33. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. Our point is that a corporate

act must be external to the individuals who unite to
make it.

34. DR. FAIRBAIRN. We agree that there can be no religion
without its proper external expression. That is one thing,
but it is quite another thing to say that the corporate act
or expression must be external. The corporate is not the
corporeal, but may even be its antithesis or negation. The
sacrifice of Christ expressed corporate relations and
interests, but these were not exhausted by His corporeal
form and suffering.

35. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. No ; but the corporeal form

supplies the externality which is essential to a corporate
act of sacrifice.

36. DR. MOBERLY. It is not necessary to say that the external
involves the corporate.

37. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. The sacrifice is not identical
with the righteousness which is the spirit of the sacrifice.
Our Lord's action, when He says ' I come to do Thy will,'
becomes a sacrifice, because he offers His sacred humanity;
that is, an outward offering by which the inward will is



96 FIRST DISCUSSION [1.88-45

realized as a sacrifice ; and the sacrificial language we use
about our thoughts and prayer and praise is only intel-
ligible in view of the fact that there is a sacrificial gift and
outward act which constitutes them our sacrifices.

38. DR. FAIRBAIRN. What is the sacrificial idea behind this

sacrificial language ?

39. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. The outward sacrifice of
Christ's body, in union with which we offer our inward
spiritual sacrifices.

40. DR. FAIRBAIRN. If the sacrifices be inward can they be
corporeal acts ? and in whait sense are they corporate ?

41. CANON GORE. Surely what our Lord created for us by

His expiatory sacrifice was the freedom of approach to
<&od. It is that expiation of His which admits us into
that life which is (not in the expiatory, but in the more
fundamental and general sense) sacrificial. The wisest
and truest use of language appears to me to restrict the
phrase ' propitiation or ' expiation ' to Christ's initial work
for us ; but to assert also that propitiation does not exhaust
sacrifice, but rather restores the worshipper to its true and
original exercise.

42. DR. SALMOND. We have again and again, as I have said,
and in very explicit terms in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
the distinction drawn between two sacrifices gifts and
sacrifices for sin. Now when Canon Scott Holland speaks
of our ' sacrifices/ does he mean that they belong to the
second category sacrifices for sin ? I admit that the New
Testament says that we have sacrifices to offer, but in
what sense and of what kind ?

43. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. Only in the sense that Christ
was our sacrifice, and that we take part in His atoning
sacrifice.

44. DR. FAIRBAIRN. Does then our sacrifice like His atone
for sin ?

45. DR. MoBERLY. Apart from Him it does not.



I. 46-58] FIRST DISCUSSION 97

46. DR. SALMOND. Apart from Him, we all agree, it has no
virtue. But has any sacrifice we can offer any virtue in
itself, or any such expiatory virtue as His has ?

47. DR. MOBERLY. We become a part of His sacrifice, and
our acts are echoes or expressions the result of God's
grace and not the cause.

48. DR. SALMOND. 'Is there anything in the New Testament
which attributes to our sacrifices the capability of effect-
ing the remission of sins, any propitiatory or expiatory
efficacy?

49. CANON GORE. My inclination would be to deny that our
sacrifices were propitiatory or expiatory.

50. MR. ARNOLD THOMAS. What sacrifices are we speak-
ing of?

51. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. We are speaking of the
sacrifice of a broken heart, and the value it has in Christ.

52. DR. SALMOND. We all agree that the grace of the Spirit
comes to us through Christ, and that it is only in virtue
of that that any offering we are competent to make has
any worth.

53. MR. LANG. May I ask what Dr. Salmond means by
sacrifices ? I think he has in his mind such sacrifices
as the offering of prayer for forgiveness of sins.

54. DR. SALMOND. Yes. The sacrifices which the New
Testament speaks of the believer as offering are those
' spiritual sacrifices ' of which prayer is one.

55. MR. LANG. Then our prayer for forgiveness of sin
would avail, not for any inherent efficacy of its own, but
because it unites us with the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

56. DR. FORSYTH. I would ask, can the Church reproduce
the sacrificial act which constituted it ?

57. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. No.

58. MR. HEADLAM. May I inquire in what way is the prayer

of a righteous man efficacious in what way is it propitia-
tory or expiatory ?

H



98 FIRST DISCUSSION [1.59-67

59. DR. MOBERLY. I think that the question might be asked

even more effectively with reference to penitence ; because
penitence, in relation to sin has certainly about it some-
thing which can be described as of an ' atoning' character.

60. DR. SALMOND. I should hold the term ' atoning ' entirely

inapplicable to penance or to prayer.

61. MR. HEADLAM. I want to know whether we can get at
a definition which will bring this home to us. It is
because of Christ's death and sacrifice that we are in
mystical union with Him.

62. CANON GORE. I think that every one must admit that we

avoid an extraordinary amount of misrepresentation and
misunderstanding if we limit such phrases as propitiatory
and expiatory to the work of Christ for us. It is only
a limitation of phrase adopted to express what we all
mean.

63. MR. HEADLAM. There is no doubt that a very large
part of Christendom, both in the East and the West,
believe that the eucharist is propitiatory. Although we
don't agree with that, we must find out what inherent and
fundamental truth there is in it. Can we in any sense
say that prayer is propitiatory, although we dislike the
phrase ? In the same way they may say that the eucha-
rist should be propitiatory, although we wish to avoid the
phrase.

64. DR. SALMOND. Of course the Roman Catholic Church

goes far beyond that.

65. DR. MOBERLY. I don't think you can ask what the
sacrifices of a Christian are, on the hypothesis that they
can conceivably be at all apart from Christ. The hypo-
thesis implies a distinction which is necessarily misleading.

66. DR. FAIRBAIRN. Then are you not arguing for a position
which identifies the creation with the Creator ; the equiva-
lent in Christian Theology of Pantheism in Philosophy ?

67. DR. MOBERLY. I do not think so.



I. 68, 69] FIRST DISCUSSION 99

68. DR. SANITAY here intimated that the time for the adjourn-
ment had arrived.

69. DR. FAIRBAIRN. I think, Dr. Sanday, you have every
reason to congratulate yourself with regard to this con-
ference. It has begun well and is leading up to important
questions.

The Conference then adjourned.



H a



100 SECOND DISCUSSION [II. 1, 2



SECOND DISCUSSION.

1. DR. SAND AY. I think it will be best on the whole to

follow the same order of proceeding as this morning. We
shall have to finish quite punctually by half-past six, and
I therefore think we will begin with five-minute speeches.
I will once more call upon Father Puller to commence.

2. FATHER PULLER. I will take up the line I suggested

tttis morning in regard to the complex character of the
sacrificial act as set forth in the Old Testament, and apply
it to that which we are now prepared to discuss the New
Testament doctrine of sacrifice and of priesthood. I would
lay great stress on the thought that while our Blessed
Lord's death on the cross is a most essential and funda-
mental element in His sacrifice, His priestly work is
especially to be connected with His life in glory. I have
pointed out that the killing of the sacrifice was not in the
typical dispensation a sacerdotal act, and that it was only
accidentally that a priest ever took any part in it, and that
when on any occasion the priest did kill the victim, he
was not acting as a priest, but rather as the offerer.
Similarly I am accustomed to regard our Lord, when He
was dying on the cross, rather as the victim than as the
priest. This, I think, is the teaching of the Epistle to
the Hebrews. The author of that Epistle seems always
to connect our Lord's priesthood with His life in the
state of glory. I would refer specially to Heb. ii. 17;
v. 5-10 ; vi. 20 ; vii. 28 ; viii. 2, 3 ; and I would lay
stress on the fact that Dr. A. B. Davidson, of Edinburgh,
in his remarkable commentary on the Epistle to the



2] SECOND DISCUSSION IOI

Hebrews, to a great extent bears me out. Dr. Davidson,
on p. 151, says : ' It is doubtful if the Epistle anywhere
regards the Son's death considered merely in itself as
a priestly act. . . . The Epistle seems to confine the high-
priestly ministry to the acts done in the sanctuary, and to
refrain from including under the priesthood, when it is
spoken of distinctively, any acts not done there.' I would
call special attention to what is said about our Lord's
becoming a High Priest in Heb. v. 5~ IQ - The holy
writer says : ' So Christ also glorified not Himself to be
made a High Priest, but He that spake unto Him, " Thou
art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee." ' Here I note
in passing that our Lord's elevation to the High Priesthood
is by implication described as a glorification of Him by
the Father; and it is also implied that the Father was
glorifying the Incarnate Son to be High Priest, when in
the words of the second Psalm He said, ' Thou art My
Son, this day have I begotten Thee.' But those words
are interpreted by St. Paul of our Lord's Resurrection
(see Acts xiii. 33 and Rom. i. 4). The writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews goes on to say : ' As He saith
also in another place, " Thou art a priest for ever after
the order of Melchizedek." ' And these words are taken
from Psalm ex., a psalm of our Lord's life in glory, a psalm
which begins with the words, ' The Lord said unto my
Lord, Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine
enemies Thy footstool.' Thus our Lord's glorification to
be High Priest is connected with His resurrection and
His session in the heavenly places. The rest of the
passage, Heb. v. 7-10, will be found to corroborate this
result. Thus, it would appear that, when our Lord
entered the heavenly sanctuary and was about to present
Himself to the Father, He became a High Priest, and in
some mysterious way He fulfilled what the high priest did
on the Day of Atonement, when he went within the veil



102 SECOND DISCUSSION ' [II. 3

v**J^Jr*~~3

and offered the blood. Again, our Lord no doubt also
fulfilled the other priestly act of presenting His Holy
Body as a sacrifice.^ St. John, in the Book of the Revela-
tion, looking up into heaven, saw ' in the midst of the
throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst
of the elders, a Lamb standing as though it had been
slain.' There was the sacrifice in heaven. The lamb
was the sacrificial animal par excellence^ and our Lord is
described not simply as the Lamb, but as the bpviov s
(crQayufvov, which last word is the usual word in Leviticus
for the mactation of sacrifices. Yet the Lord is not now
dead. He is standing, for He is alive for evermore. Thus
He is represented as a living sacrifice, who has passed
through death. The Jewish sacrifices had to be offered
in death with no resurrection life in them ; while the
Christian sacrifice has passed through death and ' is alive
for evermore.'

3. ARCHDEACON WILSON. The special subject we have to
consider is the sacrifice and priesthood of Christ. I think
that when we are speaking of the sacrifice of Christ we are
speaking of the work of One whom we can only imperfectly
understand even in His functions and relations to man, and
still more imperfectly in His divine and eternal relations
to God. Those relations existed prior to, and during, and
subsequent to that which we speak of as His earthly life
and death which took place in time. Much of the con-
fusion and difficulty arises in speaking too positively and
precisely of an aspect of the subject with which we are
necessarily unable to grapple. I desire, therefore, to put
those latter relations aside as unknown to us except
through revelation as in a glass darkly; and to con-
centrate our thoughts on His human work, which we
have the faculties, at any rate in part, for understanding.
Those functions, seen from their human side, are in the
strictest sense an atonement or reconciliation with God



II. 4] SECOND DISCUSSION 103

through identity of will, perfect obedience, and service ;
and are therefore, it seems to me, rightly described
as priestly and sacerdotal, and are the perfect model
for our imitation. The only part of Christ's sacrifice
we can repeat in this spirit, forming, as we do, His body
on earth, is the perpetual consecration of life in obedience
to His spirit. Now with this understanding our priest-
hood and sacrifice are of the same nature as His, and
that is as far as they are capable of intelligible state-
ment. Something I said this morning made it seem
to one speaker that I demur to the very use of these
words. I do not demur to the use of the words
priesthood or sacrifice, although they have the mis-
fortune of gathering around them some misleading
associations. I think the only test we have of truth
in religion is vitality and permanence. Ideas which
are permanent, must be rooted in human nature, and
are not accidents of association, or of race, or of educa-
tion. It is on these grounds of vitality and permanence
that we are obliged to believe in the personality of God,
in the possibility of approach to Him through prayer,
in the possibility and reality of the eternal life. Sacrifice
and priesthood come into that category, and have been
so vital in human nature as to lay claim to correspon-
dence with real truth. The danger to us is that we should
be drawn back into the lower and magical conception
of a sacrificing priesthood, when we should go forward
towards the higher and ethical. The thought of God
of our service to Him has to be detached from the
materialistic conceptions and made more spiritual. This
appears to me to have been the special characteristic of
Christ as a teacher.

4. DR. FAIRBAIRN. When we come to our Lord's own
teaching we are met by the difficulty that He never
names Himself a priest, makes no explicit reference to



104 SECOND DISCUSSION [II. 4

His priesthood, and does not interpret His death in
the terms of the Levitical sacrifices. If we grant the
presence of the priestly idea in His mind, we shall be all
the less able to regard this failure to find some fit ritual
expression for it as accidental or insignificant. On the
contrary, it may better be described as abstention than
as silence or as reticence. If we conceive how the
priesthood and their ritual constituted the very atmo-
sphere within which the local religion lived and breathed,
we shall see how impossible it was, spontaneously or
undesignedly, to think or speak concerning worship in
terms which shut them out. But this our Lord did,
never speaking of Himself or His disciples as priests, or
indulging in any form of sacerdotal speech. If we are
to seek a reason for this remarkable abstention, we
shall find it in the governing idea or thought which
filled His mind. This is embodied in the title which,
if He does not directly use it of Himself, He yet ex-
pressly invites and allows others to apply to Him the
Christ. (Cf. Matt. xvi. 16; xxvi. 63; xxvii. n, 12, 17,
22.) He is the Messiah ; it is because He claims to be
the Messianic King that He is crucified ; and the king-
dom He founds, with its laws and ideals of conduct and
worship, is the social expression of His Messianic king-
hood. Out of the same title grew the functions He
described Himself as having come to fulfil, especially those
which stood directly associated with His sacrifice. Thus
it is out of Peter's famous confession which our Lord
Himself elicits, 'Thou art the Christ,' that His first
explicit reference to His sufferings and death grows
(Matt. xxi. 1 6, 21). The Messianic idea is even more
distinctly expressed in the second reference: 'the Son
of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister,
and to give His life a ransom for many' (Matt. xx.
26-28). The associations here are not those of a



II. 5] SECOND DISCUSSION 105

priestly ransom, but of a kingly sacrifice ; the act of
One whose right was to be ministered unto, but whose
actual work was to minister. Hence He places His
sacrificial kinghood in contrast to the dominion exer-
cised by the great ones of the earth ; they lord it over
man, while He redeems by giving Himself unto death.
When He goes up to Jerusalem it is the Messianic
idea which fills His mind, and the minds alike of His
disciples and of the people (Matt. xxi. 5, 9, 12-17).
He is welcomed as David's son, and does not refuse the
name; the question He puts to the Pharisees is, 'What
think ye of the Messiah? Whose son is He?' (Matt,
xxii. 41-46). When He institutes the Supper He does
not cease to be the King, nor does He become a priest
save in the sense in which every Hebrew father was
a priest. The vision which fills His imagination was
Israel coming out of the house of bondage, the great
domestic sacrifice by which it was achieved, and the
solemn domestic ceremonial by which it was com-
memorated. His death was the reality foreshadowed
in those paschal sacrifices which belonged to the family
and not to the priesthood ; and it signified that in His
blood a new covenant had been established, which meant
that a new people stood before God, because God had
become a new and more gracious Redeemer of His
people (Matt. xxvi. 17-28; Luke xxii. 14-20; i Cor.
xi. 23-25). But though emphasis falls on the lamb, and
the blood, and the covenant, there is no place for the
priest; the father, the family, the household are all
here, but not the temple or any of the forms proper to
sacerdotal worship (Ex. xii. 3, 21-28, 43-46).
5. DR. MOBERLY. I said this morning that the ceremonial
and the moral, the inward and the outward of sacrifice
and priesthood were but very gradually fused, and fused
perfectly only in the person of Jesus Christ. In Him



106 SECOND DISCUSSION [II. 5

outward actions or sufferings were the direct expression
of the consecrated will ; along this line of thought I can
re-echo much of what Archdeacon Wilson said just now.

But if His sacrifice may be said to find its culmination
in consecration of will, I utterly demur to any inference
that the darker implications of Old Testament sacrifice
have therefore passed out of the word. It is the whole
Old Testament, not one aspect of it, that is fulfilled in
the New. If there is the prophetic protest against merely
outward sacrifice, there is also the whole ritual of sacri-
fice itself to be accounted for ; and the principle which
lies far back in it, that 'without shedding of blood is
np remission.' Nothing of all this is in vain. It is all
not abolished, but taken up and made vital in Christ.

I do not dwell now on the thought (supremely impor-
tant though it is) that the term 'blood' never simply
means death, but essentially life ; though, no less essen-
tially, life that has passed through dying. I do not
go further into that. But if we speak of the supreme
sacrifice as finding its culmination in consecration of
will, obedience, &c., the obedience in question is not
so much obedience in its other, or brighter aspects, as
particularly the obedience of penitence. It is the culmina-
tion of moral righteousness in reference to sin the actual
consummation of perfection of penitence. Penitence, on
analysis, is found to require no less than personal identi-
fication with absolute holiness ; but with holiness par-
ticularly in its aspect as the absolute condemnation
of sin. All penitence within our experience is imperfect
penitence. Perfect penitence is only possible to the
personally sinless. In Him it would mean the surrender
of self, on sin's account, as part of the self's relentless
condemnation of sin, by virtue of that self-identity with
sinful man, which was constituted by the Incarnation,
for the very purpose that this sacrifice might be possible.



II. 6] SECOND DISCUSSION 107

I am endeavouring to answer Dr. Fairbairn's question
as to the meaning of my printed definition of the
sacrifice of Christ. It is the self-consecration of the
absolutely sinless, self-identified with the sinful so
that the absolute condemnation by righteousness, of
sin, may be made complete by the self, within the
self, and at the cost of the self; which is the ideal
consummation of what penitence, if ever it could be
absolutely perfect, would mean.

My time is finished. If I am able to add anything
further, I would rather try to do so in the time of
general conversation by-and-by.

6. DR. RYLE. I think it is essential that our attention
should be called to the absence from our Lord's teaching
of anything definitely relating to His priesthood. Our
Lord, who called Himself the Good Shepherd, and who
identified Himself with ' the Lamb who was slain,' never
identified Himself with the priest, whose work was
necessarily occupied in the constant performance of
animal sacrifice; though He dwelt in an atmosphere
of ritual associated with the sacrifice of animals, and
was Himself connected by relationship with one who
was born a priest. Our Lord and His great forerunner
were prophets and teachers ; and that part of their work
stands in the forefront of the Gospel teaching. True, our
Lord appropriated to Himself terms implying consecra-
tion ; and He called Himself a ransoming victim. But
this was only metaphorical language that would naturally
be employed in addressing Jewish hearers. In the institu-
tion of the Last Supper He introduced a memorial of
His death, a feast of sacrifice which was associated with
the thought of the lamb of the Passover, when the victim
was not killed by the priest, but by the head of the house-
hold. Moreover, both in the institution of this sacrament
and in the words with reference to Holy Baptism, our



108 SECOND DISCUSSION [II. 7

Lord addressed Himself to the Apostles as representa-
tives of the whole Society, and not as any priestly order.
The work of our Lord as a priest will include, of course,
His function of intercession, benediction and absolution.
These belong to His eternal priesthood. So far as His
historic work is concerned, there is no teaching in the
New Testament which would imply either that His
mediatorial office and sacrifice for sin were otherwise
than completely finished in Himself and in His own
person ; or that the duties of service are not to be per-
formed by all alike who were His disciples. The priest-
hood and sacrifice of Christ 'in the heavenlies,' in the
presence of the Father, seem to me matters quite beyond
the range of our conception. The self-surrender of
Christ is presented to us in the New Testament as a
propitiatory offering. The metaphor was intelligible to
the Jews, although it may not be to the modern and
Western minds which are quite unfamiliar with the
eastern sacrificial idea The Apostolic writer, in his
Epistle to the Hebrews, speaks of the Levitical system
as coming to an end. In Christ the old sacrifices were
abolished. The law and the prophets were ' fulfilled ' in
the sense of receiving their full and final meaning, not of
obtaining a new and undefined expansion. The work of
Christ as the Divine Head which has to be continued by
His ' society ' or ' body ' is not the work of expiation.
I cannot understand any way in which that atoning
work of Christ, once completed, can be said to be carried
on by those for whom the historic sacrifice was offered
7. DR. SALMOND. In endeavouring to ascertain the New
Testament ideas of sacrifice and priesthood, we should
begin, I think, with our Lord's own words, and try to get
His own conception of His work. From this we should
next proceed to the teaching of the various New Testa-
ment writers.



II. 7] SECOND DISCUSSION 109

There is less of direct utterance, however, on these
subjects in our Lord's own words than we should expect,
especially with regard to priesthood. He does not speak
directly of Himself as a priest. He speaks of His work,
however, in priestly terms, and in terms of a sacrifice.
He speaks in general terms of ' giving His life for the
sheep/ of ' sanctifying Himself,' or setting Himself apart
as a sacrifice in His death, &c. But He speaks also more
specially of ' giving His life a ransom for many,' and the
idea of ' ransom ' (X-urpov) is that of procuring by a price