There is another consequence. Only the eternal Reconciler, the High Priest, can guarantee us our full redemption. “Take, my soul, thy full salvation.” You cannot do it except you do it in such a Cross. It is not enough to have in the Cross a great demonstration of God’s love, a forgiveness of the past which leaves us to fend for ourselves in the future Is my moral power so great after all, then, that, supposing I believe past things were settled in Christ’s Cross, I may now feel I can run in my own strength? Can I be perfectly confident about meeting temptation? Nay, we must depend daily upon the continued energy of the crucified and risen One. We must depend daily upon the action of that same Christ whose action culminated there but did not end there. His death is as organic with His heavenly life as it was with His earthly. What is the meaning of His perpetual intercession if it does not mean that – the exhausted energy of His saving act? It is by His work from heaven that we appropriate His work upon earth. He guarantees our perfection as well as our redemption.
The last step. It is only the atoning reconciliation of a whole world that guarantees the final perfecting of that world by its Creator. How do we know that creation is going to be perfected? How do we know that it is to be to the glory of God who made it and called it good? How do we know the world will not be a failure for God with all but the group of people saved in an ark of some kind? We only know because we believe in the reconciliation of the whole world in Christ’s Cross. There is a great deal of pessimism today, much doubt as to whether perfection really remains for the whole world; and you find people in the burdened West drawn to the Buddhistic idea of the human soul’s extinction. Some Christians content themselves with individual salvation out of a world which is left in the lurch, or they are satisfied with personal union with Christ securing their own future. But the gospel deals with the world of men as a whole. It argues the restoration of all things, a new heaven and a new earth. It intends the regeneration of human society as a whole. Christ is the Savior of the world, who was also the agent of its creation. The Creator has not let His world get out of hand for good and all. That is to say, our faith is social and communal in its nature. We must have a social gospel. And this you cannot get upon the basis of mere individual or sectional salvation. You can only have a social gospel upon one basis, namely, that Christ saved, reconciled the whole world as a unity, the whole of society and history. The Object of our faith, Jesus Christ, is what our fathers used to call a federal Person, a federal Savior, in a federal act. All humanity is in Him and in His act. It is quite true every man must believe for himself, but no man can believe by himself or unto himself. The Christian faith fades away if it is not nourished and built up in a community, in a Church. And the Church fades away if it do not hold this faith in trust for the whole world. Each one of us is saved only by the act and by the Person that saved the whole world.
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* See Schweitzer’s very remarkable “Quest of the Historical Jesus” (A. and C. Black) – the last two chapters – where a dogmatic and atoning motive in Jesus is declared by an advanced critic to have been the explanation of His death.
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From Peter Forsyth, The Work Of Christ; Cf. The Work of Christ at Amazon
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