05.31. Appendix C.
Appendix C.—Supplementary Remarks On The Subject Of Sacrifice By Blood. IN the earlier editions of this work, it was deemed unnecessary to do more, by way of supplement on the subject under consideration, than to indicate with some fulness the defective, though somewhat plausible, views of Bähr respecting atonement, and expose their essential contrariety to the teaching of Scripture. Since then, however, a great deal has been written upon sacrifice, both in regard to the blood which formed the more vital clement of its efficacy, and the actions which were appointed to accompany its presentation; so that the views of Bähr no longer hold the prominence in the false direction which they once did. Latterly, indeed, Hofmann (in his Schriftbeweis), with no higher views than Bähr, has endeavoured, by a still more careful and elaborate exegesis, to unsettle the received doctrines of the Church upon the points at issue. In this, however, he has been vigorously met by Kurtz, Delitzsch, and many besides, who, with solid learning as well as distinguished ability, have maintained and vindicated, on Old Testament ground, the great principles involved in the doctrine of vicarious atonement. It has been, I think, a misfortune, naturally indeed, yet unhappily, growing out of this minute and controversial discussion of the topics in question, that a degree of precision and exactness has sometimes been sought by the defenders of the church doctrine, as well as their opponents, to be imposed upon the Old Testament symbols, which they cannot fairly be expected to convey. A symbolical religion, from its very nature, addresses itself to the popular apprehension rather than the analytic and discriminating reason: it deals in what may be called the broader aspects of things; and while admirably adapted to express the more fundamental articles of belief, and impress them vividly on the mind, yet, when the question comes to be respecting the minuter shades of belief, or the preference due to one as compared with another mode of explicating the same radical idea, religious symbols are not the proper means for determining the dispute; and the probability is, that if they are turned to such an account, they will serve the purpose of a perverted ingenuity as well as of a scriptural faith. It had been well if some of the distinguished men above referred to had refused to be led upon such uncertain ground. With this general remark, for the application of which some occasion will presently be found, we proceed to notice certain of the disputed points on the subject of sacrifice by blood.
1. What may fitly be taken first, is the sacrificial import of the blood. Was this in the room of the offerer’s blood or life? and if so, did it convey the idea of a penal quid pro quo? On this point, it is scarcely necessary to refer to the differences which still exist on the proper translation of Leviticus 17:11. Instead of, “for the blood makes atonement through or by means of the soul,” which, after Bähr, Delitzsch, Keil, Kurtz, etc., we conceive to be the correct rendering, Hofmann would take the preposition (
Another and more important question has respect to this atoning power in the blood, whether it was simply as blood, or as blood that had been shed in death—in other words, whether we are to emphasize the blood alone, or the blood in connection with the death which preceded, and in which it flowed out. Bähr had sought to separate the blood, as containing the nephesh or life, from the death going before, and to make account only of the former: he would have the blood, and not the death, to be regarded as the core of the sacrifice; although on his system, which makes all to stand in the giving away of the natural life in death, as being all one with giving it away or surrendering it to God, he found it impossible to properly dissociate the two. But Hofmann goes straight to the point; with him it is the blood, and nothing else. “The nephesh of the offering is not that which comes upon the altar, but the blood which streamed forth in the slaying, and which had been the animal’s life or soul while it was in the creature; therefore, also, not a life that had been killed, but that wherein the beast had had its life.”—(Schriftbeweis, p. 240) And again, on Leviticus 17:11 : “In this passage we neither find the blood and the soul treated as one; nor are we told how far the blood, when it was applied to the altar, had an expiatory effect,” etc. His object is to destroy as much as possible the peculiar significance of sacrifice by blood, to identify the bloody and unbloody offerings, and make sacrifice generally the payment of a sort of redemption-fee, or compensation, with faith on God’s pardoning mercy. There was in it merely the parting with one’s own property, which had been acquired with labour, and which, in the case of an animal, was besides related, as a living creature, to the offerer, and dear to him. But as the radical idea of atoning in Scripture is that of covering, it can never be identified with a compensatory payment, which, as Delitzsch justly remarks (Hebr., p. 740), is a metaphor entirely foreign to the Hebrew language. According to its mode of representation, it is not the thing exigible which was covered by the ransom, but the person in whose behalf the ransom was paid. It is also a vain attempt at hair splitting to distinguish, as Hofmann seeks to do, between the blood and the nephesh of the animal as devoted to death for the offerer. It was plainly the soul contained in and represented by the blood, which gave its value and significance to the blood; and in the common apprehension the two could not fail to be regarded, in a sacrificial respect, as one. Manifestly, to use the words of Delitzsch, “the soul of the beast, when given to make atonement for the soul of the offerer, entered into the place of the soul of the man; since, being poured out in the blood, it covered the death-deserving soul of the man before an angry God.” So much for the general idea; but if we ask, How or in what sense covered? the answers given take different shades in the hands of different interpreters, as we have no doubt the matter itself did in the experience of different worshippers; for they are but various phases of the same idea, in respect to which the symbol could not sharply distinguish. Thus Delitzsch: “The blood in the sacrifice atones, i.e., covers for sinful man, as a third thing entering between him and God, and brought upon the place of God. It enters there for the man; and as it enters for the man, whose sin, though in respect to God’s dispensation of grace a peccatum veniale, yet as sin has worked death, so there is no getting rid of this, that it enters as a substitution for the man.” Œhler (in Hertzog, Opfercultus): “The guilt is covered, and hence no longer exists for the Divine observation, is wiped away; as also the forgiveness of sin is expressed by a covering of iniquity, and a casting of it away into the depths of the sea.—(Psalms 32:1; Micah 7:19) The immediate consequence is, that by means of such covering the sinful man is protected before the punishing Judge, and without danger can draw nigh to the holy God.” Kurtz is not quite satisfied with these explanations, and thinks they scarcely come up to the definiteness which is attainable by a careful consideration of the language of Scripture. According to him, “the covering of sin in the sacrificial worship is a covering by which the accusing or condemnatory power of sin—its power to excite the anger and wrath of God—is broken; by which, in fact, it is rendered both harmless and impotent. And, understood in this sense, the sacrificial covering was not merely an apparent conventional expiation of sin (which would have been the case if it had been merely removed from the sight of Jehovah), but a process by which it was actually rendered harmless, which is equivalent to cancelling and utterly annihilating.” In reality, there is no proper difference between the several explanations, except that some particular aspect or bearing of the truth gets greater prominence in one than another. The basis of the whole plainly lay in the life-blood of the victim taking the place and bearing the doom (symbolically, of course) of the offerer; for this alone, in the presence of a righteous God, could warrant the covering of the guilt, or the person who had committed it, so that it ceased in a manner to exist as an object of wrath before the Holy One.
2. The laying on of hands, which stood in a very close relation to the blood in its sacrificial import, is another point about which there has been much recent discussion. In the course of it, Kurtz has been led to modify the view he formerly entertained and set forth in his treatise on the Mosiac offerings, though we think his difficulties and change of view are the result chiefly of that over-refinement in discussion, to which this series of topics has given rise. Formerly, indeed, he carried the idea understood to be expressed by the action of a transference of guilt to an extreme; for in all the offerings, peace and burnt-offerings, as well as those for sins and trespasses, he connected it with that idea alone. This was certainly too exclusive; and by the greater part of orthodox writers, the transference of guilt is supposed to have been exclusively indicated only in the case of the sin and trespass-offerings, while in the others this would to a certain extent fall into the background, that expression might also be given to the other feelings proper to the particular offering; though latterly the tendency has been to give too little prominence to the sense and imputation of guilt. So, for example, Delitzsch: “By the imposition of hands, the persons presenting the sacrifice dedicated the victim to that particular object which he hoped to attain by its means. He transferred directly to it the substance of his own inner nature. Was it an expiatory sacrifice? he laid his sins upon it that it might bear them, and so relieve him of them.” So also Hengstenberg, who takes it to indicate “the rapport between the person sacrificing and the sacrifice itself. Anything more precise must necessarily be learned from the nature of the particular sacrifice.” Hofmann, however, sought to explode this view of the imposition of hands, with all its subordinate shades of meaning; and to show that it meant simply “the appointing of the animal to be slain, for the double aim of obtaining its blood for the altar, and its flesh for food of fire to Jehovah—and this equally whether it was destined for supplicating God’s favour toward the sinner, or presenting thanks and prayers in respect to the goods of life.” He asks, in regard to the laying on of hands, when the person doing so was going to impart a blessing, or accomplish a cure, whether he exchanged places with the individual benefited, or conveyed over to him what he himself had? And if, in such cases, he did not give his own peace, or his own soundness, why should it be thought that in animal sacrifices the offerer transferred his own, either guilt or thanksgiving, to the victim? So also, in appointing to an office, those who laid their hands on the person designated did not make over to him their own official standing, but simply destined him to some specific undertaking.
Kurtz has yielded to these considerations so far. He thinks it improbable that the imposition of hands in the different kinds of sacrifice could have been intended to effect the transfer of different objects, unless some indication had been given of the difference. He thinks, and justly thinks, that there could not be a total difference between the meaning of the action in sin-offerings and burnt-offerings, or even peace-offerings, because what followed in respect to the life-blood was so nearly akin in all, viz. the slaughtering and sprinkling with blood. “Take (he says) the burnt-offering, in connection with which, in the very front of the sacrificial law, in Leviticus 1:4, expiation is so evidently, expressly, and emphatically mentioned as one point, if not as the main point, and placed in the closest relation to the laying on of hands (‘He shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt-offering, and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him’). Is it really the fact, that even here the imposition of hands stood in no relation whatever to the expiation? Certainly, if there were nothing to overthrow such a view, the passage just quoted would suffice, and before this alone it would be compelled inevitably to yield” (ch. iii). And this proves the inadequacy of Hofmann’s view, that the laying on of hands was only a matter-of-fact declaration that the animal brought to the altar was destined to the purpose of sacrifice: for the very bringing of it there declared that; and to connect the further act of laying on of hands in so peculiar a manner with the acceptance of the offering and the forgiveness of the offerer, would have been unaccountable. In all the other acts, too, of imposition of hands, such as ordination to a particular office, there is always implied something more than a mere declaration of the end in view; there is a formal destination to the purpose, and solemn devolving on the party concerned all that is necessary to its accomplishment.
Now it is this more general sense which Kurtz is disposed to attribute to the action of laying on of bauds, which (Elder also, and others, have come to adopt. Œhler’s definition is, “that the offerer, when, through the presentation of his victim, he had declared his readiness to present it as a gift to God, now through the laying on of his hands made to pass over upon the animal the intention with which he brought the gift, and so dedicated it to the sacrifice, which represented his person in the specific direction intended.”—(Hertzog, x., p. 627) Kurtz, also, is disposed to rest in the general sense of dedication, as what the act involves in all cases, but with a specific aim according to the nature of the particular service or occasion. In some cases, there was indicated by the dedication the substitution of one person for another, as when the Levites were put in the place of the first-born, and Joshua in the place of Moses (Numbers 8:10; Deuteronomy 34:9); but in others there was no room for this. In sacrificial offerings, however, there was room, and the special object of the service was to set apart the victim as the offerer’s representative and substitute to the ends for which it was presented. Thus, in the burnt-offering, Leviticus 1:4, it denoted “the dedication of the sacrificial animal as the medium of atonement for the sins of the person whose hands were kid on its head.” Or, as he otherwise puts it, there was in the act “the transference of an obligation by the person sacrificing to the animal to be sacrificed, that it might render or suffer all that was due from him to God, or, vice versa, on account of his sin; and through this, the blood of the animal, in which is its soul, became the medium of expiation for the soul of the person sacrificing “(ch. iii., § 43). It is only, therefore, as to the form of the representation that Kurtz has changed his opinion: instead of a transference of sin, he would make it a transference of obligation to take the offerer’s room, and do or suffer all that he owned him-elf bound to; but as the shedding of blood always had respect to sin and its atonement, the obligation in question necessarily earned with it a prominent reference to the hearing of death as the wages of sin. Yet the learned author thinks he has greatly improved his view by this change, and has got rid of an otherwise insuperable difficulty; since, if the sins adhering to the sold of the person sacrificing were to be atoned or covered by the blood of the sacrifice, as is affirmed in Leviticus 17:11, then these sins could not have been communicated to the blood itself, or the soul that was in the blood: they must have adhered to the soul of the sacrificer after the imposition of hands as well as before, viz., to render it possible for them to covered.
I confess I cannot see the force of this argument, although Kurtz seems to think it almost self-evident; and it appears to me, that the difficulties which have been thrown around the subject are but another exemplification of the effort so apt to be made by learned men, studying and writing in their closets, to distinguish where common minds could see no essential difference, and to make the symbolical action in question speak with more precision and definiteness than it was properly designed or fitted to do. First of all, the view has against it the explanation given of the action on the one occasion, where an explanation was given; namely, on the great day of atonement, when the high priest was instructed “to lay his hands on the head of the goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, putting them on the head of the goat.” This, Kurtz is obliged, without any reason in the nature of things, to regard as an exceptional case. One would rather imagine that, being by way of eminence the atonement day for Israel, it was that which might be expected, in some degree, to throw light on atonements generally. Then, if the personation of the offerer, as a sinner, with the destination to bear the penalty due to his sin, was the more immediate and prominent aim of sacrifice by blood, what could it signify for the great mass of worshippers, whether one should say his obligation to suffer was transferred to it, or his sins as to their guilt were so transferred? To them it would make no appreciable difference which form were adopted. And the argument derived with such apparent satisfaction from the circumstance of the offerer’s sins being covered by the blood of the offering, consequently still regarded as adhering to him, is precisely such an argument as might occur to a scholar, criticising and scanning the exact meaning of the words, but would scarcely be dreamt of by a worshipping people, who had to do with the complex transaction. Nay, how does it square with Kurtz’s own explanation already given, about the covering of the offerer’s sin? This was covered, he says, by being rendered harmless, cancelled, extinguished, so that it had ceased to exist anyhow; and how, then, could it still be viewed as adhering to the offerer? Or how could the obligation to suffer for it be transferred without the guilt, which involved the obligation, being transferred along with it? Apart from the guilt, the obligation could have had no meaning wanted, indeed, the very ground on which it was based. In short, the matter is to be viewed in its complexity, perfectly intelligible and impressive if so viewed—adapted, one might say, even to the capacity of a child; but if curiously analyzed and split into parts, instead of becoming more transparent and satisfactory under our hands, it will inevitably become involved in disorder and confusion. Let it be enough for us, as it doubtless was for the pious worshipper of old, that the victim brought to the altar was, by the imposition of hands, solemnly set apart to take his place, to bear his burden of guilt, and along with that, by the action taken with particular parts of the sacrifice, to express any other subordinate desires and feelings which may have exercised his soul. These were the grand features that appeared on the very face of the transaction: no criticism will ever be able to explain them away; and any criticism that would serve itself of minute observations and subtle distinctions, can do little to make them appear more consistent or reasonable.
3. The Slaughtering, and the Sprinkling of the Blood.—These two actions, which immediately followed the imposition of hands, go in a manner together, for they are properly but different parts of the same transaction; but a great deal depends upon the light in which they are contemplated, and the relation which they are conceived to hold one to another. It was one of Bähr’s great efforts to get rid of the slaying of the victim as a thing of any moment: he would have it regarded as simply the medium whereby the blood was obtained; and in the blood as symbolizing the giving away of the sinner’s soul, or selfish life, through repentance to God, the sacrifice really stood. The penal character of the transaction, or the juridical view, as it is called, of the atonement, was thus sought to be exploded; the slaying merely completed the exhibition of the sinner’s self-surrender. Hofmann, of course, follows in the same line, though on other grounds; for with him the compensatory value of the offering was the grand thing, and the killing of the animal could certainly no way enhance its value, and so far hangs as an embarrassment around the theory. But others, of much sounder views on the general subject, have recently joined hands with these writers in disparaging the slaughter of the animal, and making account only of the sprinkling of its blood. Delitzsch holds “the schehitah, or killing, to have served only as the means of obtaining the blood of atonement, and of making the beast an altar-gift; and the giving up of the gift in fire is only the means of the giving away to God, and being taken away by Him.”—(On Hebr., p. 742) He finds a proof of this in the circumstance, that the killing is never called a putting to death (
Now, in all this attempt to shade nicely off and distinguish between something, which the slaughtering might very readily be taken to be, and some other thing which it is held to have actually been, we have but a fresh exhibition of the tendency to give way to learned and unimportant minutiæ, which is out of place for the occasion, and which, for the sake of a small distinction, is apt to endanger great principles. Appealing, as the rite did, to popular sense and apprehension, the slaying of the sinner’s offering, solemnly destined to death, that its soul might be accepted in lieu of the sinner’s, could not but wear the aspect of a doom or judgment: it was a death not incidentally alone, but formally associated with sin as its immediate cause; and whatever grace it might instrumentally be the channel of conveying to the offerer, it manifestly fell with all the severity of a curse on the victim. People were not in a condition, at the sight of such a spectacle, to make nice discriminations: here, on the one hand, was the sin crying for condemnation, and there, on the other, was the slain victim that the cry might be silenced. Could people look at this, or take part in it, and feel that there was nothing of punishment? We may judge of the unlikelihood, when we find authors with fine-spun theories to support, which would lead them to exclude the idea of punishment, insensibly gliding into a mode of speech regarding it which ill accords with the demands of their system. Thus Keil, when he conies to speak of the sin-offering, says, that “by being slain the animal is given to death, and suffers for the sinner—i.e., as a substitute for the offerer—the death which is the wages of sin.” And on the trespass-offering, “The ram,” says he, “stood for the person of the guilty man, and by being slain, suffered death in his stead as the punishment for his guilt.” Such language stands in irreconcilable opposition to the author’s theory. And the theory itself, as Kurtz has justly remarked (ch. 4, § 53), is at variance with the relative position of things in the ordinance; if the expiation was simply in the sprinkling of the blood, while the death of the victim imaged the transition of the offerer, as a redeemed person, into the eternal and blessed life of God, the expiation should obviously have gone first, for then only was the offerer redeemed. Death before that would rather be the image of life expiring under a load of unpardoned guilt. And if the idea is admitted, as it is by Keil and the others who here go along with him, that the animal was the offerer’s substitute and representative, and as such had to make expiation for him, it must have been practically impossible to dissociate the thought of a penal suffering from the infliction of death.
Many of the individual objections pressed on the subject are so weak and frivolous a nature, that it is needless to refer to them particularly.[417] One of the most plausible that raised on the ground of the slaying being effected by the offerer himself, and not by the priest was long ago satisfactorily met by Kurtz, in reply to Bähr (Mosaische Opfer, p. 65): “The relation of punishment to sin is a necessary one; the punishment is the continuation no longer depending on the sinner’s choice—of the sin, its filling up or complement. Sin is a violation of the righteous government of the world, an impression against the law: the punishment is the law’s counter-impression, striking the sinner and paralyzing his sin. But all punishment runs out into death, which is the wages of sin. ‘Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’ Sin, therefore, is a half, incomplete thing, calling for its proper completion in death, which again is not something foreign and arbitrary, but essentially belonging to sin; so that the sinner himself may justly be regarded as self-punished. No doubt, the execution of the punishment might also be properly ascribed to God as the righteous Governor of the world; but there is a special propriety in allowing the sinner himself, in the rite of sacrifice, to perform the symbolical act of punishment: for there God appears as the merciful Being, who wills not the death of the sinner, but his atonement, his deliverance and salvation—of course in the way of righteousness; the sinner, again, as one who has drawn upon himself, through his sin, condemnation and death, and conscious of this being the case. Here, then, especially was it peculiarly proper and significant that he should accuse himself, should pronounce his own judgment, should bring it down symbolically upon himself. Whoever can explain how the criminal who has deserved death should ever desire this, and so put himself out of the reach of the grace of his monarch, can find no difficulty in explaining how the symbolical act of punishment in sacrifice should have been left to the execution of the sinner himself.”
[417] They may be seen fully discussed in Kurtz’s work on the Sacred Offerings, already referred to, now made accessible to the English reader.
It was otherwise, however, with the sprinkling of the blood, which completed the work of atonement; for this respected the acceptance of the substituted life for that of the offerer, and could only be done by God’s accredited representatives—the consecrated priesthood. The mere bringing of the victim to the altar, laying on it the guilt which burdened the sinner’s conscience, with other collateral acknowledgments, and taking from it its life-blood in token of what the offerer felt himself bound to render, however necessary and important, were still not sufficient to restore peace to his conscience. There must be the formal approval of Heaven, or the palpable acceptance of the one soul as a covering for the guilt of the other. And this was done by the pouring out or sprinkling of the sacrificial blood on the altar—not as that which, according to Hofmann, had once had the life of the animal (for apart from this it was only so many particles of blood, meaningless and worth less), but which, as flowing fresh and warm, still in a sense had it—the very life of the animal in its immediate seat and proper representation. This blood so presented, gave assurance to the offerer both of a satisfaction rendered for him by death, and of a pure life granted to him in the presence of God.
It is proper to add, in regard to some of those whose views on particular points have, in the preceding pages, been controverted—especially Delitzsch, Œhler, Keil—that they, not less than Kurtz, hold the strictly vicarious character of Old Testament sacrifice, and also the orthodox doctrine of atonement in relation to Christ’s work on the cross, in which the other rose to its proper consummation. It is only on certain parts of the symbolic ritual that they have adopted what we conceive to be mistaken and untenable views. Delitzsch, in particular, has done good service by maintaining, in his work on the Epistle to the Hebrews, the more essential features of the Church doctrine. Even comparatively slight departures, however, from the simplicity of scriptural statement on such a matter, are fraught with danger, and call for earnest resistance. And it seems somewhat strange and illogical, that he and the others just mentioned, who concur in holding the strictly vicarious and penal character of Christ’s death, should yet appear so anxious to eliminate the idea of punishment from the sacrificial institution of the law—as if (and so they often put it) because, being an institution of grace, it were incongruous to represent justice punishing where grace was forgiving. For, with Kurtz, we naturally reply, Could grace do under the Old Testament what it cannot do under the New—forgive without the satisfaction of justice? If on Calvary there was a real demonstration of Divine justice against sin, why should there not have been a symbolical one at the altar of burnt-offering? In both cases alike there was grace exhibited as reigning, but reigning, as the Apostle says, through righteousness,—pardon, indeed, freely extended to the guilty, but simply on the ground—indispensably demanded by Divine righteousness—of a vicarious or penal death having been borne by the sacrifice. Leave out this, and no satisfactory explanation can be given, why the soul of the sacrifice, in itself guiltless, should cover or wipe out the guilt of the sinner.