The Atonement

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The Atonement

 

John Carter

 

At a joint conference between representatives of various American and Canadian Ecclesias in the Central and Berean fellowships which was held at Jersey City, New Jersey on September 20th 1952, Brother John Carter of Birmingham Central Ecclesia addressed the delegates on the general subject “The Atonement”. In this address he explains several of the articles included in the Birmingham Amended Statement of Faith which have not been fully understood by some. This recording of Brother Carter’s address was made by direction of the Conference Committee. Here is Brother Carter.

 

I have the advantage brethren, in measure, that many of you here are quite well acquainted with what I have written over the past few years in the pages of The Christadelphian. I have the further advantage that while I have been here I have given an address on the Atonement in several places. Now in that address I have taken much more time than I have available for me this morning. I shall have to therefore be as brief as I can, but I will attempt to summarise the view of the Atonement which I personally believe to be the one that is set forth in the Statement of Faith. And then it may be possible that we can resolve any difficulties that may exist by questions.

 

In making this statement I would like to say, that I think we ought to emphasise the facts connected with the Atonement, and be careful to explain our terms when we’re using what might be described as ritual terms. For example the Atonement is many times in the New Testament defined or explained in terms taken from the ritual of the Law. That of course we can well understand, and understand indeed why it is so. Because the Law was a shadow of good things to come and the whole ritual of the Law was a prefiguration of the work that God would accomplish in Christ. But it is possible for us in using ritual terms to have one meaning in our own mind and our hearers have an altogether different meaning in theirs.

 

I have been surprised in the course of my journeys these last few weeks and meeting brethren and ecclesias of both fellowships to find how different was the understanding of certain basic words which are essential to a correct apprehension of the wonder of God’s grace which Paul expresses as:

 

“God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them.”

 

And so I will try to use as plain language as I may have at my command and will endeavour to elucidate any that is not clear.

 

We might begin our consideration of this subject by Paul’s words in Romans chapter 5 where he says that:

 

“by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”

 

And the Apostle puts that statement forward as the basis upon which he is going to explain the work of God in Christ. He tells us that at the end:

 

“as sin hath reigned unto death, so grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life.”

 

So we have sin and righteousness in antithesis, as the two operative forces. The one bringing all the disaster that is in the world, and the other the means of God’s redemption, his grace reigning through righteousness.

 

Now let us think for a moment or two about sin. Sin entered the world by one man. What is sin? The definition of our Authorised Version is that “sin is the transgression of the law”. But I think the Revised Version comes nearer to the words of John when it translates his words as “sin is lawlessness”. That is, sin is that state of mind in which a person does not recognise God’s law as the rule of his life and does not obey it. That is a deeper and a profounder thought than the Authorised Version, but it takes us to the root of the matter. The root of the matter is in the spirit of rebelliousness in the human mind in the assertion of the self of the individual.

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We see it illustrated in the beginning when God told Adam and Eve, if they disobeyed they should surely die. That definition of what would follow is amplified in the sentence that was passed upon them. But before we come to that, we can see the process of sin at work in them at the beginning. It began by entertaining doubt concerning what God had said, it passed to unbelief and it passed to the act of disobedience. But the inciting cause was expressed in the words of the serpent “ye shall be as gods”. And in being as gods they were making themselves the rulers of their own life instead of recognising the supremacy of God as the creator and their duty to obey God.

 

Now the Apostle takes up this phrase that we find in the book of Genesis when speaking of the work of Jesus:

 

“Though he were in the form of God, he thought it not a thing to be grasped at to make himself equal with God.”

 

Surely a clear reference to what we read in Genesis. But Jesus

 

“humbled himself and became obedient to death, even the death upon the cross. Wherefore God has highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name”

 

So Jesus in contrast with Adam was obedient to God. He didn’t grasp at that equality of God in which man expresses his own self-will.

 

But we go a little further in considering sin. Now sin is an expression of the personality, of his thought and of his desires. If we believed in the immortality of the soul we would be able to shunt some of the problems connected with this subject and lay them upon the soul. We could say that the soul was the thinking, the moral being, the responsible being. But we are flesh and blood creatures, so organised as living beings that we have power to think rationally in contrast to the lower creatures which are bounded by instinct. We can think rationally, and not only can we think rationally, but we can bring to the bar of our judgement our actions and determine whether they are right or wrong according to whatever standard we may have adopted. Our moral life then is closely integrated with our life of thought and both are related to ourselves as physical beings.

 

Now just as in thought we learn by rote, and an impression is made deeper and deeper in our consciousness by some arrangement of those elements of our grey matter, we know not how, so it is with regard to actions, moral actions are there expressed. And we can see this if we study ourselves in action too. We do something and we think about it, we feel a sense of shame, we feel guilty, and we think we mustn’t do it again. But temptation arises again and we yield a second time, and unless we are very careful we shall find that we are not quite so serious in condemning ourselves the second time as we were the first, and if we have done a thing four or five times we shall find ourselves, to use a modern term, rationalising the process and excusing it. Now Paul says sin deceives, sin deceives. He speaks of the deceitfulness of sin. He can even express the fact in a figure when he says:

 

“Satan is transformed into an angel of light”

 

And so we aware that as we do wrong there are these changes in us, these changes in us, by which a wrong becomes a part of ourselves. And this is one of the peculiar things concerning sin, that I wonder whether that as a community we have sufficiently thought about. The trouble with the forgiveness of sins is, that sin by its repetition has at last become the person himself. And how can you separate him from his sin when his sin is so much a part of himself. How can God forgive sins, and how can God forgiving sins bring to bear upon man that power which will emancipate himself from the thraldom of his own wrong. These are the problems pertaining to sin.

 

And the Bible tells us quite clearly some things about it in keeping with what I have said. For example we read in Isaiah in connection with the folly of idolatry:

 

Isaiah 44:20 “He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?”

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In other words sin blinds the sinner so that he becomes incapable of discerning that sin is really sin, “he cannot deliver his soul”. And John gives us the counterpart of that in his epistle when he says with a very searching word

 

“He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness,”

 

now it is the next phrase particularly

 

“and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.”

 

He “knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes”. And so sin has a peculiar blinding effect and there it is always registered in ourselves. And so it was at the beginning:

 

“By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin”

 

And why did death come by sin? Because God is supreme and God is one. And there is arising out of the oneness of God a number of inevitable consequences. Paul leads us along the way to some of them at the end of the 3rd chapter of the letter to the Romans, when he says to the Jews:

 

“Is God the God of the Jews only?”

 

No, the Jews says there is one God. Then says Paul God must be God of Gentile as well as Jew. And if God is one, and therefore God of Gentile and Jew, Paul says there must be a unity and a harmony in all God’s dealings and therefore God must deal with men, all men, upon the one essential principle that is the expression of himself. But we might carry that idea of the oneness of God a little further. When man transgressed God’s law and set up his own will in defiance of the will of God man introduced a duality in the universe. And since God is one that duality is a challenge to God’s supremacy. And therefore the only thing that God can do is to destroy that which is in conflict with Himself, and therefore death must of necessity come as a consequence of sin. Now Paul tells us that there is a law of inheritance, hereditary we call it, at work in this matter:

 

“by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”

 

And so the Apostle says we are bound up in this bundle of life with Adam in two ways. Death has passed through to all men for that all have sinned. And so we inherit a [xxxxx (word or phrase obscure or missing)], which is a bias towards wrong, and we inherit in ourselves, that which brings us to death. Now this tendency to evil, the Apostle has spoken most lucidly and eloquently in the 7th chapter of the letter to the Romans when he says that the things that he would do he does not and the things he would not do he finds himself doing. And he concludes that there is therefore a law in his members warring against the law of his mind. And he calls that law in his members, “the law of sin in my members”. He tells us that in his own experience when one day his father impressed upon him that there was the Law of God and it was to be obeyed, but when the Law came sin sprang to life and I died. There it was as it were in the figure that he uses, coiled and ready to dart, and the occasion of it was the fact that the Law said “thou shalt not covet”, and there was the impulse to covet. And Paul recognised that not only was there the impulse of sin, ready to be provoked in him by the Law, but also that it was right that the consequence of sin should be death. And so in comprehensive phrase the Apostle can say, “the wages of sin is death”.

 

And if nothing more was said, that would be the end of the matter. But it can’t be the end of the matter because Isaiah challenges the idolaters that they were worshipping a God that could not save. In other words the utter folly of idolatry is in worshipping an impotent God. And just as God must punish sin with death, so God must be a Saviour because by the same rule of his supremacy he cannot allow man’s introduction of sin to frustrate his purpose in placing man upon the earth. And so God announces himself, in contrast to the idols that cannot save, as one who can save. And he describes himself as “a righteous God and a Saviour”, an association of terms, righteous God and a Saviour which you will recall are used by Paul when he speaks of the grace of God reigning through righteousness unto eternal life. And therefore in the context of that saying, God says “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth”

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Now what has God done in order that he might be the Saviour? He must work and will work consistently with his own being, and this is what he has done. He has raised up a Son who was a member of our race. To be a Saviour and a Redeemer he must himself be a member of the race, because he is going to be the representative man. And he must be experimentally himself the subject of that which he is going to bring to others. But it was necessary that he should be of our nature, tempted and tried in all points like as we are.

 

And the Apostle with a very surprising emphasis, brings to our notice the oneness of Jesus with ourselves as sharing our nature.

 

“Forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he took part of the same”

 

And that might be sufficient as a statement of fact, but Paul wants to emphasise it, and so he says “he himself took part of the same”. But still there’s more emphasis “he himself also took part of the same”, and yet still more emphasis, “he himself also likewise took part of the same”. And there is the emphatic statement of the oneness of Jesus with ourselves. And it behoved God to provide us with a merciful High Priest who has been tempted in all points like unto ourselves And he was tempted because he knew our frame, and he shared our sorrows, its weariness, its trials, and its temptations, because while he was Son of God he was also made of a woman.

 

And so we see him with his genealogy traced back in Matthew to David and to Abraham. We see him with the genealogy traced back in Luke to Adam, who was Son of God but son of earth. The earth was his mother, the mother of Jesus was a member of the race. God’s creative activity produced man at the beginning, and God’s creative power produced the new man, but he was a member of the race, his mother was a woman of the race.

 

And we see what was done when we consider Jesus at his baptism. John was preaching as “the voice crying in the wilderness”:

 

“All flesh is grass, and the glory of man as the flower of the field.

The grass withereth and the flower thereof fadeth away,

Surely the people is grass”.

 

That is, man was mortal. And people went out to John to be baptised of him, confessing their sins. And it must have been a very striking moment in John’s life when this grave young man in the fulness of his powers stepped out. And in contrast to all others, who had found one of the many words in the rich vocabulary of the Hebrews concerning sin, to express that which they had to confess, and he had none. We are not told what he said, but it must have been a statement of the fact that he had no sins to confess. And it produced the natural recoil in John:

 

“I have need to be baptised of thee, and comest thou to me”.

 

Mark well the answer of Jesus:

 

“Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness”.

 

And we might notice that plural pronoun “us”, because what was done by him has to be done by others too. “Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” What was done by him was something that upheld the righteousness of God. For what he did in symbol in that voluntary death, he did in fact when he allowed himself to be brought to the cross. And it was necessary that he should go there because it was the Father’s will. “He was obedient”, we are told, “even to the death on the cross”. And it was the Father’s will that he should come there, because only in that way could there be that declaration of God’s righteousness, which is the necessary condition upon which sins can be forgiven. And so Paul uses the words that Jesus himself had used at his baptism, when in perhaps what is the most important and the most lucid statement concerning the Atonement, Paul wrote in the 3rd chapter to the Romans, that:

 

“God hath set forth Jesus to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past;”

 

Then Paul repeats it for emphasis:

 

“To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of them that believe.”

 

And now I must point out, which probably you know, that our English language being rich in its very varied roots has a great number of synonyms. And sometimes the verbal form comes from one root and the noun form from another root. In some cases we have related forms from the one root. Thus we can say, I believe, or we can have the noun belief. We have the word faith, but we haven’t a verb that comes from the root faith. We have to use some circumlocution such as “I have faith”. And the words faith and belief in our Bible are translations of a cognate series of words used by Paul. And in the same way the words just and justify are translations of the word that is translated righteous. We can say, “to justify”, but we cannot say in English “to righteousify”, because we haven’t developed the verbal form of the word righteous in the idiom of our speech. And because these words are used with varied translations in this 3rd chapter of the letter to the Romans which we have quoted, might we venture to freely paraphrase it in this way, that:

 

“God has set forth Jesus to declare God’s righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, to declare I say at this time God’s righteousness, that God might be righteous himself, and yet the bestower of righteousness upon them that believe.”

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And so the very condition of our sins being forgiven that we might be proclaimed righteous by God is that his righteousness should be declared in the work of Jesus. Now this is a key passage, and I don’t think it can be emphasised too much in the consideration of this subject. Here is the very nerve of the matter, here is illustrated the principle of God’s working. Now how did Jesus declare the righteousness of God? He did it by voluntarily laying down his life. And when we speak of his sacrifice and of his offering and when we speak of his shed blood, we are only using synonyms for the fact that he voluntarily laid down his life in obedience to God’s commandment. And if we can remember that we are using synonyms and resolve our terms into the plain statement of fact, I am sure that some of our difficulties shall vanish and we shall all come to a clearer understanding of this subject.

 

Jesus then went to the cross to declare the righteousness of God and we trace the connection with John’s message of the mortality of man. Was God righteous in involving Adam and all his descendants in these conditions which we have already noticed prevail as a consequence of Adam’s sin? We see Jesus as a wearer of that nature which has descended from Adam and we see him voluntarily laying down his life. As though he was saying in effect, and he did say this in effect, this nature is a nature that is a dying nature, it is a nature which is sinful in its tendencies, in all others it has produced sin. But though Jesus himself was sinless, he nevertheless as a wearer of our nature could go to the cross and say, God was right in involving this nature, this flesh, with its inhering tendencies to evil, with its inhering mortality, to death. It was unfitted to live. And God was right, God was right in what he did in involving the race in this.

 

And thus Jesus, instead of thinking it something to be grasped at, to make himself equal with God, reasserted the will of God that had been violated in Eden. And upon that basis, of the reasserted supremacy of God, God invites men and women to receive of his mercy, the forgiveness of sins if they will identify themselves with Jesus and make him their representative in what he did when he went to the cross. And so in our baptism, which is a symbolic death, we are baptised with Christ into death, we are buried with him. And so in that way we identify ourselves with him. And God recognises our acknowledgement in Christ Jesus, of the supremacy of God’s will as the rule of life. And God has said, that we who cannot do anything ourselves to provide the basis for the forgiveness of sins, forgives us for Christ’s sake.

 

But that’s only a part of the story and there’s another side that must now be introduced. For it would have been possible for any one of us by being immolated to declare God’s righteousness, but it wouldn’t have brought salvation. And so we must see the other side. And I would put to you, brethren and sisters, that when we’re engaging in contention about the nature of Christ, it is tragically possible for us to overlook the wonder of the fact that Jesus was the Son of God. And that that man displayed throughout all his life, from childhood up to the day when he was upon the cross a perfect obedience to God.

 

“He did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.”

 

“He was tempted like us, yet without sin.”

 

That is testified. And Paul in the sharpest antithesis can say that, “God hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin”. And Paul didn’t say God had made him a sin offering here, although Jesus was a sin offering, for the Greek is not patient of such an interpretation. But Paul says God has made to meet upon him all that sin has wrought, as it were, in human life. In being born of a woman, in being brought to this agony of Gethsemane, in going to the pain of the cross. God hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin. And because he was sinless, God has raised him from the dead and made him the Saviour. Because it’s only one half of the story to say that he was delivered for our offences. The other half is, he was raised again for our justification and his resurrection is the consequence of his perfectly obedient life. For if disobedience has brought death, then obedience is the way in which life can be brought. And so grace has reigned through righteousness in Jesus, the sinless one, upholding and maintaining and declaring the righteousness of God. And it reigns, it is a regnant power, unto eternal life. And so we have two regnant powers, as sin has reigned, so grace reigns.

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And here we find the resolution of the other problem. If we confess our sins and obey God in repenting and coming to baptism, God forgives us our sins. But what about the trouble that sin has become ourselves? But grace reigns, because in the death of Christ there is a motive power for righteousness. And Paul has expressed it beautifully, but very feelingly, I would like to go into this if time permitted, when he says in his epistle to the Galatians:

 

“I am crucified with Christ”

 

He recognised the need of being there on the cross with Christ, one with him. “For if Christ died for all, then all died”, and all must die in him to share in what he has done

 

“I am crucified with Christ, yet I live, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the power of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

 

“I do not frustrate the grace of God”, because there was a transforming power, a constraining power in the love of Christ, which working in Paul, gradually, as Paul renewed his mind day by day by learning from the word of God and applying it, gradually transformed Paul, as Paul says it must transform us. For our service is a rational one, says Paul, that is a reasonable, one springing from the reason, and therefore our minds and our reasons must gradually and steadily be brought into conformity with God’s will. It’s a slow process, it’s a life’s process, it’s never complete in anyone except in the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

 

But it may be, if we have by the renewing of our mind transformed ourselves, if we have reflecting the glory of Christ been subjected to the transformation, as Paul puts it, from glory to glory, that when we stand before Christ who is our judge, as the result of his work as the sacrifice for sins, his blood will cleanse us from all sin, because there has been in us, as much as in us as is possible, that change that we might be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

 

Now this, brethren and sisters in short, very brief, perhaps not adequate, is an outline of the essentials of this work as I see it. Its need, in what happened in Eden and its consequences upon all of us. The work of God in Christ in all the wonder of it, it’s a wonderful thing, it’s a tremendous thing surpassing our power to grasp. That, that man was the Son of God it passes our grasp. The wonder of it that God spared not his own Son, but freely gave him for us all. And God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. There is the Apostolic presentation.

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Now let us just read the clauses in the statement, 4, 5, 8, 10 and12.

 

4. That the first man was Adam, whom God created out of the dust of the ground as a living soul, or natural body of life, “very good” in kind and condition, and placed him under a law through which the continuance of life was contingent on obedience.

 

5. That Adam broke this law, and was adjudged unworthy of immortality, and sentenced to return to the ground from whence he was taken—a sentence which defiled and became a physical law of his being, and was transmitted to all his posterity.

 

And you may wish that I linger just a little there. And it may be that a little fault could be found with the phrasing of this from a grammatical point of view. The defilement was the operation of God’s moral law in life, and it’s a law that runs true today as we have tried to illustrate. But I don’t think we need quarrel about that if we put the sentence in it’s comprehensiveness as part of God’s statement when he gave the law to man and including what was passed upon him when he had transgressed. But as to it being a physical law of his being, how can it be other in the light of the illustrations we gave you. William James in his book on psychology has an interesting statement. He recalls how in the story of a man who is a drunkard said this, “I won’t count this one”. He may not said James, and a merciful heaven may not, but the molecules in his brain are counting it, and next time temptation comes they will assert themselves. It’s a law of life and that is what it means.

 

8. That these promises had reference to Jesus Christ, who was to be raised up in the condemned line of Abraham and David, and who, though wearing their condemned nature, was to obtain a title to resurrection by perfect obedience, and, by dying, abrogate the law of condemnation for himself and all who should believe and obey him.

 

“Wearing their condemned nature” I think has been adequately touched upon. “Was to obtain a title to resurrection by perfect obedience” and I think that wants a full emphasis. “And, by dying, abrogate the law of condemnation for himself and all who should believe and obey him” and that means this. That so long as he lived, just so long was he subject to the conditions of human life, with it’s temptations and it’s trials, and the operation of that in us which brings us to death, that we may call mortality. But that could no longer operate when he was dead, and his death on the cross was the condition upon which God gave him incorruptibility and life. And upon that basis, because of his perfect obedience to that and the upholding of God’s principles, God gave him a nature which is God’s own nature, the Divine nature. And he promises it us, that he will transform the bodies of our humiliation, to the likeness of the body of his glory, according to the working of that power, whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself. But this is extended to all who believe and obey him

 

10. That being so begotten of God, and inhabited and used by God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was Emmanuel, God with us, God manifest in the flesh

 

And that to me is the most wonderful thing, that here was one who could be described as Emmanuel, God manifest in the flesh. “The Word was made flesh” says John “and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. And the man who was thought of as the carpenter of Nazareth, just as a man among men, could yet say, “which of you convicteth me of sin?” And he could say, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”. We might go back to the Doctor’s exposition of Deity manifested in flesh to rise a little to an apprehension of the doctrine of Theophany as it is revealed in the scriptures. Reading on:

 

[Clause 10 (cont’d)] —yet was, during his natural life, of like nature with mortal man, being made of a woman, of the house and lineage of David, and therefore a sufferer, in the days of his flesh, from all the effects that came by Adam’s transgression, including the death that passed upon all men, which he shared by partaking of their physical nature.

 

I think what has been said sufficiently illustrates that.

 

12. That for delivering this message, he was put to death by the Jews and Romans, who were, however, but instruments in the hands of God, for the doing of that which He had determined before to be done, namely, the condemnation of sin in the flesh, through the offering of the body of Jesus once for all, as a propitiation to declare the righteousness of God, as a basis for the remission of sins. All who approach God through this crucified, but risen, representative of Adam’s disobedient race, are forgiven. Therefore, by a figure, his blood cleanseth us from sin.

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And now we’ll just look for a minute at the phrase that is used here, “that God had determined before to be done, namely, the condemnation of sin, in the flesh”. And you noticed that I’ve tried to separate “sin” from “in the flesh”, for “sin in the flesh” is not a hyphenated phrase as though it were “sin–in–the-flesh”. It isn’t a compound phrase like that, and I am afraid it has been thought of as such. Paul has been speaking in the 7th chapter of sin that dwelleth in me, and those impulses in human nature are by metonymy called sin. And the figure metonymy is where cause is put for effect, or effect for cause, or some other relationship for the thing itself. And Paul speaks of these impulses within him as sin because they lead to sin. They’re part of that bias which is part of the whole man, as a thinking moral being, an organised being. And as a descendant of Adam there is this bias, this tendency to evil. And this tendency is by that figure of metonymy described as sin.

 

And it’s in the flesh, but in the flesh doesn’t mean just human tissue from that point of view. The flesh is put for the whole man, the flesh and blood man, the man as he is, as a thinking rational, and in the case of all men, sinful man, in whom there is sin, this impulse, this waywardness, call it what you will. And this which is there is the very embodiment of the rebelliousness against God, as a result of which death has come, and it has got to be condemned. And it was condemned by Jesus all his life overcoming it, and then it was put to utter reprobation, when on the cross he says, “human flesh with its waywardness and its weakness, its inhering evil tendencies is something to be put away. And it couldn’t have been said more emphatically than in the act which Jesus did when he went to the cross. “The condemnation of sin in the flesh through the offering of the body of Jesus, once for all, as a propitiation to declare the righteousness of God”. And that brings it together.

 

Now this list includes 4 and 5 of “Doctrines to be Rejected”.

 

4. That Christ was born with a “free life”.

 

And you may say, “Whatever does that mean?” I’ve been asked once or twice, “Brother Carter, I’ve been reading “Doctrines to be Rejected” What does that mean which says “That Christ was born with a free life” in the “Doctrines to be Rejected”?” I wonder how many of the younger people here know anything about it. Well we ought to know something about it, before we talk about it being a doctrine to be rejected.

 

Well here’s the history of it very briefly. In the 70’s of last century a man called Edward Turney put forward a theory concerning God’s work in Christ. And his theory can be briefly expressed in this way: that when Adam sinned his life was condemned, his life. Now when you think of that carefully it’s rather foolish, because what is a man’s life. It isn’t something that you can take and put in a bottle and label and condemn. Man is a living being because he is an organised being, in life. And we can’t define life. We see its manifestations, we know when it has ceased to be when death comes, but you can’t condemn life. You can condemn the individual. And so Brother Roberts in the 70’s of the last century met this error by the emphasis which The Christadelphian magazines of those years contains, that our nature is a sinful nature, is such because of sin at the beginning and it is the man as a living organised being that was sentenced to return to the dust of the ground. Now this was put forward to explain the Atonement, and Edward Turney’s view was, and it isn’t this that has troubled us much, so much as that side of his case, that Jesus, because he was the Son of God had a life, and again that’s an abstraction, a life free from condemnation. And therefore Christ could give that life free from condemnation to offset the condemned life of Adam. And so Edward Turney said Jesus had a free life. One wonders sometimes what brethren have done in the use of terms in the controversies because we wonder if we haven’t sometimes reached the limit of absurdities in the things that have been said. Now that is what this doctrine refers to.

 

But in the controversies of the years, there came a time in the 90s, when JJ Andrew put forward the view that the sentence upon Adam was a sentence that passed to all of us and it held us in the grave. And that unless we pass from Adam and the sentence upon him and upon us into Christ, we cannot be raised from the dead. And that philosophy was put forward by JJ Andrew to resolve a tension in his own domestic life in order that he might escape from the thought that those who knew the revealed will of God and hadn’t obeyed it, could not be raised from the dead. But that put an emphasis upon condemnation which went to an error, altogether an extreme that was wrong. I don’t think that there is any doubt about that. And his views have been resisted with a possible swing to the other extreme, and again maybe a falling into error.

 

And so if we are intelligently assenting to these doctrines to be rejected, we must know a little of the history of the Truth, and recognise that these phrases are really potted history, potted ecclesial history. And that is what that clause refers to.

 

5. That Christ’s nature was immaculate.

I don’t think we need spend any time on that.

 

27. That there is no sin in the flesh.

Well in the light of what I said, I don’t think we need to go further on that.

 

Now I’ve taken a little more time than I thought. I hope I haven’t wasted any time. I have tried to speak slowly and deliberately, although I usually speak quicker than I have done this morning because I wanted all to hear clearly, and I wanted all to have time to think of what I’ve said. As you’ve noticed I have spoken extemporary, I’ve spoken from my heart, I’ve spoken as I understand the Scriptures to teach. It may be because I haven’t written out and therefore read with all the disadvantages of that, that some of my own language may not be free from obscurity. I hope you have understood it, I hope I have made my meaning clear.

 

TheAtonementJohnCarter.pdf