19.1
The very heart of the doctrine of the Redemption is that the human acts of Christ were the acts of a Person who was divine. Everything that Christ did, suffered and experienced must be seen as suffered and experienced by God. God was born of a virgin in Bethlehem. God was a carpenter. God rejoiced. God sorrowed. God suffered. God died. If God did not suffer and die, then no one did, for there was but the one person in Christ. The phrase "God died" gives the greater shock, but is less mysterious than the phrase "God suffered". The whole created universe is held in existence from instant to instant solely by the continuing will of God. The words “God died” seem to carry annihilation to all things that depend on God. It is by the operation of His divine nature that God sustains all things in being. It is not in his divine nature that God the Son died, but only in His human nature, the most glorious of created things, but still a created thing. Death is a separation of soul and body. The phrase " God died" means that for three days' God's soul was separated from God's body. A real death but not affecting the divine Nature.
God’s suffering was not in the divine nature, but in the human. Christ's suffering, the fear and agony in the Garden for instance, was real suffering. Someone really suffered it, and that was God the Son. What it means, we cannot fully know, or know at all. Even if we cannot say it, there are momentary flashes of light, in which we half see it only for plain human consolation.
Summarizing this relation of nature and person in Christ's atoning act, we see that He was man with a true human nature. He could offer a true human act in expiation of human sin, an act of total love to balance humanity's self-love. Because He was God, the human act He offered was of infinite value and could satisfy for the sins of men. Any act of Christ must be of infinite value since the Person who does the act is God. Why then does Christ offer His death, when some lesser act would have been of infinite value and been totally sufficient?
In one sense the answer is clear. He had come into the world to teach the truth. The truth about Himself as God, about Himself as Messiah, about the Kingdom which was to be in the world but not of it, about the Gentiles who would come into it, and about the failure of the leaders of Israel to grasp the essentials of their own religion. His execution was the natural consequence. Only a miraculous intervention of the divine power could have prevented it. Given that He was to die, it is hard to think of His offering some lesser thing than His death as the sacrifice that should save mankind.
All things are in the power of God. God could have intervened to prevent His death. He might have chosen a way of life that meant no direct challenge to the rulers. Why in all reverence, did the divine plan include the death of the Redeemer? The two answers are that nothing could show the love of God so overpoweringly as His willingness to die for us, and show the horror of sin so clearly as needing His death to expiate it. Calvary is a proof both of the awfulness of sin and of the love of God, but not unless there was something in the nature of sin that required Calvary. If the sin could have been expiated by some act of Christ less than His death, then Calvary would not show the horror of sin but would in fact exaggerate it.
The same line of argument would not so obviously apply to Calvary as a proof of God's love, yet there would be something profoundly unsatisfying showing His love for us by a needless death. A moment's reflection will show that there was something in what Our Lord had to do which made His dying the best way to do it. It is true that on the side of the Person who made the offering, any act in the human nature, however small in itself, would have sufficed. But on the side of the nature in which the offer was made, can we feel that any act however small would have sufficed?
The sacrifice was a true act of human virtue offered in reparation for a human act of rejection of God. It was the divinity of His Person which gave the act of Christ's human nature the efficacy, which by itself it could not have had. If the human element in the sacrifice was a mere token, we should be left with a sense of an unreal transaction in which God makes an offering to God. It was human nature's offering, though it took a divine Person to make it. The God who made the offering was man, too, and it was in His manhood that He made it. Human nature could not do it all, leaving the divinity of the Person to supply the remainder. Expiation is something required not only by the nature of God, but by the nature of man. There is something in man, when his intellect is clear and his will right, that longs to make expiation rather than have his sin forgiven. In human dignity a man should want to pay his debt rather than have it written off. If he cannot pay the whole of it, as in this supreme instance, he wants to pay all that he can. Christ's humanity gave all it had to give, for a man has no more to give than his life. What divinity gave was only what humanity could not give.
Discussing what the Redeemer might have done gives us certain lights upon the problem of our redemption. They are nothing compared to the light that floods from what He did. He gave all on Calvary. Martyrs have died in the strength of His death, knowing even humanly speaking He gave more. Without His death, we should not have had the Resurrection. As we shall see, by baptism we are buried with Him in His death, and rise with Him in His Resurrection.
19.2
The sacrifice of Christ was totally effective, given that He Who offered it was God. It is important to grasp what it effected. Whatever it was meant to effect, it did effect. At the moment of His death on Calvary, Christ Our Lord said It is consummated. Something was completed. Something was beginning, too, not simply the paradisaic enjoyment by all men, by an elect, or even by Christ Himself of what He had achieved by His sacrifice. It was something with vast labor and anguish, as well as the possibility of failure in it for men, and with work still for Christ to do. Something was completed, but at the right hand of the Father, Christ Himself continues His work of intercession for us (see Heb.7:25). We see His last days on earth filled with the preparation of His Apostles, to continue His work among men until the end of time.
What was completed was the Redemption of the race. The race had sinned in its representative man, and was no longer one with God. Heaven was closed to it. Bound up with the severed relationship of the race with God, there was a mysterious subjection to the Devil. By his victory over Adam, the Devil had secured some kind of princedom over Adam's race, so that he is called the prince of this world. His princedom carried no legal rights but vast power. The primary effect of Our Lord's sacrifice was the undoing of Adam's sin. The princedom of the Devil was destroyed. The breach between the race and God was healed, so that Heaven was opened to the members of the race. This fundamentally is the Redemption.
Let us consider these two results in turn. If the Son of God was revealed to us, says St. John, it was so that He might undo what the devil had done. (see 1 John 3:8) It is foreign to our habits of thought to attach any real importance to the Devil, that intervening third in the relations between man and God. This is a defect in our mental habits. It is not intelligent to take lightly anything that God takes seriously. God takes the Devil very seriously. After the fall of man, God had foretold Redemption. He had not only foretold it to the Devil, but had expressed it in terms of a victory over the Devil: “the seed of the woman was to crush his head.”
When the hour of the Redemption came, Our Lord was intensely preoccupied with the struggle between Himself and the Devil, issuing the victory for Himself over the Devil. Early in Passion Week He cried out: “Now is the judgment of the world: now shall the Prince of this World be cast out.” (Jn. 12:31) At the Last Supper: “The Prince of this World comes and in me He has not anything.” (Jn. 14:30); and again: “The Prince of this World is already judged.” (Jn. 16:11)
Our Lord was preoccupied with Satan because He was restoring the order of reality against which Satan is the great protest. Satan's power was ranged against Him at the peak of intensity. What is interesting is that the Devil, so little understood the nature of Our Lord's mission, that he rushed on his own defeat. For as St. Luke and St. John both tell us, it was Satan who entered into Judas to cause him to betray Christ into the hands of His enemies, thus precipitating Christ's redemptive sacrifice. It is some consolation to know that an enemy of intellect so powerful is not always well informed.
But the overthrow of Satan's princedom is only incidental to the healing of the breach between the race and God, by which Heaven is opened. This was something done for the race. John the Baptist had hailed Our Lord: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold Him Who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) There was a sin of the world, and Christ died to destroy it. As a result, Heaven was once more opened to men. A man was enthroned there where no man had yet been, a man who had gone there to prepare a place for us. “A man had brought us death and a man should bring us resurrection from the dead; just as all have died with Adam, so with Christ all will be brought to life.” (1 Cor. 15:21-22)
Adam falls, and we are informed that Adam represented us and we have all fallen in him. Christ atones, and we are informed that Christ represents us and we are all redeemed in Him. Each is our representative because of a real relation of us to him. We have already seen that this is so of Adam. There is a solidarity of the human race, linking us physically to one another, and to the first man from whom we all come. Because of it, our fate was involved in his.
Christ is entitled to act for us by a double title. First on the side of His divinity, He is the God by whom, and in whose image, man was created. Second on the side of His humanity. He is the perfect man, so that where Adam was the first man in time, Christ is the first man in value. Christ is the moral head of the race. Adam represents humanity in that all of us come from him. Christ in that there is no element of humanity in any of us (Adam included) that is not better, richer and more complete in Him. His act, in compensation of Adam's, is available for all men (Adam included). The barrier erected by man's sin between the race and God is down. There is no longer a sin of the race, between us and sonship of God, between us and entry into Heaven.
Our different relationships to Adam and to Christ involve a difference in the way of our sharing in the result of their acts. We fell in Adam, as we are united with him. We are restored in Christ as we are united with Him. Adam's act becomes ours because we are (cannot help being) one with him. Christ's act becomes ours only when we become (or may unhappily fail to become) one with Him. We are incorporated with Adam by the fact of being born; whereas for incorporation with Christ, we must be reborn. We fell as members of humanity stemming from Adam. We are restored as members of a new humanity stemming from Christ.
We may now look again at what was completed by Our Lord's sacrifice on Calvary. Satisfaction was made; complete satisfaction for the sin of the human race. The breach between God and the race was healed. He had merited for men, restoration to the sonship of God, the supernatural life in which that sonship consists and the life by which we can look on the face of God in Heaven. Heaven was once more open to men.
19.3
The opening of Heaven does not mean that every man will get there. The defeat of Satan, in his effort to hold the race, does not mean that he will have no more victories over individuals. The Salvation of the individual does not follow automatically on the Redemption of the race. It is a further warfare, as no man enters Heaven simply because Christ offered the atoning sacrifice. His sacrifice availed for the Redemption of the race; both satisfying for sin and for meriting restoration, thus making the Salvation of the individual possible.
There can be no hard and fast allocation of the word Redemption to what Our Lord did for the race and Salvation to what He does to the individual. He was the Savior of the race, as well as of the individual. By redeeming the race, He redeemed the individual. The sacrifice on Calvary was a propitiation not only for the representative sin of the race, but for the personal sins of all members of the race: “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for those of the whole world. “(1 Jn. 2:2)
The Redemption of the race was entirely His work and wholly achieved. The Salvation of the individual depends on our cooperation with His work, and some of us may fail. This is the reason for a variation of phrasing in Scripture. Christ being said at one time to have died for all and at another to have died for some. The first phrase means He excluded none from the reach of the sacrifice, the second that some have excluded themselves and are not reached by it. “Being consummated He became, to all that obey Him, the cause of eternal salvation.” (Heb. 5:9)
Salvation depends on our receiving the supernatural life; by which we become sons of God, and having this life in our souls when we die. Christ merited it for all men. We do not receive it automatically by being born, as by birth we are one with Adam in whom we fell. By being re-born in Christ, made one with Him, we are restored. But, if we do not receive the life, receive and lose it, or die without it, we shall not be saved.
Notice how St. Paul emphasized the distinction between Christ's death on Calvary and our salvation by it. “God means us to win salvation through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has died for our sakes, that we, waking or sleeping may find life with Him.” (1 Thess. 5:10) In the Epistle to the Romans he makes equally clear, not only that there is something to be done by us for our salvation, but that Christ's own part in our salvation is not confined to His death on Calvary: “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled shall we be saved by His life.” (Romans 5:10)
Christ’s death made our salvation possible. Christ’s living still operates to make it actual. Christ works for us in Heaven in His own Person, and on earth through His Church. We have seen that He is at the right hand of the Father in the whole of His reality, body, soul and divinity. We have also seen that He continues to make intercession for us: “Jesus continues forever, and His priestly office is unchanging; that is why He can give eternal salvation to those who through Him make their way to God, He lives on still to make intercession on our behalf.” (Heb. 7:25) “He sits now at the right hand of God, annihilating death, to make us heirs of eternal life.” (1 Peter 3:22)