heological formula)
as well as His passive obedience was essential to His propitiation--we
should rather say that His life is part of His death: a deliberate and
conscious descent, ever deeper and deeper, into the dark valley where
at the last hour the last reality of sin was to be met and borne. And
if the objection is made that after all this only means that death is
the most vital point of life, its intensest focus, I should not wish to
make any reply. Our Lord's Passion _is_ His sublimest action--an
action so potent that all His other actions are sublated in it, and we
know everything when we know that He _died_ for our sins.

The desire to bring the life of Christ as well as His death into the
Atonement has probably part of its motive in the feeling that when the
death is separated from the life it loses moral character: it is
reduced to a merely physical incident, which cannot carry such vast
significance as the Atonement. Such a feeling certainly exists, and
finds expression in many forms. How often, for example, we hear it
said that it is not the death which atones, but the spirit in which the
Saviour died--not His sufferings which expiate sin, but the innocence,
the meekness, the love to man and obedience to God in which they were
borne. The Atonement, in short, was a moral achievement, to which
physical suffering and death are essentially irrelevant. This is our
old enemy, the false abstraction, once more, and that in the most
aggressive form. The contrast of physical and moral is made absolute
at the very point at which it ceases to exist. As against such
absolute distinctions we must hold that if Christ had not really died
for us, there would have been no Atonement at all, and on the other
hand that what are called His physical sufferings and death have no
existence simply as physical: they are essential elements in the moral
achievement of the passion. It leads to no truth to say that it is not
His death, but the spirit in which He died, that atones for sin: the
spirit in which He died has its being in His death, and in nothing else
in the world.

It seems to me that what is really wanted here, both by those who seek
to co-ordinate Christ's life with His death in the Atonement, and by
those who distinguish between His death and the spirit in which He
died, is some means of keeping hold of the Person of Christ in His
work, and that this is not effectively done apart from the New
Testament belief i