Expiation

Expiation "a religious act, by which satisfaction or atonement is made for the commission of some crime, the guilt done away, and the obligation to punishment cancelled. The chief methods of expiation among the Jews were by sacrifices; and it is important always to recollect that the Levitical sacrifices were of an expiatory character; because as among the Jews sacrifices were unquestionably of divine original, and as the terms taken from them are found applied so frequently to Christ and to his sufferings in the New Testament, they serve to explain that peculiarity under which the apostles regarded the death of Christ, and afford additional proof that it was considered by them, as a sacrifice of expiation, as the grand universal sin-offering for the whole world. For our Lord is announced by John as 'the Lamb of God;' and that not with reference to meekness or any other moral virtue, but with an accompanying phrase, which would communicate to a Jew the full sacrificial sense of the term employed, 'the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.' He is called 'our Passover, sacrificed for us.' He is said to have given 'himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God, for a sweet-smelling savor.' As a priest, it was necessary 'he should have somewhat to offer;' and he offered 'himself,' 'his own blood,' to which is ascribed the washing away of sin, and our eternal redemption. He is declared to have put away sin by the sacrifice of himself, to have 'himself purged our sins,' to have 'sanctified the people by his own blood,' to have 'offered to God one sacrifice for sins.' Add to these, and to innumerable other similar expressions and allusions, the argument of the apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which, by proving at length that the sacrifice of Christ was superior in efficacy to the sacrifices of the law, he most unequivocally assumes that the death of Christ was a sacrifice and sin-offering; for without that it would no more have been capable of comparison with the sacrifices of the law, than the death of John the Baptist, St. Stephen, or St. James, all martyrs and sufferers for the truth, who had recently sealed their testimony with their blood. This very comparison, we may affirm, is utterly unaccountable and absurd on any hypothesis which denies the sacrifice of Christ; for what relation could his death have to the Levitical immolations and, offerings if it had no sacrificial character? Nothing could, in fact, be more misleading, and even absurd, then to apply those terms which, both among Jewis and Gentiles, were in imse to express the various processes and means of atonement and pecular propitiation, if the apostles and Christ himself did not intend to represent his death strictly as as expiation for sin — misleading, because such would be the natural and necessary inference from the terms themselves which had acquired this as their established meaning; and absurd, because if; as Socinians say they need them metaphorically, there was not even an ideal resemblance between the figure and that which it was intended to illustrate. So totally irrelevant, indeed, will those terms appear to any notion entertained of the death of Christ which excludes its expiatory character, that to assume that our Lord and his apostles used them as metaphors is profanely to assume themn to be such writers as. would not in any other case be tolerated; writers wholly unacquainted wtih the commonest rules of language, and therefore wholly unfit to be teachers of others, and that not only in religion, but in things of inferior inmportance.

2. "The use of such terms, we have said, would not only be wholly absurd, but criminally misleading to the Gentiles, as well as to the Jews, who were first converted to Christianity. To them the notion of propitiatory offerings, offerings to avert the displeasure of the gods, and which expiated the crimes of offenders, was most familiar, and terms corresponding to it were in constant use. The bold denial of this by Dr. Priestly might well bring upon him the reproof of archbishop Magee, who, after establishing this point from the Greek and Latin writers, observes, 'So clearly does their language announce the notion of a propitiatory atonement, that if we would avoid an imputation on Dr. Priestly's fairness, we are driven, of necessity, to question the extent of his acquaintance with those writers.' The reader may consult the instances given by this writer in No. 5 of his 'Illustrations,' appended to his 'Discourses on the Atonement;' and also the tenth chapter of Grotius's De Satisfactione, whose learning has most amply illustrated and firmly settled this view of the heathen sacrifices. The use to be made of this in the argument is, that as the apostles found the very terms they used with reference to the nature and efficacy of the death of Christ fixed in an expiatory signification among the Greeks, they could not, in honesty, use theml ini a distant figurative sense, much less in a contrary one, without giving their readers due notice of their having invested them with a new import. From ἄγος, a pollution, an impurity, which was to be expiated by sacrifice, are derived ἁγνίζω and ἁγιάζω, which denote the act of expiation; καθαίρω, too, to purify, cleanse, is applied to the effect of expiation; and ἱλάσκομαι denotes the method of propitiating the gods by sacrifice. These, and other words of similar import, are used by the authors of the Septuagint, and by the evangelists and apostles; but they give no premonition of using them in any strange and altered sense; and when they apply them to the death of Christ, they must, therefore, be understood to use them in their received meaning. In like manner the Jews had their expiatory sacrifices, and the terms and phrases used in them are, in like manner, employed by the apostles to characterize the death of their Lord; and they would have been as guilty of misleading their Jewish as their Gentile readers had they employed them in a new sense, and without warning, which, unquestionably, they never gave.

3. "As to the expiatory nature of the sacrifices of the law, it is not required by the argument to show that all the Levitical offerings were of this character. There were also offerings for persons and for things prescribed for purification, which were identical; but even they grew out of the leading notion of expiatory sacrifice, and that legal purification which resulted from the forgiveness of sins. It is enough to prove that the grand and eminent sacrifices of the Jews were strictly expiatory, and that by them the offerers were released from punishment and death, for which ends they were appointed by the lawgiver. When we speak, too, of vicarious sacrifice, we do not mean either, on the one hand, such a substitution as that the victim should bear the same quantum of pain and suffering as the offender limself; or, on the other hand, that it was put in the place of the offender as a mere symbolical act, by which he confessed his desert of punishment; but substitution made by divine appointment, by which the. victim was exposed to sufferings and death instead of the offender, in virtue of which the offender himself was released. With this view, one can scarcely conceive why so able a writer as archbishop. Magee should prefer to use the term 'vicarious import' rather than the simple and established term 'vicarious,' since the Antinomian notion of substitution may be otherwise sufficiently guarded against, and the phrase 'vicarious import' is certainly capable of being resolved into that figurative notion of mere symbolical action, which, however plausible, does in fact deprive the ancient sacrifices of their typical, and the oblation of Christ of its real efficacy. Vicarious acting is acting for another; vicarious suffering is suffering for another; but the nature and circumstances of that suffering in the case of Christ are to be determined by the doctrine of Scripture at large, and not wholly by the term itself, which is, however, useful for this purpose (and therefore to be preserved), that it indicates the sense in which those who use it understand the declaration of Scripture, 'Christ died for us,' so as that he died not merely for our benefit, but in our stead; in other words, that, but for his having died, those who believe in him would personally have suffered that death which is the penalty of every violation of the law of God.