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RELIGION, THEOLOGY, AND BIBLICAL LITERATURE.

The Death of Christ. Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament. By JAMES DENNEY, D.D., Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology, United Free Church College, Glasgow. 12mo, pp. 334. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son. Price, cloth, $1.50.

This is not an exhaustive treatise on the Atonement or on Justification: it is an examination of the New Testament teaching on the Death of Christ. Neither in theology nor in preaching to-day does the death of Christ hold that prominence which is given it in the New Testament. To set Christ's death in that scriptural high relief, thus rectifying current Christianity by the proportions and perspective of apostolic Christianity, is part of our author's purpose. He takes a fresh survey of the ground in the light contributed by the critical investigation of Scripture which has been the work of the last two generations. While religion is one thing and theology another, they meet and are inextricably involved with each other in the cross of Christ interpreted as the New Testament interprets it. Dr. Denney's study of this supreme subject is at once scientific and devout, critical and reverent. In his preface he writes, "If evangelists were our theologians or theologians our evangelists, we should come nearer being the ideal Church;" and he hopes that in this book he has done something to bridge the gulf between them. Certainly he has given to a day which badly needs it a new and weighty invoice of thoroughly evangelistic theology and biblical exposition. No analytical discussion of the book is possible here. But we call attention to it as the timely offering of a scholar of high repute, especially valuable in warming the atmosphere of a time when not a little pretentious scholarship is facing toward frigid regions. On page 169 the author points out Ritschl's failure to understand correctly what the New Testament means by "the righteousness of God," and says: "Ritschl's treatment of the passage in Rom. iii, 3ff., where God's righteousness is spoken of in connection with the judgment of the world, and with the infliction of the final wrath upon it, and where it evidently includes something else than the gracious consistency to which Ritschl would limit it, is an amusing combination of sophistry and paradox." In insisting that Gospel preaching must be a preaching of Christ's death and not merely about it, Dr. Denney says that its vicarious or substitutionary character is necessary in order to account for its importance; and also that a rational connection must be shown between that death and the responsibilities which sin involves, and from which that death delivers. His meaning is made clear by the following simple illustration: "If I were sitting on the end of a pier on a summer

day, enjoying the sunshine, and some one should come along and jump into the water and get drowned to prove his love for me, I would find it quite unintelligible. I might be much in need of love, but an act in no rational relation to any of my necessities could not prove it. But if I had fallen off the pier and were drowning, and some one sprang into the water, and at the cost of making my peril, or what but for him would be my fate, his own, saved me from death, then I should say, 'Greater love hath no man than this.' I should say it intelligently and intelligibly, because there would be an intelligible relation between the sacrifice which love made and the necessity from which it redeemed. And there must be such an intelligible relation between the death of Christ-the great act in which his love to sinners is demonstrated-and the sin of the world for which in his blood he is the propitiation. I have never seen any intelligible relation established between them, except that which is the key to the whole of New Testament teaching, and which bids us say, as we look at the Cross, He bore our sins, He died our death. It is so that his love constrains us. . . . The propitiatory death of Christ, as an all-transcending demonstration of his love, evokes in sinful souls a response which is the whole of Christianity." In the chapter on the importance of the death of Christ in preaching and in theology Dr. Denney is entirely Methodistic. "Because of the Atonement made by the death of Christ, there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. We have the assurance of a divine love which has gone deeper than all our sins, and has taken on itself the responsibility of them and the responsibility of delivering us from them. A relation to God in which sin has nothing to say, but which is summed up in Christ and his perfect Atonement for sin-in John Wesley's words, full salvation now-is the burden of the Gospel. . This is the great soul-winning Gospel, this message of a sin-bearing, sin-expiating love, which pleads for acceptance, which takes the whole responsibility of the sinner unconditionally, with no preliminaries, if only he abandon himself to it. Only the preaching of full salvation now, as Wesley tells us-and who knew better than he?-has any promise in it of revival." Dr. Denney's volume might almost be called A Text-Book for Evangelists, in which class he would include every preacher who really preaches the Gospel. And it is a book to make evangelism sane, intelligent, and convincing. On the adaptation of the Gospel to the conscience, the author says: "It is true that the Atonement presupposes conscience and appeals to it, but it is truer still that of all powers in the world it is the supreme power for creating and deepening conscience. The first Moravian missionaries to Greenland, after twenty years of fruitless toil in indirect approaches to the savage mind, found it suddenly responsive to the appeal of the Cross. Probably Paul made no mistake when he delivered to the Corinthians immediately the message of the Atonement. No one can tell how near conscience is to the surface, or how quickly in any man it may respond to the appeal.

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We might have thought that in Corinth much preliminary sapping and mining would have been requisite before the appeal could be made with any prospect of success; but Paul judged otherwise, and preached from the very outset the great hope of the Gospel, by which conscience is at once evoked and redeemed. . . . All experience shows that the Gospel wins by its magnitude, and that the true method for the evangelist-preacher is to put the great things in the forefront." Dr. Denney's powerful volume closes by saying: "The Son of God, made sin for men, so held Paul's eyes and heart, so entered into his being with annihilative and creative power, that all he was and all he meant by life were due to him alone. Paul does not look any. where but to the Cross for the ideals and motives of the Christian: they are all there. And the more one dwells in the New Testament, and tries to find the point of view from which it shows a perfect unity, the more is he convinced that the Atonement is the key to Christianity as a whole. 'Christ died for the ungodly.'" Socinianism (or Unitarianism) is supposed by many to be specially connected with denial of the Incarnation. But it began historically with the denial of the Atonement. It is with the denial of the Atonement that it always begins anew, and, as Dr. Denney points out, to begin there is to end, sooner or later, with putting Christ out of the Christian religion altogether. Some of Harnack's teachings face that way. And that way lies impotence and death for the Christian Church. Such a book as the one before

us is urgently needed to counteract the existing tendency to magnify the Incarnation and to minify the Atonement.

Ourselves and the Universe. By J. BRIERLEY, B.A. (“J. B." of The Christian World). 12mo, pp. 340. New York: Thomas Whittaker. Price, cloth, $1.50.

These studies in life and religion are a companion volume with Studies of the Soul, by the same author, noticed in Editorial Discussions in this number. The title given to this volume means that the essays it contains aim to set the facts and experiences of religion in the framework of that new Universe which modern research has opened to us, in accordance with the conviction that religious teaching must henceforth be a cosmic teaching. This central idea pervades the book, speaking distinctly in the very first essay, which is entitled "A Roomier Universe." Man has not yet fully adjusted his conceptions to the vaster cosmos which astronomy has opened to view. See Tennyson's poem "Vastness." Hear Carlyle, when a friend called his attention to the brilliant night-sky as "a glorious sight," exclaiming with a shudder, "Man, it's just dreadful!" Though not yet fully acclimatized to immensity, man is feeling his way about in his enormous habitation, and after a while his spirit will be not only at home in it but gloriously free and exultant. It is immensely reassuring to realize that to the uttermost verge of these vast spaces we find not only everywhere the presence of a Mind, but of the same Mind. And if the universe, through all its extent, knows but one

Master of the House, who is already known to us, there is enough in that to thaw out the chill of strangeness and to make the cosmic spaces to their uttermost reach friendly and homelike. Furthermore, the greater the universe, the greater its Maker. And if God in these later ages has astonished us by the revelation of his mighty workings on the material side of the universe, what surprises may he not have in store for us on the side which is spiritual? If his power is expressed in that wondrous stream of worlds, the Milky Way, what is the Love that is proportioned to such a Power, and what marvels may we not expect from it? And majestic as is the realm of the stars, there are roomier realms for the soul. Christ teaches that worldliness is provincialism, it is absurdly limited. He brings us tidings from a larger world on which he proposes straightway to launch us. His proposition is that we should

Here on this bank in some way live the life
Beyond the bridge.

The parochial view finds its end in the gaining of sensual pleasures, of wealth and worldly honors. Christ proclaims this to be the pastime of babes, and suggests that we take up pursuits worthy of manhood. He speaks as the citizen and emissary of a larger universe to whose vaster and more splendid careers he invites us. He set us an example by taking suffering and trial, and affront and ignominy, as moments simply in a constant spiritual ascent, as factors and instruments for making visible on earth the invisible things of the Kingdom of God. The essay on "The Divine Indifference" gives reasons why we should "bear without resentment the divine reserve," and feel assured that this mysterious universe has a kindly significance: more than this, that those who penetrate to its spiritual center find there a clear sky and angels' food. To him that overcometh the demons of doubt and fear is given to eat of hidden manna. The Jesuits have been credited with proprietorship of the doctrine that the end justifies the means; but a Ritualist Oxford don of the nineteenth century said, "Make yourself clear that you are justified in deception and then lie like a trooper." A French writer has said, "Beware of a religion which substitutes itself for everything; that makes monks. Seek a religion which penetrates everything; that makes Christians." To shut up our religion to the narrow ground of a few elementary ideas is to put it in charge of a kitchen-garden when its true rôle is to govern a universe. Those who think law is only harsh are shown some truth in the statement that it is full of grace; that in its operations, its conditions, its promises, its performances, it suggests everywhere what we understand by Gospel. A man proposes to learn swimming or cycling. He finds himself immediately in contact with certain laws. They say to him, “Believe, obey, and according to your faith it shall be unto you." The neophyte, if he be nervous, imagines that while other men in this matter may be under grace, he is certainly singled out for reproba

tion. The laws by which a man may keep at the top of the water or in easy equilibrium on a bicycle, have assuredly, his fears suggest, a statute of limitations which shuts him out. Let him trust and see. He learns finally that in place of reprobation, of favoritism, of limitation, the law says, "Whosoever will." To all and sundry, to rich and poor, to gentle and simple, to wise and foolish, to good and bad, it offers without restriction all its largess of service, provided only it is trusted and obeyed. . . . What a significant eulogium was that pronounced by the skeptic Gibbon on the mystic William Law, who was tutor in Gibbon's father's house at Putney: "In our family William Law left the reputation of a man who believed all that he professed, and practiced all that he enjoined." . . . "Art thou Brother Francis of Assisi?" said a peasant once to a saint. "Yes," was the answer. "Well, try to be as good as all think thee to be, because many have great faith in thee, and therefore I admonish thee to be nothing less than people hope of thee." Our chief debt to our fellows is the obligation to be good, to live the highest life we know. A childlike, God-loving soul, that begins its life afresh every morning, whose history is that of a perpetual soaring, is the most refreshing, heart-healing thing that exists. Beneath the world's cynicism lives the consciousness that its chief treasure, its rarest product, its pearl of price, is the saint's supernatural life. When humanity sees this plant growing in the wilderness it takes heart in its journeying, knowing it is not forsaken of God. . . . The religion of the old Stoics had a gray sky over it, and a north wind blowing. It was bracing, or stiffening, but the scene lacked sunshine. Just here it is that the Christian sanctity so far surpasses the Stoic sanctity. It gives a positive for the pagan negative. [See notice of Harper's Monthly in Summary of Reviews, in this number.] It offers a home in the invisible such as we search for in vain in Epictetus, or Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius. They have hardened themselves into a noble scorn of pain and loss, but they have not that fine sense of harborage far up in the shelter of the Will of God which enabled our Baxter to sing:

No walls or bars can keep Thee out,
None can confine a holy soul;

The streets of heaven it walks about,
None can its liberty control.

This spirit which makes the soul, in old Tauler's words, "so grounded in God that it is dissolved in the inmost of the Divine nature," is far more than a defiance of the world's disabilities. Its note is not Stoic defiance, but delight. The soul revels in having attained at last to life's inmost secret, and being launched at last on a career which answers its deepest aspiration and calls forth all its powers. ... Religion and amusement: the two things are here together on this God's earth of ours; have been here from the beginning, and we have not yet found the formula which unites or sensibly relates

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