Horace Bushnell · 11 of 21

Chapter IV. How He Becomes So Great a Power. · Part 3

4. To another and last point, where the moral power obtained by Christ gets even its principal weight of impression; viz., to the fact made evident, The culminating fact is God’s affliction for sin. by his vicarious sacrifice, that God suffers on account of evil, or with and for created beings under evil—a fact very commonly disallowed and rejected, I am sorry to add, even by Christian theology itself, as being rationally irreconcilable with God’s greatness and sufficiency.

It was very natural that the coarse, crude mind of the world, blunted to greater coarseness and crudity by the chill of guilt in its feeling, should be overmuch occupied in conceiving God’s infinity and the merely dynamic energies and magnitudes of his nature; the sovereignty of his will, his omnipotent force, his necessary impassibility to force external to himself, his essential beatitude as excluding all inflictions of pain or loss. Hence it has been very generally held, even to this day, as a matter of necessary inference, that God is superior, in every sense, to suffering. Our theologians are commonly shocked, as by some frightful word of derogation, when the contrary is affirmed, and when they come to the matter of Christ’s suffering, they’ are careful to show, regarding it as a necessary point of reverence, that it was only the human nature that suffered, not the divine, suffering by itself. Besides, it will even be admitted, perhaps unwittingly, by those who dare to obtrude in this manner upon the interior mystery of Christ’s person, where all reasonings about the physical suffering must be at fault, that even God himself, as well out of Christ as in the incarnate person of Christ, does incur a profoundly real suffering—not physical suffering, as I now speak, yet a suffering more deep than any physical suffering can be.

The principal suffering of any really great being and especially of God is because of his moral sensibility, God’s perfections even require him to suffer. nay, because of his moral perfection. He would not be perfect, if he did not feel appropriately to what is bad, base, wrong, destructive, cruel, and to every thing opposite to perfection. If the sight of wrong were to meet the discovery of God, only as a disgusting spectacle meets a glass eye, his perfection would be the perfection of a glass eye and nothing more. None of us conceive Him in this manner, but we conceive him as having a right sensibility to every thing. We say that he is displeased, and what is displeasure but an experience opposite to pleasure? so far a kind of suffering. We say that he “loathes” all baseness and impurity, and what is closer to a pain than loathing? We say that he “hates” all unrighteousness, and what is hatred but a fire of suffering? Is he not a “long suffering” God, and is there no suffering in long suffering? Is he not a patient God, and what is patience but a regulated suffering? So of compassion, pity, sympathy, indignations suppressed, wounds of ingratitude, bonds of faith violated by treachery. So far we all admit the fact of divine suffering, no matter how sturdily we deny it in theory. The suffering is moral suffering it is true, but it is the greatest and most real suffering in the world—so great that a perfect being would be likely, under it, to quite forget physical suffering, even if it were upon him. Making then so vast an admission, what does it signify, afterward, to turn ourselves round, in what we conceive to be our logical sagacity, and raise the petty inference that God, being infinite, must be impassible!

But we must not omit, in this connection, to notice a fact, as regards the moral suffering of God, that is not commonly admitted, or even observed, God’s beatitude not diminished by the suffering of is love. like the others just referred to. Thus we conceive, that God is a being whose moral nature is pervaded and charactered, all through, by love. Some teachers even go so far as to insist that the Scripture declaration—“God is love”—is no rhetorical figure, but a logical and literal teaching; that God’s very substance, or essence, is love. And yet love is an element, or principle, whether substance or not, so essentially vicarious, that it even mortgages the subject to suffering, in all cases where there is no ground of complacency. As certainly as God is love, the burdens of love must be upon him. He must bear the lot of his enemies, and even the wrongs of his enemies. In pity, in patience, in sacrifice, in all kinds of holy concern, he must take them on his heart, and be afflicted for them as well as by them. In his greatness there is no bar to this kind of suffering; He will suffer because he is great, and be great because he suffers. Neither is his everlasting beatitude any bar to his suffering; for there is nothing so essentially blessed as to suffer well. Moral greatness culminates in great and good suffering; culminates also in blessedness, for there is a law of compensation in all moral natures, human as well as divine, divine as well as human, by which their suffering for love’s sake becomes always a transcendent and more consciously sovereign joy. There ought to be no incredible paradox in this; for it is a fact every day proved—always to be known by mortal experience.

Now it is this moral suffering of God, the very fact which our human thinking is so slow to receive, that Christ unfolds and works into a character Christ’s moral power consummated in the agony and the cross. and a power, in his human life. His compassions burdened for guilty men, his patient sensibilities, sorrows, sacrifices, the intense fellow-feeling of his ministry, his rejected sympathies, wrongs, ignominies—under and by all these it is that he verifies, and builds into a character, the moral suffering of the divine love.

Hence what is called the agony, which gives, in a sense, the key-note of his ministry; because it is pure moral suffering; the suffering, that is, of a burdened love and of a holy and pure sensibility, on which the hell of the world’s curse and retributive madness is just about to burst. There is here no physical suffering, save what results from his moral and mental suffering. There is no fear; for, to human appearance, there is nothing as yet to fear; and, besides, the pathology of the suffering is exactly opposite to that of fear; in which the blood flies the skin, retreating on the heart, instead of being forced outward and exuding from it. There is, too, no appearance of panic in the sufferer’s action, and he expresses, no doubt truly, what he feels when he says, that his “soul is exceeding sorrowful.” We discover, also, at several distinct points in his ministry before, that he is under a tendency to just this kind of agony; as when he groans in Spirit, declares that his soul is troubled, spends whole nights in prayer. It is as if there were a load upon his sensibility which his mere human organization could with difficulty support. And accordingly, now that his active labors are ended, and his feeling is no longer diverted and drawn off by occupation, now that he has made his farewell discourse, offered his parting prayer, instituted his supper of communion, the surge of burdened sensibility rolls in upon him all too heavily to be sustained. And this is the agony. It is just what such a nature, made the vehicle of such feeling, facing such a juncture, ought to suffer and could not, humanly speaking, avoid. It is the moral pain of his love, sharpened by the crisis of his love; and, and a bloody sweat is wrung from his too frail body, by the overload of divine feeling struggling under it.

In his cross there is also a physical suffering, of which something is made by the Scriptures, and a great deal more by theology; for multitudes conceive that this physical suffering is the pain God takes for satisfaction, when he releases the pains that are due under the just liabilities of sin. I will not undertake to solve the mystery of these physical pains; for it must be admitted that God is a being physically impassible. But it is something to observe that there is nothing peculiar in them, as distinct from the mystery of the incarnation. God is not finite, or subject, any more than he is impassible, and yet he is, in some sense, uninvestigable by us, both finite and subject. Enough for us, as regards the subject state of Christ, that he is able to express so much of the glory of the Father. So of the pains or physical sufferings. Their importance to us lies probably, not in what they are, but in what they express, or morally signify. They are the symbol of God’s moral suffering. The moral tragedy of the garden is supplemented by the physical tragedy of the cross; where Jesus, by not shrinking from so great bodily pains, which the coarse and sensuous mind of the world will more easily appreciate, shows the moral suffering of God for sinners more affectingly, because he does it in the lower plane of natural sensibility. And yet even the suffering of the cross appears to be principally moral suffering; for the struggle and tension of his feeling is so great that he dies, it is discovered, long before the two others crucified with him, and sooner than, by mere natural torment, was to be expected.

But there is a much harsher and sharper meaning frequently given to the agony and the cross, as if Jesus were in the lot of sin a great deal more Nothing penal in the agony and the cross. literally than I have conceived him to be, and God were giving him a cup of judicial anger to drink, from which his soul recoils This conception is supposed to be specially justified by his exclamation from the cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me;” where it is imagined that God is dealing with him in severity, hiding his face behind a cloud of ire, and leaving him to bear the penal woe of transgression; or, if not this, so far withdrawing from him as to drape the scene of his death in a felt darkness of soul, that shall somehow express the divine abhorrence to sin. The assumption, whether in one form or the other, appears to be gratuitous. That the soul of Jesus, just reeling into death, should utter such a cry was most natural, and it should be printed with a point of exclamation, as being a cry of distress, not with a point of interrogation, as if he were raising a question of remonstrance about a matter of fact. When will theologic dogmatism understand the language of passion? Besides an angel is sent to him in his agony to strengthen him-an angel sent to support him in the desertion of God? Does he not also protest that he can have twelve legions of angels to help him, by simply asking for them? And in what does he close the scene of his suffering, just after his bitter cry on the cross, but these most open, trustful words of confidence—“Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” It is hardly necessary to say that this hard and revolting conception of the agony and the cross has a purely theologic origin. At no other two points, in the ministry of Jesus, would the eternal Father have testified with a warmer approbation or a sympathy more close—“This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Nay, the Father did, in fact, give just this testimony for him beforehand, in this article of his suffering; for when he was speaking of his death now at hand, and his soul was troubled, falling into a kind of incipient agony, how does he quell his feeling but in the petition, “Father, glorify thy name;” whereupon there comes a voice from heaven, saying, “I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” Comforted by such a testimony, and daring, in his last prayer, to say—“I have glorified thee on the earth,” will it be imagined that God, beholding such an accession of glory in his death, is even hiding from him still, when the last hour comes, in grim displeasure?

Here then it is, in the revelation of a suffering God, that the great name of Jesus becomes the embodied glory and the Great Moral Power of God. In it, as in a sun, the divine feeling henceforth shines; so that whoever believes in his name takes the power of it, and is transformed radically, even at the deepest center of life, by it—born of God.