writer who finds a substitutionary doctrine throughout the New
Testament is altogether wrong. He goes so far as to admit that 'if we
look at the matter from what may be called an external point of view,
no doubt we may speak of the death of Christ as in a certain sense
substitutionary.' What this 'certain sense' is, he does not define.
But no one, he tells us, can do justice to Paul who fails to recognise
that the death of Christ was a racial act; and 'if we place ourselves
at Paul's point of view, we shall see that to the eye of God the death
of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race
than as an act which the race does in Christ.' In plain English, Paul
teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly, than that the ungodly in
Christ died for themselves. This is presented to us as something
profound, a recognition of the mystical depths in Paul's teaching: I
own I can see nothing profound in it except a profound misapprehension
of the apostle. Nevertheless, it brings out the logic of what
representative means when representative is opposed to substitute. The
representative is ours, we are in Him, and we are supposed to get over
all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just
because He is ours, and because we are one with Him. But the
fundamental fact of the situation is that, to begin with, Christ is
_not_ ours, and we are _not_ one with Him. In the apostle's view, and
in point of fact, we are 'without Christ' ([Greek] _choris Christou_).
It is not we who have put Him there. It is not to us that His presence
and His work in the world are due. If we had produced Him and put Him
forward, we might call Him our representative in the sense suggested by
the sentences just quoted; we might say it is not so much He who dies
for us, as we who die in Him; but a representative not produced by us,
but given to us--not chosen by us, but the elect of God--is not a
representative at all, but in that place a substitute. He stands in
our stead, facing all our responsibilities for us as God would have
them faced; and it is what He does for us, and not the effect which
this produces in us, still less the fantastic abstraction of a 'racial
act,' which is the Atonement in the sense of the New Testament. To
speak of Christ as our representative, in the sense that His death is
to God less an act which He does for the race than an act which the
race does in Him, is in principle to deny t