“A ccording to the New Testament, primitive Christianity, when it used the words ‘Jesus redeems us by His blood,’ was thinking of the ritual sacrifice, and this conception is diffused throughout the whole New Testament; it is a fundamental idea, universal in primitive Christianity, with respect to the significance of Jesus’ death.” So remarks Paul Fiebig;1 and W. P. Paterson, summarizing Albrecht Ritschl,2 emphasizes the assertion. “The interpretation of Christ’s death as a sacrifice,” says he,3 “is imbedded in every important type of New Testament teaching.” By the limitation implied in the words, “every important type,” he means only to allow for the failure of allusions to this interpretation in the two brief letters, James and Jude, the silence of which, he rightly explains, “raises no presumption against the idea being part of the common stock of Apostolic doctrine.” It was already given expression by Jesus Himself (Mt. 26:28, Mk. 14:24, 1 Cor. 11:25, Mt. 20:28, Mk. 10:45),4 and it is elaborated by the Apostles in a great variety of obviously spontaneous allusions. They not only expressly state that Christ was offered as a sacrifice.5 They work out the correspondence between His death and the different forms of Old Testament sacrifice.6 They show that the different acts of the Old Testament sacrificial ritual were repeated in Christ’s experience.7 They ascribe the specific effects of sacrifice to his death.8 They dwell particularly, in truly sacrificial wise, on the saving efficacy of His out-poured blood.9 William Warburton did not speak a bit too strongly when he wrote, more than a hundred and fifty years ago: “One could hardly have thought it possible that any man who had read the Gospels with their best interpreters, the authors of the Epistles, should ever have entertained a doubt whether the death of Christ was a real sacrifice.”10
It would be strange in these circumstances if, in attempting to determine the Biblical conception of the nature of the work of Christ, appeal were not made to the sacrificial system; and it were not argued that the nature of Christ’s work is exhibited in the nature of the sacrificial act. Whatever a sacrifice is, that Christ’s work is. It will be obvious, however, that we are liable to fall into a certain confusion here. Jesus Himself and the Apostles speak of Christ’s work as sacrificial, and it is clear (as Paterson duly points out11) that this is on their lips no figure of speech or mere illustration, but is intended to declare the simple fact. It is quite plain, then, that His work was conceived by them to be of precisely that nature which a sacrifice was understood by them to be. But it is by no means so plain that they conceived His work to be of the nature which we may understand a sacrifice to be. Failure to regard this very simple distinction has brought untold confusion into the discussion. If we would comprehend the teaching of the writers of the New Testament when they call Christ a sacrifice, we must, of course, not assume out of hand that their idea of a sacrifice and ours are identical. The investigation of the previous question of the notion they attached to a sacrifice must form our starting-point. So little is this mode of procedure always adopted, however, that it is even customary for writers on the subject to go so far afield at this point as to introduce a discussion not of the idea of sacrifice held by the founders of the Christian religion, or even current in the Judaism of their day, or even embodied in the Levitical system; but of the idea of sacrifice in general, conceived as a world-wide mode of worship. The several theories of the fundamental conception which underlies sacrificial worship in the general sense are set forth; a choice is made among them; and this theory is announced as ruling the usage of the term when applied to Christ. Christ is undoubtedly our sacrifice, it is said: but a sacrifice is a rite by which communion with God is established and maintained, or by which a complete surrender to God is symbolized, or by which recognition is made of the homage we owe to Him as our God, or by which God’s suffering love is manifested. As if the question of importance were what we mean by a sacrifice, and not what the New Testament writers mean by it.