just; I say he doesn’t and is just. You say he does because the Bible says so. If the Bible said so, the Bible would lie; but it doesn’t. The Lord of life complains that men don’t judge rightly. To say on the Bible’s authority that God does what no honourable man would do is to lie against God, and to call it right is to lie against his very spirit. To defend a lie for God’s sake is to be against him; he is the truth, and only truth is on his side. If his child can’t see why something is right, God would far rather hear him say, ‘God couldn’t do that,’ than believe he did, even if it were right; and if the man is sure God did it, he should say, ‘There must be something here I don’t know.’ But when an evil is invented to explain a good, and a lover of God must believe the invention or be cast out, he needn’t mind being cast out, for it is into Jesus’ company. If the only ground for believing God does a thing is that men eager to explain him say so, no true man accepts it against his own conscience of God; I accept no explanation that asks me to believe of God what I’d scorn as false or unfair in a man. You say something may be right for God that wouldn’t be right for man. Yes, because a maker’s relation to his creatures differs from one creature’s to another, and he has duties toward them that no man has toward his fellow. But he can have no duty that isn’t just and merciful; creation asks more of him, not less: higher justice, deeper sympathy, and nothing an honest man who understood it wouldn’t call right. If a thing is beyond man’s understanding, he can’t say whether it is right, or even know that God does it, since what he calls it may be only one facet of a composite action. His part is silence. If someone says God does something that seems unjust to me, then either I don’t know what it is, or God doesn’t do it. Take the saying that God visits the sins of the fathers on the children. A man who takes visits upon to mean punishes and the children to mean the innocent children must say, ‘Either I don’t understand this, or it isn’t true, whoever says it.’ God may do what seems wrong to a man, but only because he acts on higher, perfect principles, too right for a selfish, unfair or unloving man to grasp. Least of all should we take a low human notion of justice and argue that God is just in acting by it.”

So the common idea is that God’s justice consists in punishing sin. To give a larger idea of it, I ask: why is God bound to punish sin?

“How could he be just and not punish sin?”

“Mercy is good and right,” I answer, “and without sin there would be none. We’re told to forgive and be merciful as our Father in heaven is, and two rights can’t conflict. If God punishes sin, punishing must be merciful; if he forgives it, forgiving must be just. Every attribute of God is as infinite as he is, so he can’t be merciful only sometimes, or just only sometimes. Mercy is his own and needs no theological trickery to justify it.”

“So you mean punishing sin is wrong, and God doesn’t do it?”

“Not at all. God does punish sin, but punishment and forgiveness aren’t opposed; one may even be necessary for the other. My question stands: why does God punish sin?”

“Because sin in itself deserves punishment.”

“Then why does he command us to forgive?”

“He punishes first, and once he has punished, he forgives?”

“That hardly works. If sin demands punishment and the right punishment is given, the man is free; what is there to forgive?”

“He needs forgiveness because no punishment could ever cover what he deserves.”

I set aside for now the likely expansion of this answer.

“Then why not forgive at once, if punishment isn’t essential and part of it can be skipped? And can something be required that, on your own showing, is inadequate? Perhaps you’ll say, ‘God may choose to take what little he can get.’ That brings me to the fault in the whole idea.”

Punishment is no offset to sin. Foolish people sometimes say, with self-satisfied pity, “If I have sinned, I have suffered.” Even suffering you laid on yourself did nothing to make up for the wrong, whatever good it did you. Deserved suffering is no counterweight to sin. Put it in the other scale and it won’t move it a hair; the two are no more of one kind than mind and matter. We say a man deserves punishment, yet we don’t always feel wrong when we forgive instead, or feel any amends made when we punish. If punishment offset wrong, God would be bound to punish for its own sake, but he forgives, so he isn’t. He punishes, then, as a means to an end and not as something that in itself must be done. It isn’t directly for justice, or how could he show mercy, which would be injustice?

God’s first obligation is not to punish sin but to destroy it. Were he not the Maker, he might not be bound even to that; I don’t know. But since he created creatures who sinned, so that sin entered the world through his act of creating, his own righteousness binds him to destroy it.

“But that leaves no room for mercy.”

You’re mistaken. God does destroy sin, always, and I trust he’s destroying it in me; saving the sinner from his sins is destroying sin. But vengeance on the sinner, a tooth for a tooth, is not in God’s heart or hand. If the sinner, with the sin in him, were the object of divine wrath, there’d be no mercy, and sin would end only with sin and sinner destroyed together. That would produce no atonement, nothing to make up for the wrong God let into being by creating man. There must be an atonement, a bringing together, and only the man who sinned can make it.

Punishment, I repeat, is not what God is bound to do; the complete destruction of sin is. What good would it do the world, the sinner, God or the truth for the sinner to suffer forever? Would it justify God in making creatures he knew would sin? If justice demands suffering as the equivalent of sin, then God must exact it and can’t pardon, and making man was a tyrant’s deed, a creative cruelty. But even granting that the sinner deserves to suffer, no suffering atones for his sin. Eternity of it couldn’t make up for one unjust word. Does one unjust word deserve eternal suffering? Only God in my heart can cleanse me of the evil that spoke it, but did I see that evil so perfectly that eternal punishment would be just? Sorrow, confession and self-abasing love make up for the word; suffering doesn’t. Evil in the abstract is eternally evil and nothing can be done about it, but I can be saved from it by learning to loathe it and shrink from it forever. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner its executioner. In man, sin and punishment are not at odds, any more than pardon and punishment are in God; punishment is born of sin, because evil has no life of its own but lives only by the life of good, and in itself is death. The opposite of sin is not suffering but righteousness, and the way across the gulf between wrong and right is not fire but repentance. If a friend has wronged me, will it console me to see him punished? Wouldn’t a shadow of repentant grief, the light of returning love in his face, heal me at once, however deep the wound? Ask how justice is served by punishing any of the wicked in Dante’s hell. I’m not saying it’s wrong to punish them; I’m saying justice is never satisfied by suffering. Human resentment, revenge and hatred may be. A justice like Dante’s keeps wickedness alive in its most terrible forms. Isn’t God defeated each time one of the lost defies him? All hell can’t make Vanni Fucci say “I was wrong.” Throughout the hell of his vengeance God is triumphantly defeated; though aimed at evil, it is a tyrant’s vain, wasted cruelty: it destroys no evil but magnifies its horrible power amid tortures only a divine imagination could invent. If sin must be kept alive, hell must be kept alive; but though I count the smallest sin infinitely loathsome, I don’t believe any being who was never good enough to see sin’s ugliness could sin so as to deserve such punishment. Leaving duration aside, to condemn a creature born imperfect, with impulses to evil he never generated and couldn’t help, and never shown God’s true face, is a lie against God as loathsome as can find room in a heart too undeveloped to know justice and too low to look into the face of Jesus. No heart has really held it, though many a hair-splitting brain has. One thing is lower than deliberately believing such a lie: worshipping the God it is believed of. The deepest, truest suffering in the wicked must come from a true sight of how hideous their lives were and what horrors they have done. Physical pain may help rouse it, but “I would I had never been born!” must be the cry of Judas not because of the hell-fire around him but because he loathes the man who betrayed his friend, the world’s friend. When a man loathes himself, he has begun to be saved. Punishment tends that way. It exists not for its own sake, nor to make up for sin, nor for divine revenge (a horrible word), nor to satisfy justice, but for amendment and atonement. God’s love binds him to punish sin in order to rescue his creature, and his justice binds him to destroy sin in his creation. Love is justice, the fulfilling of the law, for God as for his children. That is why justice requires that the wicked not go unpunished: through the eye-opening power of pain they may come to see and do justice, want to make every possible amends, and become just. For Justice, who is God, must see justice done by his children in their very being, not only in outward acts, and the only way he can make up for their wrongs is to bring the wrongdoer to repent. When a man says, “I did wrong; I hate myself and what I did; I can’t bear to think I did it!” atonement has begun. Without that, all the Lord did would be lost. Repentance, restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness and righteous living afterward are the only true make-up for sin, and for nothing less did Christ die. When a man owns the right he once denied and says to the wrong, “I renounce and loathe you; I see now what you are, and couldn’t see it before because I wouldn’t; God forgive me; make me clean, or let me die!” then justice, who is God, has conquered, and not before.

“So what atonement is there?”

Every atonement God cares about. Jesus Christ’s work on earth was the creative atonement, because it produces atonement in every heart: he is bringing God and man, and man and man, into perfect unity. “I in them and you in me, that they may be made perfect in one.”

“That is dangerous teaching!”

More dangerous than you think, to many things: every evil, every lie, and not least every false trust in what Christ did instead of in Christ himself. Paul glories in the cross of Christ, but he trusts not the cross but the living Christ and his living Father.

Justice therefore requires that sin be ended and atoned for. Where punishment can help, by showing the sinner what he is guilty of or softening his heart to see his pride, wrong and cruelty, justice requires that it not be spared, and the more we believe in God, the surer we are that he will spare nothing suffering can do to save his child from death. If suffering can’t serve, we should look not for more hell but for sin destroyed by destroying the sinner, which seems to me a defeat for God, blameless but a defeat.

If God is defeated, he must destroy, that is, withdraw life; how could he go on sending his life into irreclaimable souls just to keep sin alive in them forever? Even then no atonement is made, and God stays defeated, having made what sinned and wouldn’t repent. Those who think many souls will defeat him can’t believe he cares enough to do his best for them. He is their Father, who made them out of himself yet separate from himself, able to be one with him: surely he will somehow save them! Not even sin can close all the channels between creator and created.

The idea that suffering offsets sin, that a man can suffer his way out from under the claim his wrongdoing has put on him, comes first, I think, from the satisfaction we feel when wrong comes to grief. We hate wrong but, not being righteous ourselves, hate the wrongdoer too, so we are rightly glad to see the law’s disapproval in his punishment and wrongly glad of his suffering, because his wrong has hurt us. That is how the justice born in us passes over to evil. God takes no such pleasure in the suffering of the wicked. To look on any suffering with satisfaction, except sympathetically for its power to cure, comes of evil and is inhuman because undivine. His nature is always to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Wrong is so foreign to him, and it so grieves him that one of his little ones does evil, that I believe there is no extreme of suffering he wouldn’t put them through to destroy it in them. A man might flatter, bribe or coax a tyrant; from the love of God there is no refuge, for very love will insist on the last farthing.

“That isn’t the kind of love I want!”

No, how could you? You can’t care for it until you start to know it. But eternal love won’t surrender you to the selfishness that is killing you. What lover would hand his lady over to her craving for morphia? The Son of God, who took the weight of that love and carried it through the world, is content with it, as is everyone who knows it. The Father’s love is radiant perfection, and love, not self-love, is lord of the universe. Justice demands your punishment because it demands the destruction of sin and that your Father do his best for you. God, the God of justice, of fair play, who made us prone to fall and able to be raised, is bound to punish in order to deliver us; otherwise an earthly father would do better by us. Mercy belongs to the Lord, as the psalm says, because he deals with every man by his work, and a man’s work is his character.

To think Jesus saves us from the consequences of our sins is false, mean and low. Christ saves us from the least leaning toward sin, into the clean air of God’s way of thinking and feeling, and makes the heart pure, willing and choosing purity. To such a heart sin is disgusting: it sees things as God sees them. A soul so saved would sooner sink into hell’s flames than slip into heaven and skulk there under the shadow of an imputed righteousness. No soul is saved that wouldn’t prefer hell to sin. Jesus didn’t die to save us from punishment; he was named Jesus because he would save his people from their sins.

If punishment is no atonement, what does that mean for the popular theology that all opponents of what they call Christianity take to represent its doctrines? Most of us were raised on it, and many have learned, thank God, to cast it out of mind and heart. Many think it dead, but it lies at the root (the intellectual root only, thank God) of most of the teaching of Christianity in this country, believed, so far as the false can be, by many who think they’ve left it behind and have only dropped its plainest wording. It is humbling to see how many fairly honest people think softening a falsehood’s statement gets rid of it, when it only passes better both with those who hold it fully and with those who would revolt at it plainly said.

Once for all I’ll ease my soul about this horrid phantasm. My opinion of it hasn’t changed since I first wrote or spoke, but I have said little about it, because I didn’t want to preach mere negation. My work was never to destroy the false except where it blocked the building of the true, so I tried to say what I believed, trusting the true to drive out the false and avoiding dispute. I won’t take sides in doctrinal contests. But I would do all I can to stop those who think correct opinion essential to salvation from loading true men and women with any burden but their Master’s yoke, and to lift such a burden where it already weighs. Let the Lord himself teach them. A man without the mind of Christ, which only the man who makes it his business to obey has, can’t have correct opinions about him, and if he could they would do him no good, only harm. Our business is not to think correctly but to live truly; only then will correct thinking be possible. A chief cause of unbelief is that people who have seen something of Christ’s glory theorize about him rather than obey him. They have taught about Christ rather than taught Christ. More eager for a believable theory than for doing the truth, they presumed to explain a Christ whom only years of obedience could have taught them to grasp. Their teaching offends the common sense of many with far fewer advantages, in whom, as in Nathanael, there is no guile. Such teachers press their inherited theories on others, insisting they think about Christ as they do instead of urging them to go to Christ and learn whatever he chooses to teach; they do their unintended worst to stop all growth and life. From them and their false teaching I would gladly help the true-hearted escape. Let the dead bury their dead, but I would keep them from burying the living.

If merely punishing the wrongdoer can’t satisfy justice, what of the idea that justice is satisfied when someone else suffers, and that being perfectly innocent makes his suffering perfect satisfaction? That he consents makes it worse; their own claim was that the sinner must be punished, and here is one far more than innocent. They have changed ground: now the law requires not punishment but mere suffering! I reject this utterly, in any form. Rather than believe in a justice, that is a God, who could be satisfied by an innocent man suffering for a guilty man’s wrong, I would live with the wild beasts, who lack reason enough to be unreasonable. God, the Father of Jesus Christ, content with direst injustice? God forbid! The fancy swaps punishment for the suffering least like it, when even the severest punishment satisfies nothing. How did anyone imagine it? From a fearful distrust that can’t believe in the Father’s forgiveness or trust him without a legal arrangement binding him (failing to trust God, they fall back on a text), and from the pride that insists on understanding what it can’t before obeying what it sees. Whoever must understand first will believe a lie, and only obedience will free him. If you say, “But I believe what you despise,” I answer that believing it is your punishment for being able to; call it your reward if you like. You ought not to be able. It is the poorest, most shameless fiction, invented by someone who didn’t see he was inventing. It also satisfies many a humble soul content to let another think for him and tell him his Father’s mind. Let him be satisfied; that he can be shows he isn’t ready for better, and how much blame attaches, God knows. Opinion, right or wrong, won’t save him. I wish he’d stop thinking about opinions and do the Master’s work. What gives me a right to speak is that people like him force evil things on others from seats of authority or influence, to their agony, paralysis, unbelief, indignation and stumbling. I would save my fellows from having whatever notion of God they can reach blotted out by a lie.

Asked how a false doctrine of substitution has stayed an article of faith so long for so many, I answer: by the principle on which God took up and used the sacrifices men, lacking faith, invented to please him. Some children lie to please parents who hate lying, even confessing wrongs they haven’t done because they think confession is what the parents want. God accepted men’s sacrifices until he could bring them to see, and with many in church and out he hasn’t yet, that he doesn’t care for such things.

“But then,” someone may ask, “where does that teaching get its undeniable power?”

From containing a notion of God and his Christ that is poor and faint, but suited by that very poverty and untruth to the weakness and unbelief of the men who invented it to ease their own. The truth is there: it is Christ, the glory of God. But the ideas poor, cringing souls form of that glory the moment the darkness begins to lift are another matter. Truth is too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it or dare give it. Unable to believe in the love of the Lord Jesus, they invented a mediator in his mother to come a little nearer; unable to believe in their Father’s readiness to forgive, they invented a way of being forgiven that asked less of him and spared them believing outright in the tenderness of his father’s heart, which they found impossible. They thought he had to punish for punishing’s sake, as an offset to their sin; clear forgiveness didn’t seem divine and needed justifying; so, to justify it, they invented a satisfaction for sin that insults God, a horrible injustice taking in all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. He sought no satisfaction but an obedient return to the Father; what satisfaction was needed he made himself, in what he did to turn them from evil and back to him. I would gladly help their followers loathe such thoughts of God, but that needs them to become better people; until then, intellectual conviction would be worthless, and I won’t speak a word to bring it about. When the heart recoils at the horror of such an unreality for God, it will begin to ask whether it must accept such statements and to search for a real God to free it from the terrible idol. I write for those so moved, not to dispute with people who love a lie they may not be to blame for holding, and who like the Jews of old would expel from the synagogue anyone who doubts their caricature of God, their travesty of the atonement of Jesus Christ, branding him an unbeliever in it. But a lie for God is against God and carries its own death sentence.

Instead of doing God’s will, men of power have built a system to explain why Christ had to die and what God needed and intended in allowing it. In our own day they have discarded much of the good in Roman teaching yet clung to its morally and spiritually vulgar idea of justice and satisfaction, held by pagan Rome, propped up by the Jewish notion of sacrifice, and, alas, still sheltered by the mother of all western churches. The reformers would have done better to keep purgatory and drop vicarious sacrifice.

Their system, briefly: God is bound to punish sin to the uttermost, because his justice requires it. But he loves man and would rather not. Jesus Christ says, “I’ll take his punishment on myself.” God accepts and lets man go unpunished, on one condition. His justice is more than satisfied by punishing an infinite being, God’s own everlasting son, perfect in love and truth, in place of a world of worthless creatures; his suffering outweighs that of all generations through endless ages. The condition is that man believe in this atonement. He must say, “I have sinned and deserve to be tortured forever, but Christ has paid my debts by being punished in my place, so he is my Saviour, and gratitude binds me to turn from evil.” Some would demand more, but this is enough for my purpose.

Enough has been said on whether justice requires the sinner’s punishment, and on how little satisfaction his suffering gives it. If it is required, let it be given. But what can we say to the base picture in which what is required is not the sinner’s suffering but suffering as such? And, as if that were not baseness enough to crown every heathen picture of God’s ways, that the suffering of the innocent is far preferable in his eyes to the wicked’s, as a make-up for wrong? And lower yet: that the suffering of the holy, the loving, the eternally and perfectly good is supremely satisfying to the pure justice of the Father of spirits! All the suffering heaped on the wicked couldn’t buy them a moment’s respite; under this law of equivalents, this lex talionis, millions of years of it couldn’t pay off one farthing of the debt. But the suffering of the innocent is so much more precious and satisfying to God’s justice that in return for it another wrong is done: the sinners who deserve punishment are set free.

I know the root of all that can be said on this subject; the notion is embedded in the gray matter of my Scotch brain, and when I reject it I know what I reject. For the love of God my heart rose early against this low invention. It is strange that in a Christian land anyone must say that punishing the innocent and letting the guilty go free is unjust: it wrongs the innocent, God himself, and the guilty worst of all, by treating them as innocent. The whole device is spiritual charlatanry, fit only for a fraudulent jail-delivery. If the wicked ought to be punished, it would be the worst perversion of justice to punish a righteous being, however strong, in place of the sinner, however weak; even the poorest idea of just punishment requires that the sinner, and no one else, receive it. The strong one willing to bear it might be worshipped, but what of the God whose so-called justice he defeats? If you say it is justice, not God, that demands the suffering, I say justice can’t demand what is unjust. God is absolutely just, with a justice one with his mercy and impossible to escape. To make the living God a party to this is to hide behind a mask of cruelty and hypocrisy the face whose glory is seen only in Jesus, and to put a tirade of vulgar Roman legality into the mouth of the Lord God merciful and gracious, who will by no means clear the guilty. Rather than believe such folly of the God whom those who know him long for like the deer for water, I would say, “There is no God; let us neither eat nor drink, that we may die! This is not our God!” But I have seen his face and heard his voice in Jesus Christ, and this is our God, whose being makes it an infinite gladness to be his creature. I will not have the God of the scribes and Pharisees, whether Jewish or Christian, Protestant, Roman or Greek, but your Father, O Christ! He is my God. If you say, “That is our God, not yours!” I answer, “Your portrait of your God is an evil caricature of the face of Christ.”

To believe in vicarious sacrifice is to take refuge with the Son from the Father’s righteousness: with his work instead of the Son, with a theory of it instead of the work, behind a false legal quirk instead of in the eternal heart of the unchanging, righteous Father, who is merciful in that he deals with every man by his work and compels obedience, with no legal dodge. God will never let a man off with any fault; he must have him clean. He will excuse him to the very limit of the truth and no further, for he is his true father and will have his child true as Jesus is true. He will credit him with nothing he lacks and overlook no smallest good he has, will quench no smoking flax and break no bruised reed, but bring judgment to victory. He is God beyond all that a heart hungry for love and righteousness could desire.

If you say the best of men have held the opinions I condemn, I answer: some of the best have, and some of those I have loved and honoured, for what they were, not what they thought. They were what they were through obedient faith, not through these theories. By knowing God through obeying his Son, they rose above theories they had never looked in the face and so never recognized as evil. Many have reached, in their growth, the point where they must give them up; the man of whom I knew the most good gave them up gladly. A man may be good to the point of worship and hold them, and I hate them the more for it: they are lies that, hiding under the truth mixed in with them, burrow as near the good man’s heart as they can. Whatever the holder’s blindness, a lie is a lie, fit only for the pit of hell, and no falsehood may enter the justice we deal it. Yet until a man sees it is a lie, how can he help holding it, with shadows of the best truth mixed in? While he can love a lie he can’t see it for one; the thoroughly true know untruth at once, and to that sight we must all come. I don’t write for those who make or heartily accept any lie; when they see God’s glory they will see the eternal difference between false and true, and not before. I write for those whom such teaching has wrapped in a cloud, so that they can’t see the stars of heaven and some doubt there are any. For the holy ones of earlier days who believed and taught these things, all is well: many of the holiest threw the lies off long before today’s teachers were born, and many who would never have invented them took them humbly as established truths, sealed by so many good men, and, overawed by the authority of lesser men, ordered their lives by the truths they found with them, so that the reward of obedience, knowing God, broke for them the net of a presumptuous, self-styled orthodoxy. Everyone who tries to obey the Master is my brother, and I revere him, whether he counts me one or not; but dare I spare what I see to be a lie because my brother believes it? The lie is not of God, whoever holds it.

“If you toss vicarious sacrifice aside so casually,” many will say, “what theory will you put in its place?”

“In the name of the truth,” I answer, “none.” I’ll send out no theory of mine to stir up fresh whirlwinds of argumentative dust that hide the Master behind talk about him. If I have one, I won’t scatter it along the road but offer it on a clean plate to whoever I think should see it; only eyes opened by the sun of righteousness and made single by obedience can judge even the dim, moonlike pearl of a formulated thought. Call me afraid to show my opinion; is a man a coward who won’t throw his child to the wolves? Whatever faith of that kind I have I’ll keep to myself before God until I see better reason to speak.

“So will you take away my faith and give me none in its place?”

Your faith! God forbid. Your theory is not your faith, nor anything like it. Your faith is your obedience; your theory I don’t know what. Yes, I’ll gladly leave you without any of what you call faith. Trust God. Obey every word of the Master. That is faith, and believing that way, your opinion will grow out of your real life and be worthy of it. Peter says the Lord gives his spirit to those who obey him, and only the Master’s spirit can guide you to a theory worth holding. Jesus is lord of our minds as well as our hearts: nothing he doesn’t think is worth thinking, and no one can think as he does without being pure like him, which means going with him and learning from him. To put off obeying until we find a believable theory about him is to push aside the medicine we know we should take, to study the schools of medicine. You know that much of what Christ asks is right and your duty, whether he said it or not. Do it. If you don’t do what you know of the truth, I’m not surprised you look for it with your mind; as Milton shows, that can comfort even fallen angels. But don’t call whatever you gain that way The Truth. How can you, not caring to be true, judge the one whose life was doing, out of love, the very things you admit are your duty and don’t do? Obey the truth and let theory wait. Theory may spring from life, but life never springs from theory.

So I won’t tell you what I think, but I’ll tell anyone who cares to hear it what I believe, and I’ll do so now. What I say must share this much with theory: I can’t prove it, only try to order my life by it.

I believe in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, my elder brother, my lord and master. I believe he has a right to my absolute obedience wherever I know or come to know his will; that obeying him is climbing to the summit of my being, and not obeying him would be denying him. I believe he died that I might die as he did: die to every ruling power in me but God’s will, and live ready, as he was, to be nailed to a cross if God wills. I believe he is my Saviour from myself and from all that has come of loving myself, from all that God doesn’t love and wouldn’t have me love; that he died so that God’s justice and mercy might have their way with me, making me just as God is just, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect. I believe, and pray, that he will give me whatever punishment I need to set me right or keep me from going wrong. I believe he died to free me from all meanness, pretence, falseness, unfairness, poverty of spirit, cowardice, fear, anxiety, every form of self-love and all trust or hope in possessions; to make me merry as a child of our Father in heaven, loving only what is lovely and wanting nothing I’d be ashamed for the universe of God to see. I believe God is just like Jesus, only greater, for Jesus said so; that he is absolutely, grandly beautiful, as the highest human soul counts beauty but infinitely beyond it, with the beauty that creates beauty and doesn’t merely show it; that he has always done, and is always doing, his best for every man, so that no one is miserable because God has forgotten him; and that he is not a God to cringe before but our Father, to whom the child’s heart cries out in joy, “Do with me as you will.”

I believe nothing is good for me or any man except God, and more and more of him, and that we can come near him only by knowing Christ.

I believe no one is ever condemned for any sin but one: refusing to leave his sins and come out of them and be the child of his own father.

I believe justice and mercy are one and the same thing: without full justice there is no mercy, and without full mercy no justice. Such is God’s mercy that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they’ve paid the last farthing, dropped the purse of selfishness with all its dross, and rushed home to the Father, the Son and the many brothers, inside the heart of the life-giving fire whose outer rings burn. I believe no hell will be lacking that could help God’s just mercy redeem his children.

I believe that to the man who obeys, and so opens his heart to the eternal gift, God gives the spirit of his Son, his own spirit, to enlighten him by teaching righteousness and lead him into all truth; that the true disciple will therefore always know what he ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do. I believe no teacher should try to make men think as he does, but lead them to the living Truth, the Master himself, from whom alone they can learn anything and who will make them know in themselves what is true by seeing it. I believe only the inspiration of the Almighty gives understanding. I believe that being Christ’s disciple is the purpose of existence, and persuading men to be his disciples is the purpose of teaching.

“So in sum, you don’t believe in the atonement?”

I believe in Jesus Christ. Nowhere am I asked to believe in any thing or statement, but everywhere to believe in God and in Jesus Christ. In what you mean by the atonement I do not believe. God forbid I should, for it would be to believe a lie, and a lie to blame for much refusal of the gospel here and elsewhere. But the word as the best English writers used it when the Bible was translated, I believe in with all my heart, soul, strength and mind, whether you spell it a-tone-ment or at-one-ment. I believe Jesus Christ is our atonement; through him we are reconciled to God and made one with him. The New Testament never speaks of reconciling God to us; we are the ones to be reconciled. I’m not writing a treatise, since my business is to persuade people to be atoned to God, but I’ll go this far with my questioner, whose opinion is worth nothing to me, though his truth is worth endless good: even in the sense of a making up for the evil men have done toward God, I believe in the atonement. Did the Lord not throw himself into the eternal gulf of evil between the children and the Father, and bring us the Father in the face of his true Son, giving us the sight of him that alone could make us love him? Did he not hold to the one saving truth, that God was just what he was, to the last, against contradiction and death, laying down his life to persuade us to lay down ours at the Father’s feet? Has the life by which he died not passed into those who received him and made theirs new, so that they now live with the only life that is life? Did he not defeat evil by letting every wave of its horrid sea break over him and die without rebound, its rage spent? He made atonement, truly! We sacrifice to God? It is God who has sacrificed his own Son to us; there was no other way to get the gift of himself into our hearts. Jesus sacrificed himself to his Father and to the children to bring them together, all the love on the side of the Father and the Son, all the selfishness on the side of the children. If the joy that alone makes life worth living, the joy that God is like Christ, is true in my heart, how can I not believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ? I believe it wholeheartedly, as God means it.

And as the power that makes up for wrong done by one man to another, I believe in the atonement too. Who that believes in Jesus, like a repentant child who has wronged his father, doesn’t long to make amends to his brother? Who moves us to repentance, to the passion that pays back fourfold? Jesus, our propitiation, our atonement, the head and leader, the prince of atonement. He couldn’t do it without us, but he leads us up to the Father’s knee and makes us make atonement. Learning Christ, we are not only sorry for our wrong and turn from it and hate it; we become able to serve God and man with an infinitely high and true service, a soul-service, and to offer our whole being to God, to whom it belongs by deepest right. Have I injured anyone? With him to help my sense of justice, newly risen with him from the dead, shall I not make good amends? Have I failed to love my neighbour? Shall I not now love him with an infinitely better love? Thanks be to him who is my atonement, making me one with God and my fellows, that I will and can make atonement! He is my life, my joy, my lord, my owner, who perfects my being by his own perfection. I dare not say with Paul that I am Christ’s slave, but my highest hope is to be it.

“But you don’t believe that Christ’s sufferings, as sufferings, entitled the supreme ruler to do anything he would otherwise not have been free to do?”

I do not. I think the notion as unworthy of man’s belief as it is dishonouring to God. It began, no doubt, in a healthy sense of sin; but a sense of sin is not inspiration, though it may lie not far from the temple door. It opens the eyes, but to our own defilement, not to heavenly truth. The theory has another ingredient too, unbelief: the inability to accept the freedom of God’s forgiveness, to believe that forgiving is his chosen nature and that his own divinely willed nature binds him to it. He needs no atonement except that men leave their sins and come back to his heart. But men can’t believe in his forgiveness, so they need, and he has given them, a mediator, and still they won’t know him. They think of the Father of souls as if he had given up his fatherhood because of their sins and taken on the judge. If he put off his fatherhood, which he can’t, since it is an eternal fact, he would put off all relation to us with it; he can’t throw out the essential and keep what follows. Men can’t or won’t see that nothing but his being our father gives him any right over us; they treat him as their governor! They give up the Ancient of Days, “the glad creator,” for a wretched, puritanical martinet of a God who cares not for righteousness but for his rights, not for eternal purities but for respectable proprieties. The prophets of such a God drain the glow, hope, colour and worth from life on earth and offer instead what they call eternal bliss, a pale, tearless hell. Above all, turn from a mean, impoverished faith. But if your own mammon-worshipping soul is cramped, how will you believe in any God bigger than can stand up in that prison cell?

I want to start no quarrel and will quarrel with no one, but for the sake of those troubled by certain believers I have spoken my mind. I love the one God seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From every copy of Jonathan Edwards’s portrait of God, however faded by time or softened with gentler colours, I turn in loathing. He is not the God of whom John heard the message from Jesus, that he is light, and in him is no darkness at all.