Table Of ContentThe Atonement
and the
Sacraments
The Atonement
and the
Sacraments
The relation of the Atonement to the Sacraments
of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
ROBERT S. PAUL
Abingdon Press
NEW YORK
NASHVILLE
@
THE ATONEMENT AND THE SACRAMENTS
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This book is humbly dedicated
to the members of the church and congregation of
Christ Church (Congregational), Leatherhead in
the County of Surrey, England,
who by their questions raised the central issues
of the faith, and who in their lives have revealed
him on whom all our faith rests
Preface
THE PREFACE OF A BOOK, I IMAGINE, SHOULD BE LIKE AN HONEST MENU
—it should give a fair account of the bill of fare with some indication
of what the reader will be expected to pay in terms of interest or ted—
iurn.
The contents of this book are concerned with the doctrine of the
Atonement and the Gospel Sacraments. At first sight it appears to be
far more about the Atonement, although we shall discover that our
discussion of that doctrine comes to its natural focus in the Sacra—
ments. However, the reader had better be warned that a great num—
ber of books have been written on the Atonement, and the addi-
tion of one more would seem to demand a fairly formidable excuse.
My excuse is the doctrine itself. If the heart of the Protestant ex-
position of the Christian faith is the great act of God in Jesus Christ
for our redemption, then we must needs struggle continually with this
doctrine in order to express in ever new and living terms what it means
to the Church. This is one of our primary aims. The book is written
by a minister for those ministers and other Christians who have dis—
covered that they cannot altogether dispense with theology and who
are involved in relating the Christian faith they profess to the Church’s
life of worship and witness.
The theme was conceived in a parish ministry and came to birth
in an ecumenical ministry. It originated in questions that were put by
church members in a pastorate that lasted nearly ten years in post—war
England. I discovered that the post—war minister could not depend
upon the theological images and formulations of the past. Nor could
he reject them as entirely worthless. Other doctrines might be ade-
quately safeguarded by creeds and confessions, but the doctrine that
deals with what God has done for us in Christ has never been so ir-
revocably defined.
Why is that? Can it be because these facts of the gOSpel are so
fundamental to our salvation and so charged with saving grace that
no human theory of their meaning in past, present, or future can claim
7
THE ATONEMENT AND THE SACRAMENTS
to be the Holy Spirit’s last word on the subject? Yet all the attempts
of faith to wrestle with their meaning have some value. This means
that we are less concerned with defending Irenaeus against Anselm or
Abelard against Bernard than with trying to discover what may be of
value to our own day in the historic theories of the Atonement. We
shall discover that those fundamental aspects of the doctrine which
can be expressed for all time bring us to the very heart of Baptism
and the Lord’s Supper.
The vital task of relating this to the Church’s apologetic still re—
mains, but that is outside the scoPe of our present study. Our con—
cern is with the prior questions, what the Atonement means to the
Church, and its relationship to the Church’s own life of worship cen-
tered in the preaching of God’s Word and the Sacraments given to us
by our Lord. For only by constantly reassessing in each generation
the meaning of the work of Christ for her own salvation can the
Church equip herself for the task of interpreting that same gospel to
the world. Until we can say clearly what it means to us, and particu-
larly what it means to us now, we shall not be able to prove its rele—
vance to the rest of mankind.
Like the classical sermon and Caesar’s Gaul, this book is divided
into three parts.
I. The Legacy from the Ancient World. We commence with an
examination of the doctrine of Atonement from the early Church to
the nineteenth century. It is a task which has been done many times,
sometimes at inordinate length and sometimes like the Levite in the
parable—with a brief glance backward for the sake of decency and a
speedy maneuver to pass by on the other side! I have attempted an
independent review of the classic theories in what I hope is a reason—
able compass. Sometimes I have been led seriously to qualify previous
judgments, and it cannot be pretended that the results will be to every—
one’s liking. Like any substantial hors d’oeuvre this section should be
treated with discretion, according to appetite and need.
II. Disputes About the Inheritance. One recent writer listed over
seventy books on the Atonement by British theologians written during
the first fifty years of this century. The list was not complete. This il-
lustrates one of the ecumenical aSpects of our subject, for national and
geographical emphases in theology are just as much a part of the ecu-
8
PREFACE
menical encounter as the issues arising from our confessional a1-
legiance. Often in ecumenical discussion American Methodists, Pres-
byterians, and Episc0palians will find that they have as much or more
in common as Americans than they have with their European co-con-
fessionalists. Just as sometimes within the same setting English
Anglicans and Free Churchmen—with a shock of surprise—discover
themselves saying the same things, although they could never agree on
the soil of Albion. Over against the clash between “Anglo-Saxon” and
“Continental” theologies (often limited to the issues between Ameri-
can and Swiss—German theology) I suggest that British theology has
had its own contribution to make which has centered in the Atone-
ment and its relationship to Church and Sacraments. Of course, one
could drive this thesis too far. British theologians are not tied to one
doctrine any more than they have a monopoly of interest in it. Until
the death of Horace Bushnell in 1876 the interest was certainly shared
in America, and there have been great continental theologians like
Ritschl who treated the doctrine with characteristic erudition and
profundity. Nevertheless, I think we can say that the Atonement has
received special attention within Britain during the past hundred
years and has become the point of reference from which theological
thinking in that country has begun and then spread into other areas
of doctrine. In this part of our study we shall therefore concentrate
upon this aspect of recent British theology which deserves to be better
known on both sides of the Atlantic. It will demand a good deal of
concentration from the reader.
III. Treasure in Earthen Vessels. At this point we shall apply the
results of our previous study to our understanding of Baptism and the
Eucharist. We are well aware that the interpretation of the Sacra—
ments is a central ecumenical problem. We live with the results of
the historic divisions over Baptism, and we have been all too con—
scious of the rival interpretations of the Eucharist—Roman, Lutheran,
Calvinist, and Zwinglian. But today all the answers of the past seem
curiously irrelevant in face of the mute scepticism of an indifferent
world. Perhaps ministers who are most alive to the needs of their
people and to the silent questions of those who watch the churches
without ever entering them are less concerned with denial than with
affirmation, less concerned with denying other peOple’s experience of
9
THE ATONEMENT AND THE SACRAMENTS
Christ’s presence than with asserting the reality of the Presence they
themselves have known in Word and Sacraments.
How is a modern Protestant to understand the Sacraments? He
can only understand them evangelically, i.e., as related to and included
within the great act of God which redeems his peOple and creates his
Church. For him there is no theology of Sacraments to be developed
as an interesting sub—theme in liturgics, but he must study the mean—
ing of the Sacraments because they are given by Christ and therefore
have their place within the gospel. They are central in worship be-
cause that which is declared through them is the same gospel of recon—
ciliation that is proclaimed in the preaching of the Word. They are
a means whereby the living and victorious deeds of Christ are re-
vealed once again in his Church.
There is, however, a further problem at which we shall glance from
time to time—the interplay between doctrine and the historical sit-
uation in which it is formulated. At first sight this seems to be a long
way from our subject, but we touch it at almost every point. A man
standing in Montana and watching a stream tumbling down the
Rockies to join the Missouri will not immediately think of it in close
relationship to the water which is cascading at that moment down
the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River. Two thousand miles
divide the two, and yet they ultimately flow together in the waters of
the great Mississippi. It is something like that within this question
of the relationship between history and doctrine. Traces of this will
flit and shadow across our page, but they will all come to focus in
the one central issue, to show how the Church makes explicit by
Word and Sacrament the message that “God was in Christ, reconcil—
ing the world unto himself."
In trying to acknowledge all those to whom I ought to express my
thanks, I can only echo the writer to the Hebrews, that the “time
would fail me” to tell of all who by their prayer, precept, writing, or
example have contributed to this book. I am particularly grateful to
former students of the Ecumenical Institute’s Graduate School of
Ecumenical Studies (especially the 5th semester) who gave my in—
terpretation of the Atonement and the Sacraments the kind of testing
that only students can give.
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