That is why it was the Apostles who were able to declare so decisively to their listeners: "We have seen and testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world" (1 John 4:14), for we have proclaimed to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, not following cunning fables, but being eyewitnesses of His majesty (2 Peter 1:16; cf. Acts 2:32; 4:20; 5:30-32; 13:31).

All other people, of course, are in a different position in relation to this point of the apostolic preaching. As they were not eyewitnesses of Christ's greatness, they, of course, cannot positively know that Christ really accomplished the work of saving the world by His death on the cross. But they can discuss Christ's teaching about the salvation of the world, and the historically authenticated desire of Joseph.

Unbelief is indeed possible, and even more, faith in the truth of the apostolic preaching is absolutely impossible when the main point of the apostolic doctrine – the teaching about the salvation of the world – is questioned or directly denied. If, for example, we can think in a pagan way that the abolition of sin is absolutely unnecessary for man, because God can forgive man all his sins for some personal virtues of man himself, or simply out of His infinite mercy, and that the simple forgiveness of sins is absolutely sufficient for man to be saved from sin, then we, of course, cannot believe in the truth of the apostolic preaching; for in this case no sacrifice for sin on the part of man is evidently required, and consequently the teaching of J.

And in the same way, if we can think in a pagan way that the immortal spirit of man, after his death, having been freed from the deceptions of the sinful body, can of itself take the path of true life and can truly make all the sins of his present life only the former sins of his former life, then for the same reasons we will certainly inevitably come to the same conclusions in this case. But if, on the contrary, we reach such grounds from the point of view of which Christ's teaching about the salvation of the world will appear to us to be undoubtedly true and the only true one, then, even if the Apostles said nothing about the resurrection of Christ, we could believe in Him as the real Savior of the world on the basis of His own communication about His actual accomplishment of the work of salvation. True, in this case the degree of consistency of our faith would be very low; but since the very fact of its undoubted possibility unconditionally removes all improbability from the apostolic testimony to the resurrection and glorification of Christ, the content of this testimony would not only supplement the basic content of our faith, but also raise the degree of its validity to full confidence in its truth, i.e. to the decisive impossibility of denying it. In fact, the apostolic witness is in full harmony with the positive foundations of the Christian faith: with the knowledge of the only possibility of the real salvation of the world and with the Gospel story of the life and person of Christ. Therefore, in the essence of what we know for certain and what we can recognize as true in the teaching and life of Jesus Christ, we cannot have the slightest reason to reject the apostolic witness to Him. By acknowledging this testimony precisely as the testimony of eyewitnesses, we thereby obtain in it a factual proof of the full truth of the faith, i.e., we obtain a proof of the highest possible character; because in order to weaken the significance or completely refute this proof, it is not enough to say unfoundedly that the apostles could not see and therefore did not see the risen Christ and were not eyewitnesses of His greatness, but it is necessary first to refute the very foundations of the Christian faith.

In fact, the Christian faith, even among the apostles themselves, arose not from the vision of the risen and glorified Christ, but from the knowledge of the truth of Christ's teaching and work, from the knowledge of the very truth that for the destruction of sin in the world a redemptive sacrifice for sin is really necessary, and that Christ Himself, as the true conqueror of sin, can indeed serve as this redemptive sacrifice. Consequently, the posthumous apparitions of Jesus Christ, in fact, did not create an apostolic faith in Him as the true Saviour of the world, but only increased the degree of consistency of their faith, because they showed the apostles the factual reality of what in terms of the content of the rational foundations of faith could logically be affirmed by them only in the sense of a simple possibility.

And for this reason the Apostles themselves, confirming their preaching about Christ by the miracle of His glorious resurrection, nevertheless explained this miracle itself by the miracle of the saving cross of Christ. The whole essence of their preaching consisted in the news of the cleansing of sins by the redemptive power of Christ's death on the cross: a man guilty of sin is guilty of death (James 1:15; Romans 6:23), but Christ replaced all transgressors with Himself and voluntarily took upon Himself their necessary death (1 John 3:16; Romans 8:32; Ephesians 5:2; 2 Corinthians 5:5). 21; Hebrew. 2, 9); therefore, every person who wishes to replace his necessary death with the innocent death of Christ is washed by His living blood and cleansed from all his sins (Heb. 9:12-14; Rev. 1:5), and with this cleansing of all the sins of man, of course, all his guilt for these sins is removed (1 John 2:2; 4:10; Rom. 3:24-25; Col. 1, 14), and therefore every person who has washed himself with the sacrificial blood of Christ is a completely new creature of God, with a new hope and the power of real justification before God (1 Cor. 5:7-8; 2 Cor. 5:17; Eph. 2:10; 4:24; Col. 3:9-10). This content of the apostolic preaching determined the basic content of the religious faith of Christians.

Ancient Christian teachers in expounding their doctrine usually limited themselves to the pious call of Christians to reverent contemplation of the holy image of Christ and to the understanding of the mystery of His holy cross: "Let us look to the Lord Jesus Christ, Whose blood was given for us... let us look attentively at the blood of Christ and know how precious His blood is in the sight of God, because, shed for the sake of our salvation, it has acquired the grace of repentance for the whole world"[304] – in this teaching of St. Clement of Rome the whole Christian theology is abbreviatedly expressed. Christianity was apparently assimilated not as a doctrine, but as a living fact of the religious history of the world, i.e. it was assimilated not by the dry logic of human reason, but by a living consciousness of the moral forces and needs of the spirit, and therefore it was completely understandable to those people who, in the depths of their spirits, painfully thirsted for God's truth, while in their conscience only exposed themselves in the obvious wrongs of life. Whoever was aware of his sinfulness and his inability to free himself from sin, for him this very consciousness made the necessity of an expiatory sacrifice for sin completely understandable. And whoever heard the apostolic sermon about the holy life of Jesus Christ, and could vividly imagine the striking picture of His sufferings on the Cross, and could reverently bow down before the feat of His voluntary death for the sake of the destruction of sin, for this very greatness of the Gospel image of Jesus Christ served as an absolutely sufficient basis for faith that His innocent death was indeed a redemptive sacrifice for the sins of people. Therefore, there could be no need for a logical treatment of the Christian faith for the Christian believers themselves, and for this reason the Christian teachers strove not for a rational explanation and justification of their faith, but only for the most accurate exposition of it in the spirit and letter of the New Testament writings. In full agreement with the revealed teaching, they looked at the death of Jesus Christ on the cross as a means for the salvation of the sinful world accepted by God before eternity, because the world cannot be saved in a natural way, and God deliberately allowed the turn of world history to take place in order only to show people this very impossibility. Therefore, when it became sufficiently clear that people could not enter the kingdom of God of their own accord and could not make the law of necessary death meaningless in relation to themselves, God then revealed the ineffable riches of His love and wisdom and saved the world from destruction by the sacrifice of His only-begotten Son. Ancient Christian theologians explained God's choice of this very method of saving the world from the essence of salvation as the redemption of the world, because redemption consists precisely in the fact that God preserves the life of the sinful world, having destroyed its sins, by virtue of which it is necessarily guilty of death, the death of His Son. Consequently, from the concept of redemption it follows directly and obviously that the death of the God-Man was necessary – not, of course, by virtue of any obligation of God to save the sinful world, but by virtue of His free will for the salvation of the world: so that the work of salvation was undoubtedly the work of God's free will, but since God was pleased to take upon Himself the accomplishment of this work, He could not accomplish it in any other way. only by the incarnation and death of His divine Son[306].

For believing Christians, who had come to a perfect understanding of Christ's truth, all this was completely understandable. But the ancient Christian teachers had not only to confess and preach their faith, but also had to defend it from various mockery on the part of the pagans, for whom the thought of saving the world by the death of the only-begotten Son of God on the cross seemed to be complete madness. The pagan, who thought of the sinner's destruction as God's punishment for sin, naturally thought of the sinner's salvation as God's deliverance from the punishment he deserved. By virtue of such a view of salvation, he could not understand at all why it would be necessary or pleasing for God to take upon Himself death for the sins of men, when it is entirely up to His own will to forgive men all their sins and not to punish them, just as it depends entirely on His own power to preserve people's lives, if the destruction of their mortal bodies is indeed a misfortune for them. To explain to such people that the forgiveness of a sinner is not his justification before God, and that by forgiving a sinner, God does not at all cleanse his sins and, consequently, does not save him at all, but only expresses His desire for his salvation – it would be completely useless to explain this, because in his conception of salvation as a simple change in the external position of man, the pagan is also justification before God, Obviously, he could understand only in the sense of the external recognition of the sinner as free from the punishment for sin, i.e. he could only think in such a way that if the sinner was freed from the punishment for sin, then this means that he was justified before God. In view of this, in order to defend the basic Christian dogma, the apologists of Christianity, in fact, had no choice but to present their faith as reasonable even from the point of view of the pagan concept of salvation. Apologists have indeed turned to this method of defense. They began to prove to the pagans in a rational way that the Christian teaching about the redemptive significance of the God-man's death on the cross does not contain anything absurd, even if the salvation of sinful man, instead of the actual cleansing of his sins, is understood in the sense of his forgiveness; for it is certainly in God's mercy to forgive sins, but precisely because He is God, He cannot forgive them unjustly. And yet He would obviously be unrighteous if He freed from punishment the very sinner in whose punishment we ourselves acknowledge Him to be righteous. Consequently, in the matter of the salvation of people, both God's love and God's justice must be realized. And since the requirements of love and justice are clearly opposite, they cannot, of course, be directly realized on the sinners themselves at the same time. For love necessarily demands that the sinner be forgiven, while truth necessarily demands that he be punished, and that he be punished in proportion to the crime he has committed; and his crime is a crime against God Himself, which means that it is such a great crime that it can never be washed away by any suffering of the sinner, and, therefore, of necessity must remain his eternal crime, and therefore, of necessity, it must determine his eternal punishment. Therefore, in spite of God's love for people, they would certainly have perished, if God's mercy had not found a special means to save them by the miracle of the redemptive sacrifice of the only-begotten Son of God. This immeasurable sacrifice fully covers all the crimes of people, and therefore, fully satisfying God's justice, it really opens up a place for God's all-forgiving love and, therefore, really makes God's salvation of people possible. Consequently, the Christian teaching about the salvation of the world by the death of the only-begotten Son of God on the cross does not contain anything absurd at all.

In this way, Christian apologists could defend their faith against the objections of pagan thinkers with undoubted success. They made Christianity understandable without leaving the circle of universal ideas and concepts. Thanks to this, the crude judgment of pagan philosophy, that Christian preaching is only the foolishness of mad people, fell of its own accord as completely unfounded, and with this judgment, of course, an essential obstacle to a calm discussion of the Christian faith was removed.

Вся эта связная цепь логически возможных обоснований христианского учения о лице и деле И.Христа вполне ясно показывает, почему именно юридическое представление этого учения издавна пользовалось особенным сочувствием христианских богословов и с течением времени оказалось даже господствующим в системах христианского вероучения. Это потому именно и вышло так, что юридическое представление Христова дела довольно рано появилось в христианской литературе и, ввиду его практической пригодности, рано же сделалось весьма популярным, так что богословская мысль в течение веков естественно свыклась с ним как с общепринятым мнением – тем более что для многих людей, которые подошли к христианству путем этого представления, оно и действительно казалось вполне правильным представлением христианского вероучения. Между тем на самом деле оно не только не выражает собой сущности христианского догмата, но и делает его прямо невероятным.

По общему учению новозаветных писаний, значение крестной смерти И.Христа заключается в том, что ею очищаются все грехи людей и что, в силу этого именно очищения грехов, с верующего во Христа человека снимается всякая вина за сделанные им, но жертвенной кровью Христа омытые и уничтоженные всякие грехи его. Если это значение Христовой жертвы мы будем рассматривать с точки зрения ее юридического понимания, то оно окажется для нас совершенно непонятным; потому что, по юридическому представлению дела спасения, люди погибают, собственно, не потому, что вследствие греха они оказались неспособными осуществить цели и смысл своего бытия, а потому, что они подверглись Божию осуждению за грех, т.е. они погибают, собственно, не от греха, а именно только от Божией кары за грех; и потому ради спасения людей, очевидно, требуется только отвратить от них праведный гнев Божий, и это самое дело совершил Богочеловек Христос, так как Своей крестной смертью Он принес за грехи людей бесконечное удовлетворение Божию правосудию. Для мысли об очищении грехов здесь, очевидно, нет и не может быть места. Но так как эта мысль составляет подлинное содержание апостольской веры и так как она неизменно исповедуется церковью в учении о возрождении и всыновлении Богу людей по силе крестной смерти И.Христа, то в изложении и объяснении Христова дела в мире этой мысли непременно должно быть место. Отсюда для христианских богословов, понимающих Христово дело в смысле юридического представления о спасении безмерными заслугами Христа, неизбежно возникает неразрешимый вопрос: каким образом перенесение Христом Божией кары за грех не только освобождает людей от наказания за их грехи, но и совершенно очищает эти грехи, т.е. делает людей не только оправданными грешниками, но и действительно святыми людьми?

Для правильного решения этого вопроса в духе и смысле апостольского вероучения и древней церковной веры христиан, очевидно, нужно обратиться к апостольскому разъяснению догмата о спасении, что именно спасение людей совершается не простым удовлетворением Божьему правосудию помимо людей, а праведной жизнью самих людей, по силе, однако, живой веры их в действительность искупительной жертвы Христа. Но, в границах юридического представления о деле Христа, для мысли о живой вере в Него и о праведной жизни людей опять-таки нет и не может быть места; потому что если можно сказать, что "Господь Иисус Своими страданиями и смертью принес за нас правде Божией плату, не только совершенно полную и удовлетворительную за долг наш, но и преизбыточествующую, и таким образом не только искупил нас от греха, но и приобрел нам вечные блага", –

Таким образом, здесь выходит положение до невозможности нелепое, что будто люди спасаются не потому, что они достойны спасения, а только потому, что Богу угодно было излить на них всю полноту Своей благости и что будто спасение людей заключается не в том, что они могут явиться собранием истинных Божиих святых, а только в том, что они могут быть свободными от Божия наказания за грех.

Это нелепое положение безусловно извращает и христианское понятие о спасении, и общечеловеческое понятие о Боге и превращает все дело Христа в какое-то чудовищно-странное самоистязание Бога ради прекращения Его же собственного гнева на людей. Ввиду этих недостатков совершенно понятно, что юридическая теория искупления, когда несчастным самовластием римского первосвященника она из условного богословского мнения превратилась в безусловную церковную формулу христианского догмата[307], оказалась камнем соблазна и преткновения для множества мыслящих христиан и сделала врагами церковно-христианского вероучения множество людей, которые на самом деле вовсе не желали отказываться от христианства. Например, известные рационалисты XVI века – социниане – во всех своих еретических заблуждениях были только несчастными жертвами своих неудачных попыток осмыслить значение крестной смерти Христа. Они не могли помириться с теорией, которая в своем логическом развитии явно игнорирует собственную праведность человека, а в своем практическом приложении в сфере церковной жизни освящает даже позорную торговлю отпущением грехов за счет сверхдолжных заслуг И.Христа.