We have also found, from abundant and indisputable documentary evidence, that the great Apostle who founded the Churches of Europe did in fact teach the following: using language shaped by the Jewish thought of his own time, he taught that God receives into His favor all who believe the good news announced by Christ; that this salvation comes to them through Christ’s violent death; that Christ deliberately laid down His life for this purpose; and that the need for such a costly means of salvation lay in human sin. We found teaching equivalent to this attributed to Christ in four memoirs that have come down to us from the first century of the Christian Church, though the wording and ways of thinking in those memoirs are quite different from Paul’s. We found similar teaching in other documents from the same period as well. This agreement among witnesses, despite wide differences in form and detail, gave us complete proof that Paul had correctly understood and reproduced the teaching of Christ. It is also clear that Paul and the other writers of the New Testament accepted these doctrines with complete confidence, and that these doctrines shaped their whole way of thinking and living.
These results leave us with only one alternative. Either the remarkable doctrine of salvation through the death of Christ, which we have now traced both to the confident belief of the earliest preachers of the Gospel and to the actual teaching of Christ, is true; or else the very men who won the world’s homage for Christ and in doing so helped save it were in DEEP ERROR about the work of their Master, and the great Master Himself was mistaken about His own mission to humanity. Such an error is highly unlikely. And the extreme unlikeliness of it creates a very strong presumption that the doctrine so firmly believed by the Apostles and so confidently attributed to Christ is true.
As we move forward we shall find clear evidence that they accepted it as true simply on Christ’s word, because they had proof that convinced them He had risen from the dead. And I shall try to show that their conviction was correct. If it was, then the attested resurrection of Christ will be complete proof of the truth of the doctrine just explained. We shall believe that He was given up to death for our sins because we have proof that He was raised for our justification.
Once we accepted Christ’s teaching that He was about to die in order to obtain forgiveness of sins for humanity, we immediately had to ask: why was such a costly and mysterious means of forgiveness necessary? Paul answers this question by saying that God gave Christ to die in order to make the justification of believers consistent with His own justice. We found this answer to be the only conceivable explanation of the abundant teaching we have traced to the lips of Christ, and we also found it to agree with what we know about God’s moral government of the world. Therefore, if we accept the unanimous teaching of the New Testament about the death of Christ, we will also accept this explanation of it. And although this explanation brings difficulties that we could not completely unravel, those difficulties were somewhat reduced by our study of the New Testament’s teaching about the original relation of the Son of God to humanity and to the eternal law of righteousness. In any case, these difficulties did not weaken the documentary evidence that, in its broad outlines, Paul’s teaching came from the Light of the World.
Teaching essentially the same as what has been explained above has been held in ALL AGES and in almost ALL Christian CHURCHES. It is one of the distinctive and unmistakable features of the Christian religion. All Christian art and literature testify to the powerful influence it has had over Christian thought and life. Even in a world where everyone is destined to die, and even in a world stained with the blood of martyrs and heroes, the Death of Christ stands without parallel.
That salvation is offered to all people through the death of One Man for the sins of all, and that His death makes the pardon of everyone who believes His words consistent with the justice of God, reveals not only the innocence of that One Man but also His infinite superiority to the many for whom He died.
So now we ask in wonder: Who is this One Man whose death becomes life for all who accept the salvation He offers? Who and what is Jesus of Nazareth? Answering that question is the purpose of the next section of our work.
This post is based upon Lecture XXIV from J. A. Beet's book Through Christ to God: A Study in Scientific Theology (1893), re-written with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. The original text may be found at the Internet Archive here: Through Christ to God.
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