Article February 20, 1943 Issue

Practice Illustrates the Atonement

JOHN M. TUTT

Substitutional atonement is as old as the human race. It was originally a token of appeasement designed to avert the disastrous effects of the anger of the gods, as in plagues, earthquakes, fires, floods, storms, or droughts. Propitiation of the gods seemed to primitive men a necessity arising from their helplessness before the elements they neither understood nor could control. The element of the unknown in nature, forces incomprehensible and uncontrollable by men, produced a religious sense and set up a pantheon of false deities.

Gradually the evolution of knowledge has eliminated the spurious gods, until humanity has generally reached a conception of monotheism in so far as religion is concerned. And so the making of a sacrifice for the appeasement of an offended deity has come down with the evolution of human thought, from the offering of vegetable and animal forms of life and of human beings all the way to the Christian doctrine of the self-sacrifice of one for the sins of all. Thus the sublime flowering of Christianity, Jesus' atonement, seems in a certain historical sense to have developed from a pagan rite. But actually it stems from the instinctive sense of necessity to be at one with one's Maker and the desire to bridge the seeming gap between.

Christian Scientists are interested in the doctrine of atonement not merely as a religious belief, but rather in whatever of metaphysical or spiritual meaning it may have. The belief that Jesus' suffering for our sins appeased God or relieved us of our own responsibility is annulled by the Scriptural teaching that every man must answer for his own sins, and this is the teaching of Christian Science. "We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 497). Jesus suffered for our sins, that is, he voluntarily laid himself, a pure sacrifice, upon the altar of all-out service for his fellow men. He laid down his life for his friends.

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