Thursday, July 22

A fact that demands an explanation

The atonement wrought by Christ can never be a bare fact. The bare fact is simply the death of a Jew upon a cross in the first century of our era, and that bare fact is entirely without value to anyone; what gives it its value is the explanation of it as a means by which sinful man was brought into the presence of God.

It is impossible for us to obtain the slightest benefit from a mere contemplation of the death of Christ; all the benefit comes from our knowledge of the meaning of that death, or in other words (if the term be used in a high sense) from our ‘theory’ of it.

— J. Gresham Machen
What Is Faith?
(Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 146