was they who smarted keenly under the severity of their heathen masters. Thus the good portion of the nation suffered what the faithless really deserved. But Yahweh must have a purpose to serve in this experience of his faithful ones. By this fiery trial he must intend to purify and save the nation as a whole and, specifically, to recover the careless and faithless. Thus the faithful remnantthose who represent the ideal Israel- become the saviours of the rest. They thus accomplish the divine will in the redemption of the nation, and so in the accomplishment of the nation's mission to the world. This company of God's true servants, collectively and ideally viewed, are here personified as an individual. He shall deal wisely and achieve victory (lii. 13-15). Men shall see that though despised and rejected, he had borne not his own but their sins and sorrows in order to bring to them peace and salvation (liii. 1-6). For no fault of his own did he suffer, but only for others' good. It was the divine will that he should thus pass through the depths of humiliation and chastisement in order to win the triumph of suffering love in the salvation of many (liii. 7-12).1

We have here a new element in Jewish Messianism: the idea of the righteous suffering with and for the guilty in order to secure their salvation. It is to be noted that the office of the Servant is prophetic, not priestly. It is the suffering of actual experience which falls upon him. The vicariousness is ethical. The blood of this offering is the blood of real life. If we are to use the word "substitution" we should say that the substitution here involved

1 It is not intended to suggest that the Servant designates merely the pious kernel within Israel. I understand the term to designate the nation as a whole, not, indeed, in its concrete character, but in its ideal intention and destination as God's messenger to the nations. But this conception of the nation as a whole appears to have been developed from the experience of the few in their endurance of suffering on account of, and on behalf of, the many. See the thorough investigation of F. Giesebrecht, Der Knecht Jahves des Deuterojesaia (Königsberg, 1902), whose view (like that of Kautsch, D. B., Vol. V., p. 707 sq.) is that Is. liii. 1 sq. is to be understood as spoken by the Gentiles, and that Israel's sufferings in exile are thought to be designed for their benefit, rather than for the benefit of Israel itself.

is that which takes place when one puts himself under another's burden, and from love and sympathy makes that other's suffering lot his own. This idealization of God's holy Servant is not created out of materials drawn from the Levitical ritual, but was produced out of Israel's experience of trial and suffering, illumined by an invincible faith in God's purpose of grace.1

Let us now summarize the elements of prophetic teaching which approximate most closely to the Christian doctrine of salvation. They are chiefly these: (1) Salvation is not primarily a national or collective, but an individual, affair. (2) It is, above all, an ethical process - the recovery of the life from sin to harmony with God through moral likeness to him. (3) The conditions on which this salvation must be realized are, accordingly, moral. Man cannot be set right before God by any ceremony or transaction performed on his behalf. He must personally repent of his sin and forsake it. (4) But in so doing man can never anticipate the grace of God, nor does he achieve his salvation without the divine aid. (5) The experience of the righteous bearing the sins of the unrighteous in Israel is adapted to suggest the thought of a divine vicarious suffering in which a greater than human love should take the woes and burdens of sinful men upon itself.

1 One reference only to the ritual is found. His soul is made a guilt offering (liii. 10) (not "offering for sin," as in our versions). This offering was an act of reparation. The reference to it here contemplates the sin as an affront to God's honor which, however, is sustained, as if in reparation, by the life of the righteous Servant. The textual difficulties of the verse as a whole are very great. Duhm says, "Es ist zweifelhaft, ob wir jemals den ursprünglichen Wortlaut und Sinn herausbringen." Comm. in loco. The apparent reference to the cultus in lii. 15 (Eng. vss., "So shall he sprinkle many nations") disappears in the translation adopted by almost all exegetes, "so shall he cause to rise up in admiration, that is, startle (R. V. marg.) many nations.”

CHAPTER III

THE TEACHING OF JESUS ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTIC

GOSPELS

We now approach the question: What does salvation mean in the teaching of Jesus? He declared that he came to seek and to save the lost. Just what was it which he came to do, and by what means did he propose to accomplish it? He frequently expressed the purpose of his mission in another set of terms of which we should here take account. He came to found the Kingdom of God and to induce men to enter it. To be saved and to enter the Kingdom of God must mean substantially the same. He also spoke of men becoming sons of God and of being like God. In view of such expressions there is hardly room for doubt as to what the idea of salvation was as it lay in the mind of Jesus. It is the life of obedience to God, or, more fundamentally stated, it is the life of sonship or moral likeness to God. Jesus came into the

world to save men in the sense that he came to win them, to help them to the living of the life of fellowship with God and of likeness to him.

Now this general and rather formal statement requires for its elucidation a study of several questions: What is man to be saved from and why does he need to be saved? What is he saved to? If to obedience or likeness to God, what does that involve? On what terms and conditions may this deliverance take place? What must a man do to be saved? And finally: How does Jesus effect this salvation? By what means does he promote or procure

1 I have reviewed in detail the passages bearing on our present subject in The Theology of the New Testament, Pt. I., chs. ix. and x., to which I refer the reader. I shall take for granted a general familiarity with the texts,

that harmony with God which constitutes man's true blessedness, here and hereafter? We shall try to answer these questions in the light of the teaching of Jesus as reported in the Synoptic Gospels, reserving for later con. sideration the Johannine version.

The reason why men need to be saved is that they are morally lost. They need to be saved from sin. Jesus, indeed, spoke of men being saved from sickness and from suffering, but prevailingly he described salvation as a moral recovery from an evil life. He did not speak of sin and sinners in that technical sense common in his time, according to which "sinners" denoted a class almost as definite as "publicans." For Jesus the term "sinner" did not classify a man in public estimation or social standing; it described his moral state in the sight of God. Sin is a corrupt state of the heart, a perversion of the will and the affections, a radical disharmony with God. More concretely, it is lovelessness, that is selfishness, with the evils which it engenders. Jesus did not give definitions or theoretic descriptions of sin, but his treatment of individual cases leaves us in no doubt as to what sin is. It is seen in the unfilial life of that lost son who repudiates all his natural obligations to his father and friends, abandons all restraints, and gives himself over to a life of selfish gratification. It is seen in the Pharisee with his counterfeit piety, trying for social advantage to seem what he inwardly knows he is not. It is seen in the hardness, the cruelty, the intolerance of the rich and ruling classes of the age; in the pitilessness of a priest and a Levite who put social distinctions above humanity, and in a people who carefully observe their inherited traditions and tithe mint and anise and cummin to the neglect of judgment, mercy, and the love of God. These are examples of sin as Jesus views it. They are the "lost" who are forfeiting their lives in selfishness in its various forms, pride, hypocrisy, sensuality, cruelty, hatred. All these sins are but various phases of that self-gratification or self-will in which man loses his real, true self. From this kind of life men need to be saved.

This can

be done in but one way, - by a change in their motives and purposes. The sinful life can only be abandoned by being replaced. Love must supplant selfishness; kindness, humility, and sympathy must replace hardness, arrogance, and indifference. Men are to be saved to the life of service and helpfulness; they must learn that to give their lives is to save them.

Jesus' idea of salvation centres in his idea of God. His most characteristic description of God is as the bountiful Giver. With liberal hand he pours out his blessings upon all mankind. His love is large and generous. He is ready and eager to bestow his gifts. This impulse to give and to bless springs from God's boundless, universal love. Jesus' favorite expression for this aspect of God's character is the term "Father." As the Father he loves and blesses all men even his disobedient and sinful children. He yearns for the lost son and waits and watches for his return; he continues to love those who are indifferent, or even hostile, to his will, and sends his Son to seek and to save them.

Now salvation means a life corresponding to this character of God. Jesus expressed it by the phrase "becoming sons of the Father" (Mt. v. 45). Sonship in the Hebraistic mode of thought denotes moral kinship and likeness. Jesus shows how by niggardliness, pride, and hatred men prove themselves to be no true sons of God. When they love only those who serve them, hate their enemies, and revenge every injury, they show themselves no better than the despised publicans and heathen. Such is not the Godlike life. He is the righteous, the truly saved man who has become like the Father in love and self-giving. Jesus illustrates in detail the elements which constitute this true righteousness or salvation. They are such as humility, meekness, aspiration after goodness, mercifulness, purity, peacemaking. These qualities constitute that real righteousness which is the passport into the Kingdom of heaven (Mt. v. 3-9, 20).

Other descriptions tally with this. In the judgment parable the accepted are those who have loved and served