Sanctification vs. Sanctificationism.
"THE ALTAR SANCTIFIETH THE GIFT."—SOUND WORDS VS. A SOUND OF WORDS. THERE is a difference. The difference is wider than the sea. On that pivotal difference precious doctrines and vital experiences turn. Indulge me. I am not about to put forth my hand to steady the ark. It is my humble purpose to ask a few questions about the "teams" which volunteered to haul the cart. It is pertinent to say that I am far from opposing or undervaluing the doctrine of entire sanctification, or perfect love. I have read most of the notable books published on that great topic, and for three privileged years it was my joy to attend, weekly, in the spacious parlors of Mrs. Bishop Hamline, a meeting specially designed to promote the experience. From that meeting men and women have gone forth to spread Scriptural holiness in many lands. Confidently, I have the best of reasons for assurance that the doctrine is true and the experience attainable. The very preciousness of the doctrine suggests the high expediency of having it truly and ably taught. Incompetency, shallowness, "sanctified vanity" here may, and probably will, work incalculable mischief. Yet incongruously enough, there is no other experimentalism in religion which mistaken and unqualified persons attempt to teach with such flippant and offensive dogmatism. To select a particular or two, which will serve as both proof and illustration, let me instance a stereotyped formulary, to which Mrs. Palmer's use of the terms has given countenance, and which widely prevails. The seeker for sanctification is addressed in set phrases thus: "You lay all on the altar, don't you? Don't the Bible say that the altar sanctifies the gift? Do you want any better reason for believing than the word of the Lord? Now you are all on the altar. The altar sanctifies the gift. If the word of the Lord is true, you are sanctified. Profess it. Mind nothing about your feelings. Don't wait for any evidence. Isn't the word of God evidence enough? Profess it; rise right up and profess it, and give God the glory!" Such is the formula. Doubtless many devout and somewhat disciplined and instructed minds reach beyond this clumsy but well-meant scaffolding, grasp the substance of truth, and are saved. But it is too sorrowfully obvious that many habitual verbalists, like some of their teachers, get only a mechanical sense from the mechanical teaching, and—as a good woman, now in the blessed enjoyment of the grace, said was true in her own case—"profess themselves to death." The result is disastrous. Forgetting, or never having known, that "the end of the commandment is charity (love) out of a pure heart and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned, from which some having swerved, have turned aside to vain jangling, desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor whereof they affirm," these unfortunate ones instantly set up for teachers, with loud and irreverent professions, and a bigotry as bitter and exacting as that of a Pharisee. This short and easy method of confusing the sincere, and inflating the conceited, so long as it passed as a rude drift of inexact speech, could be left to the corrective effect of reflection. But when a fluent sciolist sets criticism at defiance, and perverts the Scripture to find support for the error as a doctrine and model of full salvation, it is made to occupy a prominence which renders further silence akin to sin. Let us briefly examine the authority for a verbiage with which the lips of many honest persons have become unprofitably familiar. In Matt. 23:19, our Lord rebukes the Pharisees: "Ye fools and blind! for whether is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?" In Heb. 13:10, Paul says: "We have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle." Ergo, Christ is the altar on which we offer ourselves. And the altar sanctifies the gift! Is not that plain? It certainly has a captivating sound, because the "name that charms our fears" is in it. But is it a just interpretation? A logician will demand to know whether the nexus, the main point which carries all the rest, is provable. If Paul does not mean that Christ is the altar, then the logomachy of the superficialist expends itself for naught. Simple souls will be misled to their hurt, but no one is edified. The answer to this question settles the controversy. Christ is a priest, even a high priest, forever, after the order of Melchisedec. Heb. 2:17; 3:1; 4:14, 15; 5:5-10; 7:26; 8:1; 10:21. Christ is a sacrifice, an offering. "Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God." Heb. 9:12; 13:14. "But now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." Heb. 9:26. "By the which will [of the Father] we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." Heb. 10:10. "But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sin forever, sat down on the right hand of God." Heb. 10:12. So much is clearly taught. Christ is priest and expiatory sacrifice. He is the only priest and the only expiatory sacrifice. Even he, "if he were on earth, should not [now] be a priest, seeing that [they] are priests that offer gifts according to the law;" and the law of ceremonial offerings ceased to convey significance or obligation when Christ offered himself once for all. Heb. 8:4. "Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession." Heb. 4:14. So much is clear. Our Lord is priest and sacrifice. There is no earthly priest of expiation, and no sacrifice to be offered by men but the sacrifice of dedication to God. Now, WHERE, WHAT, WHO, IS THE ALTAR? It is Paul who says we have an altar of which they have no right to eat who serve the tabernacle. Did men eat the Jewish altar, or the sacrifice? Recently a very wordy teacher said in my hearing, that McKnight and all the Christian scholars said Paul meant Christ. When I ventured to correct him, thinking I might save him from making himself an object of contempt or ridicule, he became much excited and declared that he didn't care what critics said. He had the word of the Lord for it, and he would stick to that. Unfortunate for the critics! But really the man appeared incapable of discriminating between a sacrifice of consecration and a sacrifice of expiation. Nor did he appear to apprehend the patent fact that every man who discourses upon a Scriptural theme necessarily gives an interpretation of the Scriptures. The question arises with respect to the point in dispute, whether it is wiser to take the consensus of devout scholars who have given their lives to the study of the sacred Scriptures, or the shallow and self-assertive notions of a probably well-meaning but illiterate and very self-confident talker. The notion of a literal altar of expiation other than the cross in the Christian church, comes from the Church of Rome, whose priests assume to offer the very body of Christ anew as often as they elevate the host. The same theory has tinged the language of the Church of England, and of some writers outside of both communions. The Jewish altar "sanctified the gift," not by penetrating the offering with any new quality, but simply and solely by making visible the dedication of the offering to God. It sanctified the gift as the temple sanctified the gold. The renunciation of ownership on the part of the offerer, the dedication to God, was the main element in the transaction, and the altar made visible that fact. Any expiatory virtue came through the worshiper's faith in the coming sacrifice of Calvary. In the Christian dispensation, then, On which our great High Priest offered himself for the sins of the world? I will answer in the language of the most approved expounders of the word of God. Thusiasterion, an altar. "That the altar here signifies the sacrifice offered upon the altar, is plain from this, that of this altar they were to eat. So they that eat of the Jewish sacrifices are said to be partakers of the altar." (Patrick Lowth, Arnold, Whitby, Lowman.) "We have an altar—that is, a sacrifice upon an altar—namely: Christ, who was sacrificed on the altar of the cross." (Benson.) "The 'altar' to which he here refers is evidently the cross on which the great sacrifice was made."—(Barnes.) "Altar, the cross—the victim, Christ." (J. Camper Gray.) "The altar is here put for the sacrifice on the altar." (Clarke.) "The altar is that on which Jesus offered up himself to sanctify his people."—(The Bible Commentary, approved by the church of England.) "Thusiasterion, an altar. The cross of Christ, on which his body was sacrificed." (Bengal.) "Here, by a usual metonymy, the altar is put for the sacrifice, as is plain from the apostle's adding, 'of which they have no right to eat.'" (McKnight.) "The altar is not Christ himself (Bugenhagen, Biesenthal, etc.), nor the table of the Lord's Supper (Bohn and others), nor an expiatory arrangement in general (Mich., Stier, Tholluck, etc.), but the cross on Golgotha. (Thorn., Aqui., Este, Bengal.) (Critical, doctrinal, and homiletical commentary, by Lange, Schaff, Bengel, Auberlin, C. J. Riggenbach and others.) "We have an altar—the cross of Christ." (Wesley.) I will not consume space with further quotations. Let any devout person ask himself, first, When was the one all-sufficient sacrifice offered? Secondly, Where was the sacrifice offered? Thirdly, On what was the sacrifice offered? The answers will not linger nor mislead. It was made when Jesus died; made on Calvary; made on the cross. What wonder then that Paul (very unlike a verbalist who asks, "What can the cross do? the cross sanctifies nothing") should exclaim, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom [whereby] the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." There is no impropriety in speaking of an altar of consecration, by which figure we mean a solemn dedication to God; or an altar of prayer, as conceptually descriptive of any place where we offer our supplications before the Lord. Nor ought we to object to the common expressions that God sanctifies us, Christ sanctifies us, the Spirit sanctifies us. God the father sanctifies us as the originating cause. He loved us, and set forth Christ "to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins." Christ is the meritorious cause of our sanctification, inasmuch as he "purchased eternal redemption for us." The truth is the instrumental cause—"Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth." (Let no man pervert Scripture, and degrade his own intellect by confounding "truth" in this last quotation with the eternal Logos, the embodied Godhead.) The Holy Spirit is the efficient cause. We are saved "by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost." Conventional speech cannot be held in leading-strings; but when we attempt the technical exactness of teachers, especially of the priceless doctrine of fullness in Christ, perfect love, or entire sanctification, it is desirable to give no uncertain sound. God the Father governs and upholds, Christ redeems, the spirit sanctifies. An altar of consecration is anywhere where we make a solemn self-renunciation or entire surrender to God. Our "bodies" are offered "a living sacrifice," not of expiation, but of dedication to holy uses. There is but one priest of expiation, Jesus; one altar of expiation, the cross; one sacrifice of expiation, Christ Jesus the Lord, who tasted death for every man; not by offering his humanity on the altar of his divinity, which turgidity leaves to intelligence no Christ either for priest or sacrifice. The divinity without the humanity is not Christ. The humanity without the divinity is not Christ. The human-divine Christ is a perfect Saviour, and through him we have a perfect salvation.—Cal. Christian Advocate. "I am rich enough," said Pope to Swift, "I can afford to give you a little advice; I'll give it to you for nothing. I have a little to spare, and I should be glad to enjoy it."